Bricklayers (Week 4)

Well good morning.

I'm Forrest Lead Pastor here at Multiply.

I'm so excited for today.

And if you're new with us, welcome.

Glad you're in the house today.

If I've not gotten to meet you, it's uh it's a special day today.

I'm I'm thankful that you're here if you're new.

Uh my family and about a hundred other people uh last m uh March launched in the beginnings of what is Multiply Church today, and I'm excited for what God is gonna do in our midst this morning.

Um so welcome.

A few weeks ago I got to check out uh the new movie that uh is about the boxer George Foreman's life.

It's a a story about uh him from before coming to Christ in the early days of him getting in trouble with the law and and having uh a difficult road and path that he went on to then ascending to greatness as the heavyweight champion of the world.

And then after a near-death experience that he had, him coming to faith in Christ in a radical way, so much so that he left the game of boxing and became a preacher.

Now it was while he was uh serving as a preacher and pastor of a church and had uh different uh a gym and nonprofit in the community, it was during that time in 1983 that the connections and the partnerships and uh the consequences of his past life uh caught up with him, and the five million dollars that he had earned in his career went completely away.

Filed for bankruptcy in 1983, and the story of the movie shows about his return to boxing way past his prime, and for him to take the steps that he took to ultimately in 1994 at age 45 to win again the heavyweight championship of the world.

You know, it's one of these stories that's like rags to riches, but it's not just rags to riches, it's rags to riches, rags to riches.

Twice over, like the story of Henry Ford and other notable people that we have known.

Here's this man who had everything.

Could you imagine five million dollars and it all going away?

And then to take the steps to see it built all the way back.

Now, the the thing that I remember George Foreman the most from was those ridiculous grills that he sold.

Informershell, you all know what I'm talking about, the George Foreman grill.

I don't know if any of you all have one of those.

I didn't have one, but um, you know, now George Foreman now is worth hundreds of millions of dollars from that.

And he, in faithfulness to God, he built back his life.

And that's the same story of Nehemiah and the people of God that we've looked at over the last few weeks.

A story of having God's favor, taking them out of slavery and giving them a promised land, and then for them to rebel and sin against God and for a foreign oppressor to come and take everything from them, leaving Jerusalem waste, in rubble, destroyed, rock torn from rock, burned to the ground.

And then we've walked through the story of the people of God and their return, the building back of the temple, and ultimately Nehemiah helping to build back the walls of Jerusalem so that they could walk in the blessing and the faithfulness that God intended for them.

See, for each of us, God wants for us to be able to walk in a blessed life.

But we have an enemy.

And the enemy doesn't want us to walk in a blessed life.

Instead, the enemy, Satan, wants us to have a burden life.

See, uh, for for so many of us, uh Satan is is trying to get us to be in a place where we're lacking instead of truly living.

Satan's trying to get in a in the way and stop what God has built us for.

But we're not supposed to live as a people burdened, but a people blessed.

You know, it's Jesus Himself who said in Matthew 11, 28, he says, Come to me, all of you who are weary and what?

Burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

You ever felt burdened?

You ever had the weight of the world on your shoulders?

I remember back in uh 2021, when the beginnings of our church, about six months before we launched, we had been meeting all over the community, and we were meeting in this home, we were filling up this home, it was a rather large home, and I don't know if y'all remember this, in the fall of 2021, uh the the Delta variant happened, and everybody was wondering what in the world's gonna happen, and things were going crazy again.

And this home that we were meeting at, we started to meet outside of the house, and we had 60 or so kids and adults who were coming into this house, and then the people who were hosting the the hosting us at the house were like, hey, this is we can't have this many people come into our house right now.

And there was about a two-week stretch where the weight of the world was on my shoulders with our church thinking, okay, we don't have a space, we don't have a place to meet.

We've been meeting in all these different places all over town.

There's nowhere for us to go.

And I remember about a two-week stretch of just feeling the weight of the world of what in the world are we gonna do?

We have nowhere to meet in the beginnings of this church.

God is the is the wheels gonna fall off?

What's gonna happen?

And I remember I sat with a friend and we had a meal together, and I was telling him about what was going on and that we were needing to find a location.

And he looked at me and he said, Forrest, you look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.

And you know that Jesus wants you to not have your own yoke, but his yoke upon you.

I'll never forget the conversation because what he told me was, he said, You've got your yoke on you right now.

But what Jesus has told you in the scripture is that you shouldn't have your burden in your yoke, you should have his on you and it's easy and it's light.

And you can find rest in him.

Two weeks later, the Lord provided that we could start meeting that old office space over next to the treasures building.

Some of y'all remember that.

Some of y'all came at that time.

And I remember those few months leading up to the end-of-year giving weekend like we're having right now back in 2021.

And it was during that time in our church, before we ever launched, that a giving of that Sunday, and what we had already done in the community, before we ever launched, we were able to give and invest over$50,000 into different organizations, nonprofits in the community in Frankfurt.

I was telling this story to a friend the other day, and I was talking about those early days.

They weren't around at that time and knew kind of what was going on.

And he said to me, Forrest, you realize that that$50,000 that you all gave back then was a tithe for what's happening right now with the building that you're moving into.

And I had not, I had never connected the dots.

This was just a few weeks ago, and it hit me, it hit me that so much, even in our journey as a church, the enemy wants to get us in a place of feeling burdened, weary, lack, need, and instead God wants us to be walking with him in blessing.

See, Nehemiah, he was this extraordinary that God made an extraordinary impact through, and it was his obedience and his consistency that we talked about last week that ultimately it brought blessing to a whole nation.

See, this to catch you up a little bit, the people of God, they had been taken away in captivity and slavery to this northern kingdom of Babylon.

But there was this one ordinary guy, Nehemiah, who, when he heard about what was happening in Jerusalem, some family told him that things were not well, that the walls of Jerusalem were still broken down, and he was burdened, and he was heartbroken, and he was moved to action to ask the king for provision and protection so that they could go back to Jerusalem and build the wall.

He prayed for four months.

He took a stand and asked the Lord in prayer twelve times across the book of Nehemiah.

And ultimately, what we got to see last Sunday in the conclusion of the story is that despite distraction, despite opposition, they were able to complete the wall.

What had been broken down for a hundred and forty years was built back in 52 days.

So you remember last week that there was so much distraction and opposition that was coming against Nehemiah.

But Nehemiah and his resolve to see the blessing of God return to his people and to Jerusalem, he told them, I cannot come down.

I cannot stop what I'm doing.

I have to move forward.

And as is the church, we cannot come down from the good work that God has called us to, that we can see it to come to completion.

See, this is in Nehemiah 6.15.

So on October the 2nd, the wall was finished, just 52 days after it had begun.

When our enemies and the surrounding nations heard about it, they were frightened and humiliated.

They realized this work had been done with the help of our God.

And guess what happened?

Six days later, after the walls were were completed, revival came.

Revival came.

See, we're building our families, our homes, our relationships with God.

We're building our church, we're building his kingdom here in our community.

And as we see what Nehemiah did, for him to take the step in boldness, to give and give and give and give, to lead.

Ultimately, what happened in his building was it ushered in a revival.

See what happened was the priest Ezra in chapter 8, verse 2.

A few days later, on October the 8th, Ezra, the priest, brought the book of the law before the assembly, which included men and women and all children old enough to understand.

And then verse 6 Then Ezra praised the Lord, the great God, and all the people chanted, Amen, Amen, and as they lifted their hands, then they bowed down and worshipped the Lord with their faces on the ground.

And then verse 8, they read from the book of the law of God and clearly explained the meaning of what had been read, helping the people understand each passage.

Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who are interpreting for the people said to them, Don't mourn or weep on such a day as this, for today is a sacred day before the Lord your God.

For the people have been weeping as they listen to the words of the law.

Imagine.

The walls have been completed, the temple is formed, the priest Ezra steps up and he begins to teach from the Word of God.

But the people in the crowd, they had been away from Jerusalem, they had been in captivity, in slavery, in a foreign land for so long, they did not even understand the language of God's book at that time.

It said that they had to explain the meaning, they had to interpret the law so that the people of God could understand, and their response was to worship on their face.

See, if we're to be like Nehemiah and what he did, we we too, we have to build, and we have to build on God's word.

Build on God's word in your life, build on God's word as our church.

I had a conversation with a guy named Kyle Wade this week.

And Kyle told me his testimony that years ago when he was in college, before he was even in college, he grew up in a home that was not a Christian home.

He had got a DUI at 17, had had some other charges, and he ended up making it to college, and he was in college, not a believer, didn't know anything.

He said he had gone to church one time with a friend to a lock-in, which is barely church, okay?

If you know anything about that, it's church people.

You know what those are.

And so while he was in college, he had a sociology professor who, in the teaching, began to say all kinds of negative things about the Bible.

And he wondered to himself and thought to himself, man, all these things that that that this professor is saying, I need to figure this out for myself.

And so a non-believer, non-believing home, he went to the bookstore and he bought a Bible for himself.

College student, and he sat in his dorm and he began to read, and he read for two weeks straight, and what he said was it was like it fed his soul.

He got to the end of the gospels reading and he had to make a decision.

Is this true or not?

And so he made a decision that he was gonna go to a church.

And so he invited, he was in Chicago at the time, and so he invited his dad.

If his dad would go with him to this church, and his dad had said, he said his dad had already thought he'd like got off the deep end.

He's like, What are you doing?

You're like obsessed with reading this book.

What's going on?

But his dad accepted the invitation.

They went to church that Sunday, both he and his father got saved.

The next Sunday, they brought his stepmom, his stepmom got saved.

The next week, they brought nieces and nephews, the nieces and nephews got saved.

His whole family came to Christ in a three-week time frame just because he opened the Word of God.

Just because he didn't want to listen to what some professor said, he had to figure it out himself, and he went and bought a Bible.

I wonder what how Kyle's story would have been different if somebody would have shared the gospel with him plainly earlier.

If somebody would have been building the wall for him in his life, to open the door to this blessed and better life with Jesus.

You know, it was Jesus who said in John chapter 10, verse 9, I am the door.

John 10:9

If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.

And he will go in and out and find pasture.

The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Just like Nehemiah, just like what we want for our church and for our homes.

We want to build for abundance.

It's Jesus himself who said that we would have an abundant life.

Now, what does it mean to have an abundant life?

Here's some synonyms: affluence, plenty, prosperity, riches, fortune, thriving.

Some of the opposites are lack and little and need and want and deficiency and inadequacy.

And having an abundant life, this abundant life that Jesus has to give us, it's not dependent on circumstances.

See, it was Jesus who said that we would have tribulations and trials in John 16, 33.

Peter said that we shouldn't be surprised by suffering in 1 Peter 4.12.

James said that we should expect trials and count it as all joy in James 1.2.

Paul says afflictions bring endurance and glory in Romans 5, verses 3.

Romans 5:3

See, this abundant life that we have from Jesus, it's not based on what our bank account is.

It's not based on what our health is.

It's based on the fact that Jesus has blessed us and given us the gift of Himself that we can be saved, forgiven, and walk into eternity in heaven in one day.

That one day I have a promise that my feet are going to be walking on gold streets because of what Jesus did for me on the cross.

It was the psalmist who said in Psalm 73, Whom have I?

But in heaven but you.

I desire you more than anything on earth.

My health may fail, my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart.

He is mine forever.

We have an abundant gift from the Lord Jesus.

And for the people of God, they were in a state of revival.

So much so that weeks later we see in chapter 9 of Nehemiah that again they came together in assembly, and they remained standing in place as Ezra read from the book of the law of the Lord their God, and he read aloud to them.

And then for three more hours they confessed their sins and worshiped the Lord their God.

Six hours of worship and words, still weeks later.

And what they were building towards was they were building so that they could ultimately be a blessing.

See, there was a promise that was made to the people of God through Abraham.

And in the rest of chapter 9, you can go and read it.

Ezra prays a prayer over the people, and he recounts the story of the people of God going all the way back to the beginning.

And his covenant that he made with Abraham and the blessings that were supposed to flow through their nation.

See, because God had come to Abraham and told him that he was going to make a covenant with him, that his descendants, that they would, they would be more than the sand on the seashore, even though at the time Abraham and his wife had no children.

And then he promised, and in their covenant, that his covenant with Israel would be a blessing to other nations.

And it's almost like the people of God forgot that.

Ezra's reminding them in this prayer as he gives words to them from God and about God that God had preserved them.

He made a covenant with them.

He performed signs and wonders with them.

He made promises to them.

He knows them.

He'll lead them.

He'll bring provision.

He's sworn to them.

He'll give wonders and show signs and miracles, forgiveness, graciousness, and merciful.

That he be abounding and steadfast in love and that he will multiply them.

See, God made this covenant with his people.

And Ezra stands in front of them and he reminds them of God's goodness and his covenant to them.

And you know what today?

Millennia and millennia later, God has made a new covenant with us.

See, with Jesus coming and dying on the cross for us, He with His blood purchased a new covenant that we would also walk in glorious life with Him.

That what we put our hand to, and as we walk in faith in Jesus, that He will.

Be faithful to multiply it.

That we would live a life that would be a multiplied life.

I've read this scripture every Sunday for the last few weeks, Matthew 6.33.

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Do you believe it, church?

Do you believe it?

We seek first his kingdom.

And we seek first his kingdom here in this place.

In our city, in our area, in our region.

And that's like that's like with Nehemiah, our heart should break for Frankfurt and the surrounding areas.

And that we would see Frankfurt move forward to flourish.

To flourish by the strong work of Jesus.

And today we get to be builders, we get to be bricklayers for his kingdom.

And we get to look at one another and we get to say to each other, hand me another brick.

Hand me another brick.

That I can build my home, our hometown, our community, the surrounding areas can be built on God's favor and his love.

So what does it look like?

What is it that we are going to do together?

Well, today we get to give.

We get to give all the time, but today we get to give intentionally and specifically to see God's kingdom expand through our church and beyond.

The fact that we get to come alongside and partner with Juana Joyce Robinson to bless many, many families with Christmas this year.

That's going to cost around$5,000.

And today, the giving that's given today is going to provide for that.

They're going to get to come alongside and give a gift to Avenues Clinic, our Crisis Pregnancy Center here in our community, who's had land donated to them next to the hospital, and they're just walking and asking the Lord to provide the provision for them to be able to build a facility so that they can continue to help women, mothers, and children.

And love them, care for them, and protect precious life.

We get to give.

This is it.

You were here.

I was here.

We were here for this moment.

That we would see an overflow from God's Spirit.

I had a lunch with a friend this week who I grew up with in high school, and his name is Jay.

Over the last year, Jay's battled, uh had a long battle with cancer.

And from the beginning of his cancer journey, which he finished his chemo in October, Jay has said from the very beginning so many encouraging things to me, his mindset, and he said this to me multiple times.

He posted all the time.

He said, be a faucet, not a drain.

Even in his journey this year with brain cancer, having to relearn how to walk.

And so he's involved in athletics and has coached football and has continued to stay connected with the team and blessing other people.

Just a few weeks ago, one of the children and students that he has helped to come alongside and be a caretaker for has cerebral palsy.

He got to make it happen a few weeks ago that uh at the Titans football game that his young friend got to score the beginning touchdown of the game, and the news was there and did an article on it.

And Jay sat with me at lunch this week and he said, Forrest, I got a scan back this week, and the doctors are telling me that maybe my cancer is back.

And then he looked at me and he said, I'm ready to be a faucet, not a drain.

He finds out this week whether his cancer has returned.

And I'm praying that it has not.

But even if it has, I know he's gonna overflow.

He's gonna overflow.

When Jesus promises to us an abundant life, this isn't a life that's worry-free.

This isn't a life that's free of trials, difficulties, hardships, sickness.

But instead, it's an abundant life built on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, that will carry us from this life into eternity and allow us in this life, no matter the circumstances, to overflow with his spirit, to overflow with his joy, to overflow with his love, to overflow with his goodness, to overflow with his kindness and characters of the other people would come to the saving knowledge of Jesus, and not have to be broken anymore, and not have to be beaten down anymore, and not have to be separated from God's love anymore, but instead to be restored to him.

That no one would not feel the love of God that so many of us in this room have experienced, and many more need.

The walls have been torn down for 140 years and rebuilt in 52 days.

Here in just a few minutes, uh, Bain is going to come and it's gonna lead us through a time of giving.

And there are cards that are in your seats.

And over the last few weeks, you've been invited to walk with God, to ask him what it looks like for you to bring an offering to him.

And so some of you have prepared those, some of those that are in the seats right now.

We're gonna have a time of worship and singing together.

And during that worship and singing, I'm gonna invite you and my family to come forward to give into these giving stations up front.

There's also gonna be a QR code that you can scan with your phone so that you can give online.

And during this time, and I was thankful to get to share last Sunday, that we have the confidence in knowing that every single dollar that we give today is gonna be matched dollar for dollar, up to$90,000 by our partner in Sending Church, Southland, who've come alongside us over and over and over again.

And so we give today with the confidence that right now we're walking in the multiplied life because of his faithfulness to us, because of God's blessing over us.

And so today, if you're new here today, I'm so glad you're here.

Watch faith in action.

If you're here today and you're not sure about who this Jesus is and what this is all about, let me encourage you.

Watch Jesus in action as people overflow in generosity, the love of Jesus and to our city and our community.

This is it for us, this is for the Lord.

This is it for us, this is for Jesus.

Today, may today be a sign to you of the faith in Jesus that He is real.

You may have come in the room today and you're wondering what's this God thing all about?

Is this real?

Is this fake?

Today, watch it be real.

Today, watch it in action.

And I invite you to follow him.

Begin a relationship with Jesus.

Receive the forgiveness and the new covenant that he purchased with his blood on the cross in your place.

Will you bow your heads and pray?

Father, all across this room, Lord, we're here today to worship and lift you high.

God, we love because you first loved us.

And so, Father, we thank you, God, for you showing your loving kindness.

And Lord, today, God, I already know that faith and action has been taking place over the last few weeks, the last few days.

God, as we prepare to bring to you, God, a gift that we know, Lord, that you'll honor, that you'll use, that you'll multiply.

And Father, I pray all across this room, God, for anybody who's in the room today, God, and they don't yet have faith in you, today, Lord, Father, I pray, God, that today they would see faith in action.

And that, Lord, today they would step across the line to ask you, Jesus, to save them, to forgive them, to restore them, to be in right relationship with you.

They could pray this, Jesus, save me.

I believe that you are the Son of God to your life.

Forgive me, cleanse me, so I can be in heaven with you one day.

Thank you for abundant life.

I give you my life as you gave yours for none.

Thank you.

In the strong name of Jesus, everybody says, Amen.