High Hopes (Week 4)

I'm excited to be here with you all.

I love this church and I and I love the Coleman family.

And and I just feel like uh God has forordained for us to be friends until we're old.

And so we're gonna be kicking it at Cracker Barrel, sitting in chairs, and somebody's gonna have to help us get up.

All right.

And and that's just the way that we're gonna do it.

And so I'm just so grateful for friendship, but also the opportunity to minister here.

Um as as as you know, we're in this series called High Hopes.

And in a society where uh it can almost be bleak, that hope can almost be lost, it's really important for us to keep high hopes.

It's really important for us to understand uh what God is calling us to and what God is offering us.

And a lot of times what begins to happen is uh as we begin to try to have hope in difficult circumstances, what can begin to happen is we begin to hear this this whisper that is all too familiar.

And you all have probably heard this whisper before.

You probably say it to your kids this week if you have kids.

Don't get your hopes up.

How many of y'all ever heard don't get your hopes up?

We've heard don't get your hopes up for a number of reasons.

Maybe you heard don't get your hopes up and somebody said that to you out of a place of protection.

There were times where in my journey as a boy, there was some hard things going on with my family.

And and there were some times where I couldn't count on my father to do what he said he was gonna do.

He said he was gonna come pick me up and come spend some time with me.

And there were some times where he didn't do it.

And my mom would come on the front step and say, hey baby, listen, I know that you he said he was coming, but don't but don't get your hopes up, okay?

If he shows up good.

There are times that that that people say it to you out of punishment.

I I know I've used that before to my kids, and maybe somebody said it to you.

Uh, you know, we had this yesterday where, you know, uh we had dinner, and the plan was for our family to go get ice cream, so we were all gonna go get frosties.

But my youngest son decided that Sloppy Joe all of a sudden makes him want to throw up.

He loves, he's every other time has Sloppy Joe been the problem.

But for some reason yesterday, he didn't want Sloppy Joe.

Well, everybody else ate their food, and so we're going to get frosties, and he thought we forgot.

And it was like, no, bro, don't get your hopes up because you ain't getting no frosty.

And it was an early bedtime for him because he couldn't handle not having that hope.

And sometimes people say it out of a state of pessimism, right?

They just don't believe that anything else is possible, that anything else is feasible for their lives or for your life or for the situation.

So I ain't gonna get my hopes up.

They they they move towards something without exercising faith.

They just say, hey, I'm gonna do it for the sake of doing.

I'm just gonna show up for the sake of showing up, but uh, but I'm not gonna get my hopes up.

And here's what I want to do.

I want to borrow that phrase, and and and in a sense, in a way, I want to use it and say the same thing to you.

I want to tell you, uh, don't get your hopes up, but instead let the gaze of your hope remain upward.

Don't don't get your hopes up.

Don't don't ride the wave of circumstance, don't ride the wave of situation, don't, don't ride the wave of how strong you feel in your faith, but but just do the consistent work of allowing your hope to remain upward because what we see here horizontally will always change.

And so, what I want to do is we're gonna be in the book of Luke, uh, chapter 18.

If you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and meet me there.

Um, it's gonna be on the screens if you if you didn't bring your Bibles.

No judgment.

I usually make a joke about people, but I forgot my Bible a couple times on Sundays now, so I can't make that joke, all right?

But if you have it, if you have a phone, then you have a Bible.

And so we ask you to turn there.

I'm gonna be reading from the Christian Standard Bible.

Um, it's gonna be on the screens.

Here's what I want you to do.

Can we go ahead and stand on our feet to receive God's word this morning?

Reading from the book of Luke, chapter 18, starting in verse 1, says this.

Luke 18 · chapter mention

He then told them a parable on the need for them to pray always and not become discouraged.

There was a judge in a town who didn't fear God or respect man, and a widow in that town kept coming to him, saying, Give me justice against my adversary.

For a while he was unwilling, but later he said to himself, Even though I don't fear God or respect man, yet because this widow keeps pestering me, I will give her justice.

So she doesn't wear me out by her persistent coming.

Anybody with kids can say, Amen.

Then the Lord said, Listen to what the unjust judge says.

Will not God grant justice to his elect who cry out to him day and night?

Will he delay to help them?

I tell you that he will swiftly grant them justice.

Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

And the church said, Amen, and blessed the reading of God's word.

You may be seated.

Now, the parable we just read is a part of a bigger section where uh Jesus is helping his disciples uh understand how to discern the coming of the kingdom.

But uh he's trying to help them understand what it means to persevere in their faith in the face of difficulty in that time.

If we were to go back to chapter 17, we get a better picture of this.

Uh, there are a couple statements I want to highlight from chapter 17 that helps us get a framework for what's happening here in this prayer.

I mean, this parable in chapter 18.

The first comes in verse 22 of chapter 17 when Jesus says, uh, the time is coming when you will long to see the day when the Son of Man returns, but you won't see it.

So, number one, he establishes that uh the coming of the kingdom will be in a time uh of deep longing for his followers to see Christ crack the sky.

It will be a time that people will be saying, uh, any day now, Lord.

The phrase that they would say uh in their culture was Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.

And he said, and in the approaching of my kingdom, that it will be a time where my people in their spirits and in their souls will be longing and crying out for me to return.

But it will feel like day after day they cannot see it.

The second verse that helps us is in verse 30 of chapter 17, which says, Yes, it will be business as usual, right up to the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

In this section, Jesus is teaching that the world will feel kind of like the days of Noah and then the days of Lot that you've read about before, where people kind of just did what they wanted to do.

They kind of decided what was truth for them.

When the revelation of God came, they would reject the revelation of God, and they would be so consumed with their everyday pursuits that the signs around them would go over their heads.

Not just a theology to say, we we are definitely living in the last days.

And if you've lived in any time, you know that there has been a moment in any time where people can say, man, we must be living in the last days.

But I believe in this passage, Jesus is giving us a lens to look at life post his death, burial and resurrection with a here but not yet worldview.

What does that mean?

That means that as believers, we are to live in light of our eternal kingdom reality today that comes with rights, blessings, privileges, and responsibilities while also living with the ever clear reality that this life is not all there is.

And this is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray uh, let your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Our daily reality as follows Jesus is not to just live for the kingdom, but we live from the kingdom.

We live in this anticipation of the kingdom, and that is the context for what we've read this morning.

That Jesus wanted to teach his disciples to live from the kingdom in the face of the hardship that they would face.

And we know as we follow their story, they faced extreme hardship.

Every one of his disciples were beaten, tortured, murdered, killed.

Peter was crucified upside down.

They had a terrible future laid out for them.

And I'm sure in many of those moments they were like, any day now.

But Jesus needed to establish in them a hope that will sustain them in the face of trial so their stories might be recorded so that when we face trials, there's a great cloud of witnesses that have gone ahead of us that can remind us that hope is worth it.

And so we persevere.

Now, in our passage, uh we have two main characters.

We have a judge and we have a widow.

Uh the judge is described as one who uh had no fear of God nor fear of people.

In other words, this guy marched to the beat of his own drum.

He thought of himself to be all powerful.

He had nobody that could check him.

I'm the judge of this town, I make the law.

You think about those old westerns, like the the sheriff, like he just he just the dog, he just the he's just the big dog.

And listen, uh, he tell the judge what to do, he tell the doctor what to do, he tell the saloon what to do, like he just he just do what he has to do.

Like this judge kind of had this posture of like, yeah, I decide what justice is.

But then we have this widow, on the other hand, who would have been one in that society that had the least amount of power, rights, and ability to make anything happen for herself.

In her cultural sense, she was helpless and had experience and injustice that she needed this careless judge to give his attention to.

To be a widow in this time was to be almost a living death sentence.

If you didn't have a son that would take care of you, you had no means of getting income.

You had no means of sustaining yourself.

And so to experience an injustice, probably she was cheated out of something.

Somebody took advantage of us of her because she did not have an advocate to help her in the marketplace and getting things done.

We've all seen that, right?

We we still see remnants of that in our society.

This is why, you know, uh more and more women are just learning things that aren't necessarily womanly.

They're learning about cars, they're learning about how to do these things because there's a history in our society.

If a woman shows up at a dealership or at a car place, they gonna they're gonna trick them.

That was the old way of doing things.

And now that's that's not quite working, right?

My wife just told me the story the other day she went to AutoZone uh to kind of get some her fluids topped off and change her uh engine uh uh filter.

And the guy, he's an older guy, he just kept making these jokes and he's like, I got it, I got it, you know.

She gonna she's gonna tell me to come help her pour the oil in, and I'm I'm gonna have it.

And she was like, No, give me the stuff and I will do it myself.

Right?

And and so, but this woman and that culture that just wasn't a thing.

That that wasn't a possibility.

But we know in our passage that she had something that she could use, and she did.

And so, with that in mind, what I want to do is I want to learn from this widow.

I want to see what she teaches us about prayer, because the whole point of this passage, Jesus said, is to learn how to persevere in prayer.

And so that's that's what this widow teaches us.

So we're gonna pick up in verse 3.

And it says this A widow of that city came to him repeatedly saying, Give me justice in this dispute with my enemy.

The judge ignored her for a while, but finally he said to himself, I don't fear God or care about people.

Man, this judge should not be a judge.

Um, but this woman is driving me crazy.

Never mind.

Um I'm going to see that she gets justice because she is wearing me out with her constant request.

Point one.

Faith is the substance of our hope.

Now, for reference, Hebrews 11:1 defines faith this way.

Hebrews 11:1

Now, faith is the confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

In other words, faith is the overflow of my certainty that what I need will be delivered.

We can see faith in a lot of different things.

Uh, when we confidently sit in these chairs, I mean, I'm sure these chairs have been here a long time.

A long time.

We just roll up in here and we sit on down.

You know, sometimes, sometimes we five pounds heavier, sometimes we five pounds lighter.

Yeah, I'm sure the weight requirement for these chairs is about 275.

I'm breaking that at least by 30 pounds.

So it's like, but I sit down and I sit down with confidence.

I'm operating in faith.

We see faith every time you go to a wedding and and a bride walks down the aisle.

Somewhere in that journey from the door swinging open to the altar saying, I do, there's an exercise of faith that what I'm committing to will be fulfilled.

We see it every time we get on the highway, and these Kentucky drivers, we just believe they're gonna let us merge over, and they don't.

You gotta go 125 to get on the highway sometimes.

Because these Kentucky folks don't care and they built these highways crazy with these merging.

I'm like, what is this?

They need to come to Georgia and see how we do it down there.

Because they're learning from their mistakes, they're building out, they're trying to redo it.

But man, how many, how many cars have been lost because of Kentucky drivers, right?

Faith is what gets us moving.

Faith is the belief that the best case scenario is already mine, but it requires you to live in the place that though I know that to be true, I don't know the journey to it.

Now this is different, and I this is different from a prosperity gospel mindset because that can sound very similar.

But see, the prosperity gospel mindset is it wants you to avoid the journey, it wants you to avoid the hardship and the pain and and and the difficulty that might come with getting to what's rightfully yours.

But but don't make no mistake, you don't have to embrace a poverty mindset in the kingdom either.

Uh, you are a child of God, which means you have rights and things belong to you as they belong to Christ.

This is again God's word.

And so you walk with the faith that as long as I'm in the pursuit of God's will, what's on the other side of this trial is from God and it is for me.

Now, the issue is a lot of times we're pursuing things that are not of God's will.

And God will make it clear to us with a with a no, or sometimes he'll make it clear to you with a yes and let you feel the results of that request so you never ask for it again.

But but faith is that thing that just keeps us chugging along.

For this widow, we see that what she faced didn't match her hope.

She had experience and injustice, and the only person that had the power to change it didn't care.

He wanted nothing to do with her circumstance.

It might have been easy to count her out.

She probably had moments of doubt in the journey of going to this judge every day.

She probably had fear that if I keep bothering this man, he may render me uh a problem and that may cost me more.

But her faith moved her beyond the no's she previously received to keep asking.

In verse 5, we learn that this judge makes this statement.

He says, The woman, I'm sorry, this woman is driving me crazy.

Because of that, I will make sure she gets justice.

But not because he cares about justice, but so that she can shut up.

He says that she is wearing me out.

How many of y'all know, like, to be wore out by somebody, but that is a terrible feeling.

Like, like I have said that before.

I'm like, bro, y'all are wearing me out.

Go downstairs.

Like, I can't even think.

Like, all I want to do is just walk in the house and get off work.

What?

You know, like you wear me out.

And he said, she's wearing me out with her constant nag.

And the commentators debate about this because sometimes they they say that this wearing out could mean like ruin one's reputation.

Like, that's what I thought.

I think he was, he says he doesn't care about man's opinion, but he knows that like there's privilege being a judge, and if people begin to think that the judge is not a righteous judge, even though we know he's not, if people begin to think that, then his time as a judge is probably ending, and then his privileges and and and the life he lives as a judge is probably so.

He was like, okay, I gotta I gotta squelch this.

I I imagine a woman who showed up every day at his house, in the marketplace, in other people's court cases.

I I don't care about that child support.

I had it in judge.

Like she interrupting everything.

I mean, she's showing up.

But but one commentator says that that and some some people uh in historical context when they read this, they think about it as this judge, like she got so aggressive that she started beating him up.

And so he said, This woman, I need to help this woman before she gives me a black eye.

Either way, the context for this historically is that this woman was relentless about her injustice, and she knew that this man who had the power to render a righteous answer should do it.

And so she kept asking.

She didn't allow his many ways of tearing her to shut up to keep her from believing, to keep her from asking.

To the Jewish listener of this parable, their minds would understand this widow had no other advocate.

At the same time, they would also understand the connection here between the widow's persistence and the historical persistence of their people.

In the biblical stories that we read in the Old Testament, when they face various trials, oftentimes in the scripture, you get this line where it says, The Lord heard his people.

As they went through trials, as Israel was in Egypt, they didn't know the God they were praying to because generations had passed and they were unfaithful to pass along the history, but they knew that I need to pray.

And they prayed and prayed and prayed, and in the scripture tells us that God heard the cries of his people and he moved.

And so Jesus is using this parable and pointing out to his disciples, though I am here, the heart of the Father is still the same.

If you cry out to him, he will hear you.

Jesus is calling to memory their heritage of petitioning God.

Because he's a God that keeps his promise.

What does this mean for us?

Ultimately, it's a call for us to embrace that age-old saying to walk by faith and not by sight.

Because what you see is not always an indicator of what's to come.

Our commitment to prayer is a picture of our commitment to faith.

As much as you pray, is that much faith you have.

And in fact, it shows you who you have faith in.

A lackluster prayer life means you have a lot of faith in yourself.

It means that your heart is not desperate enough to need God.

If you can fix it on your own, then in some ways you're not even facing things big enough for God.

And so maybe this is a challenge for you to step out on faith and start facing and tackling things that's gonna need God's help.

Maybe it's time for you to stop stuffing that what needs to be healed.

Because you can handle stuffing it, but you can't handle healing it.

And you need God to step in and heal it.

Maybe it's time for you to stop to.

To stop fighting, white knuckle against the addiction, but saying, Hey, God, no, no, no.

I need you to eradicate this addiction from my life.

I need your freedom.

We can all white knuckle and do good for five days.

But but but can you be free for a lifetime on your own?

I don't think so.

And so your willingness to pray is oftentimes a picture of your willingness to be humble before a holy God.

You gotta have a clear reality of who you are.

And a clear reality that all you need comes from a source outside of yourself.

Point number two, uh, persistence is the expression of our hope.

The word our text uses to describe this woman's actions is constant.

One translation uses the word pestering.

Ultimately, she has been given the name the persistent widow.

We don't even know her name.

We just know she's a persistent widow.

We all know people in our hometown that just we don't know their name, they just got a nickname.

Right?

That man man over there.

That's that's bubble.

That ain't bubble name.

We don't know why he call him Bubble.

That's big over there.

Because he's big.

His name just became big.

Who is big?

Do you know Big Dot?

Who I mean, or you know Elvin Dot?

Elvin, who's Elvin?

You know Elvin?

Big.

Big.

Oh, I know big, big dot.

Right, we know people by their nicknames.

Right?

And we we know this woman as the persistent widow.

Uh persistence is defined as a firm or obstinate continuance.

Those are words we don't use all the time, but I'm gonna use them today.

A firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.

Want you to hear that.

In psychology circles, it is said that persistence is founded on optimism, whereby an individual continues to believe in what they are doing despite obstacles.

Words that come to mind for me are tenacity, determination, grit, resolve.

The quality this widow carried is the same quality that all of our favorite underdogs carry.

It's what Rocky took into the ring every movie.

He just had this grit determination, and then that who drew it at the end was like a hallelujah when you get to the other side of what God has for you.

It's a picture of hope.

It's oftentimes, it's what Rudy had.

Every time he went to practice, and even though his dad and his brother told him, bro, you ain't gonna never make the team.

You need you got to go to the Catholic junior college.

You ain't even, you ain't gonna never make the roster.

It was foolishness.

But he proved foolishness wrong because he had this persistence that kept him showing up every day.

In many ways, this is this is what those who were enslaved while carrying faith experienced.

They live in the circumstance where I know that there is a God that is good and that is for my liberation, but I still exist in chains.

What does this mean for my hope and what does this mean for my faith?

Well, I'm just gonna believe, despite my circumstances, that this God is still a liberator and he is still a deliverer.

And if I don't see it, I'm gonna pray that my kids will see it.

And many of them died praying that prayer, and it was their children and their grandchildren that got to experience the blessing of their prayerful hope.

It's what martyrs carry with them as they faith this, and you and you hear these miraculous stories of people on the way to their death going to be killed for their faith, and they're singing songs of praise.

And it bewilders the people that have captured them and are trying to get them to denounce their faith.

There's just a determination with them that even death will not rob me of the hope that kept me alive every day that I lived.

Oftentimes, uh uh what fuels that persistence is a deeper truth or an inspiration that supersedes the circumstances.

For this widow, her persistence was fueled by two threads of knowledge.

Number one, she knew where to go with her need.

And number two, she knew her rights.

She knew where to go with her need, and she knew her rights.

As we've already covered, on her own, this widow was destitute and powerless.

But but with the help of this of the right person and with the right cause, their power becomes her power.

We see that she didn't try to manipulate the situation.

She didn't try to go to the oppressor and threaten him.

She didn't try to go to the oppressor and bargain with him or take matters into her own hand.

She didn't become a vigilante.

But instead, she put aside all her pride and she put on a poor spirit for all to see, and she begged for what was rightfully hers.

And she did this day and night, day and night.

It didn't tell us how long she did this, but I think the parable is significant because it had to be for a long time.

As unjust as this judge was, she knew that power and time would eventually match up.

She knew that his obligation would eventually hold him captive.

And his requirement to be a faithful and righteous judge in order to keep his seat was the only currency she had, and she used it.

She knew she had a legal right to justice.

For the believer, we'll see why this matters in a second.

Now, beyond Jesus wanting to teach his disciples uh uh how they ought to pray, he wanted to teach, or rather, remind them, of the character of God as they pray.

And so, picking up in uh verse 6, it says this.

Then the Lord said, Learn a lesson from this unjust judge.

Uh even he rendered a just decision in the end.

So don't you think God will surely give justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night?

Will he keep putting them off?

I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly.

But when the Son of Man returns, how many will be f will he find on earth who have faith?

As we read that, it's important to know that Jesus is not saying that the Father is all in all like this unjust judge.

Instead, he's using the character of the unjust judge to illuminate the goodness of the Father's character.

Now, in the circle, in the parable, the judge is the most powerful person.

But Jesus is even highlighting that to show, to help them understand that even that judge, though he thought he was all powerful, there was still one more powerful.

And it's important for us to know that.

And in our passage, the judge only moved to protect his nerves.

That was it.

It tells us the only reason he did justice was to protect his nerve and maybe a black eye.

It was to protect his reputation.

But God moves because he loves and has chosen his children.

And though he is not moved or controlled by anything in his creation, he chooses to move on behalf of his creation.

See, God's righteousness and his justice are his own accountability partner because he is perfectly righteous and perfectly just.

And so nothing he does is outside of righteousness and justice.

So for us, it's important to understand it.

It's important for us to recognize that.

That when we go to prayer, we're not praying to a God that we have to convince.

We're not praying to a God that we have to twist his arm and beg him.

We have an advocate that is doing that for us.

This is why it's important to understand Jesus more than just who he was on earth.

But it's important to understand who Jesus is after his resurrection.

Jesus has a number of jobs.

One of his jobs is to be an intercessor on the behalf of his people.

Jesus is our advocate.

He goes to court for you and me every day.

Because our lives deserve death every day.

So therefore, Jesus' job right now is to sit at the right hand of the Father and constantly remind him that you, me, and us are chosen.

And every time that his right response to our sin, that wrath and that judgment rises up, there beside him is a picture of grace.

And it reminds God of his covenant and commitment to a sinful people.

It reminds him of the promise he made years ago in the book of Jeremiah that we're living in today.

That he will be our God, and that he will be our righteousness, and that his word he would write it on the tablets of our hearts.

It's this reminder of this new covenant promise that we live in.

So if faith, as we've learned, is the substance of our hope and persistence is the expression of our hope.

And this is what the widow modeled for us.

Just like her, we have to remember who to take our needs to.

And if you have a wrong understanding of who God is, then you will take your needs wrongly.

And Jesus wanted his disciples to get rid of their wrong theology and understanding of the Father.

Because see, here's one of the things that's so remarkable as you understand it.

For them in their Jewish context, hardship meant sin.

Hardship in their life meant out of the will of God.

Bondage meant we were out of alignment with the Father.

And this was his discipline on us.

So every time somebody was, that's why when the guy was blind, whose sin is this?

When somebody is lame, who what caused this?

Every time they would face hardship, their old covenant theology would try to rise up.

And that old covenant theology would try to tell them that you have done something and this is why you experience what you experience.

And for us, sometimes that old fleshly nature tries to rise up when we face hard things.

And it tries to remind you that what you're facing is because you did something wrong.

God is now punishing you.

God is disappointed with you, and He is sending something in your life to teach you a lesson.

And what the scriptures remind, what Jesus is reminding his disciples, what he's reminding us, is that I am inaugurating a new covenant.

That everything you experience has nothing to do with your sin and everything to do with your sanctification and God's will in your life.

God has promised and he has foreordained for each and every one of us to be made into the image of Christ.

And everybody's journey looks different.

But everything that you face, it is burning something, it is burning the chaff off of you.

It is reshaping you, it is making you soft clay again.

And so that God can mold you and make you and shape you into this walking statue of Jesus Christ everywhere that you go.

And so when you face hardship, don't allow the old sin to rise up in your mind and tell you anything different about the loving father you have.

Can God cause hardship in our life?

Sure.

But we know that it's not for judgment, we know that it's not for punishment, but it's for our perseverance.

And so we walk.

Yes, with a judge, but a judgment that is yet to come.

And we know that judgment is yet to come, but even when that judgment comes, we will stand with an advocate of grace.

So we walk, knowing that the all-powerful one in which we are sending our request to is on our side.

The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1:3, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Ephesians 1:3

And in Ephesians 2, we are reminded that in our regeneration, God raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus.

Because of this, we are called to approach God's throne of grace with confidence.

So when we pray, we don't make requests from a place of lack, but we do so from a place of abundance and assurance.

I don't know if you understand that.

I don't know how much we understand what's in store for us one day and how to live in the reality of what is and the yet to come.

That scripture, like y'all, like y'all should have had a praise rise up in you when I read that to you, says that you have been blessed with every spiritual blessing.

Everyone.

It goes on the list that you have been redeemed, forgiven, uh uh sanctified, like you have been justified.

Every spiritual blessing is yours, even if you don't feel like it today.

But it also says that you have been seated in the heavenly places with God.

This is the most remarkable thing about Jesus.

Jesus came and lived the life we could not live and died the death we deserve and rose again like we never could.

He lived the most sacrificial life to step into the name above all names that was adorned on him after he finished the work, to split his inheritance with us.

That's crazy.

So all of us are that wayward son that came home and got a double portion of the inheritance.

Jesus was telling a story about himself.

He was letting us know that, man, I'm gonna share with you abundantly.

And that's what we have.

And so in these seasons that are hard, and I know I don't want to minimize some of the seasons that we're going through in this room.

Some of us are going through some hard seasons, some diagnoses, some marital issues, some familial things, some mental health things, some things that are really chasing us down, and maybe they've had us bound for a long time.

I don't want to minimize them, but I do want to put them in their right place.

They are not the throne of your heart.

Jesus is.

And so you don't give your circumstances your full attention.

You give Jesus your full attention.

You don't allow your circumstances to shape your identity and your purpose.

Jesus shapes your identity and your purpose.

Because the power of your prayer, the power of your hope is in your position.

And if I'm seated with Christ and I know that I'm promised to rule with Christ for eternity one day, ain't nothing I face here gonna rob me of that joy.

But I also know I have access and I have a right to rights to a God that wants to move on my behalf.

And so I pray with confidence.

This is not to say that everything we pray for will happen when and how we want them to be answered.

But from a confidence, we pray that no matter what, as I pray, as I go through, as I navigate, surely goodness and mercy will follow me every day of my life.

I know that that's follow me, then I know that surely I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

So in my circumstance where I feel broken, I feel lost, I feel like I'm without hope, I feel like I've been praying and praying and praying, and God, you're not moving.

I feel like God, I just need your help.

I need your strength, I need, I need your hope.

We have to remind ourselves, hey God, surely goodness and mercy is following me as I pray to you.

Surely goodness goodness and mercy is following me as I go through hardship.

Surely, right?

Surely goodness and mercy is following me all the days of my life.

And God, even if I can't call it good, I know what I can call good, and that is what to come when I dwell with you forever.

So maybe our prayer should be, God, help me call whatever it is good.

God, whatever it is, because your good is good.

You're doing something.

It's hard to persevere, church.

I I was talking with a group of college students yesterday, and they're all studying to be preachers, and and they were asking me all these questions about advice and things like this, and I said, Man, the thing I want you to preach to your people, if we can get, if we can start preaching to this more confidently, it would change the church.

We gotta stop combining the easy yoke of Jesus and the way of Jesus.

Jesus says, My yoke is easy.

Jesus is saying, Hey, my salvation is easy.

It's free.

I do all the work.

But Jesus said, My way is hard.

And sometimes we combine those and we give people a false hope and we adopt the false hope and we and we apply truth about something else to the wrong thing.

He never said that walking with him would be easy.

In fact, he promised it would be the hardest thing you would ever do in your entire life.

But his yoke is easy.

As you journey into that hardship, you ain't never got to worry about if you lost his love and his salvation.

But his way is hard.

There are detours everywhere for you to take, there's wrong turns everywhere for you to take.

There are people along the path that have that have been have been ordained by the enemy to enter into your life and destroy what God has for you.

There's a flesh that will be with you for the rest of your life that has nothing more to do but to try to convince you that the way your own is the wrong way.

And one-third of the heavenly realm rebelled with Satan.

So one third of all the angels are now ordained to ruin your life.

But Jesus says, My yoke is easy.

Your salvation is sealed, your hope is sealed, but I call you to walk.

Along the journey, the path is gonna get wide, and that path starts getting wide, then you need to know you're going the wrong way.

And it's gonna hurt to turn and go the other way.

It's gonna hurt to seek reconciliation.

It's gonna hurt to deny yourself.

It's gonna hurt to choose somebody else other than yourself.

But man, we know that on the other side of the journey, there's love like we could have never imagined, there's hope like we could have never imagined and dreamed of.

And it's there for us.

Our job.

Is to defiantly proclaim to this world and to the spiritual realm and to this life that this is not our home, this is not the measure of who I am.

The outcomes of this life could never replace the bet, the best yet to come.

The widow's hope was solely in the outcome of her injustice.

For the believer, our hope has to be solely in the injustice and the scandal of the kingdom.

That somehow a sinful, lustful, broken, unfaithful people still have a claim to anything good from the hand of God.

Jesus is teaching the disciples.

When God promised to be your God, He has promised to simply be your God.

So don't get in the way with your unbelief or your self-loathing when life goes crazy.

I guess the way I would say it is this we keep on praying because we believe God, not because we need to convince him that his justice is swift and that his grace abounds.

But we keep on praying because we believe that to be true.

He knows who he is.

He's calling us in prayer to know who we are.

So my last point for you, and this is the bow and foundation of this whole message.

So if you didn't write anything else down, write this down on your phone, write it on the tablets of your heart, commit it to your memory.

But when you face hardship, when life goes crazy, when you don't know what to do next, and you're still striving and you're still going, know this.

The perseverance that you're walking with is the fruit of your hope.

Because Christ is the joy of our hope.

When you persevere, when you keep on praying, when you keep on trying, when you keep on coming to church, when you keep on reading your Bible, despite what you're feeling, that is fruit that you are walking faithfully with God.

And don't let the enemy steal that from you.

That is also evidence that somewhere, somehow, even if you can't name it, that Christ is seated on the throne of your heart and he remains the joy of your heart.

And when Jesus asks that question, when I return, will he find faith on earth?

That perseverance is your ticket to know that when he comes back, he will find you.

So hold on.

We can only lose hope if we somehow lose sight of Jesus.

So my charge to you is to live at the cross.

I remember middle school, I mean, I mean in elementary school, going to this Wednesday night Bible study, the church van would come down the dirt road, and I just knew they had hot dogs.

I was I was poor, and there were some days we didn't have dinner, but I knew on Wednesday nights, if I got on that church van, I was gonna get as many hot dogs as I wanted and get some chips.

All I had to do was behave just enough.

But at the end, they would always gather the kids back into the sanctuary, and the deacons would get in there, and every time they would sing the song, I'm not gonna sing it, but they would just say, at the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light, and the burdens of my heart rolled away.

It was there by faith I received my sight, and now I'm happy all the day.

There were some people in that room that were going through some crazy stuff, but they proclaimed the oil of joy poured out from their mouth.

And they say, Because I have Jesus, I'm happy all the day.

May that be your story.