But God...

Over the last year and a half, I've been in this journey of formation,

and God has done so many things in me.

And then over the last few months, personally, I think I've mentioned that my

wife and I received a word from someone who doesn't even know us.

It never met us, and it just bore witness, and it was spot on.

It just read us, read her, read me. But it has led me in this kind of journey

of, you've done some things in me, and now there's some things you're trying

to do through me or in me so that you can do things through me.

Some things that God is trying to form in me as a leader and as a pastor.

And as I, throughout the season, it's been crazy.

God has been giving me all kinds of weird dreams. I'm not the kind of person

that leans into dreams and people tell me they had a dream. I'm like,

okay, yeah, that's great.

But who am I to say that God can only speak to me in my waking hours?

And so there's been a process. And there was a message that I thought I was

going to preach this week. and it's something that God was really doing in my life.

Again, it's something that he's forming in me for this particular moment and season.

And I realized this last night, I had Georgia sleeping with me on the couch,

because she had a traumatic moment in day.

And so I'm like, I'm not ready for tomorrow, but I got to love my little girl.

And so I was in the, I'm not going to cry this, I promise. I mean,

I am, I am going to cry. I promise.

And so I said, hey, baby, she's watching Dora. I hate Dora on sports. It's just the worst.

And I'm like, I guess go get ready for bed. I'm going to go to the bathroom.

Get ready. He's like, yeah, sure. They're a puppy.

And so I'm in there thinking, I got this message that is just, I feel.

And I felt God say, that message was actually for you.

And I'm like, well, then what do I do tomorrow? And so I felt the Holy Spirit

say, I want you to look back at what you've preached.

And I've done that a few times. I've repreached several messages and I want

you to find the message that, and he, God wasn't asking me.

I don't believe the Holy Spirit was like, this was a trick question.

Like, I don't really know what the answer is.

Like leading me, I want you to go to a message that in a season of your life

meant the world to you. And I want you to preach it.

And so I did. I said, it only took me a second. I didn't have to think, well, which one was it?

Immediately I preached, I've looked through, I looked through my outlines recently

in my PowerPoints and there's so many things I can't There's been times where

I felt stirred to preach a message, and I'm like, oh, this is so good,

and I'm excited, and I'm studying.

I'm like, I think I've said something like this before. Let me go look at my

outline, and I realize I preached the entire message already before,

because I've forgotten.

But I knew immediately what it was that God wanted me to preach or what God

was asking me to do. Maybe this is just for me. This is our summer crew today.

And I'm grateful that you're all here. I'm grateful for every member of this church.

And those of you that are here today could be on vacation. You probably will

be on vacation if you're not today.

That's okay. I want to be on vacation too.

No shame in needing to get away and rest.

But God let me do a message, and I'm just going to preach it today.

It's a message that I preached before I was even a senior pastor,

and it's a little different.

It's titled, But God, when I preached it all those years ago,

I believe it was 10 years ago, this May.

It was called The Redeemed, God's Textbook. And I'll explain why and we'll get

to it. And I'm a different person than I was 10 years ago.

I see things differently. I do not use the translations that I used to use.

And sometimes the translation was the whole heart of the message.

And when you go back to re-preach it and using a translation that I trust more,

I'm like, I can't even say those things anymore because the Bible doesn't actually say it.

But I just want to take it to a season in my life that was the scariest moment in my life.

I mean, that sounds kind of big and extreme and grandiose.

But particularly in that moment, I can't think of another time where I was more

afraid, where I was more rocked.

And of course, it had to do with my kids and something going on in one of my kids' lives.

And it just rocked me. And I wasn't a pastor at that point, but my parents were

out of town and it was my job to preach.

And I had to preach and I didn't, I can remember when this particular moment

and Mimi would know the moment I'm talking about because she had to come and

wandered in the street in the rain as I was trying to put my,

I just had to walk because I tried to deal and wrestle with the fear that I was going through.

And, but then I had to get over it and I had to preach a message to the church.

And so God led me to this passage. And I'm going to be honest,

this particular passage in Ephesians two, one through seven,

it is not necessarily talking about what I got from it, but the Holy Spirit

used it to speak something to me.

And what I got out of it is in there. It's in the, but we're just going to go

in Ephesians chapter two.

And back in the day, I would have read it in the New Living Translation,

which I still like, it's nothing wrong with it, but it's just not one of the ones I use anymore.

But today I want to read it actually in the Kingdom New Testament,

which is N.T. Wright, Tom Wright's translation.

And it says this, so where do you come into it all?

Well, you were dead because of your offenses and sins. And that was the road that you used to travel,

keeping in step with the world's present age, in step too with the ruler of

the power of the air, the spirit that is even now at work among people whose

whole lives consist of disobeying God.

Actually, that's how all of us used to behave. And Paul, of course,

is speaking to a church that is predominantly Christian.

Gentiles, but there's also some Jewish believers, because we know he talks to

the Jewish believers and says, we were no different even though we had the promises.

But he's talking to these people that come from a worldview that embraced rebellion

towards God and leaned into the powers in the air.

And anyways, he says, actually, that's how all of us used to behave,

conditioned by physical desires.

We used to do what our flesh and our minds were urging us to do. What was the result?

We too were subject to wrath in our natural state, just like everyone else.

But when it comes to mercy, or some translations say, but God,

but when it comes to mercy, and we can still say, but God, because he's still

the subject of this statement.

But it says mercy is the sub subject. I forget what that was called, is it whatever.

But when it comes to mercy, but when it comes to mercy, God is rich.

He had such great love for us that he took us at the very point where we were

dead through our offenses and made us alive together with the king.

Yes, you are saved by sheer grace.

He raised us up with him and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in King Jesus.

This was so that in the ages to come, he could show just how unbelievably rich his grace is.

The kindness he has shown us in King Jesus.

And this was the part of that verse that I clung to at that moment in the New

Living Translation, and I will read the way it says it,

is that so God can point to us in all future ages as examples of the incredible

wealth of his grace and kindness toward us, as shown in all he has done for

us who are united with Christ Jesus.

Beth Moore once said that you cannot amputate your history from your destiny

because that is redemption. And this is all about redemption.

Paul David Tripp, I don't know if you ever heard of him. He's a really cool

guy. I follow this podcast, but he once said, God is the ultimate musician.

His music transforms your life. The notes of redemption rearrange your heart and restore your life.

His songs of forgiveness, grace, reconciliation, truth, hope,

sovereignty, and love give you back your humanity and restore your identity.

Early on in Ephesians, before Paul gets to this point when he's really greeting

in this letter and he offers this prayer,

and he says this, in him we have redemption through his blood,

the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace,

that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.

He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure,

which he purposed in Christ to put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment,

to bring unity to all things in heaven and earth under Christ.

Now, this is a broad statement.

This is a very big theological, a heavy, dense statement talking about the future.

But I love the reality. What he speaks of is what I kind of want to touch on

for a moment. He says that we were redeemed.

In him, we have redemption through his blood.

Redemption is a concept. Now, when I first preached this message,

I didn't go into the deep Hebrew understanding and the narrative throughout

all the Bible of this word. So I won't do it today either.

I'm going to do my best to remain and keep with the integrity of this message

as God gave it to me all those years ago through a little bit of maturity of time and circumstance.

But redemption, all of this that we're talking about in God's grace and his

sovereignty and what he did for us, all stems on this one word,

this one idea, this one phrase and a concept, redemption. Attention!

It means we're releasing, affected by payment of ransom, redemption,

deliverance, liberation, procured by the payment of a ransom.

It comes from apo, separation, in litron, the price for redeeming.

What am I saying this for is because we always belong to God.

We were always supposed to be his special treasured possession,

his image bearers, the ones that he communed with and that the world experienced him through.

We always belong to him and through sin and through our own rebellion, we lost something.

We became our own and in return became evil's possession.

Living our lives, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, as we just read,

living our lives for the power, for ourselves and for rebellion against God.

But we were supposed to be his and the price that all that God did wasn't just

so that we can have better lives so that we could be his again.

There's so much more to discover when we look into this Hebrew,

again, this phrase, but I won't do it today. I'm going to hold back.

But we were ransomed from separation,

the work of the cross and the resurrection, the ministry of Jesus.

What it gives us is a new way to be human. But what God was doing was,

buying us back. You belong to me. And now I can be yours and you can be mine.

That's a powerful understanding that God, all that he did, it wasn't so that

we can choose whether or not we want him because all of us are going to live

under the reality that we are his, that we belong to him.

And whether we live under the reality of his wrath or enter into the reality of his grace.

The truth is we belong to him and he did everything to get us back.

But the wrath of God, he says here, we too were subject to wrath in our natural

state, just like everyone else.

The wrath of God is one of those things that we don't like to talk about in

the modern age that we live in.

We just don't mention it. We don't talk about it, but it is simply a reality,

to the existence of humanity, to all things.

John 3.36, Jesus says, this is after he says, For God sold the world,

they gave his only begotten Son, that whom shall never believe in him shall

not perish, but have everlasting life.

Goes on to say, whoever believes in the Son is eternal life.

Actually, this part in John is not Jesus' words. It's the writer of John saying

these things about Jesus.

Whoever believes in the Son is eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will

not see that life, for God's wrath remains on him.

The wrath of God is a reality, and for all of us, it was our reality. What do I mean by that?

It means that the trajectory that we were on was always going somewhere.

Either we respond to God's grace and receive that payment that was paid for

us, or we continue on this trajectory that no matter how good we feel it is,

no matter how good this road looks, and it looks successful. It looks like it's good.

I'm doing good things, and I'm happy no matter how good it is.

Before Jesus rescued us, we were dead in our trespasses.

It was always going to the same place and the same end and the same destination.

And we lived in this way. I wouldn't necessarily,

when our first priestess said that we were under the rule of the prince of the

power the age, but I think it's more probable or more accurate to say we lived

in conjunction with the powers and we reinforced and leaned into it.

And this has ruling powers on the earth that we gave it, but this trajectory,

this role that we were on under the wrath of God was always leading to the same place.

And we were dead in our trespasses, no matter how good, because there's some

seemingly really good people on the path, their own path, and they're doing

good things. And I applaud that.

And I think it's Christ-like, but that is not the payment for our redemption.

In fact, in Mark 10, 17, Jesus addresses this.

When someone comes up to him and says, How do you have eternal life? Good teacher.

Jesus says, A man raised him and fell on his knees before him.

Good teacher. He asked, What must I do to inherit eternal life?

And why do you call me good?

Jesus answered, No one is good except God alone. Now, this is not Jesus denying his deity.

It's not Jesus saying, I'm not good. He's saying, What do you mean by that?

What do you mean by good? No one is good. In fact, if we look at the Psalms,

I love the Psalms, and they're just beautiful and their praise and their lament.

And here we had the Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there's

any who understand, any who seek God, and all have turned away.

All have become corrupt. There's no one who does good. No, not even one.

All I'm saying here is that doesn't matter. There's nothing that we can do to

buy back what only Jesus could buy back.

We were dead, selfish, living for ourselves, separated from the goodness of

God. But here's the good news.

That is the reality we lived in. That is the reality that all creation that is groaning lives in.

But the wrath of God, however, is not the entire story.

It's a dark background contrasts with the glorious exhibition of God's grace.

This is who we were. This is where we're going. And this is where you're going

apart from the work of Christ.

Without hope in the world, dead. We were under God's wrath.

But God, rich in mercy, abounding in steadfast love.

She says conjunction, but, introduces God's actions towards sinners in contrast

with their plight, in contrast with the consequences of their choices and the

sheer sickness of sin and separation.

But a conjunction is any member of a small class but is a conjunction in greek it's de.

De sounds cooler than but conjunction is

any member of a small class of words distinguished in many languages by their

function and in greek it has the same function de as connectors between words

phrases clauses or sentences or ideas the action or an instance of two or more

events or things occurring at the same point in time or space.

This is happening, but this is happening. This is happening, and this is happening.

This is happening. However, this is also happening. God's wrath and God's grace

are two constants that are occurring simultaneously at the same time.

They're two separate realities.

But on the contrary, yet for the redeemed, this little word is very,

very powerful. It's just a little word that means but.

And I've heard it said before that when you say but after a statement,

it negates or cancels everything you said before. How many of us do it?

I love them, but you just negated the love because love believes all things.

It endures all things, but I love them, but I want to do that,

but it negates everything you said before. So that's good for us as the redeemed in this statement.

My wrath is real, and you are under it, and you deserve it, but.

And then the but is followed by God. It's all about God and who he is.

At one word, his grace is able to cancel the verdict of the transgression and

change the reality of the one receiving that grace.

But you deserved. You are under my wrath. You've chosen disobedience and rebellion

and chaos and ugly and destruction.

And because of that, you were under the wrath of God.

But God's grace is the action of his faithful love.

And we can say a lot about grace. And it's a very powerful word and means so many things.

But it is the action of God's love.

Grace means that God has something that we don't have. and God chose by his

mercy and his love to give it to us.

That's grace. It's the action of his faithful love, but not just saying it's okay.

It's okay that you messed up. It's actually offering not just forgiveness for

the wrath that we were under, but a whole new reality.

This is your reality. This is where you were heading. You were dead in your

trespasses, but God, rich in mercy, abounding in steadfast love,

offered a new way, a new path, forgiving our transgressions,

forgiving our rebellion, and offering us a new hope for the future.

I'm gonna talk for just a minute on the contrast of hope and longing, grace and wrath.

Ephesians 2.12 goes on to say, remember that at that time you were separate

from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants

of the promise without hope and without God in the world.

That is the condition living under God's wrath is you are hopeless. You have no hope.

Hope, expectation of good, joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation.

This word hope, that when Paul uses it predominantly, it's not just saying it's

going to work out, though it is.

It's hope is attached to the reality that God is going to fix everything.

And everything is in God's sovereign hands. And everything is attached to God's goodness.

And all things will be worked out through his sovereignty for the good of all

of creation. That's hope.

Longing, on the other hand, is a strong, persistent desire or craving,

especially for something unattainable or distant.

But long, you see, hope and longing are not the same thing.

And sometimes we kind of misuse hope and reallocate it to actually what we're saying is longing.

But I just, I have hope that God's going to do something.

What you're saying is I'm just longing for it to be true that perhaps God can

do something in my situation.

Before hope, before the reality of the redemption, before the reality of being

called the children of God and living in the reality and the hope of God's good

kingdom and good future, before that, we long for something more.

Before that, we long for a place to belong. Before that, we long for purpose.

Before that, we long for our children to be okay.

Before that we longed for everything to work

out we longed for our bills to be paid we longed for

everything to be okay and longing

unattached to actual hope and confidence always leads to searching but without

hope and you see the world world is searching their longing which i believe

is a part of the process of the holy spirit jesus said if i be lifted up i will

draw all men unto me There's something that happened, I think,

supernaturally on the earth, that after he was lifted up on that cross,

that something happened in this new force, that there's this drawing.

And so people are fundamentally longing for that, but they don't know what it is.

So they're just longing for something to fix what they're feeling.

And longing leads to searching and searching is fine, but without hope.

Of ever finding, we're driven to counterfeits and forced to settle for what

is within our means to attain.

I long for something more, but I'll settle for what I can do.

But hope never disappoints or fails to deliver.

In Romans 5, verses one through five.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith now, justification and

salvation do not the same things when Paul uses them, but they are communicating

them within the same understanding and ideology and the concepts of being redeemed.

Justified simply means declared God's people.

When you're justified, God has declared that you belong to him. And that's powerful.

And therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with

God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Justified, declared God's people, declared his chosen generation because of

our faith in the work that Jesus did.

Or some would say because of Jesus' faithfulness, because he was faithful to the covenant.

What he did makes it so that we can now be declared God's people through our

faith in him and his work. That's amazing.

That's another whole message that wasn't part of the message years ago.

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now

stand, into God's favor, into God's abundant goodness, the things that he has.

And we've talked before about this grace and faith custom in this kind of culture that they lived in.

When somebody had something that you couldn't do and they would show you grace

because you couldn't do it.

So they had what you don't have. So they'd give you pisses.

They'd give you what you couldn't give. And all you had to do to respond was

be faithful to them, and they would give you grace.

We now have grace. We have all that God has to offer.

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering

produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.

I'm not quite sure how that all works out, but it's in the Bible.

And hope does not put us to shame or some translations say hope does not disappoint

because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit

who has been given to us. You see, we don't have to just long.

Hope is the confident expectation grounded in the love of God that we have tangible

awareness of through the Holy Spirit in us that cries out, Abba, Father,

bearing witness with our inner

being, all of who we are, responds to the spirit that says you are loved.

And that love poured into our hearts produces this confident expectation.

You see, because of the love I have, the person that I love the most in the whole world is my wife.

And so it's the only way that I can even truly relate in this way,

in this concept, because of how much she has loved me.

One time somebody said, and we were going through some things in our life and

we were, I don't mean in our marriage, but in our life.

And I think it was Davy, her brother said, dude, that woman loves the hell out of you.

And I was like, I know. And because I can, and I love the heck out of her.

I didn't say that, I'm just quoting him.

But God, do I love the hell out of her, sir. Because she loves me.

She loves me so much when she tells me something, when she gives me a promise,

When she says this is going to work out or I'm going to make this happen,

there's this confident.

I'm not longing. I hope she delivers.

But God is even better than my wife. It says because of the love that is poured

in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, we have hope that does not put us to shame.

We're not ashamed when we put all of our eggs in this basket that God is going

to do what God said he would do. That God will be faithful.

That God will deliver on his promises. that God will make all things right through

his sovereignty and his goodness.

See, longing says, I hope, or I'm sorry, I wish.

I'm really, really thinking it would be great if God could do this.

Hope says God's love has convinced me that he would do anything for me.

And he's promised that he's gonna work all things out according to his good pleasure.

So thou have, because of the Holy Spirit in me, the tangible awareness of God's faithfulness.

Hope is the confident assurance of a future glory that God will work this out.

I think the difference between a woman who longs for a child, but is not pregnant.

I don't mean to be insensitive to those who have had hard times getting pregnant,

but this is just an analogy and illustration.

This is a difference between a woman who longs to have a baby.

I just long to have a child.

There's a difference between that person and the woman who's bearing a child.

Pregnant is different than really wanting to be a mom.

You see, I long to be a mom, but when you're pregnant, there's a different kind

of expectation attached to it.

There is a baby coming. I don't know what it'll look like. I hope not like his dad.

I hope he doesn't have red hair, as Rappelle said. And here he comes and she's,

oh, he got red hair. She said, of course he does.

While his father was in a wheelchair, passed out.

Just kidding. I mean, I'm not kidding, but it's awesome. I love Tyler so much.

There's a difference between longing to be a mother and the confident expectation

of knowing a child is in the womb.

The one who longs is forced to try and fill that unattainable desire with other things.

I want to just mother everybody and I'm just going to have a dog,

which is great. It's fine. If you can't be a mother, be a pet owner.

That's stupid. That's not even close.

The one who expects will see the fulfillment of her hope at the right time.

See, we have hope, not longing, which is guaranteed.

So in my notes from all those years ago, it says this, so for your children have hope.

In that moment, I needed hope. I was clinging on to this. For your children have hope.

And now as I thought of this message laying next to my beautiful granddaughter

who had a traumatic day and has to go through, I don't need to go through the details.

All of us, I think in this room, know what's going on in their lives.

For the rest of her life, she will have to deal with the process.

So many things that she shouldn't have to process.

And for some people, it can destroy you. But I have hope because God said he

holds her. He loves her more than I love her.

And therefore, as I prayed all those years, as I wrestled with this message

and had to preach confidently, I said, God, I have hope.

I long to see what I want to see, but I have hope that you have all things in your hands.

I love the way Paul begins to conclude Romans in 15, 13, the God of hope fill

you with all joy and peace.

So you trust in him so that you may overflow with the hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

You want to know what the Holy Spirit, how powerful, the greatest thing it's ever done in my life?

It has overflowed hope in times when things were hopeless.

And so therefore, in every season of our lives, we can see the reality of this

contrast, these two existing realities, God's wrath and living under God's wrath,

separated from the goodness of God, separated from the hope of God,

going in one direction that's not going to lead to a good place,

no matter how good it may feel and think,

than the other reality of God's grace and faithfulness and the free gift that

he gave us to buy us back to be his and to live a new reality and new existence

throughout all of our experiences.

We can see how these have contrasted in our lives.

In good times, under wrath, we have no one to praise but ourselves,

which always produces selfishness and arrogance, but also with it the driving

fear that it could change at any time.

Even good times become this thing that I can't, God, I hope it doesn't end.

Of my favorite books in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. I know that's kind of sick

and twisted, but I am a four.

Right in the beginning of Ecclesiastes is what Solomon says,

the writer, the preacher, as he leans into this through his wisdom,

the reality of the human experience.

And this is the reality of the human experience.

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher.

Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all

their labors at which they toil under the sun.

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets, and it hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south and turns to the north.

Round and round it goes, and ever returning on its course, all streams flow

into the sea, yet the sea is never full.

To the place the streams come from, there they return again.

All things are wearisome, more than one can say.

The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear is full of hearing.

Nothing that we accomplish, so even good times, under wrath,

under this trajectory of all things eventually ending, nothing that we can do

with our hands can ever last, and it will never be enough.

You will never find a rich person who is rich enough.

Maybe you will. That's a bit of a bold statement, but I I think it's kind of

hard because the more you have, the more you want, and the more you want to

hold on to what you have, unless you're in the lottery and you blow it all in a week.

But nothing in this world that we can do with our hands, nothing's new, nothing less.

But in good times under grace, you see, it's a whole nother perspective, a whole nother reality.

We can see the hand of God in every blessing, in every season,

which leads to praise and thankfulness and the understanding.

When one good season ends, and my last message when I preached it 10 years ago,

I followed it with, it's always followed by another good season.

But the problem is it's not always true.

But you see, under grace and under this living in the reality of the hope of

God's sovereignty and goodness and faithfulness and mercy, we see all things

coming from, all good things coming from God's hand.

Every good and perfect thing comes down from the Father of lights,

who there is no shadow or variation of turning, as it says in James.

And we see all things good coming from God's hands.

And then we have this deep understanding that when one good season ends,

it is always followed by another season, but another season that God is in.

It may not be another good season, but it's another season where we know the

faithful love of God is still in this season, no matter what it looks like.

I love Psalms 30. I love the Psalms through the message translation,

which is Eugene Peterson's translation, spent years translating it.

He just was a beautiful man.

Psalms 34.1, he just says this, bless God, every chance I get,

my lungs expand with this praise.

That's the posture, the reality, living under the reality of hope,

turns everything into a praise. My lungs expand.

You are so good and you are so faithful.

Paul writing to the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians 9, he says,

talking about generosity and how they'd given, he says, now he who supplies

seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store

of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

In other words, everything comes from God and the one who has everything will

give it to you generously and you will be enriched in every way so that you

can be generous on every occasion and through your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

You see, living under this hope, we don't hold hard good moments and hoard the

things that God gives us.

We thank you for them and we know even if this gone tomorrow, you are still here.

And you are all that I want. I don't want anything else.

And therefore what I have becomes an opportunity to sow into the lies of those

that God has placed in front of me.

Generosity becomes an opportunity for gratitude and thankfulness and praise to God.

In bad times. Under wrath, we long for relief that is unattainable most of the

time, or uncertain, and we allow the trial to harden us, which always leads

to bitterness, not strength.

You see, hardness is not strength.

Some people think they've gone through hard things and it's made them hard because of it I'm strong.

A hardness is not the same as strong. Let me give you an example and science and steel,

if steel is heated until it glows red and is quenched in water immediately,

gets really hot under pressure, and then put in water immediately,

it becomes very hard but also very brittle.

This means it is likely to break or snap if put under any great pressure.

You see, without hope, hard times are abrupt.

Go from one hard thing to the next, and they're sudden, and we are at their

mercy having to endure until they end. And when they end, we are often left hard and brittle.

It was so sudden, it was so hard, it hit me. I went through the fire,

and now I'm going through the flood.

Without hope, these things, they're so abrupt, and they're so traumatic,

and they leave us hard and brittle.

Even us as believers who should be living in the reality that is ours,

sometimes we allow this to happen.

We allow our hearts to get hardened, ourselves to get hardened when we do not

and cannot consider the sovereignty and goodness of God in our circumstances,

when we give more attention to what's happening, what we're going through,

then we do the reality of God's word and God's faithfulness.

And we go through these hard times and we're hardened, we're brittle,

and eventually we break.

See in bad times, hard seasons, when we're living under the reality of God's

grace and hope of his faithfulness, we have hope.

And as we trust God through the hard times, we are not hardened,

but tempered and performed.

They do change us. Hard times change us even under grace, but they don't harden us. They temper us.

They form us, leaving us changed, but stronger and better and more like Jesus.

Elizabeth Elliot, I don't know if you know much about her.

She was the wife of a missionary in South America, and her husband,

Jim Elliot, died, was killed trying to minister to this tribe in South America.

And for two years, she stayed with the tribe that killed her husband and ministered to them.

And she later went on to write several books and became a missionary herself

and a beautiful speaker.

But she says this, our vision is so limited, We can hardly imagine a love that

does not show itself in protection from suffering. This can't be God's love.

The love of God did not protect his own son. He will not necessarily protect

us, not from anything it takes to make us like his son.

A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.

Now, I'm not here telling you that all of our suffering comes from the hand of God.

But God doesn't remove us from the fire all the time. Sometimes he does.

Sometimes he walks on water and he ushers us across the roaring seas.

But often he takes us through them. Takes us through them.

As we go through them in hope and trust in God, something happens to us when

we come through the other side.

And we have to believe. This is hard. If you have a theology that says that

we are supposed to be as Christians, the head, not the tail,

everything is supposed to be.

We're supposed to just be living this high life and we're supposed to be flourishing.

But to be human and to be as Christ in the world means that we live in a place of brokenness.

We live in a place of pain. And we sometimes have to go through those things.

There's nothing in the Bible that you can ever read that will tell you otherwise.

But what it does promise us is that there is a future hope and that all things

that we go through, come on, as we go through them, trusting God and trusting

Jesus, come on, I'll have a purpose to make us something more and to be used in and through us.

Everything that we've gone through as a family, God has somehow used to glorify himself and bless us.

But you see, as the believer, as the redeemed that goes through hard times,

they are not hardened but they're tempered tempering is

a heat treatment technique applied to a ferrous alloy

such as steel or cast iron to achieve greater strength

in fact you have to put them through trials to make them stronger by decreasing

the hardness of the ally alloy the production and hardness is usually accompanied

by an increase in ductility thereby decreasing the brittleness of the metal

decrease in other words it gets stronger but it also gets easier to form.

Process is different than hardening. It requires a delicate hand,

skillfully applying heat, then water, then more heat, then water,

leaving the metal ductile and strong.

Ductile means able to be deformed and shaped without losing strength.

Pliable, not brittle.

In 1 Peter, as Peter closes his letter, he says this, and the God of us is the

last statement, and the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory

in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong,

firm, and steadfast to him be the power forever and ever. Amen.

Isaiah 43 and 40, some passages in the Old Testament that Paul really latched

onto, and we see a lot of echoed in the New Testament.

Isaiah 43, 1 says this, but now this is what the Lord says, he who created you,

Jacob, he who formed you, Israel, do not fear for I have redeemed you.

I have summoned you by name. You are mine. And when you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

And when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned.

The flames will not set you ablaze.

Notice he didn't say, I will keep you from the waters.

I will keep you dry and high and warm and not too hot.

He said, when you pass through them, I will be with you.

You will not be consumed. I love that song we sang a couple of weeks ago,

I was tossed in the water, but I never went under.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. And then he says in

Isaiah 40, he gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.

But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary.

They will walk and not be faint. Amen.

Might go through things. We may have to endure some things that do not come from the hand.

Suffering doesn't come from the hand of God. Suffering is a part of being in

a broken world and being called to be as Christ, as God's redeemed with the

hope of the future where all things are made new.

That requires us to be in a place where we sometimes have to walk through the

fire, where we sometimes have to be tossed on the water.

But the promise is, I'll never leave you nor forsake you.

And as you go through these things, I will use them not to harden you,

not to brittle you, not to punish you.

But as you come through them alive, come on, you will be formed.

You will be tempered. You will be strong.

In closing, I closed this message all those years ago with God's textbook as

I went back to this key point.

This was so that in the ages to come,

that he could show, or as the New Living Translation says, he can point to us

and show just how unbelievably rich his grace is, the kindness he has shown us in King Jesus.

Through all things and all seasons of life, if we trust God and allow his wealth

of grace and kindness to work in our lives,

we are the textbook, we are the illustration by which God will turn to demonstrate

who he really is. Look what I did for them.

Look what my kindness has done for them. It doesn't say that he will point to his wrath.

He's not pointing to those under wrath. Look what happened to them.

At the end of all things, at the age to come, it'll be his kindness that he

points to. And the way he points to his kindness is by pointing to us.

How he points to his faithfulness is pointing to us. Look what they went through

and stayed faithful and I was with them.

And look how I worked it out, because they trusted me and they waited for me.",

He points to His grace, always as the example.

Sometimes grace looks like judgment. Sometimes God is removing things from our

life, but his grace and judgment also often work together.

But he always uses his grace and his goodness as this example of who he is.

Now, when I preached this message all those years ago, it was a moment that

in my fear and in the overwhelming feeling of failure as a father,

I clung with all my strength to the but,

to the hope that God would point back at this life lived as a testament of his faithfulness.

And here's the thing, the situation and the moment, it got better and then it got worse.

But here's the thing, but the faith and the hope that I stood before this church

and preached through, that I grabbed a hold of till my fingers bled,

that became a tempering agent that has still strengthened me in this moment

where I'm still by hope waiting for God to do what only he can do with a confident

expectation that God is going to be glorified in this life, in my kids' lives,

in my grandkids' lives, in this church's life, in your life,

and the lives lived for and with him and in him.

And go ahead and stand up. A new particular psalm that I've leaned into this

summer, really just the last few weeks, is in Psalm 31.

And I had a whole message about David and Saul.

But again, I believe that was really a message for me.

Maybe you get to hear it in the coming days.

Psalm 31, it begins in verses 1 through 5, and David says, "'In you,

Lord, I have taken refuge.

Let me never be put to shame.'".

Deliver me in your righteousness. And know that David, when he says,

let me never, God, it's not like a rhetorical question. It's not like a begging.

He's got confidence as we see.

Turn your ear to me. Come quickly to my rescue. Be my rock of refuge,

a strong fortress to save me.

Since you are my rock and my fortress, for the sake of your name, lead and guide me.

Keep me free from the trap that is set for me. For you are my refuge.

Into your hands I commit my spirit, meaning my whole being, myself, my life.

Deliver me, Lord, my faithful God.

And in verse 13, it says, for I hear many whispering terrors on every side.

They conspire against me and they plot to take my life, but I trust in you, Lord.

I say, you are my God and my times are in your hands.

My times are in your hands. That's really kind of been the driving prayer of

mine over the last few weeks. God, my times are in your hands.

My past, my present, my future, my family's past, present, future,

my kids' family, past, present, and future, my grandkids, my church,

the people, my friends, my loved ones, their past, present, and future.

God, our times are in your hands.

Deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me.

Let your face shine on your servant. Save me in your unfailing love.

There's something that can only come through time a confidence that you can

only get when you go through things a strength you can only get but,

all the seasons of my life, all of my times, all of my days,

God has ever been faithful.

His grace has ever been the reality that I live in.

I am yours and you are mine. You brought me back.

And because of your faithfulness, I can trust that it will not cease that your

faithful love will not cease, will not end.

And so therefore, God, today, can we just close our eyes today?

Father, we just lean into the reality of the grace that we've been purchased

with and through and the hope that is attached to your faithful love.

And so whatever it is that any individual in this house is going through,

and there are some who aren't here because they're going through some things that we know.

And there's some that aren't here because it's vacation time and that's okay.

Wherever we are and whatever season we're in, whatever times that we are presently

inhabiting, Lord, they're all in your hands.

They're in your hands and you are faithful. You are sovereign and you are good.

So Father, today we just lean into your love and your grace.

And through that cling to hope that all things will be summed up in Christ Jesus,

I may not see everything that I long for but I will see everything that I hope

for and I hope my hope is in you,

and your goodness and your sovereignty and I just thank you today Lord for your faith.