Generous Part 3 | Giving Other Things with Karl, Rhet, Lauren

Welcome to Hub City Vineyard.

To get connected or to give online go to connect.hcv.church or give.hcv.church.

If at any point during this message you feel called to make a change in your life, text

change me to 970-00.

Thank you and enjoy the message.

Well good morning Hub City Vineyard.

How do you guys feel today?

You guys are good.

Alright so you're probably wondering what in the world is going on.

The countdown hit zero and we always go right into worship.

Well we are going to flip the script on our service today and the reason is we are going

to spend an extended time of worship today.

So before we get into that, Carl, Lauren and I wanted to set the stage.

We wanted to just prepare our hearts because we believe that God has some really really

special very important things that he wants to do in our hearts today.

So if you guys are new to Hub City Vineyard and you're wondering wow this is an interesting

way to start, we're all experiencing this together but I promise you it's going to be

good.

So I want to introduce two of my best friends in life.

To my right is Mr. Carl Hartman.

He is our worship leader and music director.

To my left is Lauren Silky Parker and she is our worship leader.

The three of us head up the leadership team of the worship team.

So we're going to have a seat and we're going to talk to you guys just about worship.

So when Chris told me that he was going away and he said, Brett I'd like for you to lead

the first Sunday.

I'd like for you to preach.

My initial thought was no I don't think I'm going to preach.

I think we're going to worship because I love to worship and she loves to worship and he

loves to worship and I know that you guys love to worship.

And we believe that our worship literally breaks chains.

So as you guys know we're in the middle of our generosity or being generous series and

we're going to continue with that generosity, that generous theme, but we're going to take

a little bit of a different spin.

So you know when it comes to generosity when we are generous with our money it means that

we are giving above and beyond maybe a little bit more than that tie that or that offering.

When we're generous with our love we are going out of our way and giving more love to people

right when we're generous with our time we are dedicating more of our life's resources

and more of our life's time to those people.

And you see there's a reward for being generous.

If you're generous with your money the Bible says the measure that you get will be measured

on the measure of what you give.

So the Bible is saying that if you are generous you will be blessed financially and in other

ways.

If you're generous with your love the reward is that you're going to be able to create

stronger bonds with people whether it's your spouse or your kids or just your friends.

If you're generous with your time you are going to be blessed with just deeper relationships

with people.

If you are giving people more of your heart, more of your soul, your relationships are

going to be strengthened.

If we're generous with our worship I believe that we will be blessed with a better perspective

and an increased amount of faith.

And through those two things we are going to talk this morning about those things.

How many of you guys read the weekly email that came out?

It comes from Chris but it was actually written by me this week.

Alright 12 of you.

Good deal.

You guys got to get on the weekly email list because we have a lot of different thoughts

and ideas that we share but also it's just a good way to keep up with all that's going

on.

So today's talk is going to be about circumstantial worship.

You see one thing that I believe that we all share in common is that we all go through a

lot of different things in life.

A lot of different storms, a lot of different battles, right?

It's hard to keep up with our finances.

We live in a world that's just politically crazy.

We have the pressures of being a good employee and being a good mom, a good dad, a good son,

a good daughter, a good friend.

We deal with friendship drama in our life.

We deal with a lot of stuff and if we're not careful all of those things can consume our

hearts.

They can consume our lives.

They can consume our minds.

And it's really easy to focus on the negative.

I know that I'm someone and my wife will tell you that if I have something going on in my

life admittedly a lot of times that captures a lot of my time and attention.

If I have a situation at work constantly talking to her about it, what should I do, what do

you think?

And she's like, Rhett, this will be okay.

And where that becomes a problem is it's easy to get in between you and God.

You and Jesus.

You and your worship.

And I know that so many of us can come into this place on a Sunday and it's hard for us

to lift our hands because of the chains that we're allowing to bring us down.

It's hard for us to lift our minds into a place of being elevated to worship because

our minds are consumed by the issues that we're going to face tomorrow morning at the

job.

And I know that if there's one thing that worship cannot be, it's circumstantial.

Because our God is a never changing, ever present, always here God.

And just because your idea of a situation changes, His idea of how He sees you does

not change.

You are still the same in His eyes.

And before I turn it over to Lauren, I want to give two thoughts.

Number one, I want you guys to realize that I firmly believe that there is a difference

between praise and there's a difference between worship.

There's a difference between praise and worship.

You see, praise is an attitude of thanksgiving.

It's declaring glory to God for who He is and what He's done.

But you see, worship costs you something.

Praise is free, but worship costs you something.

Worship costs you your current attitude.

It costs you your current mental space.

It costs you to turn over your burdens, your cares, your worries to the foot of the cross.

Worship costs you surrender.

You see, praise looks like David playing his harp after he was anointed king.

But worship looks like Abraham walking up the hill with his son.

Praise looks like Jairus after Jesus brings his daughter back to life.

But worship looks like the woman who gave the two coins because it was all that she

had left.

And so this morning, I want to ask you when you come in here, do you praise or do you

worship or do you do both?

Because I believe that the terms praise and worship are combined together because it's

good to have an attitude of both.

It's good to give God glory for the things that He's doing in your life.

But it's also very, very, very good to worship Him even from a place of defeat, from a place

of surrender.

I said this in my email and I believe it.

I believe the broken hallelujahs that we give to the ears of God are more pleasing to Him

than the praises that we give when everything in our life is going wrong.

So the last thought I want to give you before I turn it over, the devil's main desire is

for us to become more defensive.

I believe that.

Because our worship should be a weapon.

Our worship should put us on the offense.

Did you know that Lucifer was the archangel of music?

Did you guys know that?

Lucifer was the archangel of music.

He was literally in charge of heaven's worship.

So isn't it ironic?

Isn't it coincidental that the first thing we tend to give up when we experience hardships

in our life is our attitude of praise?

And I believe that that is a tool of the enemy to distract us from the good things that God

has.

Amen to that.

So I'm gonna just punctuate real quick some points that I feel are really strengths for

us when we choose to worship and what worship really can be for us.

You talked about entering His...

When we come to praise Him, we gotta enter His courts with thanksgiving in our hearts.

And every time we are choosing to worship, every time we're worshiping through a situation,

we gotta go to the throne room, we gotta go with thanksgiving in our hearts.

And there is always a reason to be thankful.

I had a verse to go along with that.

Ephesians 5 20 says, sing songs from your heart to Christ.

Sing praises over everything.

Any excuse for a song to God the Father in the name of our master, Jesus Christ.

Any excuse.

Any excuse to...when you are facing a situation and you don't know what to do, you choose

to be thankful.

You choose to praise.

Because when we worship our way through our circumstances, we change our perspective from

our human perspective to a kingdom perspective.

We see it the way that God sees it.

We go from a deficit-based mindset, woe is me, I can't believe this is happening to me,

to a growth mindset.

What does God have for me on the other side of this?

Because it's okay to feel disappointment.

It's okay to feel like your world has just absolutely been rocked.

But He doesn't want you to stay there.

It's okay to go through that as a season or as just a brief moment in time, but we're

never meant to stay there.

And the way that we get through that is by choosing to worship.

One of the things I love so much about communing with God in a way of worship is that it's

not perfect.

We are human, we're flawed, and so our worship is imperfect.

Like you said, it's like a broken hallelujah.

Those are the most beautiful because we're being honest about where we are.

We're being vulnerable.

And you guys know we chose vulnerability as our team word for our worship and tech team

this year.

And so we got to speak with our team in January and kind of set the stage for how we're gonna

live in vulnerability this year.

If I'm being really honest, I'm being really vulnerable right now because I can be up here

on stage singing a lot, but it takes me out of my comfort zone to be here kind of giving

a little bit of a message.

Some would tell you that this is nothing.

This is exactly what I do anytime I speak.

And if you know, you know.

I'll try to keep it to the clock.

So the imperfect part of our worship and of our praise comes from an area of just complete

honesty, just being releasing that thing that is deep inside of us.

Everybody is carrying something that they've buried within their hearts.

And worship is just the key to unlock what we have tried to hide.

If you don't know, if you don't understand this yet, I think most of us do, but you can't

hide your thoughts, your innermost feelings, your experiences.

You can't run from God.

You can't hide from Him.

Like He is super good at hide and seek.

Okay.

So like He's going to be like, okay.

He could count to 10,000 and still be like, gotcha.

Are you going to come hang with me now?

Are you going to go try to run and hide again?

You know, He's the architect of all of that.

And I find that extremely comforting to know that we can come to Him in a place of just

complete brokenness.

And worship is just that key to just unlock what our healing is going to be.

So real quick, you also talked about, you know, like worship is our...

Worship was something that Lucifer was the architect of.

He was the archangel in charge of that.

And it's amazing that worship can be our best weapon.

You know, like that's the best way that we have that we can fight against the enemy.

And we talk a lot on Sunday mornings.

You hear us in worship talk a lot about the Jericho walls coming down because they chose

to worship through it.

And we remember the story of Jehoshaphat and his army.

Like who?

What's that word?

Jehoshaphat?

We've talked about him in here before.

We've had message series on Jehoshaphat before, but just a refresher.

With Jehoshaphat's armies, they had finally gone into the promised land.

He had led the people of Israel, but they are in the promised land.

They're living in Israel.

Like they're good.

It's been promised all this time.

And now there are these armies descending upon them.

They are way outnumbered.

They are surrounded.

And Jehoshaphat and his people are just like, what are we supposed to do?

We're gonna be taken out.

We thought we were in the promised land.

We waited all these years to be here.

Like what is up with this?

What is going on?

So they know that they're gonna be defeated if they choose to go fight this battle.

And God gives them a word.

And he says, I want you to worship me.

I want you to choose to worship me.

When the people began to praise, they sang, give thanks to the Lord for he is good.

His love endures forever.

And in their faithfulness to follow God's lead, to walk out what he had commanded them

to do.

The armies that were descending upon the kingdom of Israel under Jehoshaphat began turning

upon each other.

They looked next to them.

They looked at their allies that had come down to defeat the land of Israel.

And they started killing each other until they themselves defeated themselves.

And it was over because they chose to follow God.

They chose to worship.

So how do we apply that to our lives?

Anytime we face a situation, we need to choose to worship first.

Worship will change your atmosphere of chaos into an atmosphere of peace immediately.

And when we allow ourselves to worship through it, then we become exactly who God intended

us to be.

We are reminded of his goodness.

We're refreshing our spirit with his goodness.

It allows our spirit to intercede on our behalf to fully commune with the Holy Spirit.

And so just to kind of close with this, the last point I had is worship to me is an open

door.

And if you just in your head just sang love is an open door, I want you to replace that.

I want you to replace that with worship is an open door.

Come on everybody.

Worship's an open door.

Come on.

Yep.

Okay.

So if you're not a worship, you're welcome.

That is something I want that to stick with you though, because we know that when we sing

through something, like God designed our brains so that it gets deeper in there and we always

remember that.

That's why we learn our ABCs by singing a song, right?

Be honest, you wouldn't know your ABCs if you didn't learn that song in pre-K.

It's why I still know all 50 nifty United States.

So when you can sing that and when you can go to that and say, wait a second, I'm going

through something.

Worship's an open door.

Okay.

I just want you to remember that because when we try to hide behind that door that he's

coming knocking on, that he's going to come and find us because he's really good at hide

and seek.

He's finding you.

So when he comes to knock on that door and we allow our worship to push us through, when

we open that door back up again, there's a whole different scene on the other side of

it.

Worship is your open door into restoration of your faith in him and your trust in his

promises that he is going to be continuously good because he has always been good.

He always will be good.

And worship is your open door to embracing that.

Love it.

Well, that's awesome.

Thank you.

It's fantastic.

On numerous occasions, Rhett and I have had the opportunity to preach about the life of

Jacob and Jacob is one of my most favorite Bible characters.

We typically focus in on one specific event, one significant event in Jacob's life where

he was running from Esau and he came to this place called Luz, which means separation or

departure.

The author of Genesis wants to create in our minds this perception that because Jacob was

running from his family, he was somehow becoming separated from the covenant that God had made

with Abraham and Isaac.

So Jacob went to sleep for the night and during the night, he had this incredible encounter

with God where God revealed his glory and reaffirmed his faithfulness to Jacob.

And Jacob woke up the next day and he anointed the place and he renamed it Bethel, which

means the house of the Lord.

And Jacob said, surely the Lord was in this place and I was not aware of it.

Now it wasn't until this past week that I came to realize that there's more to the story.

This is not the last time that Jacob would have a significant encounter with God in Bethel.

After Jacob left Bethel, he went to the house of his uncle Laban where he began to accumulate

wealth and build his family.

And years later, God would call Jacob to go back to the land of his father, which led

him straight back to Bethel.

And I'm going to read from Genesis chapter 35.

Genesis 35 · chapter mention

Then God said to Jacob, go up to Bethel and settle there and build an altar there to God

who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.

So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, get rid of the foreign

gods you have with you and purify yourselves and change your clothes.

Then come, let us go up to Bethel where I will build an altar to God who answered me

in the day of my distress and who has been with me whenever I have gone.

In verse six, Jacob and all the people with him came to lose, that is Bethel, in the land

of Canaan.

There he built an altar and he called the place El Bethel because it was there that

God revealed himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother.

God brought Jacob back to the place where Jacob had first encountered God's faithfulness.

And there are many of us here this morning who have had incredible life-changing encounters

with God where God has pulled us from sin and shame and brought us into his grace through

Jesus.

As we approach God to worship him this morning, I want to encourage you to go back to that

place where you first encountered God, to remember what he's done for you, to remember

his faithfulness.

We need to understand God's faithfulness so that we can have a proper perspective on

his promises.

Here's the thing about Bethel.

Bethel was located in Canaan, which was the land that God had promised to Jacob's grandfather,

Abraham.

Jacob was building an altar in what would ultimately become the promised land.

God had called Jacob to praise him for the promise generations before anyone from Jacob's

family would actually possess that promise.

How many people here this morning are believing in a promise from God that has not yet come

to fruition in your life?

Yeah, I believe that God is calling us to praise him for the promise, even if that promise

is not yet in your hands.

We can trust him knowing that the promise is safe in his hands.

Just like Jacob, when our circumstances get difficult, they can make us feel like we're

separated from God.

We can turn our hearts to God and worship and learn to say, surely the Lord was in this

place.

Yes, that's good.

As I was reflecting on our theme for today, worshiping God in every circumstance, I began

to think about how God is challenging me to grow personally.

I'm sure many of you can relate.

I can clearly see God's goodness and his faithfulness when things are going well in my life, when

I can see his hand working.

But when I encounter struggles or trials, it becomes so much more difficult for me to

see God's goodness and to be motivated to worship him.

But I think that we need to be careful not to confuse the nature of our circumstance

with the nature of our God.

Our God is good even when our circumstance is not.

What I've come to find out is that it is easy to praise God from the mountaintop moments

in our life when we're standing in his blessing.

But sometimes the most impactful praise is praise from the pit when it's just you and

the angel shutting the mouth of the lions that you've been thrown to.

Sometimes the most impactful praise is praise from the prison when it's just you and Silas

or you and your spouse, you and your kids, and you're praising God even as the enemy

is trying to keep you bound.

That's the praise that shakes prison walls.

And as followers of Christ, I need you to know that if he's good on the mountain, then

he's good in the valley.

And if he's good in the pit, then he's good in the palace.

If he's good in the peace, then he's good in the battle.

Come on, he is good.

He is good.

That's what we call an alley-oop.

So he said something about prison walls and foundation shaking.

So to close here today before we jump into our worship night, and I said worship night

because that's what it's going to feel like in here.

That's how long it's going to take.

One of my favorite stories is, as Carl talked about Jacob, I love the story of Paul and

Silas.

You guys ever been going through your life and you feel like you're doing everything

the way that you should be and you're giving God your first and your best, but things still

continue to go wrong?

Yeah?

Just no?

Okay.

So the disciples found themselves out doing the Lord's work, preaching the gospel.

And what happens?

They get thrown into prison.

The Bible says that the crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas.

After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison and the jailer was

commanded to guard them carefully.

When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and he fastened their feet

to the stocks.

But about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.

You see, they chose to worship in a time where they had every right to cower in a corner.

They chose to exclaim the goodness of God when they had every right to use the excuse

to keep their mouth shut.

Suddenly there was a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prisons were shaken

and then their shackles came loose.

So just like Carl said, he had a realization.

I had a realization reading that.

The Bible doesn't say that their shackles just came loose.

It says the foundation was shaken and then their shackles came loose.

So what I came to say this morning is that I believe sometime God needs to shake the

foundation of what you're going through to wake you up to see that that's the reason

that your chains came off.

He didn't just make them magically come off, but he wanted to shake things going on around

you.

He said everything that can be shaken must be shaken so the things that can't be shaken

will remain.

So what will remain in your life?

Will it be your pain or will it be your praise?

I said this in a message before.

Do your chains break your praise or will your praise break your chains?

You see, I believe that Paul and Silas, God allowed their miracle to happen in a prison

so you can be freed from your prison this morning.

I'm going to say it again.

I believe that God allowed Paul and Silas' miracle to happen in a prison so that this

morning you can be freed from the prison that you're in.

The same action that released Paul and Silas from their prison is the same action that

can cause you to have a brand new perspective in your life today.

So as we get ready to transition into our time of worship, I want you to think about

Jacob and Jehoshaphat and Paul and Silas.

And I want you to relate to one of those three stories because I promise you you can.

You're either going to run from something, you're either facing a battle, or you either

feel like you're imprisoned behind the walls.

Your feet are shackled, your hands are bound, and it's hard to lift your hands in praise

and worship when you've got chains around them.

But the perspective that you choose to take this morning is up to you.

And the way that you walk out of those doors here in about 35 to 40 minutes is up to you.

You can walk out feeling free.

Let me tell you something.

You're free even before you're freed.

You are free this morning even before you are freed.

God has already called you loved.

He's already called you chosen.

He's already freed you from the thing that you need to be free from this morning.

But it's up to you to believe it.