Stirred...Not Insecure

Good morning, Church at Chelsea Westover.

How are we today?

Good morning.

I would love if everyone was here, but the reality of it is that we're just not.

But that doesn't change the fact that I'm honored to be sharing this pulpit.

I'm honored to be walking on this stage where Pastor Danny and Pastor Rick bring so many great messages.

And I believe firmly that God has a word for you today.

I believe that we would all be lying to ourselves if we don't say that on some level we're hurting.

People are hurting right now.

The enemy is attacking us.

We're doing a series called Stirred, and it took one week in the series for our church to get stirred.

Today I want to bring you a message, though, called stirred but not insecure.

Stirred but not insecure.

I'm bringing the message from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 29.

Jeremiah 29 · chapter mention

So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to Jeremiah 29.

We're going to look at verses 10 through 14.

And as we look at this, there's a promise in this text that is one of the probably top 25 most quoted verses in all of the Bible.

Verse 11, Jeremiah 29, 11.

I want to look at it from maybe just a little bit different light, try to define and dig in a little bit so maybe we can really see what Jeremiah was saying when he talked to the people here.

Today I'm going to be using the New International Version as I read this.

So I just want you guys to know this is where I first came in contact with Jeremiah 29.11, and I want to break it down from that text.

So let's read Jeremiah 29.11.

This is what the Lord says when 70 years completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.

Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and will bring you back from captivity.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for this day you have given us.

And Father, I thank you for your word that is so relevant today.

Lord, I pray that you will just open our hearts, clear our minds, and let us focus in just a few minutes on a word that you have for us that I believe can change the trajectory of our day, our week, our month.

It could change the trajectory of our church.

So just let us not be lost in that, Lord.

And I pray today, God, that you will use me to bring a word to your people to heal their pain.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

As we look through Jeremiah 29, 11, the first thing I want you to notice is that it says, um, I, and God says, I know the plans I have for you.

Now he had already told the people in verse 10 part of the plan.

And part of the plan, if you missed it, is the Jewish people are going into 70 years of captivity.

And he promises them that he knows the plan he has for them, and he tells them all of these things after he tells them you're going to be captives for 70 years.

That's a pretty tough promise to grab a hold of, right there.

If I was going into captivity for 70 years, that's like your whole life.

And that would really stir me up.

So God is talking here to a stirred people, a people that are very confused, a people probably that are very insecure.

Because of the promise he's made them of 70 years.

So after that, he tells the people, I know the plans I have for you.

And I read that, and sometimes I want to read, I know the plans God has for me.

But that's not what the Bible says.

The Bible says the word of the Lord came and God said, I know the plans that I have for you.

The fact of the matter is this I don't know the plans God has for me.

I have some generalizations, but the day-to-day in and out details, I have no idea the plans God has for me.

And you know, I think there's reasons that we don't know the plans God has for us, but yet we still spin our wheels and give ourselves headaches and migraines and maybe even heart attacks trying to figure out what God's plans for us are.

God says, I know the plans, and He doesn't tell us the plans sometimes.

If you're filling in blanks, I have some blanks.

We might mess up the plan if God were to tell us what the plan was.

We may not like the plan if God were to tell us what the plan was.

We may be scared by the plan if we knew exactly what God's plan was for our life.

A lot of people, they have this lie they tell themselves, where if I they say, if I knew the exact plan, then I would be obedient.

If you read the Bible, it's anything but that.

You go back to Genesis chapter 12, God told Abram, leave and go to the place I'll show you.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

Three verses later, Abram picked up his whole life at 75 years old and left.

Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee.

Simon, Peter, and Andrew casting a net into the water.

Jesus says, Come follow me and I'll make you fishers of men.

Whatever that is.

And they immediately left and went and followed him.

Where were they going?

Who knows?

You look at Jonah.

God told Jonah exactly where to go, exactly what to say, and exactly why he needed to go there.

And Jonah went the other way and tried to flee the presence of the Lord.

Don't think that if you know God's plan, you're going to be obedient.

See, another thing is I know myself, and I know that even if I know where I'm going, it's no guarantee that I'm going to get there.

I have a horrible time with directions.

It's been going on all of my life.

When I was in high school, I went to this magnet school.

They bust us in across the county to school.

So we had to get to a bus stop, and then the bus picked us up.

The bus stop was four miles from my house, and we went 20 miles across the county to school.

So every morning my dad drove me to the bus stop, and every afternoon my dad took me back home from the bus stop.

We did this all of my ninth grade year.

Come along about April, and some of my friends, they also drove to the bus stop because they didn't want to drive 25 miles back and forth to school.

So they would ride to the bus stop, and I made a senior friend who offered to take me home from the bus stop one day.

And I was so excited.

I mean, ninth grader, senior, I was cool.

So my dad said it was okay.

I couldn't believe it.

And we got in the car that afternoon, and for 45 minutes, we drove around West Jefferson County with me looking for my house until I finally had to stop at a payphone and call my daddy to ask him how to get home.

How embarrassing is that.

But the point is, I knew exactly where I was going and I still couldn't get there.

It's not just then.

My sister-in-law lives in Pelham.

Our kids are the same ages, just about.

They play together all the time.

She's been living there for nine years.

She lives four turns off of Highway 11.

I've been going to this house once or twice a month for the past nine years.

Let me just tell you, Thursday, I took the wrong turn going through her neighborhood.

It's been happening forever.

Pastor Rick and Pastor Danny and Benji and David Wilson and the halls from our church all live on one street in Chelsea Park.

I've been in this church for six years and I go there regularly to this little section of the neighborhood.

And it's a roll of the dice whether I'm going to take the turn that gets out or the turn that goes to the cul-de-sac.

Knowing where I'm going doesn't have any impact on me.

And God doesn't always tell me where I'm going.

You want me to tell you what has impact on me?

What has impact on me when I'm going somewhere is if I have Amanda in the car with me because she'll tell me where to turn.

And if we go the wrong way, she'll tell me to turn around.

And sometimes she tells me that I need to slow down or stop or whatever.

You know, I think maybe God doesn't give us the exact directions because he wants to go along for the ride.

And he knows if we have all the directions, that we don't have to ask him anything.

And he wants to be along for the ride.

It's called a relationship.

He wants to tell us that we need to turn here.

He wants us to ask him if we've gone the wrong way.

Sometimes he tells us to slow down and sometimes he puts the brakes on us and tells us to stop.

Am I right?

But he wants to be along for the ride.

You see, if God is along for the ride, I don't have to know the specifics.

He can keep me on a need-to-know basis.

And then even when I'm stirred, I'm not insecure.

That's another thing that uh that we see here.

God promises to prosper us.

He promises the people going into 70 years of captivity, I'm going to prosper you.

That doesn't even make sense.

We live fairly luxurious, comfortable lives here in our country, let's be honest.

But are we prosperous?

What prosper means is to make successful.

And we have almost anything you could want, but are we successful?

Are we prosperous?

See, I think prosperity doesn't show up in your bank account or your beamer or your boat or your abode.

You can have all those things and still not be prosperous.

I was looking through my Insta the other day and I saw one of these meme things.

And the meme uh said uh meme, right?

M-E-M-E.

It said there's four prosperities.

And I want to tell you just a little bit about four prosperities that I saw on Instagram as I was getting ready to speak with you today.

There's a financial prosperity, there's health prosperity, there's social prosperity, and there's spiritual prosperity.

Financial prosperity is having money and things and all you need.

Social prosperity, I think of as friendships, relationships, family, status.

When I think of health prosperity, I think of being physically fit, healthy, in your mind as well, not just your body.

And when I think of spiritual prosperity, I think of are you successful in your relationship with God, in your relationship with other people as God relates to them.

There's all kinds of prosperity that we can have.

And my question to you financial, physical, spiritual, or social, what's number one?

Time will tell.

What I mean by that is the amount of time you spend on each one will tell what's the most important to you.

Jesus tells us in Matthew, he says, What profit is a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

What will a man sacrifice for his soul?

Matthew chapter 6, we see Jesus telling us that lay up for yourself treasures in heaven, not here on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

What are you willing to sacrifice for stuff that moths eat, rust, destroys, and can be stolen from you?

How much of your social and your spiritual and your physical prosperity are you willing to give up for that financial prosperity?

Shift your focus and you'll see that God is making you prosperous.

The people going into captivity had to figure out what prosperity was.

I can be secure that God is going to make me prosperous as long as I have a proper definition of prosperity.

God promises to make us prosperous.

Another thing God does, he tells us that he's not going to harm us.

In the verse, God promises that he won't harm us.

Now, there's a classic scenario that I'm sure you guys have all heard before, where you have the dad and he's looking at his son and he says, son, as he takes off his belt, this is going to hurt you?

No, it's going to hurt me a lot worse than it's going to hurt you.

It's going to hurt me a lot worse than it's going to hurt you.

And if you have a smart elect kid, then they should say, Well, Dad, give me the belt.

Because I certainly deserve to be hurt the worst out of all this.

Don't recommend that for you kids who may be watching.

But we got to understand what the dad is meaning.

The dad, when he says this, is it's going to hurt me to do this, but it's not going to harm you.

Now I want to be very clear what the Bible says.

God doesn't promise not to hurt us.

He doesn't promise that we won't hurt.

Hurt means cause pain.

What God promises is that he's not going to harm us.

He says he's not going to cause us damage.

He's not going to have an adverse effect on us.

That's what he tells the people going into captivity.

Not that it won't hurt, but that he won't harm them.

In fact, if you read the Bible, it's full of examples of people being told by God that they're going to be hurt.

In Mark chapter 13, verse 9, Jesus tells his disciples, you're going to be beaten in the synagogues.

Mark 13:9

I mean, that's completely embarrassing, demoralizing, physically painful, mentally painful.

That will really get you stirred up if you go to church and you get a beating.

Paul says this in 2 Corinthians chapter 12.

2 Corinthians 12 · chapter mention

He talks about how he takes pleasure in his infirmities and in his distress and in all of his persecution.

It's happened so much to Paul, he's just learned how to take pleasure in it.

Peter tells the same thing in 1 Peter 4, verses 12 and 13.

1 Peter 4:12

Peter tells us that we should learn to rejoice when we share in the sufferings of Christ.

And that way, when he's revealed, we'll have greater glory.

So God promises that he's not going to harm us, but some things might hurt.

I'm going to tell you guys just a little bit about me.

Not everybody maybe knows some of my story, but I grew up the child of a divorce.

My parents were divorced when I was three years old.

And I lived with my mom.

My dad lived a few miles down the road.

My dad got remarried.

My mom got remarried.

We did the whole every other weekend thing.

No way to live, but that's what we did.

Rock along till about 13 years old.

And I was in private school all the way up until I was 13.

I didn't go to school in the neighborhood where I lived.

But I had developed all these friendships.

Like I had four really good friends in my neighborhood when I was 13.

And I would go to their house.

I was never in my house.

I didn't want to go to my dad's on the weekends anymore.

I hadn't seen him.

I'll go a month at a time.

And my friends became kind of my circle, and I didn't go to school with them.

So they would talk about all this stuff that was happening at school, and I didn't get to be a part of it because my mom had me over in other schools.

So we we started having these conversations, my mother and I.

And all I wanted to do was go to school with my four good buddies.

I wanted to play football at minor junior high school.

That's what I wanted to do.

And she had kind of gotten to the point, and I remember she had conceded.

And in the winter of my eighth grade year, the plan was for me the next year to start ninth grade with my buddies, play football at the high school in the neighborhood.

It was awesome.

I was so excited.

You guys ever have one of those days that just stands out in your mind?

It's just tattooed on you.

You can't forget it.

Let me tell you about February the 26th, 1992.

It was one of those days, it was still cold, but it was getting warm.

I still remember that I had a plan in place that I was going to try to sneak to church that Wednesday night in my new purple duckhead shorts.

Because my mom had a dentist appointment that day, and I thought she might get home a little too late to tell me that I couldn't.

So I was planning, I don't know why, but I was planning to wear these purple shorts to church that night.

I went to school that day and I had white Levi's.

I had a button your fly shirt, and I had these things that were popular in the early 90s.

I think they're coming back.

It looks like you sewed a couple of rugs together and you wear it as a hoodie.

It's called a Baja.

So I had my Baja on and I had a few sprays of dracardna water because that's what I wore in eighth grade.

More than a few, probably.

And off I went to school.

I see my mom in the driveway.

I said, Mom, love you, have a great day.

Bye.

My stepdad takes me to school.

I get there, I don't know much about what happened that day, but I know in seventh period, a girl named Angela Jones came and got me from P.E.

and she had a note for me.

And I was hoping that it was from her because she was okay.

But the note said, Go to the office, and my mind started rattling about what they have found out.

What do they know that I've done?

And I go to the office preparing my defense, and when I got to the office, my stepdad was there with the preacher, and on the steps of the school, they told me that my mom was gone.

She had a massive heart attack that morning, and she was gone forever.

And you want to talk about hurt.

You want to talk about pain.

I get tingles just thinking about it right now.

She was my person.

And I had all these plans, all this stuff that I was gonna do.

And mom was gone.

I was stirred.

In the months that followed, what happened was that I had to move in with my dad, who I hadn't seen in like a month.

And my dad was an old sheriff's deputy for the sheriff's department, criminal detective, investigator.

And we didn't have the best relationship.

And I didn't get to go to school where I was gonna go with my friends, and I didn't get to play football at minor junior high school.

I had to go to this magnet school where they bust us across the county.

And school was hard, and life was hard.

And I had four years that had a whole, whole, whole lot of pain.

And I got through it, and I ended up, I got a college scholarship.

And I kept up with some of my old buddies from when I was 13.

And by the time that I went to college, two of them had been arrested for drugs.

They were in and out of prison, rehab, jail.

I went on to college, I was studying, doing good, thinking about going to law school, maybe, being a teacher.

I didn't know what I was gonna do.

Got a call one day.

One of the other guys died.

He was 21.

My second year of college, I got another call, and I went to another funeral of another friend of mine from that old neighborhood, 19 years old.

Died.

And in my college room, a soft still voice from God, my creator, came to a confused little college kid, and he spoke a little bit of wisdom.

He said, Dave, you could have been right there.

That could have been you.

What I want you to know today is that the pain prevented a lot of problems.

What I want to tell you today is that the pain that I went through paved a pathway.

What I want to tell you today is that that pain prepared prosperity for me.

And I can stand here today before you and I can honestly tell you that I count February 26, 1992 as a day of great blessing.

I can stand before you and honestly say that my mom being taken away from a scared, confused, 13-year-old-year-old little boy in eighth grade, that worked for good.

See, a lot of people say, and we know that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord and those who are called according to his purposes.

Let me tell you something, I've lived it.

And I may be hard-pressed, but I won't be crushed.

Hey, I might be perplexed, but I won't be in despair.

I may be persecuted, but I won't be forsaken.

I might be struck down, but I won't be destroyed.

See, there's a lot of things in this world that can hurt me, but I serve a God whose promise that he will not harm me.

Let me tell you, he's got a plan for my pain.

To give me a hope and a future.

And he does you too.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about that hope.

Hope's an interesting thing.

What it means is that we are expecting something.

When you hope, you're expecting something is going to happen.

So if God has given me a hope, then I'm expecting that God is going to do something.

And what I want to tell you is that there's a few things that you do when you're expecting something.

When you're expecting something, expectation leads to preparation.

If you're expecting something, you get ready for it.

A lot of people focus so much on their situation that they forget about preparing for what they're expecting for.

There are all kinds of situations, good ones, bad.

Bad ones, boring, humdrum, confused, stressed out, pressure, got too much to do, don't have anything to do.

It's like we're never satisfied with the situation that we have.

What I want you to know though is every situation is a preparation.

God's preparing you to do something.

If you have a preparation mindset, you look at your situation and you say, Not how can I get out of this?

You look at your situation and say, What can I get out of this?

It's not about how quickly I can get out of this, how quickly I can get on to the next thing.

It's about what can I get out of this situation?

What can I do to prepare myself for the situation that I'm in or for the situation that's coming?

Abraham Lincoln had a quote that I've been hearing a lot lately.

He said, If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening my axe.

Pretty wise, right?

Let me tell you something.

I believe that God has a tree for you to cut down.

And what I don't want you to do is fall in the trap of spending so much time trying to figure out which tree it is that when God finally shows you, you show up with a dull axe.

Prepare.

Prepare.

Prepare.

Preparation, another thing it does, number two, it eliminates distraction.

I feel fortunate in that I am of an age where I'm I'm fairly in tune with like the new younger kids, but I still remember how things used to be.

I have a uh friend that I know in the workforce, and he posted his 20-year wedding story on uh on Facebook the other night.

They used to do wedding stories.

And what he put underneath, he said, see kids, they used to type the internet on thin sheets of paper and fling it at your doorstep.

Newspapers.

Free rubber band every day.

And I still remember newspapers.

They're relevant.

That's still, yes, they still have some, but they're not like they used to be.

And a kid born today probably won't ever know what a newspaper is.

Like I remember green stamps, like I didn't use them, but I know that they existed.

And there's people here who are like, what are you even talking about?

A green stamp.

I don't know what that is.

I I don't really know what the purpose is, but I do remember they existed.

Another thing that I remember, and I have a picture here, at my grandmother's house, Nana, she lived over in Insley, Alabama, and this here is called a phone stand.

That's a phone stand.

And on that phone stand, there's a phone book and there's a black rotary dial phone.

And if you look above it closely, there's a thing that holds papers, okay?

And that phone stand sat in the middle of the house.

And if you talked on the phone, everybody heard what you were saying.

And you dial the rotary phone and you have to wait.

It can take up to a minute to make a call if you don't mess up.

Like you have to dial the nine and wait on it to get back.

And if you get to the six number and it's supposed to be seven, and you hit six, you've got to start all over after you've called the wrong person because you weren't paying attention.

Like the old rotary phones, man, we it's old school, but we had this telephone stand and we had the telephone.

And one thing that I think kids are missing today is they don't know what it's like when you're at the house and you can't leave because you're expecting a call.

When Nana was expecting a call, we didn't leave the house.

We didn't get near that phone.

We made sure the phone was on the hook.

If anybody called, she would answer and say, I can't talk, I'm expecting a call.

This is the days before answering machines.

What a flash in the pan that was, right?

Like answering machines solved some of these problems, and then we just moved on past them.

I don't think you can find one of those things anymore.

But when we were expecting a call, we removed all the distractions.

We made sure we had all our papers together for the call, and we stayed home sometimes, waiting on the call.

What I want to know from you today is are you expecting a call from God?

And if God did call, would you be prepared for it?

Or would you be so distracted that you'd have to let him go to voicemail?

Are you expecting a call?

See, when you're expecting, things change.

When you're expecting, maybe you can't eat the same things you used to.

Maybe you can't drink the same things you used to when you're expecting.

When you're expecting, you can't do the same things that you used to do.

You can't go the same places that you used to do.

You can't leave when you may want to leave, and you have to make preparations and adjustments when you're expecting.

Are there any ladies here who have children who can tell me this is how it is when you're expecting?

When you're expecting, your life changes.

We say we have this hope.

God promises to give us a hope.

We say we have the hope and we're expecting.

Has your life changed because of it?

What do you need to do?

Finally, expectation focuses on direction.

Expectation focuses on direction.

See, when you're expecting someone to do something, you watch to see if they're going to do it.

Can you imagine if I came up here and I think everyone was expecting that I would have a few things to say, and I just stood here and didn't do anything?

At some point, you might start looking another direction.

It would be uncomfortable.

Sometimes when you're expecting things, it can be a little uncomfortable.

But you have to stay focused on the direction.

Expectation focuses on direction.

God told the people right before he gave this promise, it's going to be 70 years.

You're going to be in captivity.

And he told them in verses 12 and 13 a couple of things he wanted them to do while they're in captivity.

Don't miss this.

He says, and I think when I see the word then, it means in 70 years, you will call me and come and pray to me, and I will listen, and you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

For 70 years they were to seek and pray and try to find God and stay focused on him without turning away.

The Proverb 4, verse 25 through 27 tells us that we should stay focused.

The Proverb tells us that we should let our eyes look straight ahead.

Let your eyelids look right before you.

Ponder the path of your feet and let all your ways be established.

Do not turn right or left, remove your foot from evil.

I was in California a month ago, and we had the opportunity to go up California Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway from LA to San Francisco.

And you drive this highway, and the road is extraordinarily curvy.

There are some places where it could be like a 30-degree turn.

That's hard.

It's not easy.

You're going up mountains, there's big drop-offs, like I don't know how many hundreds of feet, but you see the ocean down there and rocks, and then all these tight turns and cars coming the other way, and you look up and you see a speed limit sign that says 15 miles an hour for extended periods of time.

The speed limit's 15 miles an hour.

But you know what they say about California Highway 1 is this they say that you can't drive fast on that road, and that you don't want to anyway.

And so we drove for hours looking.

Because if we went too fast, it would be dangerous.

And because it was a beautiful ride.

And because really, if we were honest with ourselves, we were in California and the odds are we weren't going to pass that way again.

What I want you guys to know is that God has made a promise to you.

And that promise is hope.

And because he has promised hope, we can expect that he's working and we focus on him because we know he's going to do something.

We get ready and we eliminate distractions for when he's going to do it.

And think about direction, ponder the path of your feet, but don't try to go too fast.

If you know you're going in the right direction, slow down.

Because let's be real honest, it can be dangerous if you go too fast.

And there's a lot of curvy roads out there that we have to navigate as a church, as a people.

Slow down.

Look around.

It's a beautiful ride.

And you may never pass this way again.

If you do that, I believe that even though you're stirred, you don't have to be insecure.

Of course, there's only one place that I do believe you need to be insecure, and God promises this.

There's only one way to heaven.

Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father but through him.

There's no other name by which men must be saved.

And if anyone here, anyone online is watching me, and you've never called on the name of the Lord, as we stand to our feet, what I want you to do is just there's just a heart change.

And you, if today is your day and you say, today is my day to be saved, I want to be secure.

I'm insecure about what my future has for me, and I want to be secure in that.

The Bible says what you do is you just uh believe that Jesus died on the cross for you.

He died for your sins, something you couldn't do.

And he rose again so that you can be saved.

You pray simple prayer, you can say the words.

It's not the words that save you, but it's something to the effect of, God, I know that I have sinned against you and hurt you, and I know that your son Jesus is my gift of salvation.

I believe that he died and rose again, and forgive me, Lord.

If anybody prayed that out on the internet, here, then come see us.

You've made a wonderful decision.

And all of these promises that God has given you to prosper you, not to harm you, hey, to give you hope, it all goes through Jesus.

Thank you, Lord, for hope for a hurting people.

I believe you have a plan for our pain.