Disappointed In Jesus

We're excited about this weekend.

We have a fabulous, fabulous weekend.

And uh Brady Boyd is gonna be our special guest speaker.

Brady Boyd is uh pastor from New Live Church in Colorado Springs, and really for many of you newcomers to Gateway, you don't realize that Brady was on our team for a number of years, and actually a lot of the ministries that are represented at Gateway he has his fingerprints on because God initiated those to his leadership, and he is uh incredible, incredible man of God.

In fact, he just wrote his brand new book, first book ever, Fear No Evil, and it's coming out in the bookstores.

It's available at all three campuses this weekend.

So make sure you pick this up.

And really, this is in response to all that God's done there at their church, at New Life Church, and especially through the tragedy of the shooting and how God turned that into an incredible thing in their lives.

So you want to pick this up, right?

Pastor Robert is actually at New Life this weekend preaching, so he'll be back next weekend to continue the series from Dream the Destiny.

But today we have our favorite son back home, all right?

So let's welcome Pastor Brady Boyd.

Come on, bring him on.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It's good to be back, man.

You know, it's like coming back to your parents' house after you get married.

You know, you come back, you have no responsibilities.

Mom does all the cooking, so it's good to be back.

And I brought with me my girlfriend and my wife, who happens to be the same woman, which should this way it should happen, right?

This is my wife of 20, almost 22 years.

Pam, right here.

Would you say hi to her?

And the uh we got married when we were 14.

We're from Louisiana.

So uh we're very young.

Young, young.

All right, turning your Bibles to Luke chapter 7, and we're gonna read there starting around verse 18.

Luke 7 · chapter mention

Luke chapter 7.

Luke 7 · chapter mention

And the title of the message this morning is Disappointed in Jesus.

Now we're gonna do something.

We did this in all the other services.

I know that's kind of a shocking title.

What do you mean, disappointed in Jesus?

Mad at God?

Are you kidding me?

Can we talk about that in church?

Gasp.

Yes, we can.

So we're gonna do this.

I'm gonna put your hand in front of your face like this, and we're gonna take off our church mask.

Ready?

All right.

Doesn't that feel better?

To be authentic now, we can actually have conversations about stuff that really matters, like Pastor Robert does on a weekly basis.

But I think in in church, sometimes we come into church and we pretend sometimes that everything is okay, that nothing's bothering us.

In fact, here's the three big lies told in church, all right?

I will pray for you.

I love you, I'm doing great.

The three most common lies told in the local church, all around the world every Sunday.

So today we're gonna talk about a pretty raw, honest topic about being disappointed in Jesus.

In other words, having things that you thought would happen, unmet expectations, things that you thought would be going on in your life right now that maybe not.

Maybe you thought you'd be living the American dream and you're not.

Maybe it's more the American nightmare.

Maybe you have set up God to do something for you, but he's not come through.

Maybe you prayed good prayers, biblical prayers, prayers that were not evil or with good motives and but they still have not happened.

How do you wrestle with a God that sometimes does not live up or meet our expectations?

That's a big question.

And it's being asked more than you think around the world and around our country right now.

And so I didn't know that Pastor Robert had spoken on the prison test last Sunday.

I didn't know that.

So I'm gonna talk to you about another prison test today.

I'm gonna talk to you about John the Baptist, who ended up in prison for doing nothing wrong, just doing exactly what God asked him to do.

So, in this title of the book that Pastor Robert wrote, Dream to Destiny, the word destiny is from the word destination, which means a place of arrival.

A place of, you know, you arrive at a place and you think this is my destiny.

But let me ask you a question.

What if that destiny, the place that God Himself put you, is a place full of mystery, risk, and danger?

What if the place that God put you, it was God who places you there, is a place that requires great sacrifice?

What if it's a place that looks nothing like the American dream?

What if it's a place that looks nothing like success should look?

What if God places you in a place that does not live up to your expectations?

So in August of 2007, I was right here among you.

I was a part of this church on the staff here, teaching, preaching sometimes on the weekends, you know, hanging out with the staff, had a great job here.

We love living here, and then God tapped me on the shoulder, whispered to me and Pam, I want you to go to New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

Not long before I came, they'd had a scandal for their former pastor that was on the front page of every newspaper, and it was talked about, and they chose me to be the guy to come in to replace, to be the next pastor of this fellowship in Colorado Springs, a church that's known around the world.

And I said, yes.

And we packed up our two kiddos, little kiddos, packed up our stuff, and drove up there not knowing at all what was in front of us.

Just knowing that God had said, This is your destination, this is your place, the place of arrival.

And we got there and we were the pastors there for a hundred days.

On my 100th day as senior pastor of New Life Church, a gunman, a 24-year-old young man, came onto our campus and opened fire and killed an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old girl in our parking lot, injured their father, injured another woman who was driving by with her family, came into our children's hallway with an automatic weapon, a thousand rounds strapped to his vest, there to kill as many Christians as he could.

That's what he said on his blog the night before.

Came into our hallway, opened fire down our hallway, was stopped by a very heroic security guard, who then he took his own life.

And I'm sitting there that day on my 100th day as senior pastor, fully assured that I had been called to this place.

I had arrived at my destiny, but my destination certainly was not living up to any ideas of American success.

It was tough.

It was the darkest day of my life.

It was dark, awful.

But I knew that I was right in the middle of God's will.

But how in the world did I end up there?

So this book I wrote talks about from that point until now.

What do you do when you find yourself in the darkest valleys of your life, when everything around you seems dark, when everything around you seems wrong?

Can you trust God during that moment?

Can you love God during that moment?

Can you even worship God during that moment?

I had a lady after the first service this morning walked up to me.

She says, Everything seems dark.

Everything seems dark.

I can't move forward.

What can I do?

And there's no one, two, three-step answer to that question.

I can't tell you to turn to page 38 of the manual and do everything on that page.

There is not a prescription to give you.

All I can tell you, and it sounds so simple and it sounds so churchy, but it's all I know to say is you have to choose in that moment to be a worshiper.

Because he's with us.

Listen to what the 23rd Psalm says in verse 4.

It says, Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

And then here's the most amazing thing next: for you are with me.

See, that's when David realized he could take the next step out of the dark valley.

This is when David realized he didn't have to be disappointed in God.

He could worship God when he had this awareness that in the dark valley of his life, God is with me, and everything's going to be okay.

I can do this.

So I'm asking a question this morning: what do you do when your destiny, the place where God places you, I'm not talking about disobedience.

Sometimes our disobedience leads us to a place of great despair.

I'm talking about being obedient and ending up in a place of great despair.

It's exactly what happened to John the Baptist.

He's in prison.

And by the way, John the Baptist was kind of a big deal.

He's kind of a big deal.

I mean, he was the prophet, the one who would prepare the way for the coming Messiah, and people would walk miles out into the countryside to listen to this fiery young prophet that dressed kind of weird and ate weird stuff, but he had these passionate words of repentance.

And people would listen to him, leaders and people of influence would listen to him.

But then he had the audacity to confront the evil ruler, Herod.

The audacity to say to Herod, Herod, you are in sin.

Repent of your sin, because it was unlawful, it was sinful for you to marry your brother's wife.

And Herod was furious.

And Herod was already an evil ruler, by the way, very evil.

And he said, I'm going to put you in prison.

And he puts him in prison.

And I imagine, this is not in the Bible, but it's just my own imagination, that when Herod told the guards, take this man and put him in prison, I think he looked at the guards and said, wink, wink, nod, nod, and make sure he gets special treatment.

He publicly humiliated me.

He publicly disgraced me.

Make sure that when he's in prison, he gets special treatment.

And how in the world did John the Baptist, who was kind of a big deal, end up in this awful, awful prison cell awaiting his own execution?

He's disappointed in Jesus.

This is not how it was supposed to end up.

Let's pick up the story in verse 18.

John's disciples told him about all these things.

And calling to them, he sent them to the Lord to ask, listen to this question.

Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?

And when the men came to Jesus, they said, John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?

Now listen, John the Baptist and Jesus knew one another.

They were first cousins.

And in fact, the Bible says that when John the Baptist was in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, that Mary, who had just conceived Jesus in her womb, came over for a visit.

And when Mary came into the house, John the Baptist, who was still in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, did a backflip left in her womb.

Because he, even as a baby in the womb, John the Baptist recognized the Messiah entering the home in the womb of another woman.

John the Baptist was the one at the Jordan River, and Jesus is walking toward him to get baptized, stops everything and says, Here comes a man whose sandals I'm not worthy to untie.

Then in John 3, he says, I must decrease, he must increase.

Well, be careful what you ask for, by the way.

That's exactly what happened.

And then John the Baptist is the one who baptized in the water at the Jordan River.

Put him in the water, and as he came up out of the water, what happened?

A voice from heaven said, This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.

They played baseball together.

Jesus hit a home run every time.

It was obviously Jesus was the Messiah.

Why in the world then would John the Baptist say, why would he say this?

Are you the one that we should expect?

Are you really the Messiah?

Here's the problem.

See, there were two big ideas among the Jewish leaders of the time.

There was one group of people who thought the Messiah would arrive as a spiritual ambassador from heaven.

He would awaken people's hearts toward God, and great spiritual awakening would happen, and that people's hearts would turn toward God.

Well, that's exactly who Jesus was.

However, there was another group of Jewish leaders who thought that the Messiah would arrive as this warrior king, this man who would come and drive the Romans out, establish a geopolitical nation state of Israel, they would be free forever, and they would rule and reign.

The temple would be re-established, the presence of God would come back, and everything would be made right politically.

Kind of sounds like the debate we're having in America right now, right?

What I'm kind of hoping for the spiritual awakening, aren't you?

See, I believe John the Baptist thought by this time he would be some kind of governmental ruler, he would have his own province, he would be a man of great authority, and people would respect him because I think he had bought into Messiah number two.

Instead, Jesus arrived as a humble, lowly servant who did not put himself, never made any political statements, never promised that he would run the Romans out.

And there was a whisper in the crowd.

Every time John the Baptist would talk, the whispers among the crowd would be like this: He's the Elijah.

He's like Elijah, because that's what the prophets would say.

A man like Elijah would come, a man like Elijah would come and prepare the way for the Messiah.

And John the Baptist had all the qualifications.

He was prophetic, he was powerful, he was anointed, and people would whisper, he's the Elijah.

And I'm sure John the Baptist heard it.

He found it on Twitter.

He's saying Elijah.

Elijah.

Well, you know how Elijah died, right?

Remember, this is the best funeral in all the Bible.

Elijah's standing there.

It's time for him to go to heaven, and a chariot comes out of the sky, swoops down, and picks him up and takes him into heaven.

That is the greatest funeral of all time.

And I've asked God for that funeral.

You can all come.

You can all be out in the parking lot.

I'm going to be an old man, a funny old man, by the way, a very good old man, though, a sweet man.

But I'm going to be old and I'm ready to go to heaven.

I'm going to make the turbo chariot.

And I want the afterburners to kick in right when it gets by.

We'd all sign up for the Elijah experience, wouldn't we?

What a great way to leave the earth and go to heaven.

How many of you would sign up for the Elijah exit?

Right on.

Make a fortune with the Elijah exit.

If we could just figure out how to get it to heaven, we could make a fortune.

Well, here's the point, though.

He wanted the Elijah exit.

He was going to get the John the Baptist exit.

I don't think anybody in this room would sign up for the John the Baptist funeral.

The exit.

See what happened to John the Baptist?

Some teenage girl danced in front of Herod and pressed him.

He calls her over after a few glasses of wine and says, Hey, I'll give you anything up to half of my kingdom.

So she goes to her mom and says, Hey, mom, the king, the ruler here just told me he should give me anything, he'd give me anything up to half his kingdom.

She goes, Ask for John the Baptist's head.

That's how he ended.

On a whim from a teenage girl.

Anybody want to sign up for that?

Nope.

I didn't expect a standing ovation at that point.

Alright, so these people go to Jesus and they ask Jesus this question.

Listen to how Jesus responds in verse 21.

At that very time, Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses, and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind.

So he replied to the messenger.

He looks at these people who've come from John the Baptist and he says, Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard.

Notice here that the gospel, even today, the gospel must not only be preached, it must be seen, evidenced, seen, miracles, things should be happening among us, seen and heard.

Now, he's about to loosely quote Isaiah 61.

And there's a list of things he's about to say from Isaiah 61.

So this is a quiz.

I want you to know if you're paying attention this morning.

If you know anything about Isaiah 61, it was the passage of scripture, a prophetic passage that Jesus used himself to announce his ministry on the earth.

So you know, Jesus is in the temple early in his ministry.

He asked the priest there for a scroll.

He opens up the scroll to Isaiah 61.

He reads that phrase.

He says, This is what I have come to do.

I have come to fulfill these scriptures in your sight.

Now, this is the quiz.

I'm about to read a list of things that come from Isaiah 61, but Jesus leaves one promise out.

It just so happens to be the one promise John the Baptist was hoping Jesus would make, but he leaves it out.

Notice this, all right, let's read it here.

It says, he says, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.

There's one big thing missing there that John the Baptist was hoping Jesus would say.

Anybody pick it up?

The release of prisoners, the release from captivity.

That's what John the Baptist wanted.

And here's what Jesus was saying tell John the Baptist, I'm doing everything I said I would do, with one exception.

I'm not coming to rescue him from prison.

And you can you imagine when those messengers came back to John the Baptist and said, John the Baptist, this is your destiny.

This is your place of arrival, this is your destination in this prison cell.

Jesus is doing everything he said he would do.

And we saw it, we saw the evidence ourselves.

But he didn't say he was coming to get you.

Have you ever felt like you got you're in a very dark place and you said, God, why don't you just come rescue me?

And you don't feel a sense of urgency in God to even come rescue you.

Instead, you find yourself week after week, month after month, day after day, in the same place of contention and friction, and you're saying, God, please rescue me.

And God says, I am with you.

I'm not deserting you, I'm not abandoning you, I am with you, but I am not going to rescue you.

Sometimes he does.

He does release prisoners from captivity.

He does.

In every sense, physically, spiritually, emotionally, he releases all of us from captivity.

But sometimes he leaves us in the pressure cookers of life because there's something unseen happening that we can't imagine.

We don't know.

Gene Edwards is a brilliant, brilliant writer, and he's he's gone now, but he uh wrote a book called The Prisoner in the Third Cell.

And I highly recommend it.

It's a very small book, but he puts himself in this jail cell with John the Baptist, and he imagines what those final few hours and days were like.

So I'm gonna read to the last paragraph of the book.

I'm sorry to do that.

It's not like a movie, I'm gonna tell you the ending.

We know, not to be cap and obvious, but you'd already know that John the Baptist dies, alright?

So you know I'm not ruining the story for you.

But listen to these words of Gene Edwards in Prisoner in the Third Cell as he talks about what must have been going through John the Baptist's mind as that prison cell door opened.

It's probably at night because the party was going on at night.

And by the look in those guards' eyes, they're not coming to get him for a walk.

This is it.

He's minutes away from dying.

Listen to this.

But today, you have met a God you do not understand.

Such is the mystery of my sovereignty.

Such are my ways in every generation.

No man has ever understood me, not fully.

No man ever will.

I will always be something other than what men expect me to be.

I will work out my will in ways different from what men foresee.

And this is the most chilling sentence.

It's the last sentence of the book.

Die, my brother John, in the presence of a God who did not live up to your expectations.

See here's the deal.

We found ourselves as a church in New Life, December of 2007, in the presence of a God who had not lived up to our expectations.

We had this choice to make as a fellowship.

We could either fold up the tent, I could come back here, call it all a failure.

Or we could do something that's very counterintuitive.

It's what I said to this lady this morning.

Everything I'm about to say is gonna be counterintuitive.

It's gonna be against the nature of who we are.

But at this point, we have to worship a God who's mysterious.

In fact, let me just challenge you this morning.

If you feel like you've got God figured out, you are worshiping your theology.

You're not worshiping God.

Because God's mysterious.

We're gonna spend the first billion years of heaven uncovering, unraveling one mystery after another.

And then the second billion years, when we think we got all God finally figured out, we're gonna see an entirely different new layer of this fabulous, wonderful, majestic, mysterious God who is our Lord, who loves us, who cares for us, and we are just gonna continue millennial, millennial, every millennial understanding the mysterious nature of God.

So here's the here's the challenge.

Can you worship a mysterious God, or you gotta know everything about Him?

And I can spot, I'm not I can spot analytical people out here, think, all right, my brain is as big as God's, and I'm gonna figure him out at some point.

Let me just break news alert.

Our brains are not bigger than his.

His ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts are better than our thoughts.

And you have to choose in your moment of darkness will you worship a God you cannot explain?

You will always have more questions than you have answers if you're going to worship this God.

Follow this God.

See, this is the cost of being a follower.

If you just want to be a fan of God, an adorer of God, an admirer of God, then it won't cost you very much.

If you're gonna be a follower, it's gonna cost you everything.

Everything.

This is why Jesus said.

In fact, crowds like this would listen to Jesus, and this is when the crowd would get small.

Jesus would say, You have to eat of my flesh, drink of my blood, take up your cross and follow me.

When he'd say things like that, crowds would disperse.

Are you kidding me?

I was just here out to enjoy a good sermon.

I'm just an admirer, I'm just an adorer.

Now you're asking me to follow you?

Are you kidding me?

That's when the crowds would get small.

It's always the challenge in our culture, even now, to say, are you a fan of Jesus?

Or are we followers of the way?

If we're followers, then all of this has to die, and he has to be what we worship at every time, even in the mysterious times, even in the dark times, he is the focus of my worship.

Even when I don't understand him.

Pam and I, in May of 1998, found ourselves out in Amarillo, Texas.

We were attending Trinity Fellowship Church, but we had grown up in North Louisiana.

That's where she had gone to schools, where I'd gone to school, we'd gone to college there, our families were there, our brothers and sisters were there, all our friends were there, and we had been out.

In Amarillo about three years, but we still felt lonely, detached.

We didn't really feel like God had a place for us there, and we were trying to, and we so we would find ourselves praying together, Lord, if you would open up a door for us to move back home, please, God, let your will be done, but we already know your will for us to move back home.

And if listen, if we're honest, that's how we all pray, okay?

God, let your will, i.e.

mine, be done.

Lord, I've got a good blueprint here if you'll just follow it.

And so we prayed, prayed, and prayed.

And I was in televis I was working in a television station at the time, and so a TV station in North Louisiana called me and made me an offer, making more money than I ever made in my life, having more responsibility.

I was 29 or so years old.

Yeah, yeah, it was something like that.

Anyway, so I I was 29 years old, and I had in and so he calls me at the house and I said, Pam, Pam, I put my hand on the phone, he's making me an offer.

Come here.

So I remember we're in our little house in our little kitchen area, and so I put a piece of paper on there, and he's he's telling me the the what he's the salary, the benefits, and I'm writing it all down, and Pam's looking at it, going, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

Like that.

And I said, Hey, thank you for the offer.

I'm a Christ follower, but I need 24 hours to pray about this, but thank you so much, and I'll call you tomorrow.

Okay, okay.

Click.

Pam, yeah.

We looked at each other and went, finally, God is answering our prayer.

This is awesome.

Man, this is exactly what we're gonna get to move back to North Louisiana, back 30 minutes from our parents, all our friends.

This is exactly God's will for our life.

It must be because it's what we ask for.

I mean, that's obvious, right?

It's what we ask for, it's obvious it's gotta be God's will.

So, sure enough, I said, Pam, I'm gonna go for a walk.

Just gonna pray about this, because I did say I was gonna pray about it, but I already know the answer, but I'm gonna go for a walk.

So, um, so I remember I have the uh potential to embellish a story, but I am not embellishing this one, alright?

You can be suspicious of other stories.

This one is dead on accurate that way it happened, alright?

I promise.

Not a mind.

You I don't let the facts stand in the way of a good story normally, but in this case, the facts are true.

All right?

So I walk out of the front door of the house, take two steps off the front porch, and this is the first time God ever yelled at me.

This is what God said.

No.

No.

I was stunned.

Are you kidding me?

Lord, we've been praying for this for a long time.

This is this is an unbelievable job offer.

God, are you kidding me?

What?

Said, Brady, I will bless you wherever you go because you're my son.

But this is not my best for you.

I have something better for you.

No.

I was only gone like five minutes.

I walked back into the house and said, Pam.

God said no, and she went, What?

Then Pam yells at me, What?

So I've had God and Pam who I get mixed up sometimes.

They yelled at me from the same time.

I tell men all the time, listen, the voice of God 90% of the time sounds like Pam's voice.

I don't know how that works.

That's true, though.

So she prayed, and this is Pam and I, this is how we live our lives.

We pray, we listen, we obey.

It's as simple as that and as complicated as that, but that's what we try to do.

So she prayed and she heard the same thing.

No.

And then the disappointment sets in.

Aggravation.

Still stuck out in West Texas when all our friends and family are back in North Louisiana.

Lord, man, what are you doing?

You know our hearts, you know our desires, you know what we want to do.

Why are you doing that?

Why, why, why?

That was May of 1998.

In July of 1998, a woman calls us who is six months pregnant with a little boy in her womb.

She says to us, Pam and Brady, I can't raise this boy.

Would you adopt him?

Would you take him?

Pam and I are going to get off the plane today and drive home, and there's a little 12-year-old boy waiting for us at the house.

I wouldn't have the day if I had said yes to something that God said no to.

And then two years later, another young lady who was pregnant said, I have a girl in my womb, it's a baby in my womb.

Would you take her?

When we get home tonight, a little red-headed, curly haired girl with blue eyes is gonna greet me at the door.

I wouldn't have her.

He invites me to come be a part of this little church plant down here in Gateway with a hundred people.

I had a bigger church in Herford than he had, and he, you know, it's since changed a bit, but a bit in a small way, not much.

So I came with him.

Along the way, I meet Tom Lane, I meet Jimmy Evans, I meet Jack Hayford, I meet all these men who are now my overseers, who are my friends.

Along the way, I've become the pastor at New Life Church.

It all started with God saying, No, and disappointing me.

My destination, my place of arrival, like all of us, many of us in this room, started with a season of disappointment.

Notice the last thing that Jesus said.

Jesus said the last thing he says before John's disciples go back with the message, what Jesus said.

Listen to this in verse 23.

Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.

He doesn't say on the account of sin, he doesn't say anything about temptation.

He says, there is a potential in all of us to get so disappointed in God that we fall away from God because God did not live up to our expectations, God didn't answer a prayer that I prayed, so I get disappointed, and you literally can fall away from God because of God.

But listen to what Jesus said to go back and tell John the Baptist.

Blessed is the man, blessed is the woman, blessed is the student who does not fall away on account of me.

Now, if we had the ability to bring John the Baptist on the stage today, we might, there's a saw a machine back there.

I think we might could do that.

But if John the Baptist were right here today, I would say, John the Baptist, were you disappointed in the way things ended on the earth?

Yep.

Very disappointed.

He'd be honest, right?

John the Baptist, do you feel blessed?

Yeah, I feel blessed.

Did you feel blessed right away?

Nope.

Didn't feel blessed when I was going through it.

I didn't feel blessed in December of 2007.

I can tell you that I felt cursed.

I felt abandoned.

I felt darkness.

Today, looking back, I feel blessed.

Because I learned something about God in the darkest valleys of my life that I could not have learned any other way.

I don't ever want to repeat the journey.

I don't want to go back.

I hope I learned everything the first time around.

I really do.

I'm blessed.

I feel blessed.

You may I don't know where you're at today.

I know a lot of you, I really do.

I was here, I was a pastor here for seven years, so I know a lot of you, but there's a lot of you I don't know.

And here's the challenge this morning.

Are you gonna worship a God who seems mysterious in the darkest place of your life?

Will you worship him now?

Will you come before him now when you got more questions than answers?

I just remember our church, and I'm so proud of New Life, the way we just stayed steady and worshiped a God who seemed a long way away and very mysterious.

And yet, somewhere along the way, we realized he was with us the entire time.

And what a miracle.

We should be a big used car lot at New Life right now.

Scandal, shooting, 13 months apart, no church in America has ever survived that.

None.

And yet, last year we baptized 900 New Christ followers.

It's a miracle.

It is a miracle.

Miracle.

So I just want to encourage you today, okay?

All is not lost.

It's not hopeless.

The valley seems dark.

There's mountaintops coming, I promise you.

We're coming up on one right now.

We're coming up out of the dark valley as a church.

And behind us is fog and darkness, and in front of us is this adventure that's in front of us.

It won't always stay the way it is right now.

I promise.

If you're grieving the loss of a loved one, if you lost a business, whatever you're going through, I promise you.

You can decide to camp there if you want.

Or you can worship this mysterious God and start taking small steps out of it.

I pray for you right now.

Can I just ask God to meet with you right now?

And you can close your eyes if you want.

Just the main thing is that would you just take this moment?

You're in this building, you're in this place.

God has orchestrated you to be here today to hear this for whatever reason.

So it's our, to be honest, we must all respond in our own way to what God's saying right now to you personally.

Would you just respond to God?

And say, and if you're disappointed, tell him.

Our church masks are off.

Remember, we took those off about 30 minutes ago.

Could you say to the Lord, I'm disappointed, but I'm going to worship you?

Say it to him.

I promise you, no, no lightning bolt from heaven is going to come.

In fact, you may feel this greatest sense of honesty, just a cleansing in your heart if you'll just say what you're feeling.

Lord, I'm a little upset with you.

I don't understand you, but I am going to worship you.

I am going to embrace the mysterious nature of God when I have more questions than answers today.

I'm going to come before you, God, and I'm not, I'm not, by the way, promising that you're going to have any kind of emotional feeling when you do this.

In fact, it may seem very cold and distant, may not feel anything at all, not guaranteeing any emotions.

I just know this that God is with you.

You're in the palm of his hand.

You are the sheep of his pasture.

He is the shepherd of your souls.

No scheme of man, no power of hell can take you from the palm of his hand.

You are right there.

He is right there.

And he will not leave you or forsake you or abandon you.

If you'll just worship him, he'll make himself known to you.

Draw near to him this morning.

Embrace.

Embrace the dark valley.

Because it's not always going to be your home.

I can guarantee it, it will not always be your home, but you must embrace what you're doing, where are you at?

Where is your destination?

Your destiny is right now, by the way.

So embrace it and be a worshiper.

But Father, I pray over the men and women in this room, the students, Lord, all of us who are struggling with the mysteries of your nature.

Father, I pray today that we would embrace your mystery, that we would not worship our theology.

We would be worshipers of this living God who's too bigger than we can imagine, more powerful than we can ever suppose.

Lord, we pray today that you would cause us to long after you, to pursue you.

Father, I pray in this room today that there are no fans, no admirers, no adorers.

We're all followers.

We are followers of the way.

We are men and women who choose to follow you with reckless abandon.

Thank you for that.

Thank you that you're with us.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Hey, God bless you.

It's good to see all of you.

Love you.