The Power of Negativity

Amen.

Thank you guys for that.

So I try to hide this fact, but I am on the City Council of Social Circle.

I try not to broadcast that, quite honestly, because oftentimes as soon as I somebody finds that out, there's a question or a complaint that they have to offer.

And I was appointed a couple of years back and then ran unopposed.

And I think that there were a lot of other people that were smarter than I was in running or not wanting to run.

And so it's been interesting for the past four years to serve our community.

And there's parts of it that I really enjoy.

I love being able to connect with different people in our community and they're facing issues or needs in their homes or in their neighborhoods, and being able to help kind of alleviate those things.

Like those are really encouraging and great things.

But then there's kind of a darker side to being on city council as well, where you deal with people that are incredibly negative.

Now, let me just say there are a lot of positive people.

I think our community is great.

I love Social Circle.

I think it's the greatest place you can possibly live.

But there are a handful of select people that tend to be negative.

And they love to point out anything and everything that they can that's a negative, and they would love for you to hear it.

And so we we hear this stuff all the time.

I got an email this past week about the Independence Day celebration that happened past Saturday.

And uh, you know, there was tons of people downtown.

There was a fireworks display, lots of people in our community came out for that.

Um but then we also had people that would complain about the fireworks.

They were too elaborate, they cost too much money.

Um one lady said they were too loud.

She was asking if we could buy quieter fireworks next year.

We've had people complain about sidewalks being put in the community.

Although you want to be a walkable community, they're complaining about sidewalks.

We've had numbers and numbers and numbers of complaints.

And, you know, there's some people that it doesn't matter what you do, and it doesn't really matter how you do it, it doesn't matter if you jump over qua huge obstacles in order to serve them and meet their needs.

They're just tending to be negative.

You know those people.

We all have people like that probably in our lives.

There's maybe family members or friends of yours that just tend to be negative.

And I have no empirical data or research to back this up, but I feel like our nation as a whole has kind of moved more into a negative space.

And I kind of credit social media with that, giving everybody a vocal voice where they can kind of voice their complaints and their issues to the people around them.

You know, it used to be if you went into a restaurant and you just had a bad meal, you just had a bad meal and you went home and you just didn't go back there again if you didn't want to.

But now that people feel like they've got to jump on social media and they've got to share with the world about the bad experience that they had and just really blast or uh just slander other people's names as a result.

People just tend to be negative.

24-hour news sites probably don't help this as well.

We've got on Facebook here in the community, we've got a social circle rants and raves page where people just simply get on there to rant about people and issues that they have in the community.

Sadly, though, the negativity can easily enter into the church.

It's one thing for the world and the culture around us to be negative and for people to be grumbling and complaining, but it's another thing when it moves into the church, when people in the church that have a relationship with Jesus suddenly fall victim to grumbling and complaining and negativity.

This is not of the Lord.

In fact, there's a whole entire story, actually, many stories, of Moses leading the people out of Egypt.

And as they're wandering around in the desert, negativity and complaining and grumbling was the one of the number one sins of the people that God had chosen to use and to bless.

They had been set free, they had been rescued, but yet they find themselves in some difficult circumstances, and they just tended to complain and be negative until finally God was like, All right, like you're gonna wander in the desert.

You're not gonna trust me, you're not gonna, you're not gonna follow my leadership, then you're gonna wander in the desert for longer.

And so I want us to see today as we talk about this negativity and complaining, that this is not what God desires for his followers.

God does not want his people, the people that have been saved, that have been redeemed, that have been rescued, that have been made into new creations, to be people of negativity and complaining.

That is not what God has called us to.

It says in Philippians chapter 2, verse 12.

Philippians 2:12

It says, Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear, for God is working in you, giving you the desires and the power to do what pleases him.

Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you.

This is what God wants for us.

He wants us to be people that are not people that are complaining, that are arguing, that are negative.

But how do we overcome?

Well, here's what I want us to understand this morning before we jump into the scripture we're going to focus on this morning is this idea that negativity negates God's work in our lives.

Negativity negates God's work in our lives.

That there are things that God wants to do in your life, ways that he wants to use you, ways that he wants to bless you, ways that he wants to challenge you, ways that he wants to stretch you.

But negativity forces us to kind of stay back from what God has for us instead of stepping into what he has.

And so, Lord Jesus, we just ask you again to come.

Come, Holy Spirit, speak to us, Lord, as we talk about this topic.

And Lord, I know that for so often we can be blinded to the fact that we are negative people.

And so, Lord, I pray that you would just open our eyes to see what is true this morning.

And Lord, that uh whatever you call us to do, Lord, that we would have the courage and the boldness to step out and follow your spirit this morning.

So, Holy Spirit, come, speak with us now.

Your name we pray.

Amen.

So, if you've been with us this summer, we've been uh studying the life of Joseph.

And uh Joseph is this incredible Old Testament character, and we find his story really beginning in Genesis chapter 38.

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

And Joseph was the son of Jacob, and they had twelve other brothers or eleven other brothers besides Joseph.

And Joseph's brothers didn't like him because he was his dad's favorite.

And so as a result of that, his brothers um steal his coat, make it look like he's dead.

He's send him off to Egypt, and he's there in Egypt.

His family, his father thinks that he's dead, and he's living in Egypt, and he falls into the house of Potiphar, and he's there, he's his master's servant, and he's doing everything he possibly can, but then he's falsely accused by his master's wife and thrown into prison.

And then years later, he's brought out of prison to interpret Pharaoh's dreams, and as a result of interpreting Pharaoh's dreams, he's given this incredible responsibility of managing this huge famine that's about to occur.

There's going to be seven years of plenty and then seven years of famine.

And in the famine, God is saying, you need to prepare now for what is going to be.

And so we looked a little bit about this last week, where the famine has started, and Joseph's family who live in Canaan, who are in modern-day Israel, they actually have to travel from where they live down into Egypt to come before Pharaoh, or become before Joseph, actually.

And they have to beg for food from him.

They have to try to buy food to survive for them and their family because the famine has hit that region of the world.

And so here they come, and God orchestrates this master plan, and you've got Joseph meeting before his brothers.

They don't recognize him.

He recognizes them, he sends them home, and he keeps Simeon, the one of the brothers, back in prison.

Because Joseph wants his older brothers to go back home and to bring their youngest brother, Benjamin, which is his full-blooded brother, to come back to prove that they are truly telling the truth and that they're not lying, coming there before him.

And so this whole scene has kind of taken place where Joseph's brothers are now going home to be with their father Jacob, and they're going to try to bring their youngest brother back to Egypt to prove that they're not lying.

And that's where our story picks up this morning.

Genesis chapter 42, verse 35.

Genesis 42:35

It says, As they emptied out their sacks, which were filled with grain that they had gotten from Egypt, there in each man's sack was a bag of money he had paid for the grain.

The brothers and their fathers were terrified when they saw that the bags of money were there.

Jacob exclaimed, You are robbing me of my children.

Joseph is gone, Simeon is gone, and now you want to take Benjamin too.

Everything is going against me.

So here's Jacob.

His sons have just come back, and he's been given food that he didn't have previously, and now he's saying, Everything is against me.

There's this negativity that is definitely set in for Jacob.

Now, Jacob has an interesting story.

He was someone that was first known as the deceiver.

He was somebody that was deceptful, decep deceitful, deceitful, right?

All right?

Deceptive.

Whatever, you know what I'm saying.

Deceptive in his interactions.

He stole his birthright from his brother.

He did all these kind of questionable things in Genesis chapter 32.

Genesis 32 · chapter mention

But in Jacob, my favorite story of Jacob is when he wrestles with the Lord.

There's this scene that unfolds in Genesis 35 where God comes in the form of the stranger, and Jacob starts wrestling with him because he's trying to get the blessing from this guy.

And so they're wrestling and they're wrestling, and Jacob's relentless.

He's not giving up until finally the man touches the socket of Jacob's hip and knocks his hip out of socket.

But even still, Jacob doesn't let go.

He refuses to let go, and he demands, I will not let go unless you bless me.

And so God gives him this blessing, and he actually gives him a new name at this point, and he's no longer Jacob, but he is now Israel.

And Jacob says these words, for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.

And so there's this scene that unfolds, this crazy scene.

I encourage you to go back and read it.

But the scene that unfolds where Jacob is willing to go to great lengths to wrestle with the Lord in order to get the blessing.

He wasn't going to let go until he received the blessing.

Not to mention, a few chapters later, the promises of God have been reiterated to Jacob that have been given to his father and his grandfather, Abraham and Isaac, that he was going to use Jacob to build a great nation, and that from Jacob that there was going to be this great nation that was formed, and that he was going to give them the promised land that was promised to Abraham.

But now we see, many years later, Jacob is living in the land that God had given them, and he is now no longer in the place where he's holding on to the blessings of God, but now he's saying, everything is against me.

There's something that's happened in his older age where he's become defeated, and he's now following into this trap of kind of the worst case scenario thinking.

He's saying Joseph is dead, which isn't true, but he thinks it's true.

Simeon is dead, which wasn't true, and he had no reason to think that it was.

And he's already planning for the death of his youngest son, Benjamin.

He's thinking Benjamin is also going to be killed.

Everything is against me.

Jacob, right here, is catastrophizing, which means it's a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to worst possible conclusions, usually with very limited information or objective reasons to despair.

When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.

And don't we all tend to fall into that trap to some degree?

And some probably more than others.

You get a call tonight and your boss wants to have a one-on-one meeting with you.

And you just immediately start thinking, well, what is that about?

What did I do?

And you start kind of racking your brain, thinking about all the interactions that you've had previously, and you, by the end of the, you know, hour-long thinking of this and dwelling on this that he wants to meet with you, you start thinking, well, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna lose my job tomorrow, I'm gonna come home, and I'm gonna have to my wife, my wife's gonna leave me, and then I'm not gonna have a house because we're not gonna be able to pay for it.

And like I'm living on the street, I'm destitute, I have nothing good to look for in life.

That's how easy that we can move into these situations.

You have a medical issue, it's a small headache, but you begin to think it's a brain tumor.

You have schoolwork and you're thinking, I've got to pass this test.

If I don't pass this test, then I'm gonna fail this subject, and if I fail this subject, I won't be able to go to college, and if I can't go to college, then I can't get a good job, and if I can't get a good job, then you know, and so on and so forth.

That's catastrophizing.

It's when we start looking at the worst case scenario.

There's also all or nothing thinking, which is when we simply think that there's everything or nothing.

We start making extreme statements.

Statements like, this always happens to me.

This never happens to me.

Nothing ever good happens to me and my family.

I'm not this, I'm not this, everyone else.

We start making these broad general statements, these all or nothing thinkings.

We have over-generalization, which is when we start drawing conclusions based on limited evidence or experience.

We start personalizing things, where we start taking things too personally and blaming ourselves for situations that are out of our control.

We have emotional reasoning, which is when we start letting our emotions reflect on what we think is true.

And our emotions can be a really good thing.

We don't need to ignore our emotions, but our emotions can also get us to believe what is not true.

They can get us to believe lies.

Labeling, we start putting negative labels on other people or on ourselves.

We start putting ourselves down.

I'm never going to be good enough.

I'm never going to be able to do this.

I'm never going to be able to overcome this sin or this obstacle in my life.

There's mental filtering, which is when we take this negative thought and we start to ignore all the other positive things.

I'm telling you, not to, you know, this is very humble in what I'm about to say, I promise.

But like there are times when we finish a Sunday and, you know, like I'll talk to people after the service, and like there's there's really good things that God is doing, like through the service and through the message where people be like, man, God really spoke to me through that.

Like, thank you so much.

And it's humbling, it truly is, because I know that it's not me, it's the Lord.

But then there's those like so few occasions where people have an issue with something that I said, or they think that I'm not this or not that.

And I can tell you, I mean, I can tell you from probably 12 years ago, one of the first sermons that I ever spoke, I had a man that showed up at my house the next day and just berated me on how out of touch I was with reality and people and how I didn't know what I was doing when it came to preaching, and he was probably true to some degree.

Um, but like I that still sticks in my brain.

And it's easy, right?

It's easy for us to hear all the good things, but to kind of filter those out and only hear what is negative that is right in front of us.

And here's Jacob.

He has fallen into this trap of negativity.

He's supposed to be the patriarch of the family, he's supposed to be leading them spiritually forward, but yet he's negative, he's closed-minded, he's only horizontally thinking about himself, and he's living in the midst of fear.

The Lord is in the midst of Jacob's life and his circumstances, but there's no consideration to that.

You can't tell Jacob that God is working in the midst of his trouble, in the midst of his pain, in the midst of his hardship.

There's no cup half full here.

It is very much empty, and there's a hole in it for him.

Negativity negates God's work in our lives.

Listen to how it continues.

Then Reuben, which is one of the older brothers, said to his father, You may kill my two sons if I don't bring Benjamin back to you.

I'll be responsible for him, and I promise to bring him back.

But Jacob replied, My son will not go down with you.

His brother Joseph is dead, and he is all that I have left, which don't you love to be one of the other brothers?

And he's like, Benjamin is the only one I have left.

If anything should happen to him on your journey, you would send me grieving this grieving white-haired man to his grave.

So not only does negativity negate God's work in our lives, but negativity makes us resistant to God's plans.

It makes us resistance to God's plans.

God is orchestrating the story that is, I mean, supernatural.

It's the only way that you can describe this story that God is writing with Jacob and his family.

But yet he is totally resistant that this is God's plans at work.

Because here's the reality: when it comes to following Jesus, we have to follow Jesus with faith.

Without faith, it is impossible for us to please God, Hebrews tells us.

And so we're commanded to be people of faith.

And what does faith mean?

Faith means we take risks.

Faith means that we try, faith means we step out of our comfort zone, and faith demands that we do things differently than maybe what comes naturally to us.

If we don't have to be stretched, if we don't have to be pulled out of our comfort zone, then it's typically not going to be faith.

Faith is when you're trusting something or someone to come through as you step out.

I mean, this is what God calls us to.

God calls us to sell everything we have and then come and follow Him.

This is the lifestyle that He has called us to.

It's a lifestyle of risk and faith.

But notice what negativity does in Joseph's life.

Negativity makes our fists grip tighter and refuse to live open-handedly.

Where we go, oh God, no.

That that's never gonna happen.

I mean, just take your finances, for example.

So many people have an issue with just generosity in their life, and it's really because there's idols that are in their life where they're greedy.

Greed has kind of caught up with their heart, and as a result, they're living in bondage, but they don't even recognize it.

And so they get called out, or the Lord's speaking and saying, be generous.

And I'm not talking about just with the church, I'm talking about just living a generous lifestyle.

And they go, No, I can't.

I might not have enough.

I might not believe, I don't believe that God's gonna provide.

And they close up tighter.

They have this scarcity mindset, like their father who is in heaven, doesn't have enough to give out and to supply all of our needs, and so they live with closed hands.

That's a sense of and a source of negativity.

It's complaining, it's grumbling, it's always seeing the negative, the scarcity of the situation.

And God is calling us out of that.

He wants us to live a lifestyle of freedom, not in bondage, a lifestyle of generosity, a lifestyle where we live with open hands.

But negativity makes those hands slowly close tighter and tighter and tighter.

Negativity will make us resistant to God's plans in our lives.

Verse uh one of chapter 43.

But the famine continued to ravage the land of Canaan when the grain that they had brought from Egypt was almost gone.

Jacob said to his sons, go back and buy us a little more food.

So we don't know how much time has passed between when the brothers have first come home, but now some time has passed, they've run out of food.

It could have been weeks, it could have been months, I have no idea.

But time has passed and they're once again without food.

And so Jacob says, All right, go buy just a little bit more.

And the response by Judah says this the man was serious, Joseph, when he warned us, You won't see my face again unless your brother is with you.

If you send Benjamin with us, we will go down and buy more food.

But if you don't let Benjamin go, we won't go either.

Remember, the man said, You won't see my face again unless your brother is with you.

Why were you so cruel to me?

Jacob moaned.

Why did you tell him that you even had another brother?

So now he's not only kind of negating God's work in his life, not only is he living, letting uh negativity affect him from moving forward into what God's plans are, but negativity is now pushing people away by blame and deceit.

Jacob is upset with his sons because they told the truth.

His deceitful ways have now come back.

He's acting more like Jacob and less like Israel, his old way.

He's now turned to his sons and he's questioning them for telling the truth.

He's turning on the people in his very own family.

He's upset because they did what was right.

And that's what negativity can tend to do.

Negativity can tend to push people away, and we can become very easily fall into the trap of blaming others.

We can fall into the trap of being deceitful and lying to get our ways about things.

And that's certainly what Jacob is doing here.

He's upset, he's mad because they're doing what?

Was right.

And here's the thing as people of God, as we follow Jesus, we might have to do some uncomfortable things.

Sometimes the truth is really hard.

But man, the Lord is in the truth.

The truth is what sets us free.

And so we can rest assured.

We can again trust the Lord that when we do what is right, when we step out and we speak truth, that he's in the midst of that.

But in this, Jacob wants them to cover up.

His negativity is pushing his own sons away by blame and deceit.

Verse 7.

The man kept asking us questions about our family.

They replied, he asked, Is your father still alive?

Do you have another brother?

So we answered the questions.

How could we know that he was going to say, Bring your brother down here?

Judah said to his father, Send the boy with me, and we will be on our way.

Otherwise, we will all die of starvation.

And not only we, but you and our little ones.

I personally guarantee his safety.

You may hold me responsible if I don't bring him back to you.

Then let me bear the blame forever.

If we hadn't wasted all of this time, we could have gone and returned twice by now.

Negativity slows God's work down in our lives.

So their father, Jacob, finally said to them, If it can't be avoided, then at least do this.

Pack your bags with the best products of the land.

Also take double the money that was put back into your sacks as it was probably someone's mistake.

Then take your brother and go back to the man.

May God Almighty give you mercy as you go before the man, so that he will release Simeon and let Benjamin return.

But if I must lose my children, so be it.

And as I read this, and maybe I'm reading a little bit between the lines here, but as I read this, it seems as if Jacob is concerned about himself.

I'm sure he cared about his sons.

I'm sure he wanted the best for them.

But I it it just seems here that negativity tends to lead towards this self-absorption absorption.

If I lose my children, so be it.

He's thinking about himself.

And I think that's what negativity oftentimes tends to do in our lives, where it begins for us to not look outward and think about others' interests, but it makes us think primarily about ourselves.

And the follower of Jesus is someone that is called to surrender our rights and to consider others better than we consider ourselves.

We cannot follow the way of Jesus if we are self-absorbed and only thinking about ourselves.

Negativity will prevent us from serving others, it will prevent us from living generous lifestyles towards others.

It will only make us think about ourselves.

But the followers of Jesus, the faithful followers of Jesus are people like John the Baptist who said, He must increase and I must decrease.

It's about him, it's not about me.

But negativity makes us build uh builds ourselves up and makes us think only about ourselves and the circumstances that we have to go through.

Negativity has a way of negating God's work in our lives.

Verse 15.

So the men packed Jacob's gifts and doubled the money and headed off with Benjamin.

They finally arrived in Egypt and presented themselves to Joseph.

And we'll see how the story picks up next week.

But we see that negativity has a way of permeating into our soul.

It leaves us defeated, it leaves us resistant to God's work, it pushes others away, it makes us self-absorbed.

The church doesn't need to be a place of negativity.

It needs to be a people of radical faith that believe the best and trust God in all things.

That's what we're called to be.

Now, this isn't a pie in the sky kind of attitude.

This isn't like, oh my gosh, the sky is falling, but man, look, everything's awesome.

Like I'm not saying to ignore reality.

I'm not saying that we don't acknowledge the problems and the issues and the circumstances that we face.

That's not healthy either, to ignore things.

But there is always a hand at work behind the scenes.

And we must realize that.

Jacob missed that God's hands were at work, and as a result of that, he delayed God's work in his life and in his family's life.

But if we can be people that understand that God is at work and we don't allow negativity and complaining and grumbling to consume us, then we are much more open to God moving in our lives.

And so how do we do this?

2 Corinthians chapter 10 tells us that we must take every thought captive, that we must be proactive in thinking thoughts that are from the Lord and not from the world or Satan or our flesh.

2 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

We cannot let our circumstances determine what we think about who the Lord is.

And so here's a practice for you.

It's called reframing.

Reframe is when you create a different way of looking at a situation or relationship by changing its meaning.

So the facts don't change, but how you frame it does.

So here's a picture to kind of show you what I'm meaning here.

So you've got this picture at the beach.

I love the beach and like how the clouds will move in.

It's like beautifully sunny over here, and then over here there's the dark storm clouds that are moving in.

And so you can look at this picture or you can be in this situation, and all you can see is the dark clouds.

Now, now this is this is what some of us just naturally our eyes are drawn to.

It's the negativity.

It's not God being at work, it's not the Lord working in our lives, it's not God doing stuff behind the scenes, but instead we're just focusing on the negative things that are all around us.

Well, I just never have any energy or man, I just don't seem to have enough money.

I just don't, like, and you just continually think of new ways to complain and grumble.

But reframing is when we don't ignore the fact that there's a dark cloud there, but we reframe it.

Yeah, there we go.

Oh, almost the screen a little bit.

Um, but we reframe it and we say, but God's still here, God's still at work.

We're reframing it.

The facts have not changed, but we're changing the way that we frame it.

You can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you frame it, how you see it.

Here's a great example of this.

Paul, the Apostle Paul, you know, words we can't describe Paul.

He's he's in another world, it seems.

But Paul is starting all these New Testament churches, he's writing most of the New Testament, and he finds himself in Rome imprisoned.

Here he is under chains.

And while most people would find themselves in those situations, they would be complaining, they would be citing their rights, they would be demanding to be released, but we don't find Paul complaining at all.

He doesn't even ask to be released.

Paul refuses to give himself to the negativity and complain and grumble.

Listen to what it says in Philippians chapter 1, verse 12.

Philippians 1:12

He says, I want you to know, my dear brothers and sisters, that everything that has happened to me here has helped to spread the good news.

For everyone here, including the whole palace guard, knows that I am in chains because of Christ.

And because of my imprisonment, most of the believers here have gained confidence and boldly speak God's message without fear.

He's in prison.

He can't go and come as he pleases.

He is having a palace guard that is chained to him and he can't do anything.

And he's going, oh, but look how God's working in this.

That's what it looks like to reframe.

That's what a follower of Jesus' life should look like, where it's not that we ignore the situations around us, but we do open ourselves up to that God is bigger than our circumstances, that God is working and moving in powerful ways that maybe we don't even fully understand yet.

But we trust that he is working and that he is moving in our midst.

A couple of weeks ago, um, I don't know if Carol's in here.

Probably not, but Carol Wisenhunt, her dad, godly, godly man in his 80s, and loves the Lord, loves to share his faith.

And uh he was having a uh he had been in the hospital and he had some major heart issues, and so they they took him from the regular room and moved into an ICU room.

And so I went to go and visit him in the hospital here in Walton.

And I'm sitting in the room with him, and you know, he's kind of, you know, he's got medication going on, so he's he's happy, um, but he's also kind of in and out of consciousness a little bit.

And he just starts talking.

And I mean, he I I I walked away, and like, you know, like as a pastor, like you're supposed to go to hospital visits and like encourage the person that's in the hospital.

And I walked away more encouraged and more challenged in my life and my faith by being with him.

Because here he is, and he's just like, Man, it's been so great.

I've been sitting up here, and as I'm sitting in the hospital bed, like all these nurses keep coming in, I get to keep telling them about Jesus.

I mean, just over and over.

And then we're standing there, and the the doctor, the main doctor, comes walking in, and he's just like, Let me tell you about Jesus.

He just starts sharing his faith with his doctor.

And you know, the doctor kind of does the nice thing and kind of pats him on the head and then kind of gets out of there as quickly as he can.

And he's like, Oh, but he's coming back.

And I just was like, That's it.

Yeah.

I mean, he could be going, man, my body hurts.

I'm old, my heart's giving out, my wife's struggling physically, and she's at home, and I don't know when I'm gonna be able to come out of here.

But he's going, No, God's not done with me.

God still has a purpose for me.

God's still working behind the scenes, and I'm not gonna allow negativity and I'm not gonna allow complaining and grumbling get in the way of what the Lord wants to do.

And I believe that as we walk into a season in front of us, that God is wanting a people that are called out, that are not ignoring the facts of reality, but we are reframing them to go, my God's bigger than that.

The end of the story is not that this is going to end in death, but it's gonna end in life, that this is a God that is much bigger than our circumstances, and he's working and he's moving, and we're trusting him in that.

That's the people that God is craving in this season.

That we would be people that don't allow negativity and complaining to consume us, but that we go all in.

And we say, God's on the throne and he's working.

And I don't understand it all right now, but praise the Lord for who he is and what he's doing.

That's what we need.

I'm telling you, you're starting to probably feel it already.

Election's coming.

Not to be negative, but ain't looking great.

All across the board.

But you know what?

I don't lose sleep because I know that God's working.

And we don't need people running around with their heads cut off, like going, oh my gosh, the sky's falling, our nation's trailing.

No.

We go, God's working, God's moving, God's in control, we're trusting, we're we're we're believing.

That's what we need.

So, what does the Holy Spirit want to say to us this morning?

If you would just kind of bow your heads, and we just want to create a moment where just we can allow the Lord to work and speak to us this morning.

Maybe even just take a couple of deep breaths.

Just kind of rest and quiet your soul this morning.

Jesus tells us in the book of John that his sheep hear the shepherd's voice.

And as we want to hear this morning, we want to hear his voice.

Where have negativity and grumbling and complaining got a hold in your life?

Is it in a relationship?

Is it in circumstances that you're dealing with right now?

Is it something to do with your health?

I just feel like there's some people here this morning, and maybe you're just being awake made aware even right now that just negativity is just kind of your normal kind of go-to response.

And this morning, God's saying, hey, I want you to repent of that.

I want you to turn away from that.

I want you to trust me in that and there just needs to be the surrender this morning.

And the surrender is not a bad thing, the surrender is the best thing.

So maybe that's a step you need to take.

What is the spirit saying?

I feel like the enemy wants us to be he wants us to be people of negativity.

He wants to stop God's work in our lives.

And I think the number one way he does that is to get us to believe that God's not good.

I think there's some people maybe here this morning that because of the circumstances you've walked through, because of what you're even maybe currently going through right now, you question the goodness of your God.

And this morning the Lord just wants to tell you that he's been with you all along.

He's with you, he's for you.

He's good, and he's working.

He's working.

And so we're gonna respond.

And as always, you can feel free to pray at your seat.

You can come forward, pray at the altar.

But I'll tell you, the negativity has a way of going deep within our soul.

And it takes intentionality and a lot of perseverance to be able to uproot that in our lives.

And so maybe you need to step out, and maybe you need to ask somebody to pray with you or for you.

Maybe you need to confess something of just areas where you've been negative.

And just allow the Lord to bring healing into your life this morning.

And so, Holy Spirit, we long for more of you.

As we sang just a few moments ago, Lord, we need a fresh wind.

We need a fresh wind.

We don't want to be people that fall into the trap of negativity, but Lord, we want to be men and women that trust you, that trust that you're working.

And we're not ignoring reality, but Lord, we are focusing on what you are doing in our lives and we trust you.

Help us to be men and women that have faith in you, radical, supernatural faith, that we believe that you are good and that you have good plans for your children.

Lord, help us to see that, Lord.

Help us even to feel that right now in this moment.

Lord, help us to feel your presence in such a way that we recognize your goodness, Lord Jesus.

So come, Holy Spirit, Lord, help us and be with us as we respond to you.

In your name.