Pastor Brodie Kalamen | Our Homecoming Journey | March 7th, 2021

Welcome KCC.

My name is Brody Calluman, and welcome to our homecoming journey.

And this is our journey towards sonship.

If you're watching on Facebook or on any of our other platforms, website or YouTube, go ahead and just share the link or go ahead and text someone that church is live right now, or you can watch it with someone throughout your week.

It's always great to be listening to the Word of God with other people.

Now, while you're doing that, I just want to say thank you again for faithfully giving and remaining obedient to the Lord and supporting us as a church.

We are so grateful for your commitment to walk with us and continue to support the ministries here at KCC.

We love supporting our youth program, our marriage workshops, our small groups.

We're doing whatever we can right now to be able to continue to reach out as we look forward to an incredible day coming up.

Easter, we've got some incredible ideas as to reaching our community with the hope packages and our Good Friday Youth Easter service.

It's going to be a great time.

Now, the scripture we're going to be looking at today is from one of my favorite characters in the Bible.

His name's Job.

Now, some of you may not have that as your favorite character, but at times in your life when you're looking at points and struggles that you may be going through, or obstacles that you may be facing, or frustrations you might be having, oftentimes you can go to Job.

And Job has this great narrative, this great story with so many lessons inside of it that we're going to unpack today.

So Job chapter 3, verse 25 and 26 says this for the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me.

Job 3:25

I am not at ease, nor am I quiet.

I have no rest, for trouble comes.

And this is this great magnetism, this great magnet in his life where he felt that everything he had feared, everything that he had dreaded, was attracted to him.

And I think of this much like a black hole.

And this black hole, you may have watched some of these uh storylines in sci-fi, where there's always a black hole.

It's either aliens or a black hole.

And this black hole is this region, a void in space-time where nothing, not even light, can escape it.

It is called black because it absorbs all the light around it.

It sucks in star systems and light systems, it reflects nothing.

Everything gets pulled into it.

And it's quite an incredible visual.

If you were ever to see this black hole, or they've taken pictures of these black holes in space, as everything this gets pulled in, is this great vortex of void.

And every journey in life will have these moments in time where it feels like your whole life gets sucked into this black hole, that you get pulled into this obstacle that you faced in life, and you are having to confront it.

Now imagine for a moment there was this obstacle.

This black hole, but where it lived and where it existed was in your own soul.

A place of the soul that was hidden away, a place that perhaps you didn't even know existed.

When you self-evaluate and self-assess, you'd say, I'm A-OK, I'm doing well in all these different areas, but you didn't know that there was this point and this pressure point in your life and a point in your own soul where your life was yet to be yielded to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and because it hasn't been yielded to the lordship of Jesus Christ, the enemy uses it to exploit a weakness or a vulnerability in your life.

In this point in time in Job's life, it was a point of pressure, incredible pressure, and pressure often exposes these weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

My daughter has had these friends and they had wanted to come over to our house and sleep over and have a girls' night.

And she's like, Dad, can you pull out the blow-up mattress?

And this mattress we use when we go to drive-in theaters or any of our family adventures.

And I thought about it as the last time we had used it, I thought, I remember the kids jumping on this thing.

I wonder if we should blow it up and just see what condition it's in.

And I remember thinking, in the box, it looks so good.

In the box it looked perfect.

But when I started to put it under pressure, when we started to inflate this mattress, all of a sudden, when it reached full capacity and I turned the valve closed, I realized that I was listening to this hissing sound.

And you know that sound.

It's like there's a leak.

And I know every one of those mattresses ought to come with a patch kit, but when I heard the leak, I thought this isn't a slow leak.

This is the kind of leak where someone sleeps on it and they end up on the floor at like 2, 3 in the morning.

They're sleeping on the floor.

And I thought to myself, pressure makes the difference.

When we're found under pressure, is when we're and we confront an obstacle in our life and we experience these obstacles in our life.

It is what gets pulled out of us, it's what exposes that weakness and that vulnerability.

And here was a man named Job who was a great man of the day.

In fact, God even boasted about Job.

He had a lot going for him.

He had sons, he had daughters, he had land, he had a good reputation, he had a lot of things that were going well for him.

Yet it would appear that there was something in his life, like a black hole that had never been yielded to God.

And in this obstacle in his life, when it was exposed, it took him in, it sucked him in.

And Job said, the things I feared, obviously there was a fear, a point of fear in his life, the things he had dreaded, the things he had considered, it came upon him.

And Job's an illustration of what this orphan spirit looks like.

It's where a lot of our life is submitted to Christ.

A lot of our lifestyle is submitted to Christ.

But there are areas in our life where when we're on this journey, we'll press up against the point of pressure that will expose a part of our heart that we need to address.

And if there was ever a time that this needed to be addressed, it was probably, it's probably in an environment like it is today where people are feeling fear and anxiety and of the unknown, and there's all kinds of questions related to business and finance and friendships and faith and recreation.

Everything is tossed in the air and we're under a point of pressure.

The black hole of our spirit is where the orphan spirit will take up residence.

And it's out of this black hole that the orphan spirit will seek to drive a wedge between our heart and the Father's love.

And he will try to convince us that God isn't for you, God isn't with you, God is against you, God is opposed to you.

And you'll start to, if you start to embrace this idea as this wedge is pressed in in that weak point and part of your heart, part of your soul, you'll begin to create a distance, if you're not careful, but between you and the Father's love.

As questions come up, it's okay.

You can have those questions, but you don't want to have that wedge between you and or offense or an obstacle that you build that will separate you from the Father's love.

And when this happens, the Bible calls it a spirit of heaviness.

You become distant from God, and the spirit of heaviness comes upon you, and it wreaks all kinds of havoc in your life, and it wreaks all kinds of chaos in your life.

Job explained it this way.

He said, when this black hole of his heart was exposed, and the wedge was driven in between his heart and the love of the Father, and people were telling him, just curse God and die, Job.

Come on.

All these challenges are coming your way.

I'm going to is his family was affected, his health was affected, his possessions were affected, everything that he had built securities on were affected.

And now he was left abandoned.

He felt like he was alone.

He felt like he was distant from God, and God wasn't there for him.

And people said, you should just curse God and die.

And they and he was living with ashes on his head, and this picture of heaviness is there for him.

And he explains it in a number of different ways.

He says, it's like I'm a caged animal or an animal that's caught in a net.

And the more I struggle, the more I feel trapped.

He said, I feel like I'm a criminal and that I'm before a judge, but I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm being unfairly judged.

And he was feeling that sense of persecution against him.

He was frustrated, like at a roadblock.

He said, I felt like the sea, there's a ceiling and there are walls all around me, and I can't get through this massive roadblock.

I don't see a way through.

Or that he was a king who was doing everything, had done everything that he had known to do right, a king who had lost his crown.

And lastly, he felt like he was a building that was completely demolished.

A building that had been constructed, he had spent his life and reputation building this incredible uh like epitaph to his himself, and that whole thing was crushed.

And when the enemy comes in, and this lesson from Job is when the enemy comes in, as we're all going to experience on our journey, the enemy coming in and wanting to set up an obstacle and expose in us our weak points as we all have them and drive that wedge in our heart between our life, our heart, and the Father's love, it's at that part our when we see our blind spot exposed, it's like we feel that our body and our body becomes corrupted, our body becomes destroyed, we feel weak, and this is when we feel this point of heaviness.

And this is where the Bible talks about this word heaviness as if it's a word that we would use today is similar to it, it would be depression.

We feel depressed, we feel just like the weight of the world is on our shoulders, we feel like we can't get up out of bed, we feel fatigued, we feel emotionally exhausted.

And all of us, I'm sure, as many people as I've had conversations with, we can talk, we can go back to a point in life where it said, where we can realize a point, a milestone in our life where we had to make a choice how we were going to deal with this roadblock, how we were going to deal with this heaviness that we experienced.

Job had been uprooted.

And when you uproot something emotionally, and you up you get uprooted, it tears out all that nutrition, all that point of contact with the ground, that point where the ground can draw the roots can draw nutrition to the tree, everything becomes uprooted, you begin to die.

And when that root system is destroyed, there's no fruit and there's no life.

And that's the way that Job felt.

No doubt when a dark hole is revealed, one of the byproducts of this depression or heaviness is this fog, this outlook on the future that seems to be so dim and dark.

And we want to be able to say, what do we do?

Or what we want to be able to discuss what we do when we actually experience this spirit of heaviness.

Because the question isn't when or if you'll experience it, the question is when you experience it.

What will that look like?

How will you overcome it?

How will you push through?

And I can imagine there's today someone who's listening today who has experienced this or is in currently experiencing this heaviness and needs to find a way to move through it.

Now, our journey towards sonship, our journey towards the father's heart, and that deeper, more intimate relationship with the Father, uh, it can be found ways to get through this.

And there are keys that are found in Isaiah 61 as to how to overcome the spirit of heaviness.

And the first key is this accountability, where we place ourselves under a spiritually anointed ministry.

And that means you have people around you who you can contact, who you can discuss what you're going through, and they're not going to just pull you down or wallow with you, but they're going to inject the spiritual anointing, the anointing of God into that moment and into your heart.

And that is why we need this accountability.

And we need these people in our life.

And right now, if it's a phone call or a text message or a Zoom call or a quick coffee with somebody on a regular basis or some family that you have that's close, we need that accountability.

Every one of us needs that point of accountability so that we don't feel alone.

Together, we're better.

And we can encourage each other, we can love each other, we can even correct each other if necessary, but it's for the betterment of our own heart and our own soul, and it realigns us with the truth of God's love towards us.

So don't ever allow yourself to be pulled away so that you become alone and isolated, because at that point, that's when that wedge will begin to take a greater effect.

You need to be around people and help and allow them to help you to pull that wedge out so that you can move forward in life and on this journey.

Secondly, we know the good news of the gospel.

And the good news of the gospel is this that we have freedom and that God's intention towards us is that we would walk free.

So we don't have to live with the spirit of heaviness.

It's not our future, it's not our destiny to walk heavy.

Our future and our destiny is to walk free of the burden of heaviness.

In fact, the Lord says, cast your burdens on me, cast them on me.

My burden, your your the things that you may be carrying may be heavy, but my burden that God puts on you is light.

So if you're feeling heavy, that's not from God.

God intends for us to walk free.

And this is the message of the good news, and this is the message of Easter, and it's the message of the cross.

This great exchange happened where God took our heaviness and he gave us his lightness, he gave us his freedom.

So we want that, we want to walk that way with God, where he lightens our load and he takes those things from us and helps us on our journey.

Number three, we hope in God's promise.

Now, the promise of God is this that there would be a year of freedom, this year of Jubilee, that we would experience this great mercy from God and this great forgiveness from God and this great uh restoration from Him.

Now, this year of Jubilee is written about in the book of Leviticus, and it was a year where God would forgive all, God's mercy was demonstrated, and he would forgive all people of their debts.

All people's debts would be forgiven.

It's like the slate would be wiped clean.

And the scripture says today is you're going to experience the year of Jubilee.

Now is your opportunity to experience your slate being washed clean.

This is the kind of hope we have.

And what an incredible hope.

We don't have to live whipping ourselves, beating ourselves up.

We don't have to live persecuting or speaking down to ourselves.

We can live with the hope that, oh, yes, today we can find freedom.

Today we can have our slate wiped clean.

Lastly, we walk out of the spirit of heaviness with the joy of the Lord.

The joy of the Lord.

And this is an invitation for us to put on the garment of praise and exchange it for that spirit of heaviness where we actually put it on, a garment of praise.

Today, in preparation for this message, I knew I was going to be talking about this obstacle of heaviness on our journey where we walk and we're just heavy.

And today I thought, how can I best prepare?

And so what I did is I just put on the garment of praise.

And I didn't put on a garment of worship.

It's great to have worship, but I put on a garment of praise.

I just cranked the tunes, I put on worship music or praise music, and recently, like we haven't experienced that together in a big room with a full sound system and lots of people together praising God.

But I'm looking forward to that as we enter into that point and place of praise.

I believe the heaviness will just be shook off.

That's what I'm so excited about when we come back together to bring praise in the house so that the heaviness just breaks apart.

And this last year is as if it never existed.

So this spirit of praise, this garment of praise will displace this heaviness, a spirit of heaviness.

There's no doubt that Job was going through a dark night of the soul.

And there's no doubt that you may be experiencing a dark night.

And it's not comfortable, it's not easy, and it doesn't, it's no respecter of person, of age.

And as soon as we experience, we know how to address it.

The Bible says his heaviness or may come for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

There's a way out.

You might experience it for a moment, but joy comes for in the morning.

It's like approaching a tunnel when you're on the Coca-Cola and you're driving and you see that sunset tunnel ahead and you pop into that tunnel and everything goes black.

But you know that you're gonna get through.

And my encouragement to you today, and my declaration to you today, is that you're going to make it through.

You're gonna see you can see the other side.

If you lift up your eyes, you'll see the light at the end of that tunnel, and you're gonna make it through and and and continue on your journey towards sonship.

Walking free in your relationship with Christ.

No fear, no shame, no blame.

You're walking as you were created to be in relationship with the Father.

Micah understood this, the prophet Micah.

He said that we've got an enemy.

Micah chapter 7, verse 8, he says, Don't rejoice over me, my enemy.

Micah 7:8

When I fall, I will arise.

When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

And I love this verse because there's this acknowledgement that yes, there is an enemy.

And that this enemy is actually cheering and celebrating over your demise.

It's looking for you to fail, it's looking for you to fall.

And it says, Don't rejoice over me, my enemy.

And this enemy that we have is there, and I know that it's there, and it's and it's gonna confront each and every one of us, but we can't acknowledge it.

We can't acknowledge its win over us.

And so we have to be like Nehemiah, who who, when he was faced with an incredible obstacle, and people said, you can't rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, it's in ruins, it's like literally a beaten-down city, it won't exist anymore.

And he has just ex-slaves as his supporters, you know, around him.

Once they're literally working with primitive tools and and they've got enemies all around them.

And Nehemiah says, What am I gonna do?

How am I gonna address this massive obstacle?

And he encourages himself in the Lord and he says, This, God, strengthen my hands.

Like help me get through.

And when you say that to the enemy, and you say, the enemy's rejoicing, the enemy's saying, I got you.

I'm gonna I'm gonna rejoice, I'm gonna celebrate this win over you.

And and Micah says that, he says, Don't don't win, don't celebrate too soon.

The spirit of Nehemiah is on me.

That spirit of Nehemiah that says, God, strengthen my hands so that I can break through.

I can break in, break through.

And in fact, Jerusalem did get rebuilt.

The walls did get rebuilt, the ruins did get restored.

With that kind of resolve, nothing that comes against you can hold you down and keep you down.

Because God is, when God is for us, who can be against us?

And what weapon that's formed against us can prosper when we lean in on the name of Jesus.

Michael also said, when you fail, we will fail.

When you fail, not if you fail, when you fail, we need to keep moving forward.

And there's the testimony in the scripture of incredible people that we we talk about all the time, all their great accomplishments and the things that they had done were so well.

Well, there's a number of people in the scripture we need to recognize the other side that said, you know, they failed, and yet they didn't stop.

And it's someone called the fall hall of fame.

Let me list a few of them who failed here.

Noah, he got drunk, and things happened.

Moses committed murder.

Abraham lied.

Each of them have a story.

David committed adultery and murder, and yet still was a friend of God.

Jonah ran from God.

Jeremiah wanted to quit.

Simon Peter denied Jesus.

Not once, three times in a very critical point.

John, Mark, he quit a missions trip halfway through.

He just quit.

I want to go home.

And that's not all, but you you get the picture that there are people in Scripture.

They failed.

They fell.

And it's not a sin to fall or fail.

It's not a sin.

The sin is not confessing, repenting, getting back up.

When you sin, just confess to the Lord.

Lord, I screwed up.

I made a mistake.

I fell apart.

I did my own thing my own way.

I broke down because that wedge got into my, that black hole of my heart that was sucking up all my emotion and my strength and created exhaustion in me and heaviness on me.

And so I just gave up.

And I did what I did because of that spirit of heaviness.

And we just need to repent.

Confess to God what you did, repent, and get back up and keep moving.

And when you find yourself in darkness, that's what we need to do.

We need to ask the Lord, Lord, give us your eyes to see.

Give us your vision.

Give us your perspective.

And give us that ability to see with your perspective in this moment.

When you're in the dark, ask God, God, let me see the facts here.

Let me see what's true here.

Let me see your way through here.

Because it doesn't matter where you are.

We know as sons and daughters of God, we're not orphaned.

We're not on our own.

But on this journey towards sonship, we need to remember that God is with us.

He's Emmanuel.

He's God with me in this moment, in this time.

And I don't have to be afraid that I'm alone.

I don't have to be afraid that He's abandoned me.

He's there with me and helping me walk through.

And David said it best.

He said, Though I walk through a valley of a shadow of death, I don't fear any evil because I know you're with me.

And even when enemies surround me, you prepare a table.

I see this table prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.

Elisha had this great example of a time when he was surrounded by enemies, and his assistant said, Elisha, you gotta wake up, you gotta see that we're surrounded.

And there's no way out.

We're captured, we're caught, we've got enemies at our door.

And Elisha told them, look up your eyes, like lift your eyes up and look.

And Lord, help them to see the reality of the situation.

That we're not alone, we're not going down.

In fact, all their enemy was surrounded by another enemy.

The enemy of the Lord surrounded their enemy, and they were outnumbered, and there were horses, like flaming horses, and all God had to do was in a moment of time, the whole army was struck blind and brought into a place where they were captive.

God can do in a moment what we might think is impossible, but God can do it.

And when He when He sets his heart to do something, He when He decides upon doing it, He will do it and He will walk us through.

So we need not to be afraid.

We don't need to be afraid.

So the beautiful thing about the life of Job and the beautiful journey that Job took is that in the end, he recognized that his Redeemer lived and that God was a restorer, and God was the builder of the broken ruin.

And God closed that black hole in his heart and actually restored back to him the things that he had lost, the people who had been lost, restored back to him his health.

He was a redeemer.

And he had removed that wedge that was in Job's heart that had separated him from the love of the Father.

He had found his way through.

And so in this moment, just like perhaps it may be your own moment, I want you to take a moment and just celebrate God.

Go ahead and give up a word of praise, give up a song of praise, and begin to shout out to God and celebrate who he is.

Go ahead and text someone, call someone, message someone, and just meditate again and encourage each other again on what and who God is, what God has done and who he is, and where he's leading you through, what he's leading you through, and where he's leading you to.

You are a son, you are a daughter, you are not alone.

And he hasn't left us alone.

He's left us empowered, he's left us with the strength to be able to move on.

So we know this.

We have a living Savior.

And like Job, he knew it as well.

And the weapons in our disposal are that the blood of Jesus is there for us.

The blood of Jesus will deal with any sin.

The Bible says in John that if we walk in the light as he's in the light, we have fellowship with him, and we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus will forgive us of our sin.

We have forgiveness of sin.

And the cross of Jesus is there for us.

Galatians 2.20 says that we have been crucified with Christ, and that we no longer live, but now it's Christ who lives in us.

Christ who has this death-defined power, resurrection power that lives in him, now lives within us and can overcome the flesh.

And the name of Jesus deals with our enemy.

We know that there's no weapon that can stand against the name of Jesus, that everything under heaven and earth will one day bow down to that name of Jesus.

Every tongue will confess that he is Lord.

And that's powerful.

And lastly, we have the faith of Jesus, which is a shield to us and protects us against the darts of the enemy.

We know that we have an enemy.

We know he wants to take us down, but we've been given the shield of faith that will take the impact from the enemy and allow us to remain strong, allow us to remain unharmed behind it.

So thank you, Jesus.

Thank you, Lord.

You rescue us from a spirit of heaviness, a spirit that says the world is gonna crash down, the other boot is gonna fall, and it's gonna it's gonna crush us.

Instead, we have the we have an overcoming champion of our hearts and our life and our future, and we can trust in him.

So I'd like to lead you in a prayer today, and I welcome you to join me in this prayer.

I invite you to join me in it as we declare and we pray uh together.

Say this after me today, Father.

I believe that you want me to live a life of freedom.

Amen.

I realize that all areas of darkness must be exposed to the light of your word.

I will determine today to allow the light of the Holy Spirit to expose and defeat any strongholds and obstacles in my life.

I declare that I will no longer believe the lies of the enemy.

I am accepted, not abandoned, I am loved, I'm not rejected, I have a home, and I'm not homeless, I am a son, a daughter, and not an orphan.

And today we can believe that together, confess that together, and celebrate that together.

Amen.

So may the Lord bless you, may the Lord keep you, may his face shine upon you, may he be gracious to you and lift his countenance over you and give you peace.

God bless you today.

We hope you enjoyed the service today, and we just wanted to take a few moments to remind you of the ways that you can give.

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We hope you see you next week as we continue our homecoming journey.