Spirit of God Wk 14: Keri Jenkins | September 6th, 2026 |

Good morning, everybody.

My name is Carrie, and every once in a while I have the opportunity to come up and share with you.

But I always say yes with just a wee bit of trepidation because I know that before I stand up here in front of you, God is going to be all up in my business.

And that is exactly what this last week was for me.

So if I feel if I seem a little beaten up and bruised, is because he and I have we've had some chit-chats this week.

But it is a privilege to get to stand up here and talk to you.

And before I jump into the lesson for today, because I have a microphone, I have two shameless plugs that I want to put out there.

Number one is that this fall we are going to have a women's theology night.

This one is for my friend Kelly.

Um, it's gonna be about six weeks, and more details will be coming in the next couple of weeks or so.

You will find out more.

But yes, we're gonna do a women's theology night.

It ought to be very interesting as we deep dive into some difficult conversations and wrestle with God's word a little bit and see what he has to say about some things.

Second shameless plug, and this has absolutely nothing to do with anything regarding the sermon today at all.

It's purely a brag moment.

This is this happened this summer.

I now have a daughter officially.

Her name is Caroline.

I love her so so much.

That's it.

I just needed to brag because I can, because I'm up here, because I just want to show them off.

I tell you what, that girl right there, she can manage both those boys of mine like nobody's business.

And it brings me immense amounts of joy to have an ally in her.

I love her very, very much.

This was one of the best days of my entire life.

So that's it.

Just wanted to show you.

Okay, let's jump into our service for today.

Justin has been leading us all summer through a summer series called Spirit of God.

And the purpose behind this series was to talk about some of the characteristics of who God is, and to talk about the Holy Spirit and the gift that the Holy Spirit is to each and every one of us.

And so today I am wrapping up this sermon series by talking about a God who pursues.

Because while we've been talking about God and his faithfulness, God and the peace that he extends to us, God being an omniscient God, which means a God who knows everything, God being omnipresent, which means that he is everywhere, a God that is holy.

Last week Nate taught about a God who loves.

The reality is that God's pursuit is the movement of his character towards his people.

So when God pursues us, it is not because he feels a need to be completed.

It's because he is complete.

And his character traits are numerous.

They are not limited to what we talked about this summer.

But his pursuit is the movement of all that makes him God, of his character towards his people.

And the reality is that all of us have an innate desire to be pursued, some more than others, but there's at least a part of you that wants to be known and loved by somebody.

You want somebody to care that you exist on this earth and that you have purpose.

In God's love, he continually moves towards us to find us, to restore us, and to bring us into deeper relationship with him.

So let's take a look at this.

We're going to be in Psalm 139 today, which is where Justin has spent quite a bit of time this summer.

But before we jump into Psalm 139, let us just remember for a moment who David is.

Because this Psalm is a really beautiful prayer between David and his God.

But in order to appreciate all the nuances that are in this prayer, we need to remember who David is, the man who is writing it.

This is a man who has been overlooked.

That was at the very beginning of his story.

When the prophet Samuel went to the house of Jesse and said, One of your sons, I need you to bring them all to me, because one of your sons is going to be the next king of Israel.

And Jesse presented everybody except David, because he was the youngest.

It surely isn't him.

He was overlooked.

David, a man who was hated and hunted by King Saul, a man who lived with guilt.

He made some terrible mistakes and decisions, Bathsheba and her husband, failure, grief, fear.

This is a man who has lived a lot of extreme life with God.

But he also understood that God's presence was more constant than his circumstances.

He understood that God continually pursued him in the good and the bad, the highs and the lows.

David got that about God.

That he was never, ever, ever going to be forgotten.

Psalm 139 is the prayer of a man discovering that there is no place where God does not know him.

There is no distance where God cannot reach him.

And there is no darkness where God cannot find him.

Because this is the thing I want you to remember.

God does not pursue the perfect, but he perfectly pursues us.

I'm going to say that again because it's important that we remember that.

God does not pursue the perfect, but he perfectly pursues us.

He is everything we need at any given moment.

And that is what studying the character of God does for us.

It reminds us that there are times we need a faithful God.

There are times we need a God of peace.

There are times that we need a God that we know is everywhere.

There are times that we need to remember that we are loved.

He perfectly pursues us.

So let's jump into Psalm 139.

From the heart of a man who has been around the block a few times with his God.

You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise, you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down.

You are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue, you, Lord, know it completely.

You hem me in behind and before.

This is a very protective phrasing.

And you lay your head upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

David's like, I just, I can't even comprehend how you still love me.

This is what I was thinking about this week as I was studying this.

This is the omniscience of God.

And this is what I was thinking about.

When we talk about this omniscience, a God who knows, a God who knows us, I was thinking about the people in my life that I know love me.

And I mean, seriously, love me, not just throwing up a, you know, but love me.

Well, the first person that comes to mind is my husband.

We've been married for 31 years.

I'm a lot.

It's been, it's been a lot.

31 years.

I am not the same person that I was when he married me.

He knows me very, very, very well.

But even still, there are things that he doesn't know.

Nothing big, huge, earth-shattering.

He's got this look on his face like, we're gonna do this here.

Um, but there are thoughts, there are feelings, there are temptations, there are sins that he's unaware of.

Just things that we deal with in the very quiet, private places of our heart.

I have friends who love me.

I have friends, we have things that are in the vault, and I'm very vulnerable with my very safe friends.

I know they love me.

I have children who love me as their mother.

But when I was looking at this in David's words and I was thinking about this, I thought there is no human being on the face of this planet who knows absolutely everything about me.

Every thought, action, fear, shame, everything.

I would venture to guess that's probably true for all of you as well.

And yet we are told in Scripture that we have an omniscient God who knows everything and still chooses to pursue and love us.

And right here we have David saying, This knowledge is too wonderful for me.

I I can't believe it.

You're a perfect, mighty God.

I am so imperfect, and you're well aware because you've seen it all, and yet you still choose me.

I want to talk about Hagar.

There's something really beautiful about Hagar's story in the Old Testament.

We find her in Genesis because she is the very first person who gives a name to the character of God, the God who sees.

It's El Roy.

El Roy means the God who sees.

So Hagar was an Egyptian slave serving in the household of Abraham and Sarah.

So she was no longer part of her culture, her community, or her people.

She was displaced and she was living among the people of Abraham and Sarah.

Now, this is right around the time where Sarah and Abraham had been promised by God that they would have a son.

But as is often the case, God's timing became frustrating.

And we understand that to be true.

As is also often the case, Sarah decided to help him along a little bit because God surely didn't mean to be taking so long with this.

So Sarah takes matters into her own hands and offers up this slave girl, Hagar, to Abraham.

And she's like, Here, you go see Abraham.

You two have a moment, and you get pregnant by Abraham, and that is surely how this promise is going to be fulfilled.

Well, that's what happens.

Hagar gets pregnant by Abraham, and then, shocker, there's drama between the women.

It is straight up real housewives of the Negev, is what is it fully went down.

There's bitterness, there's rivalry.

That is not a surprise at all.

Sarah mistreats Hagar and Hagar runs away.

Hagar runs into the wilderness, and now you have a woman who is completely alone.

No family, no friends.

She is truly in the wilderness, figuratively and literally, and God shows up there.

In the form of an angel, he approaches her and he says to her, like, what are you doing here?

Which is always funny to me because he knows.

So it always seems to be a I know that you do you know that I know that you know why you're here.

She's like, Well, I'm here because you know, this awful thing happened to me, and he encourages her to go back to the camp and promises, makes promises over her for the life of the child that was growing inside of her.

But this is the part that I want to point out.

In Genesis 16, verse 13.

Genesis 16:13

She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her.

You are the God who sees me.

For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me.

Isn't that what we all want?

Just to be seen.

But to be seen so intimately that there is nothing you could do to make God stop loving you.

She discovered that God's pursuit is not limited to the places where we are strong and composed and have it all together.

God pursues us into the wilderness, the place where we are most exposed, the most vulnerable, and we are unable to rescue ourselves.

The God who knows me.

The God who is with me, going back to Psalm 139.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there.

If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me.

Even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day, for the darkness is as light to you.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

Nowhere.

The omnipresence of God, the character trait of God that says He is everywhere at all times.

If I go up to the heavens, you are there.

If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

I spent some time this week on those words.

If I make my bed in the depths, because this is the implication in those words.

If you're making your bed somewhere, you're intending to reside there.

It isn't a, I'm in my wilderness era, I'm passing through all these things.

This is a I am so far into this pit of despair.

I'm making a bed for myself.

I'm going to reside there.

And God's like, it isn't too deep for me to meet you there.

Where can I go from your spirit?

The Holy Spirit is God with us in the ordinary.

It's God with us in the wilderness.

It is God with us in conviction.

It is God with us in grief.

And it is God with us when we cannot sense him clearly.

I want to talk about a woman named Corey Temboom.

And if you're my age or older, you probably heard a lot about her, watched the movie, read the book.

But I feel like the younger generations are not as familiar with her story.

So I just want to share it with you now because it's an incredible example of God being with us even when we don't see or feel him.

So Corey Temboom was born in 1892 in the Netherlands.

She was part of a very godly Christian family and they lived out their faith out loud, very hospitable.

They had people coming to their house, they shared scriptures, they had Bible study.

Her dad, Casper, was a very famous watchmaker, and the family lived upstairs from his shop.

Well, of course, then we have World War II, and the family becomes part of the Dutch resistance.

So in May of 1940, they decide we can't sit by and do nothing while our Jewish neighbors are being persecuted.

So they created a hiding place.

And that was built into her room through a secret door.

And over the course of several years, they were responsible for rescuing over 800 Jews from persecution of the Nazis because of this hiding place.

In February of 1944, the family was betrayed and arrested.

There were people in the hiding place at the time who weren't discovered.

But her family, who was not Jewish but were sympathetic to the Jews, was arrested.

Her father died shortly afterwards, and she and her sister were sent to Ravensbrook, which was a women's concentration camp.

It is everything that we know concentration camps to be.

Horrible.

Horrid.

The depravity of humanness happened in those concentration camps.

Starvation, disease, forced labor, overcrowding.

And let me tell you something.

If you had served God so faithfully that you were actively rescuing people and you were actively sharing about God in his name, and you end up in a concentration camp, I would say you have permission to have a moment where you go, Where's God?

Where is he?

Like, how did I end up here?

What happened to this God that I serve?

But the reality is that this concentration camp and their circumstances were not proof of his absence.

And we like to try in our lives sometimes to find proof of God's absence.

And you're not going to find it because he tells us that no matter where you are, I will be there with you.

There is no proof of my absence.

So while they were at the concentration camp in the barracks that they were living in, they shared scripture, they prayed, they encouraged the women who were there.

They continued the work that they had started when they were safely at home.

And what's interesting is this particular barrack, and this is one of the most well-known parts of the story, their barrack had a horrendous infestation of fleas.

Terrible.

And Corey would say to people in the sharing of her story that it was very discouraging to her because she's like, This add insult to injury.

Like, are you serious?

And her sister is the one who would say to her, remember, we asked God for help.

And the fleas that were in that barrack kept the soldiers out.

They didn't want anything to do with it.

They didn't want to be in those barracks.

They didn't want the women out of the barracks.

They didn't want to be near those fleas.

And so they were largely left alone where they got to continue the work of the gospel with the women who were in there because it was infested with fleas.

Well, Corey was 51 years old when she was taken captive and sent to the concentration camp.

She was released from Ravensbrook due to a clerical error, but her sister ended up dying there.

After the war, Corey traveled to more than 60 countries proclaiming the word of God.

And this is the amazing thing.

The thing she's talked about the most, the message she gave the most was on forgiveness and reconciliation.

Can you even imagine?

There is one quote of hers I was looking for specifically, but then in the midst of looking for it, found quite a few others that she had said.

And some of them are so profoundly amazing.

I need to share some of them with you.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.

Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength, carrying two days at once.

This one is so applicable to us.

If you look at the world, you'll be distressed.

If you look within, you'll be depressed.

If you look at God, you'll be at rest.

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free.

That prisoner is you.

But the one quote I was looking for that I had heard at some point that she had said was there is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.

The omnipresence of God, the God who pursues us, he will pursue you right into the deepest pit.

Raven's book was not beyond God's knowledge or beyond his presence or beyond his sustaining hand.

In fact, God's presence didn't even mean that Cory and Betsy were spared every horror.

But it did mean that they were not abandoned there.

There is no dark place that can keep us from God.

The God who knows me, the God who is with me, the God who formed me.

For you created my inmost being.

You knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Your works are wonderful.

I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

God doesn't just know us from what we do for him or the achievements that we can stack up in our life.

He knows us because he's our creator.

Before we could ever perform, lead a Bible study, memorize scripture, or do anything like that, God had already given us value.

We were valuable to him from the very beginning.

His pursuing of us in this way, in this deeply knowing way, is his desire to remind us of who he created us to be.

Now I'm just gonna have to be really honest with you.

This is the one I have struggled with the most.

But I do have a treat for you.

I have a picture.

Yeah, okay.

This is Scott and Carrie Jenkins circa 1995.

He did not know I was showing this picture.

We are children in this picture.

I'm 24, he's 28, he parted his hair with the precision of an engineer.

It was amazing.

I, my long red nails were a staple.

I mean, this was a whole, we were an entire thing right here.

But this is the thing about the girl in this picture.

I was raised in a very loving Christian household, but I was also raised during a time where, as a strong-willed child, the oldest of five, I was told that was a bad, bad thing.

And that was back in the day where you had to break the spirit of the strong-willed child.

And some of you may remember that that was the parenting that happened back then.

You need to break the will of the strong-willed child.

And I'm not faulting my parents, this is just how the parenting movement was back then.

But what it told me as a very strong-willed child is that everything that made me me was wrong.

Like it was not good that I was stubborn and strong-willed, that it was a default, a factory setting that went haywire.

So I lived with that.

You on top of that, then I'm tall, very socially awkward.

Like it, the value of who I was was something I struggled with for a really long time.

Even though I lived in this beautiful bubble of Christianity, I went to high school, to Christian high school, and I've told the story in the last two services, but I'm still friends with a couple of my high school friends.

And we laugh about the fact that as seniors in high school, we sat outside during lunch one time, and we found out that a couple of the boys in our class had had beer the weekend before, and we wept.

We wept for their sinful spirits and hearts.

We were devastated, and we remember it to this day.

We're like, we cannot believe they had beer, like they're going to hell, and you know, I mean, it's so funny now and probably very different than most high school students' experiences, but that is the bubble I lived in.

And then I went to Baylor, so the bubble went with me.

I lived in the bubble, it was just hotter there.

And then I went to Houston, and all of a sudden, real life collided with this spiritual bubble that I had lived in, and I did not handle it well.

So I was already grossly insecure.

And I met this wonderful man who was also struggling with his own struggles.

And we were friends, and we decided to get married, but I was a girl who did not know her value, and I wanted Scott to be the one who made me feel valuable.

And he did.

He made me feel loved and cherished, but it was not his job to define my worth.

That is God's job.

Even now I find myself slipping into that a little bit.

Because I will often pray and I will remind God of who all of his favorite people are.

I'm like, I know your favorite women are Sharon Stewart, you know, Emily Dimitch.

Like, these are all the women that you love so, so much.

Like they're amazing.

I know they are your favorite.

And he will always have to be like, you're my favorite too.

But man, this is, I have struggled so hard.

Within a year or two of our marriage, I was in therapy, had a raging eating disorder.

I was blaming Scott for not being the God in my life, that he had no business being.

And it was messy.

But I had to understand and work through in all of these years that my value and my worth was set out before me before I was even drawing my first breath.

That God had purpose and value for me, and that He is always pursuing me, always pursuing me to remind me of my worth.

I'm gonna ask the worship team to come up.

Psalm 139 begins with the God who searches us and knows us.

It moves to the God whose spirit is with us everywhere.

It reminds us that he formed us and that his thoughts towards us are precious and countless.

Hagar discovered that God was the God who saw her in the wilderness.

David discovered that there was nowhere he could go and run from God's spirit.

Corey and Betsy Tenboom, they discovered that even in a concentration camp, the presence of God had not abandoned them.

And me, Carrie, I've had to discover that the longing to be pursued and to feel value is not answered by another person.

It is something only God can do for me.

So, what is our response to a pursuing God?

What do we do?

Number one, stop hiding.

You will lose absolutely every game of hide and go seek you play with God.

You will never win.

I can tell you that.

So stop, just stop trying.

Stop hiding from him.

Turn towards him and wrestle with him.

If you're sitting here today and you're like, I don't know that I believe this, I have done things too bad, I've done whatever your wrestle is, wrestle with God over this.

That is where you will find true peace, is in him showing you how he can pursue you in such a perfect way.

Receive his mercy.

Surrender to his transforming love.

And then above all else, pursue him right back.

He's worth it.

He is worth it.

I'm gonna ask everybody to stand.

I want to read something over you.

And I hope that this lands exactly where you need it to.

With whatever it is that you are wrestling with today, whatever it is about the idea that God pursues us perfectly, whatever part of that you're wrestling with, I hope this hits you right there.

So I'm gonna ask you to close your eyes and I'm gonna read this over you.

You are pursued by a holy God.

He will not leave you trapped in what is destroying you.

You are pursued by a faithful God.

Even when you are unfaithful, your failure does not have the final word.

You are pursued by an all-knowing God, so you do not have to hide.

He already knows the truth about you, and he has not turned away.

You are pursued by an all-powerful God, so your weakness is not the end of your story.

You are pursued by the God of peace, so you do not have to live forever in fear, striving, and unrest.

And through the Holy Spirit, God does not merely call to you from a distance.

He is the shepherd who seeks you.

He is the savior who saves you.

And he is the spirit who remains.

You are known.

You are pursued.

You are not forgotten.

You are not alone.

You are loved.