Surely He Is With You

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Good morning, Awakening.

Well, good morning.

What a nice welcome.

Um, I also was at Ed Sheerand last night, so um we're gonna see how my voice does through this whole thing, but I don't think that's my problem, I think that's their problem in the back, right?

All right.

Um, this morning, this message is really close to my heart, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Uh, you don't always get a peek behind the curtain of how sermons come together, but this morning I wanted to give you a little bit of insight of how God has been working slowly over a long period of time for you to hear what I think he has for our church today.

This message has come from a combination of what I have personally been experiencing with God over a few really difficult circumstances, and also what God led us to teach the kids at Camp Wonder last month.

Camp Wonder is our VBS, and it started as a dream that I had that Ryan agreed with in my second year as a pastor here when things were starting to reopen.

And it was this camp that for the last six years I've gotten to build with the Lord and with a team of amazing people alongside me.

You probably don't know that VBS curriculum is a really big industry in the ministry world.

And after a few years of purchasing and adapting curriculum, I felt discontent with what options were available for us, and I sensed God doing something different for our church that year.

So instead of purchasing something, I took on this huge undertaking of creating the entire content from scratch.

A kit usually provides teaching scripts and activity guides and graphics and printables and swag and so much more.

And so by choosing to do it ourselves, all of that would have to come from our kids' team and volunteers.

People told me that I was crazy.

And I told them, I know.

When you plan a VBS, you need two aspects really early.

You need the date and you need the theme.

And by early, I'm talking about the fall before.

We start this process around October each year.

So last fall I started praying and asking God what he wanted the kids to know and learn and experience at camp this year.

And what was amazing was that God took what my small group had been studying and nudged me to use what he had already been working in me.

So the theme all came together, and Megan and I set off on our planning and prep for the next however many months that is.

When it came time to actually write the teachings, there's four days of teachings, and three of them came pretty easily.

They came as easily as they could, but I was so stuck on one of them.

I prayed and I studied and I wrote and I walked and I drew big pictures and I wrote and I rewrote and I rewrote.

And finally, I had to just decide that it was good enough and I needed to just let it be.

And so I asked God to work through his scripture, despite the inadequacy that I was feeling about this teaching, and I moved on to the other mountain of tasks that I still had for camp.

Then the day of the teaching came.

It was for day three of camp, which is notoriously the most exhausted moment that we all feel.

So I didn't have a ton of energy, but I was extra caffeinated, and I was praying for God to be with me, which just so happened to be the main point of that teaching.

And then something amazing happened.

As I was teaching, the Spirit of God began moving in me.

I was swept away by the goodness of the gospel.

I sensed God in the space, and as I taught, I could see that all the other adults in the space could feel the same thing.

God was meeting us in a way that we didn't expect it.

We were there for the kids.

And here was God reminding us that He is with us always.

Each day we have the kids repeat this main truth for the day, and it's very loud and shouty.

And so as they all shouted, Jesus is with me, as I led them in shouting this, I knew that this was true for me too.

I knew that God also wanted me to grasp it, to grasp this truth from him.

So then as I prayed about this message, I had a pretty wide open slate for this final sermon.

I prayed for weeks before beginning, asking what message God wanted me to bring this morning.

And I felt blank and blank and blank.

And then when I finally sensed his voice, it became so very obvious.

It was so clear that I was to take the truth from that teaching and bring it to our whole church.

Now, when we teach to different groups of people, the packaging of that message is different.

I didn't cover my face in glitter today.

I don't have hand motions that I'm gonna make you repeat.

The packaging is different, but the truth about God remains the same.

So, with that background of how we got here, let's pray and turn our attention to God and what his word has for us this morning.

Pray with me.

God, thank you for how you have led me in this.

God, I pray that you would speak.

Would you use the words that you have given me and would you use your scripture to speak to each of us this morning?

Lord, may we understand that you are with us and that we can trust that you are always around us.

God, we look to you.

We ask that you would teach us something about yourself this morning.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Alright, we're gonna jump right into our anchor passage this morning, which was which is the final verse in the book of Matthew, and Jesus' final words to the disciples.

He says, And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

Jesus makes this promise to his disciples, and then he leaves by ascending to heaven.

So at first glance, it doesn't really seem like he kept this promise, pretty immediately left them.

But as we dig a little deeper this morning, we're going to discover how this wasn't a new promise, and that God is still keeping that promise for us today.

So this morning I'm gonna take us on a little journey of how God has shown up to his people one era at a time.

In the biblical narrative, which is the story of God and his people that we find in the Bible, there's this big timeline, and we get to see some common themes throughout it.

So for us to understand what's happening in any given passage of scripture, we need to place it in this whole narrative.

At camp, I described this process to the kids like this.

Reading one passage or story in the Bible is like looking at the night sky through a telescope.

You can zoom in and you can see one tiny section of stars really well.

We get to see this one momentary conversation of Jesus and his disciples.

But looking through a telescope doesn't show you the full picture of the night sky, where and where those stars fit in it.

To do that, you have to actually zoom out and have a wider view.

The Bible gives us this overarching narrative of God's salvation story from when he created this world and everything in it all the way to when Jesus will come back again and restore all of that creation.

And through this grand narrative, we see themes that pop up over and over and over again that are woven through this whole story that spans thousands of years.

And one of these themes is tied to this promise.

Surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

God with his people.

God has always created ways to be with his people.

So let's walk through a few of the big ways that we see this theme show up through the biblical narrative.

I'm not gonna mention every single instance, but some of the main ones, some of the main eras, so that we can expand our picture of the sky and see how this thread is woven through.

So first, we see the people in the garden.

This was an environment that God created for the people to live in and to be with God.

Genesis 3 tells us the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And the Lord called to the man.

God was with his people, he walked with them through the garden.

But then we know what happens.

We know that the world gets really broken after what has just transpired there.

So when the world was too broken for God to be walking as directly with his people, he gave them a new instruction.

Then the Lord told Moses, set up the tabernacle, the tent of meeting.

Then he gives all these very specific instructions for Moses and the Israelites to set up this tent that will travel with them through the wilderness.

They do as the Lord says, and at the end of Exodus 40, we read: Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the Israelites during all their travels.

The Lord has Moses set up this tent of meeting so that his presence could be with the Israelites and guide them.

And the people had God right in their sight through the cloud and the fire.

Now, once the people, we're moving to the next era here, once the people were able to settle in that promised land, many generations later, there was a king who built a temple for God.

Now that the people weren't traveling for decades, a permanent dwelling place for the Lord could be built.

So King Solomon set a plan and made it happen.

During the dedication of the temple, we read this: the priests then brought the Ark of the Lord's covenant.

This was what was in the tabernacle.

They brought it to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the most holy place.

God's presence was going to dwell in this most holy place.

Now, in the temple, it had to be behind this curtain that would separate the holiness of God from the sinfulness of the people.

And then we read the temple of the Lord was filled with the cloud.

For the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God.

And Solomon said, The Lord has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud.

I have built a magnificent temple for you, God, a place for you to dwell forever.

So God's glory filled the temple.

God's presence had moved in to be with his people once more.

And Solomon intended for this to be a place for God to dwell on earth forever.

Solomon offered a prayer and dedication over the temple, and then we read this: the glory of the Lord filled the temple.

The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it.

When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, He is good, his love endures forever.

So God's presence was with his people by way of the temple.

God's holiness was kept set apart by this curtain, but his presence was near.

Amidst the sin and the unrighteousness, God still found a way to be with his people.

God being in the temple lasted for centuries as the people waited for the Savior, which would be the next way that God would dwell with his people.

This next passage we're familiar with, but we don't normally hear it in July.

Matthew 1, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet.

The virgin will conceive, give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.

The name that is prophesied over Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

We often hear about this during Advent leading up to Christmas, but Jesus wasn't just God with us as a baby.

For 30 years he was fully God and fully man who lived among the people, and then in his ministry for three years, he was teaching the people and healing them.

This was God walking among them.

And then Jesus would go on to rescue his people from the brokenness and sin of the world.

The entire salvation story is absolutely miraculous.

God coming to earth as a man, healing people, feeding people, raising people from the dead, and then taking all the sin of the world upon his shoulders and dying for our sake to rescue us from death and make a way for us to be with God forever.

And then while Jesus was on the cross, something amazing happened that is part of this thread that we are following through the biblical narrative this morning.

Matthew 27, and when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

At that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

Right at the moment that Jesus died, that curtain in the temple that was separating the people from the holiness and presence of God was torn in two, representing that there would be no more separation, that God would now dwell directly with his people, not in a tabernacle traveling with the people, not in a temple that they would all need to travel to, but in a new way.

God was unleashing his presence into the world because of the work of Jesus on the cross.

So that brings us to this promise that we started with.

To help us zoom back in now and find our place in this story, we just heard about Jesus' death on the cross.

Three days later, he miraculously rises from the dead and reunites with the women first and then his disciples.

And he was on earth for another 40 days before ascending to heaven.

And in this very last conversation with his disciples, what we call the Great Commission, he makes this promise that we began with.

And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

Jesus makes this promise to his disciples, and then he ascends to heaven, which probably seems strange to them, like we acknowledged before.

He said, I'm always with you, and then he leaves.

Sometimes it feels like the Bible leaves us hanging a little bit, but this time, if we look a little bit wider in our telescope lens and look to another conversation that Jesus had with his disciples, we understand more of how God planned to do this.

In John 14, Jesus says, And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.

But the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you.

I do not give to you as the world gives.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.

He says, I will give you another advocate to be with you forever.

This is the way that God would now be with his people from Pentecost, the sending of the Spirit, until someday when Jesus returns.

We're in this era now, in this part of the timeline, right now.

And where God resided in the tabernacle and then in the temple, and then as a single man on the earth, now in this part of God's grand narrative, God's dwelling place is within each of his people.

Paul writes to the church in Corinth, don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in your midst?

So now there doesn't have to be a tent or a temple because you are his temple, which means that wherever you are, God is with you.

You are the temple, and God is always with you.

Jesus is keeping his promise.

Now, this is such a nice thought, right?

That God is with us.

We love to remember this at Christmas time because of this sweet baby Jesus.

And maybe we come to church to feel God's presence, to say, maybe in worship today I will feel God.

Some people feel it when they go to nature or when somebody prays over them.

There's lots of spaces where we go to feel God's presence.

But what about the rest of our lives?

Our day-to-day busy lives.

Our lives that here in the Silicon Valley are so full that we can't even always connect with the people who are right in front of us.

The days we spend studying or working, and then the evenings we spend scrolling or binge watching, or if we're honest, we're doing both at the same time.

Is God really with me in all of that?

And what about in the great celebrations of life?

The graduation, the engagement, the new baby, the new job or promotion.

These things are all consuming for us.

But we think surely God has more important things to worry about in the world.

So is he really with me in those moments too?

And what about in suffering?

When I feel so low that I can barely think?

When I'm walking through grief that feels suffocating, or a diagnosis that has taken over my life, or a broken relationship that I don't know if it will ever be mended.

What about when I've been betrayed?

Or fired, or harmed to the point of trauma?

When the valley feels so dark that I feel all alone, and I can't feel anything but pain and loneliness and despair.

Or when the pain is so big that all I can do is just shut it off, and now all I feel is numb.

Is God still there even when I don't feel him?

Each era of God's He creates a way to be with his people.

Jesus is promised, and surely I am with you to the very end of the age.

Surely.

In Genesis, there's a man named Jacob who has to leave his family.

He's on a journey to a new land, and God shows up to him in a dream.

Scripture tells us when Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, surely the Lord is in this place.

And I was not aware of it.

Surely the Lord is in this place.

Surely I am with you, is what Jesus says.

Surely God is with you.

Surely God is with you in your classes and when you're up in the night writing papers.

Surely God is with you when you spend hours commuting every day to a job that you're just hoping doesn't lay you off.

Surely God is with you through each little colored square on your Google Calendar, filling up the whole space.

Surely God is with you when you're trying when you can't sleep at night because your mind is racing with anxiety.

Surely God is with you in the mundane tasks of life, like dishes and taking out the trash.

Surely the Lord is in this place and we just aren't aware of it.

Surely Jesus is with you to the very end of the age.

Surely God is with you in great celebration.

Our celebration and rejoicing are a direct result of God's goodness and love for us.

Jesus says that God is a good father who gives good gifts to his children.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me, Psalm 23 says.

Even two of Jesus' closest friends, Martha and Mary, asked this question.

When their brother died, they each ran to him and said, Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died.

Jesus, where were you?

Why weren't you showing up?

I've been praying for a miracle.

I'm trying to believe that you can do it, but where are you?

We can ask God for all the miracles.

And sometimes we get to experience that amazing wonder of God doing a miracle that we've been praying for.

Sometimes we get to see God heal someone with cancer where the doctors are stunned.

Sometimes we get to meet the baby that took years and years and years to conceive with hope dwindling every single month.

Sometimes financial help arrives out of the blue when we're down to our very last bit of groceries.

Sometimes we get to see God do these things and it's incredible.

But more often we pray and the miracle doesn't seem to be coming.

Or we see it not come.

And we ask, where is God in all of this heartache?

God, if you were there, Mary and Martha said, This wouldn't have happened.

And this is where Jesus' promise becomes more true than ever.

He doesn't promise to rescue us from all of our suffering until the end days when he comes back and he will.

But quite the opposite, right now, Jesus says, in this world you will have suffering.

But when Jesus said, and surely I am with you always, he was promising the miracle of his presence.

God with you is the miracle, and it's the one that you can be certain of.

The miracle is God's presence with you.

Surely he is with you always.

When we are hopeless and when we are suffering, God actually comes closer.

Psalm 34 says the Lord hears them.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

God leans in.

So if you're suffering, if you're feeling hopeless or despair from the miracle that you're waiting and waiting for that seems like it will never come, or from the thing that really won't be touched by a miracle.

The death of someone you love, the child you didn't get to hold because of miscarriage, the health emergency that changes your body permanently, so your life is different now.

Jesus says to you, Surely I am with you always.

The miracle is God with you.

The miracle is God's presence in the suffering, in the valley of the shadow of death, in the darkest valley, the one that seems to have no light at the end of the tunnel.

God's presence is surely with you.

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.

So in all things, in the mundane, in the celebration, in the suffering, how can we become aware of it?

How can we know that God is with us always?

This miracle that He is with us always, the miracle of now being the actual temple of the Spirit of God, God's dwelling place here on earth until Jesus returns.

How do we do it?

By directing our gaze to Jesus.

We become aware that the Lord is with us.

By directing our gaze to Jesus, we become aware that the Lord is with us.

There's this hymn that you might be familiar with.

It was written in 1918 by a woman named Helen Lamel, who was so overtaken by this idea of focusing on Jesus that she penned these words.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

Look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

I have these words on my bedroom wall, and when I sense that I need to redirect my gaze to Jesus, I meditate on this to remind myself that Jesus is in fact with me.

What's missing isn't Jesus, isn't God's presence, but my awareness of him.

Surely the Lord is in this place and I wasn't aware of it.

By redirecting my gaze, I become aware of God with me.

One of the most tangible ways that we can become aware of God's presence is when we take communion.

Now, in our little corner of Christian theology, we recognize the sacrament of the bread and the cup as symbolic.

It's a symbol of Jesus' death on the cross.

His body was broken for us, his blood was shed for us, and when we participate in receiving communion, we are proclaiming this death that has saved us.

We're remembering what Jesus, our King and Savior, did to give us life eternal with Him.

So though we don't see this as Jesus' actual body and blood present with us, by participating in communion, our gaze is redirected of the things of this world that tend to bombard our minds and our hearts, and our gaze is redirected to the Lord who is with us.

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I'm aware of it.

So this morning we're gonna participate in this sacrament.

By taking communion, you are proclaiming Jesus' death, and you are redirecting your gaze to the one who is with you always in all things whose dwelling place is within you.

Surely he is with you always to the very end of the age.

Would you stand and we will pray and take communion together?

Jesus, thank you for rescuing us.

Thank you that you are in our midst.

God, thank you that you have always found a way to be with your people.

God, our eyes are focused on you.

Would you redirect us to you in this moment, O Lord?

God, would we know that you are in this place?

Surely, Lord, you are in this place, and we are aware of it.

In Jesus' name, amen.

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