Build The Boat | Pastor Noah Herrin

Genesis chapter 6 verse 8.

Genesis 6:8

This is my favorite verse in the Bible.

Are you ready?

My favorite verse in scripture, Genesis chapter 6, verse 8.

Genesis 6:8

But Noah was different.

God liked what he saw in Noah.

My name's Noah.

I'm gonna read you verse 18.

That one was for me.

Verse 18 is for you.

Okay, verse 18, verse 18.

But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark, you and your sons, and your wife, and your sons' wives with you.

You are to bring the ark into the ark, two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.

Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.

You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.

Verse 22 is my favorite part.

Noah did everything just as God commanded him to do.

I can't think of a better sentence to be said over a person's life than that sentence right there.

Can you imagine getting to the end of your life in the people who were closest to you, your family, your friends, your co-workers, them being able to say the same thing about your life?

Man, they were somebody who did everything that God commanded them to do.

That's what I want to talk to you about today.

The title of this message is Build the Boat.

Will you say that with me?

Ready?

One, two, three.

Build the boat.

Today you can say amen.

You can say hallelujah.

You can say preach a white boy, you can take notes, whatever you want to do.

We're gonna lean into God's word.

We're gonna leave here different than we came in.

And um, I'm so grateful and honored to be with you.

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for your word.

I pray that you would speak through it, that when we leave here today, we would know without a shadow of a doubt, Lord, we didn't have an encounter with a worship team or a speaker, but we had an encounter with the one true God.

We love you, we thank you so much for all that you're doing at this amazing church.

We thank you for Chick-fil-A.

In Jesus' name, everybody said.

Amen.

Amen.

Can we give it up for this worship team up here?

They're amazing, they are incredible, incredible.

So I showed you a photo of my wife, and when Maddie and I started dating, it was one of those situations where pretty much right away I was on a mission to convince her to marry me.

Now, she needed a lot of convincing, but I knew right away that this was a girl that I was in love with.

And the problem was every time I would go to tell her that I loved her for the first time, I would get extremely nervous.

And so I remember there was one time specifically where we were having a movie night at her parents' house, and um I walked into the living room, and I had every intention to say I love you.

And I walked in and I said, Maddie, I gotta tell you something.

And she said, Okay, tell me.

And I said, Your parents are at a toilet paper in the bathroom.

Because I would just get so nervous when I was around her.

And so, long story short, a couple months into our relationship, Maddie, myself, and eight of our closest friends, we decided that summer we were gonna go to Hawaii.

Now, that sounds super bougie.

It was a group on, okay?

It was a tiny little Airbnb with no AC.

It was not bougie.

But in my mind, I thought, what better place to tell the woman of my dreams that I love her than in Hawaii?

I'm picturing me surfing up on a surfboard, coconuts in my hands, Marvin gay music in the background.

This is what I'm picturing in my mind.

Like she is gonna love this.

And we get there, and it's the first morning that we wake up in Hawaii.

I'm sleeping on a little pullout couch with my buddy Andrew, and we're kind of in the back of the Airbnb.

And about five o'clock in the morning, I hear the sliding glass door open right next to our room.

My first thought was we're being robbed.

So I hop up, then I remember we're in the worst Airbnb in all of Hawaii.

We're definitely not being robbed.

And I come around the corner and I see Maddie, my girlfriend at the time, my now wife, she's walking towards the ocean.

So then I'm thinking she sleepwalks.

So I take off running after her.

I'm like, Maddie, wake up.

She starts laughing.

She says, No, I'm I'm awake.

She said, I didn't mean to wake anybody up.

She said, I think I just had some bad fish last night.

I just needed to come outside for some fresh air.

And it was like I heard the audible voice of the Lord say, This is your time.

And so we start walking down the beach and just absolutely magical moment.

The sun starts to rise, the birds are chirping, the sky is orange and yellow and blue and pink and all these amazing shades of color.

And we're walking down and I'm holding her hands.

It's just amazing.

It's it's better than I could have hoped for.

And we walk down about 10 minutes.

I I turn her to face me and I squeeze her hands and I look into her beautiful eyes and I say, Maddie, I love you.

And it was just like, yes.

And she looked back at me and she squeezed my hands and she said, Noah, I think I'm gonna throw up.

And she ran to the bushes.

Now, about one month later, I would get down on one knee and I would ask her to be my wife.

She would say yes.

A photographer would take a photo of that moment.

We would post it on social media within one week, it would be seen by 2.1 million people online.

It went crazy viral.

One of the people that saw the photo was the owner of the company that we bought the engagement ring from.

The owner slid into my DMs, it was the greatest DM slide of my life.

Slid into my DMs and said, I love the photo so much.

I heard that you bought a ring from us.

I would like to make you an offer for the rights to that photo so that we could put it on every billboard that our company owns.

And I want you to know we needed a coffee table, so we took that deal.

We took that deal.

And for the next two to three years, every billboard for this company, over 200 billboards around the southeast, had a photo of us on the side of the interstate.

I tell you that story because if you drove by one of those billboards and you saw the perfect picture, you would not know about the bushes in Hawaii.

If you saw the picture on Instagram, you would not know about the time I spilt queso in my lap on the second day.

If you saw the picture on Instagram, you would not know about the time that I chickened out again and again when trying to tell her that I loved her.

And I tell you this because I think many times we are so guilty as believers of doing this exact same thing when we read scripture.

Where when we're familiar with a passage, we skip to how it ends, we skip to the solution, we skip to the resolution instead of learning the lessons that God is trying to teach us in the text.

And I think out of any passage of scripture, the one that we are most guilty of doing this with is the story of Noah.

This is just this story that we read to our kids.

Because we know the story.

God spoke to Noah.

He said, I'm gonna flood the earth, build a boat, bring two of every animal on it.

We thank God he remembered the dogs.

We're confused how the mosquitoes made the trip, but God he did it.

He was faithful, Noah was faithful, God was faithful, he protected them, and then this cute little story, now we're all here thousands of years later.

But when you look beneath the surface of the story of Noah, what you see is that the story of Noah is one of the most difficult stories in the entire Bible.

Most Bible scholars believe that Noah built this boat for somewhere around 120 years.

Can you imagine doing anything for a hundred and twenty years?

I'm just gonna speak for me.

I cannot.

I have had the same New Year's resolution for seven years in a row.

Every January, I say, Maddie, this is the year I'm getting ripped.

And every January, for the first 10 days of the year, I'm doing it.

I'm doing bicep curls, I'm doing jumping jacks, I'm eating grass, I'm doing all the things.

I am getting ripped.

And around day 11, I am back at Chick-fil-A.

Why?

Because starting things is easy, finishing things is hard.

I'll take it a step further.

Starting things is easy, but finishing things is biblical.

And as Christians, we've got to be really careful that we don't just start, but we actually finish.

We are called to start things.

We're called to start the calling, we're called to start the career, we're called to start the family, the marriage, we're called to start building the local church.

But we're not just called to start, we're called to finish.

And when we finish what God has called us to, it actually is for the good of other people, and it actually brings more glory to his name.

We're called to be finishers.

Now, I recently came across this article, it was written in the New York Times, and it was written about Gin Z and millennials.

And I'm kind of like right in the middle of those two generations, and so it caught my attention.

And basically, they had done this massive survey, this massive piece of research on gin Z and millennials going into the workforce.

And what they found is that the average Gen Z and millennial adult will hold 14 different full-time jobs by the age of 31.

And the point of the article was not to say that that was bad or not to say that that was good.

Their conclusion was that unlike any other time in human history, humans are looking for the next best opportunity.

If it pays better, we'll take it.

If it's a better neighborhood, we'll take it.

If it leads to more fame, we'll take it.

If it leads to more notoriety, we'll take it.

If it leads to more followers on Instagram, we'll take it.

Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.

But on the other hand, we've got to be careful as Christians because we follow a God who doesn't give opportunities, he gives assignments.

And there's a big difference between an opportunity and an assignment.

An opportunity might bring your name fame, but an assignment will bring God's name fame.

An opportunity might put more money in your bank account, but an assignment will put more people into heaven.

An opportunity might be full of hype for a season, but an assignment will give your life purpose every day that you wake up on this earth.

And I came to tell somebody at Union Church Charlotte that today is not the day to give up your God-given assignment for another man-made opportunity.

Because when we get to heaven, we're not gonna hear, Well done, my good and rich servant, well done, my good, and you got a lot of followers on TikTok servant.

We're not gonna hear my well done and a lot of people celebrated you, servant.

No, we're gonna hear, well done, my good and faithful servant.

Our goal on this earth is faithfulness to the Lord.

Will you build the boat?

Not will you ride the boat, will you build the boat?

Will you build the boat?

One of my favorite scriptures is Galatians chapter 6, verse 9.

Galatians 6:9

Don't grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time you'll reap a harvest.

What?

If you don't give up.

I love that verse because it gives us one job.

Everybody say one job.

The one job that we have is to not quit.

If we don't give up, it's God who does the heavy lifting.

If we keep building what God's asked us to build, it's God who brings the harvest.

It's God who brings the rain, it's God who provides, it's God who is faithful even when we are faithless.

It's God.

Reminds me of when I was a little kid, I was about four years old, and my parents signed me up for T-ball.

It was my first organized sporting activity of any kind, and signed me up for T-ball.

And my coach could not see the athletic promise in me that I could see in me.

And so he put me in right field.

Now, I don't know if you've been to any T-ball games lately, but not many players hit the ball all the way to right field.

Okay, so first game of the season, nobody hits the ball to me.

And I get back in the car after the game, and my mom's like, What do you think of baseball?

And I was like, It's the worst.

Why am I not playing basketball or soccer or football?

Baseball's boring.

She's like, Why do you think baseball's boring?

I was like, because nobody hits the ball to me.

She I said, Mom, I want to quit.

My mom, she's old school pastor's wife, you know, knows the word of God.

She was always teaching us lessons from an earlier.

She looks over at me, she almost wrecked.

She said, Quit.

Parents never quit.

She starts preaching at me.

I she'm pretty sure she quoted Galatians 6 9.

I don't remember, but it was probably in there.

And she said, You're not gonna quit.

We finish what we start.

I was like, okay.

Well, second game of the season, they started giving free snow cones to all the players.

Baseball became my favorite sport.

Third game, fourth game, fifth game.

Nobody ever hit the ball to me, but I didn't care because we got free snow cones.

Last game of the season, this little guy gets up to that and rips the ball.

And by rips the ball, I mean it barely rolled under the first baseman's legs.

And everybody looks to right field.

My mom is going crazy.

Everybody looks to right field, there's no right fielder.

Because in the middle of the fourth inning, the right fielder had walked around the fence and was standing in the snow cone line.

My mom, she's a scrapbooker, and so she's showing my wife the photos of that season, and she tells my wife that story, and everybody's laughing, and I'm sitting in the corner of the living room thinking about it, and all of a sudden the Holy Spirit convicted me in my parents' living room and said, Noah, how often are you that same little four-year-old boy?

How often do I give you an assignment?

I put you in a position, and you believe it's me when it's time to start.

You're excited to be there when it's new.

And then some time passes and the results don't match your expectations, and you start to ask, was that really God?

You start to ask, is this really where you want me?

You start to ask, should I leave?

And you bounce right before the very thing you've been praying to show up, shows up.

What if you came to church today for the wrong reason?

What if you came to church today looking to get out?

And the word of the Lord is not that you need another position change, but you need a perspective change.

God, if you haven't told me to leave, I'm gonna do the last thing you told me to do.

God, if you haven't said that this season's done, then I'm gonna lean into what you're building right here.

God, if you haven't given me a new word, I'm gonna be faithful with the old word.

I'm gonna pick up the hammer and I'm just gonna keep building the boat.

I'm not quitting because your word says that a harvest is coming.

I'm gonna keep building the boat.

This is what Noah was doing 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 120 years.

I am convinced that the story of Noah would make the greatest Netflix show of all time.

I'm convinced.

Think about this.

Season one, episode one.

Are you ready for this?

Season one, episode one, Noah walks in the door.

His wife's, maybe she's sitting down at the table doing something, and Noah walks in, hey babe, quit my job today.

His wife's like, oh no, Noah, why'd you do that?

I'm gonna build a boat.

Oh, okay.

Um, wow, Noah.

You've never built a boat before.

I know it's gonna be great.

Okay, Noah.

Can we just talk about that for a second, Noah?

Um how are we gonna pay the bills?

Is it gonna be a fishing boat?

Are you are we are you gonna catch fish on it and sell them?

Is that how the HOA is gonna be paid?

Is is is that is that how we're gonna pay for the kids' school?

Is it a fishing boat?

And I was like, no, no, um think more carnival cruise ship.

That's what I'm going for.

Okay, let's just imagine all the married men and women in the room that that combo went great.

No problem.

Just smooth.

What about year 10?

What about season two, episode one?

How's that combo going?

Um, Noah.

It's been 10 years, and um you know those dinner parties we used to get invited to with the neighbors?

With the tea and the crumpets?

No, it's a British Netflix show.

We just made it British.

Um, you know those parties um we don't get invited anymore because everybody in the town thinks we've lost our minds.

And Noah's I just gotta keep building the boat.

What about year 20?

Year 30, year 40.

I've read it dozens of times.

You know what I don't see in the text?

I don't see a single person celebrating the faithfulness of Noah.

There's nobody tagging him on social media, there's nobody posting about him, there's nobody celebrating anniversaries of him being faithful, there's nobody doing any of that.

Nobody's writing news articles about him, there's no videos being posted about him, there's none of that, which says to me, if I want to end faithful, but I need the applause of man, I probably won't end faithful.

But if I know that God is for me, if I know that I'm serving an audience of one, it is possible for me to pick up the hammer, even when times are bad, and keep building the boat because he was faithful to me.

I can build the boat.

What about year 60, year 70, year 80?

One of the reasons I think we stop building what God's called us to build is because we get really distracted looking at other people's boats.

Oh man, look at their family.

They don't even need iPads at Chili's, they're just perfect, all of them.

Chili's is not sponsoring this sermon, by the way.

I just like it, alright?

I just like it.

Oh man, look at their business.

They started it yesterday.

I started mine 10 years ago, and theirs is crushing it.

It's the worst.

I'm the worst.

Look at their serve team at church.

God's hands just all over it, and my team, I just, you know, everyone keeps quitting on me.

And we just start looking over here and looking over here, and we forget that in the kingdom of God, success is not me compared to you.

Success is me compared to what God asked me to build.

That's success.

You will not have to give an account for their boat, you'll have to give an account for your boat.

Will you build the boat?

What about year 100?

Can you imagine what would have happened if Noah stopped building the boat year 100?

Some of you, you know exactly what Noah's going through.

No, Noah, 100 years, I just imagine people walking by, Noah, you crazy old man.

You've spent your whole life building a boat for what?

And some of you, you hear that same voice, it just sounds a little different.

You've been praying for your kids to accept Christ for decades, for what?

You've been praying that God would restore your marriage for years, for what?

You've been praying that God would move in your finances for years for what?

You've been praying for healing for years for what?

And I'm telling you, today is not the day to put down the hammer.

It's the day to pick it back up and say, I'm gonna keep building the boat.

It's the Lord who brings the harvest.

Now, maybe this is your first time at church.

If this is your first time at Union Church Charlotte, you gotta come back next week and hear Pastor Brian, okay?

Will you just do that for me?

Give it one more chance, all right?

It gets better, I promise.

But maybe this is your first time and you're like, excuse me, is this dude about to try to sell me a boat?

What are we talking about?

The boat is what God has uniquely called us to build with our lives.

It's our calling, it's our it's our purpose, it's what He has chosen us to do here.

And this is the thing about the boats that God gives us.

Every single person at church today has at least one boat that you're called to build.

At least one.

And every single person is called to build a boat that's bigger than you think.

This is what I mean.

God does not give mediocre callings, God does not call us to do things that we don't need his help for.

In fact, I believe scripturally that when God gives us a calling, it's a calling that is so big that only he can.

Get the credit for it.

Meaning, if your calling is something you can accomplish in your own strength, talent, time, and treasure, it's probably not big enough for God to step in.

God loves to step into big boats because what happens is people will look at your life, they'll look at the boat that's built through it, and they'll go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that shouldn't be possible.

And you can take a step back and go, you're right, if it were not for the Holy Spirit's power in me, this wouldn't be possible.

But because God got involved, it is.

If you come to our church right now, it would blow your mind.

The average age person at our church is 26 years old.

I started the church with my wife, we were 28.

You look around the room, there are hundreds and thousands of young people giving their life to Jesus.

And when we got there, the voice that we heard over and over again.

Maybe it'll happen when you're in your late 30s.

Maybe it'll happen when you're late forties.

We kept feeling like God said to do it.

I'm just telling you, it was a boat bigger than us.

And God loves to get involved in boats bigger than us.

What's the boat you're called to build?

There is a boat.

I just thought of a couple.

This is an example today.

Maybe the boat that you're called to build is the boat of your marriage.

That is a big boat.

Maybe you're here and you've been married for a long time.

It was easy to build that boat when you were seven years in, like we are.

But somewhere along the way, you stopped going on date night with your wife.

And maybe the whole reason you came to church today is that you're a 31-year-old preacher from Nashville, Tennessee to say, Maybe it's time to pray with your husband again.

Maybe it's time to make goals with your spouse again.

Maybe it's time to be unified again.

It's time to build that home.

Maybe the goal God's wanting you to build is the boat of your singleness.

You're single and we know.

You know what I mean?

And uh you love to worship Jesus.

But when you worship, it's always with the left hand because you want everyone to see.

Hey.

First time guest, good to see you.

You know what I mean?

A lot of space on this finger.

And maybe you came to church today because God wants you to build the boat of your singleness, meaning he wants you to pursue him more than a relationship status.

Can you imagine what would happen if you said, with all of this extra time, with all of this extra ability, I'm not going to use it all just putting myself out there in the dating field.

I'm going to use it to build the house of the Lord.

I'm going to use it to reach people for Jesus.

I'm going to use it to bring glory to his name.

Could you build a boat?

Maybe the boat God's calling you to build is Union Church Charlotte.

Maybe you've been riding the boat of Union Church Charlotte.

You're like, I like this boat.

This place is nice, man.

I'm telling you, that worship team is incredible.

My kids love the kids' ministry.

The serve team does everything with excellence.

I was talking to somebody yesterday who's a part of your church.

I said, What made you want to be a part of the church?

They said, all of the things that I learned in the workplace that were excellent in the workplace, I came to church and they were even better.

The excellence inspired me.

It made me dream.

It gave me all this creativity for what I could do for the Lord right here in Charlotte.

And I said, I gotta be a part of that.

And maybe you've been feeling that tug.

You're like, when Pastor Brian preaches, it just he's speaking to me every single week.

What if today's the day you go from listening to building at Union Church?

From spectating to participating.

Hey, Pastor Brian, Pastor Karen, where can I serve?

Where can God use me right here?

I'm a go to growth track week four.

Come on, somebody.

I'm gonna start tithing.

I'm gonna start giving.

I'm gonna get an eternal return on my investment.

I'm gonna start serving in kids.

I'm gonna be out there in the parking lot doing the wand thing, you know, doing one of these to the parking spot.

I'm gonna do it because God can use it to do things that only He can get the credit for through our church.

What's the boat?

Will you build the boat?

One of my favorite quotes that relates to this subject.

I was reading it in a random history book.

It said this.

Albert Einstein said it, one of a smart guy, if you never heard of him, he said, it's not that I'm the smartest, I just tend to stick with problems a little longer than the person beside me.

And I read it and I immediately wrote it down because I thought, man, that's exactly the description of what a Christian should be.

We should be the best in the world at sticking with problems longer than the person beside us.

Pastor Noah, why do you say that?

Because we serve a God who stuck with a problem longer than anyone else was willing to stick with us.

The Bible says, while we were sinners, Christ died for us, which means before you knew the lyrics to elevation music, before you showed up knowing what verses to repeat to Pastor Brian, before you served in kids, before you did any of that, God looked at you and loved you so much that he sent his only son Jesus to walk this earth, overcome every temptation that you and I have fallen for, to walk to a cross, stretch out his arms, die the death that you should have died, so that we could live the life that he should have lived.

Then he rose from the dead, proving that he has power over death, hell, and the grave, and he chose to stick with our problems so that we could have eternal life through his finished work.

That's why we can be faithful.

That's why we can pick up the hammer, and the God is so good.

The Bible says that even when we're faithless, he will be faithful to us.

Which means that if you've put the hammer down and you've stopped being faithful, there's grace for you too.

You can give back up.

Want to close with this story.

It's just a boat that means a lot to my family.

Uh, I got a little sister, her name's Carson, and Carson's six years younger than me.

And when she was 14 years old, she went on her first missions trip to Nicaragua.

When she was there, she just had this radical encounter with the Lord.

They were serving in this ministry that feeds over 15,000 children a day, kids who would not eat otherwise.

In one of the sessions when they were done feeding kids and having this little service for them, she felt God speak to her and say, This is the boat that you're gonna build with your life.

You're gonna be a full-time missionary to Nicaragua.

Now, God didn't say boat, I just added that because the sermon is titled Build the Boat.

But she comes home and she tells my parents, Hey, I'm gonna be a full-time missionary to Nicaragua.

My parents are like, That's amazing.

My little sister for the next 12 months taught herself how to speak Spanish on YouTube.

The next year, 15 years old, she led the missions trip with 60 adults.

She did all of the translating.

The next year after that, 16 years old, she led another trip, only this time she did the preaching in Spanish.

I'm telling you, my little sister is a world changer.

Like, we'll be out sometimes, you know, as a family, and my parents are like, This is our daughter, Mother Teresa, and this is our son.

He lives on Broadway in Nashville.

It's a church, you know.

She's amazing.

And so she feels like God's pushing her in this direction.

She starts leading all these trips a couple times a year, and towards the end of her high school years, she hears about this college called Emmanuel College in Georgia.

They're known for this amazing missions program that they have, and they send all these ministry leaders around the world.

And my sister hears about it, and she feels like God's telling her to go.

And so she comes and she tells my parents.

My parents get on the internet, they look up Emmanual College, they find out that Emmanual College costs$40,000 a year.

My parents, they're pastors, and we've always been blessed, but there's been some seasons of life where we would walk by the pond and we were so poor that the ducks would throw bread at us.

Do you know what I mean?

And so my parents, they heard 40 grand and they're like, hey, Carson, we don't have 40 grand once, let alone 40 grand four times.

So if the Lord provides the money, we'll know that this is where you're supposed to go.

But if he doesn't, it doesn't make any sense for you to spend$160,000 to go make negative money as a missionary.

My little sister, she's super stubborn.

She goes, God's got me.

Gets to the end of her senior year, it's April.

Zero dollars come in for scholarship money.

My parents sit her down at the dinner table to say, Carson, you have to come up with a backup plan.

This isn't gonna work.

Can't go.

You don't have the money.

My little sister, she gets real mad.

She goes, My entire life, you've told me that faith doesn't need a backup option.

She pushes her spaghetti to the center of the table.

She says, Can I please be excused from dinner?

My parents are like, Do we ground her?

My parents tell this story.

My little sister goes upstairs to her bedroom and they hear her crying.

She starts weeping in her room.

Just weeping.

My parents are heartbroken.

About 10 minutes later, she stops crying.

She starts singing that song, Waymaker.

Waymaker, Miracle Worker, Light in the Dark.

My God, that is who you are.

She just starts singing it and singing it and singing it.

My parents are downstairs.

They're like, well, we might as well sing it too.

So they start singing it and singing it and singing it.

Well, the next day it was a Saturday.

It was the day that you go visit a manual, you see the dorms, and you meet the professors and you sign up for classes, and my parents were so torn.

Do we take her?

Do we get her hopes up for something that she's not going to be able to do?

They end up taking her, they don't feel great about it.

They go, they spend the whole day, they do all the things.

They see the dorms, they sign up for the classes, they meet the professors, they watch a basketball game or something, and they're walking through the campus of Emmanuel College, and this girl, a student, comes running up to her and says, Hey, is your name Carson?

My little sister says, Yeah, that's me.

She says, I've been looking for you all day.

Please come with me.

Takes my little sister and my dad.

They follow her.

They find themselves all the way in the president of Emmanuel College's office.

They're sitting down and the president starts making small talk with him.

And he says, Um, he says, Carson, the reason we brought you back here is because last night, around dinner time, he said, I was on a date with my wife, and I got a phone call from one of the only people that I would answer a phone call from on a date with my wife.

He said, It's the biggest donor that our school has.

He called me and said that the Holy Spirit interrupted his dinner and told him that he was supposed to donate four years tuition for an incoming freshman who wants to be a missionary to a Spanish-speaking country.

He pulled out a clipboard.

There's 420 names on a list, one was highlighted.

He turned the clipboard around to my sister.

He said, You're the only incoming freshman who specified what you feel called to do.

He looked at my sister and he said, Would you like to come to a manual college for free?

My sister looked at my dad and said, I told you.

Because this is what's true.

When you pick up the hammer to build what God called you to build, it's not you who does the heavy lifting, it's the Lord who does the heavy lifting.

Exodus 14.14 says, You don't have to fight the battle, you just have to be still.

Romans 8 31 says, If God is for me, who can be against me?

If you feel like your past disqualifies you, 2 Corinthians 5.21, he who knew no sin became sin so that you and I could become right with God.

We get to be a part of building the boat, but it is the Lord who builds the boat.

And I'm telling you, if you will be faithful, the things that the Lord can do through your life, only God can get the credit for it.

Only God can get the credit for it.

Will you stand with me?

This is what I'd love to do.

Maybe you're right in the middle of building that boat.

Maybe you've never even started building the boat, but but today you're just saying, I am going to either keep building the boat or I'm gonna start building the boat.

If that's you at every location, will you just stretch your hands?

I just wanna pray for you.

God, I thank you for the boats that are represented in this room, for the boats that are represented at the Mint Hill location.

God, I thank you for the thousands of people who will come to know you because of the faithfulness of these people.

Lord, I pray for courage, not just to start, but to finish.

I pray for your Holy Spirit's power to go with them, to be before them, to stand behind them, to protect them, to provide for them.

God, I thank you that these boats are gonna bring your name glory.

They're gonna bring your city glory and hope.

God, we thank you that you choose to work through problems like us to be a solution in our city.

We love you and we give you the praise for it in advance.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to do one more thing with every eye still closed.

If you came to church today and you just heard that message about building a boat, we can't even get to that if you don't first have a relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord in your sick as Lord and Savior of your life.

And so if you're here today and you would say, Hey, I want a relationship with Jesus, here's the good news.

He desperately wants a relationship with you.

The Bible tells us that when we fall short of God's standard, it's called sin.

And when we sin, there's a consequence for it.

It's simply death.

It's not stress, it's not anxiety, it's not worry, it's death.

That is the problem that your favorite athlete can't help you with, your favorite politician can't help you with it, your favorite influencer can't help you with it.

You need somebody to take your place.

And the good news of the gospel is that God's son Jesus was willing to do it for you.

And all you have to do to receive what he did for you is to simply repent of your sin and put your faith in him, your belief in him.

And so if you do that, all of your sin is immediately erased.

You are redeemed, and you walk out of here today as a son or a daughter of Jesus.

And so, if that's you today, you'd like to make that decision.

Will you just lift up your hand so I know who I'm praying with?

That's amazing.

That's amazing, that's amazing.

Hands going up all over the place.

I'm gonna ask everybody at Union Church Charlotte to pray this prayer with our new friends, with our new brothers and sisters.

Can we all say this, dear Jesus?

Come on, dear Jesus, forgive me of my sins, the ones I remember and the ones that I don't.

Thank you for your grace and your mercy in the cross.

I wanna follow you for the rest of my life.

Be Lord of it all.

In Jesus' name.

Come on, in Jesus' name.

Come on, can we celebrate everybody who just made that decision?