Look Up

So this morning, I want to ask you a question, and I just want you to answer

it in your heart, of what are you expecting?

What are you expecting right now? What are you expecting to happen tomorrow?

What are you expecting to happen this week, this month, this year?

Where is your expectation? And I'm not talking about what you're expecting is

going to happen in this world.

I'm asking you, what are you expecting from God?

In Proverbs chapter 10, verse 24, it says, The fears of the wicked will be fulfilled,

Proverbs 10:24

and the hopes of the godly will be granted.

This year, God gave pastor the phrase 2025 for 2025, the year of hopes fulfilled.

If we're going to have our hopes fulfilled, we better be hoping for something.

Hope is the foundation. It's the blueprint for your faith.

So hope mixed with the word of God creates faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for.

It's that manifestation and the evidence of things.

So I believe that God is speaking to us and saying, it's time for you to pick some things back up.

Things that you've laid aside.

Maybe things that you have just thought, it's taken too long.

Maybe God didn't want me to fulfill that.

But if God spoke it, he wants you to continue to move forward with it.

And so I believe that God is saying, it's time for you to pick things back up.

So I want you to think about the things that are hindering you.

The things that have been holding you back from stepping into God's fullness.

And it's that thing that brings you such frustration because it's like turmoil

in your spirit where your spirit is waging war against your flesh and your emotions.

But God's saying, pick it back up. Expect me and believe my word.

It's that thing that you try to figure out how is it going to happen now.

But God didn't ask us to figure it out. He asked us to believe.

When God spoke to Pastor Devon and said, this is phase one of the Exodus project,

the only thing he wanted Pastor to do was believe.

He didn't have to figure out how all of those finances would come in.

He was just to believe. When God calls you to do something, he's not necessarily

going to tell you how it's going to come to pass.

He wants you to take that first step. Believe.

Release your faith. Expect me to show you step by step of what to do.

In Psalm 65, verse 11, it says, You crown the year with a bountiful harvest. Not us, God.

Psalms 65:11

God crowns the year with a bountiful harvest.

Even in the hard pathways, overflow with abundance.

And see, these hard pathways where you may feel forgotten, you may feel alone,

you may feel discouraged,

you may feel like your hope has been shattered because of things that have just happened in life.

Those hard pathways, God is saying, I'm still with you.

I am still here. My word is not going to fail, and I am going to overflow that

hard pathway with abundance.

That may be an area in your life that is financial.

It may be your health. It may be your peace.

It may be relationships that you need restored.

And in the natural, you're looking at it, and you're like, God,

this feels and looks like a really hard pathway.

But we have to stand and believe, God, you're not going to leave me.

You're not going to forsake me.

You are here with me, and you will overflow this pathway with abundance.

The problem is we hear these words, and we hear it, and we think,

How can I believe it? I have been so discouraged.

Life has came in. The enemy comes in and will speak things to us.

So when we're sitting there and we're like, do we really, really believe it?

And this is when I feel like God is saying, look up.

Look up at me. Not everything around us, but look up at me.

You're in a hard pathway.

You don't have to deny it, but look up. What are we fixing our eyes upon?

And hope, hope is a confident expectation that something good is going to happen.

It's a trust that things can improve and that there is purpose.

God is telling us that he will fulfill what he says even when circumstances look different.

And it's time that we have to get excited about something.

We have to go into a battle almost and set war against the enemy and those negative

mindsets, those strongholds that take root in us,

where we become negative.

Do we really believe that God is going to come through? And who does that sound like?

It sounds like the enemy in the garden. Did God really say that about you? Who do you think you are?

You are a child of God. You carry the Holy Spirit within you.

So when you hear those lies, you know it's a lie.

And you have to get excited. And how do you get excited? You go back to the Word of God.

And you say, what does God say? What does the Word of God say about my situation?

And it's about your situation, not someone else's situation.

What is God speaking to you?

And, you know, when I think about this, I think about Caleb.

I love this story in the Bible. Caleb is 85 years old.

He has waited 45 years for something that God has spoken to him.

God spoke to him 45 years prior and said, because you came back with a good

report, when all these others came back with a negative report,

that mountain's going to be yours.

Well, 45 years passed. He's 85 years old.

What's taking so long? Why am I still waiting?

But we see in Joshua, Caleb is declaring, I'm still just as strong as I was back then.

God said this mountain was mine and I'm ready to go take it.

In Joshua 14, verse 12, it says, So give me the hill country that the Lord promised me.

Joshua 14:12

You will remember that as scouts, we found the descendants of Anak living there

in great walled towns. But if the Lord is with me, I will drive them out of

the land, just as the Lord said.

Here we see that Caleb also knows where his help comes from.

He said, if the Lord is with me, I'm going in and I'm conquering it.

He was not afraid.

He was not timid.

He stood before them and said, one, I've been waiting a long time. God said it was mine.

Now, if God is with me, I'm going in and I'm conquering it and I'm taking it.

And we know that he did. I think about Abraham.

Abraham stood and believed for his promised child.

And it says that during that time, Abraham's faith did not even waver.

In fact, it grew stronger.

How could his faith grow stronger in that period of time? Because he kept his eyes on God.

He kept his eyes on that promise.

This is an example of hope. Of hope, that confident expectation that what God said, he will perform.

Not us. He will perform it. And God gave me an example when I was studying this.

He showed me a sink filled with water and it was full and then he showed me

like the the stopper the drain and as you pull that out that the the water would

just drain and it would be empty,

and in this God was showing me that that that drain or that stopper it represents,

things in this world. It could be fear.

It could be disappointments. It could be distractions.

And.

Until we stop looking at all of those other things,

and we stop it up, that drain, we stop it up with the Word of God,

our hope is going to be drained.

When we're looking at all these things in the world, and in the world,

things are not necessarily going to get better.

They're going to get better for us. The best is yet to come for children of God.

But for the world, we shouldn't be surprised when we see and hear rumors of

wars and things of the end times.

But here he's saying, if we're not looking and focusing on those things,

and we're focusing on God, he's going to fill that sink with living water.

And that living water is Christ.

In John chapter 4, if you look at 13 and 14, it says, Jesus replied,

John 4 · chapter mention

and here he's talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, and he says,

anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again.

But those who drink the water that I give will never be thirsty again.

It becomes a fresh bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.

Jesus is that living water. He's the living water that's going to fill you up,

fill you up with hope, with expectation, with excitement in your life.

Jesus came to give us life in abundance, to the full, till it overflows, that true life.

He did not create you to get up just to get through another day.

And we've all been there. I have been there where I get up and I think,

oh my gosh, another day. But it's such a gift.

You know, and until you encounter, you know, a loved one passing away or something

in your health, sometimes we just forget what we take for granted.

That life is such a gift, and it's a gift that Jesus has given us.

Let's take a look at Colossians. Colossians 3, verse 2, we are to fix our eyes

Colossians 3:2

on Christ. We have to train ourselves. It is training.

We have to train ourselves to keep our minds fixed more upon heaven than the things of this world.

Colossians 3, 2 says, think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth.

That verse is so important, especially I feel like nowadays.

You have to go back to that and remember, I have to stop thinking about things on this earth.

When you've had a bad day and things are coming against you,

we have to set our mind on Christ and set our mind on the things of heaven.

And also, God has set a race before you. We hear in the Bible all the time about

it saying that life is like a race.

Well, it's like a marathon. It's not a sprint.

And a marathon has very different phases of it.

If you're a runner, and there's a lot of runners actually here at True Life,

and I've ran four marathons in my life.

And that is a marathon is 26.2 miles.

Within that period of time, you will experience a lot of different things.

There will be times in that marathon that you are going to feel alive,

and you're going to feel energetic, and you're ready to conquer that race,

to conquer that purpose.

But then there's going to be times during that race that you are going to begin to feel tired.

You're going to feel some pains. You're going to feel fatigued.

You're going to want to give up. You're going to want to scream when you hear

somebody hold that sign.

You're almost there, knowing you have 15 more miles to run.

You get annoyed and frustrated.

And sometimes in that marathon, you will run alone.

You may start with a group, but they may leave you and go faster than you.

You may start with a group, and they may fall behind. And you find yourself alone.

But it's your race to run, and God has equipped you to run that race.

It's the same thing with your life.

It is the same thing with your life. God did not call you to run my race.

He did not call me to run your race.

And looking at those distractions around us, it steals our hope.

It steals our peace. It frustrates us. Let's take a look at Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2.

Hebrews 12:1

It says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses

in the life of faith, let us strip off every weight. We're going to leave that

right there on the screen.

Because when you strip off every weight, when you're running a marathon,

you can't have all of this baggage on you.

It weighs you down.

You are running for a long time. Now, elite racers, they may finish a marathon,

a full marathon in over an hour, hour and a half.

But average runners, give or take, some are faster, some are slow,

but the average of a marathon may be four hours of running.

You can't have all this stuff on you.

Now, you need water, you need electrolytes, you need nutrients,

but that's why on that path, that marathon, there are stations that somebody's

going to help provide something for you.

And it's the same thing in life. We cannot isolate ourselves.

On this race of life, you are going to have to be vulnerable sometimes and trust

people. That is hard for me.

It is funny. I have this conversation with Pastor, and he laughs,

but we've talked about this.

Our personalities, Pastor, he's like, I'm always going to trust from the beginning

until something maybe happens, and I'm the opposite.

I'm going to be cautious from the very beginning until you yearn my trust.

I'm not saying that's right, but it's life, and so we have to be vulnerable

sometimes. and we have to rely on each other in this race of life.

So right there it said, let us strip off every weight that slows us down,

especially the sin that so easily trips us up, and let us run with endurance

the race God has set before us.

How do we run this race?

We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects

our faith, Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross,

disregarding its shame,

and now he is seated in the place of honor beside God's throne.

We can run this race keeping our eyes on Christ, knowing that he's going to

be there for us, because he came

to earth as a human form and went through everything that we went through.

But he went to the cross in his deity form.

And he laid down his life as our Savior, as our Messiah, and now he is seated

beside the Father. And he intercedes for us.

He's taking care of us. He's not going to leave us. He's not going to forsake us.

And I think the biggest distraction I want to talk about today is the distraction

of comparison and looking at someone else and thinking, they're better than me.

They can do this. You know, a lot of times I think the enemy uses comparison

because when God has spoke to you, the enemy comes immediately to steal the word.

And immediately that enemy will say, do you really think that you can do what God called you to do?

Somebody else is more qualified than you. What makes you so special? And those are lies.

And if you're not careful to keep your eyes upon Christ, you will start looking

at other things, especially social media.

Social media is just a complete open portal to look and say,

I can compare my parenting. I can compare my marriage.

I can compare what I do with my free times. Look at this person.

They travel all the time. How do they have all the finances to do that?

It's so easy and it's so fake.

It's not reality. It's not reality.

And so you have to be careful with that. In Galatians chapter 6, verse 4,

Galatians 6:4

God gave me this when I opened a business because he knew, especially in the

business world, you're going to have comparisons.

That's just how it is, it's business. But we have to listen to what God is saying to us.

And it says, pay careful attention to your own work.

For then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done.

And you won't need to compare yourself to anyone else.

There are times that I believe that God in a loving, respectful way is telling

us, mind your own business.

Mind your business. Stay focused on what I've told you.

You're getting distracted because you're looking at another one of my children

who I'm blessing. I've given them a word.

They're not competition for you. I've told you to do this. I've told them to do this.

Mind your business. And as a parent, I understand this so much more.

Once I had kids, and then I had a second child, and now siblings are against each other.

And I have to sometimes tell them, you're not the boss.

Mind your business. I was disciplined in this one.

You don't need to discipline. And it's just the same way with God and us.

Mind your business in a loving, respectful way because God didn't create us

to compare with one another.

He created you a masterpiece in his master plan.

He didn't call you and give you the grace to do someone else's job,

someone else's calling.

So we have to really be careful about that. And distractions are meant to shift

your eyes off of the focus.

Now remember, God gave us the word to look up.

Keep your eyes looking up at him, not letting your eyes shift to other things.

And Peter in the Bible displayed confident expectation. I think he sometimes

gets a bad reputation because he was walking on water and began to sink. But we think about it.

He had confident expectation that he was getting out of that boat and he was going to walk.

Let's take a look in Matthew chapter 14.

Matthew 14 · chapter mention

You know, Peter is in the boat and he sees Jesus who is walking on water with

the intention to go past the boat. But, you know, they see him. They're terrified.

They're like, is this a ghost? And Jesus is like, you know, have peace. It's me.

And Peter says, Lord, if it really be you, tell me to get out and walk on water. Jesus said, come.

Come to me. And so Peter gets out of that boat to go.

It says in verse 29, yes, come, Jesus said. So Peter went over the side of the

boat, and he walked on the water towards Jesus. That is a miracle.

But when he saw the strong winds and the waves, they were there.

We are not denying that the waves and the wind was not there.

But when he saw them, when his eyes got off of Jesus and onto the things around

him, he was terrified and he began to sink.

Save me, Lord, he shouted. Jesus immediately reached out and grabbed him.

I wonder how close Peter was to Jesus.

How close are we to our breakthrough? When we say, enough, save me,

and we're right there that Jesus immediately, it says immediately he reached out and grabbed him.

Well, how close was he to Jesus? How far had he walked on water?

I think about these things.

Jesus grabbed him. You have so little faith, Jesus said. Why did you doubt me?

I have a personal story I want to share with you guys, and it is a vulnerable story.

But again, I'm going to share it because when I share this story,

you know, I'm not the type of person that thinks I can't share things because

they're going to look at me and think, how could God call her?

How could pastor trust her to get up there and tell these stories, things like that?

But it's so that you see God can take someone and add his anointing,

and he can use you to help somebody else.

And, you know, when Pastor, for the New Year service, he always asked people

how 2024, the previous year, how was that?

And, you know, I would change my response now. I haven't told Pastor this,

but I was one that said 2024 was a challenging year.

I was. No, I'm not saying breakthroughs didn't happen.

Harvest came in our life. It's like almost like I had this side of my life that

was thriving and was great.

But then I had this other side of the life that I was like, this is hard.

This is a hard pathway. And I would change that now because as I was studying

this, it wasn't challenging.

It was distracting. 2024 was very distracting.

So we started the year, and thank God, God told us, pray more in 2024,

because I put my prayers out there.

We prayed a lot because we started the year,

and many people don't know about this because I chose not to share this with

some people because I had to really guard who I was going to allow to speak into this situation.

So Pastor knew we prayed.

In the beginning of 2024, in February, we were having some health issues with one of our children.

Started out with some small things, but I was just like, something's not right.

We were having recurrent fevers. It was just random things happening.

And so we ended up going for a checkup, and in the checkup, different things came up.

And with a course of days, different things, we found ourselves sitting in a

doctor's visit, getting blood work done with the possibility of leukemia.

And so I was shocked, distracted, blindsided, but I knew it was not from God.

I knew what God had said.

And that my child will live and not die.

This child will grow and fulfill the days of their life.

And so we stood and I reached out to pastor and we were praying and different

things happened throughout the year.

And praise God, a clean bill of health. Praise God.

We fought. We fought. We stood on the word of God.

We stood on that word of God, we took communion, we confessed,

we prayed the word of God over this child.

And so we're celebrating, and we're worshiping God, and we're, thank you, Lord.

And then there were some different things with the business and the company,

and you know how things kind of go with that, that we had to deal with.

We trusted God, we got through that, we're good, we're thriving. And then June came.

And most of you know, some don't, in June, And very unexpected,

very suddenly, my mother went home to be with the Lord.

And I still have people, what can I ask? What happened? Because none of us expected it. It was sudden.

And there was really a hard, that

hard pathway in that because there were things that I didn't want to do.

You know, my mom set me as her medical power of attorney.

Because she knew I would honor her request when that time came.

When that time came, I did not want to honor her request.

I wanted to do what I wanted to do.

But we honored her request, and that was a hard pathway.

But he came in with his grace. He came in with his peace. He came in with his comfort, and he held us.

And even when it didn't feel good, he was good, and he got us through it.

Well, after she had passed away, we had already been scheduled that we had to go out of town.

I did not want to go out of town, but we were scheduled to go out of town.

And we went out of town knowing that when I got back, there were still a lot

of different things that had to be taken care of.

And when I came back, by that time, I was fatigued. I was tired.

I was like, Lord, I don't want one more thing. to have to deal with.

And I'm sharing this story because it reminds me of Peter.

When he was walking and he was so close to Christ and he said, save me, help me.

I was at the clinic one night. We were straightening up some things,

having to be, as a business owner, it kind of never ends and we had to take care of some stuff.

And so I don't remember if we drove separate, Josh and I, or if he had already

went to the car, but I was cutting off the lights and, you know,

a wave of emotions came over me.

I don't know if you've ever been there, but just like Peter,

the waves began to come upon me.

And I wasn't doubting God. I wasn't mad at God. I just was like, God.

And I just collapsed on the floor and I was crying. and

I said I believe you I trust

you just don't let me go and I remember that simple prayer of crying out to

him don't let me go because there was just so much around and my eyes I knew

needed to be on him but my eyes were like oh my goodness on everything else

and all I could say was don't let me go.

And in that moment, I had breakthrough.

Breakthrough from grief, breakthrough from guilt.

I had guilt for what happened because I made the final decision.

I felt like I was suffering through that, but breakthrough came because God

spoke and he said, I will never let you go.

Even in that moment where I felt like the waves and the wind was coming and

I was drowning and I'm just like, don't let me go,

God immediately reached out just like Jesus did to Peter and he said,

I will never let you go. And that's what he tells us.

Whatever you're going through, he's not going to leave us. He's not going to

forsake us. He will never let you go.

And so when God has spoken to you, whatever he is telling you to do,

whether it's this year or this month or even tomorrow.

I need you to hold on to that word because one word from God will change your life if you let it.

You have to keep your excitement up. You have to keep believing him and look

up and keep your eyes upon him.