The Believer

We are starting a brand new series today, and uh it's called People God Uses.

But I want to ask a question real quick, kind of get you thinking about where we're gonna go for the next few months.

Does anyone here have a pretty interesting family tree?

Like you you know your ancestry enough to know that there's some characters in your family tree.

I I've got a very, very interesting family tree.

Um, my family is from very rural southern Missouri.

Uh and so if you know that area, it's called the Ozarks, okay?

And uh that's where my family's from.

My dad is from Sparta, Missouri.

My mom is from Seymour, Missouri.

Has anyone ever heard of Sparta or Seymour, Missouri?

Like three people, okay?

That's awesome.

I I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, which to us was the city.

That was like the big city of Springfield, Missouri.

And my family tree, there's there's just some really interesting people.

Like I've got I've got a grandfather who was a preacher, um, but the kind of preacher that when his kids were out of the house they never wanted to go to church again, you know?

I've got a great-grandfather who served in World War I and then opened up a really rough bar in southern Missouri, right around the Prohibition era, in terms of the time.

And he actually passed away because he was shot trying to break up a fight in that bar.

Um, I've got I've got cousins.

I've got a cousin who worked as a prison guard.

I've got a cousin who served time in prison.

Ironically, same cousin.

Um not sure if it was the same prison.

That would be even more ironic and probably dangerous, but same cousin, you know?

I've I've just got this myriad of people in my family.

The most interesting person, though, by far, in my family tree, is my great uncle by marriage.

This is a this is a picture of my grandmother and her sister.

My grandma is the woman on the right.

Um, she passed away when I was 21 years old.

We were really close, really close.

My whole childhood is very much defined by this woman.

I miss her greatly.

Uh, on the left, that's her sister.

And during World War II, her sister served as a secretary in the war, and she was stationed in Prague.

And uh while there, she met uh a man that she would marry.

His name was Marcel Albert.

He was from France, and uh they got married.

They they were married for a very long time, very much in love.

They both died within a year of one another.

This is actually a picture of their gravestone.

There's Frida, my great aunt, and then Marcel is over there on the left.

And so you notice in the middle there's this emblem, okay?

And this is what that that emblem is, a little bit closer up.

Um it's it's an emblem of a fighter pilot unit uh that Marcel served in.

Marcel ended up being a war hero.

And when I say war hero, I'm not just using that term loosely.

For example, this is a statue of my my great uncle by marriage.

Um he's literally one of the most decorated fighter pilots in World War II history.

And so here's a picture of him from that era wearing a bunch of medals.

It's a lot of medals, Marcel there.

The the most interesting, like there's so many medals that he's wearing, and I've looked up some of these.

Um, and uh like the French version of the Medal of Honor, like he's got that one and a bunch of others.

But the one at the very top, you see the one that's just a star?

That's by far the most interesting.

Um, here's what that medal actually is.

And uh it is it is a title given to very few, and the title is called Hero of the Soviet Union.

Because in World War II, we were allies with the Soviets, and Marcel fought alongside Soviet forces fighting Germany on the Soviet front.

And he was a huge part of many battles and was a very decisive part of many battles.

And so when the war was done, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

And that is a title that very, very few people have ever been given.

In fact, there's a movie that some of you may have seen, others you're like, what's actually a pretty good, pretty good movie.

Uh, it's called Enemy at the Gates.

It's about a sniper in World War II.

Anyone see the movie Enemy at the Gates?

Okay, the the sniper in that movie, same award.

He's awarded the same award, hero of the Soviet Union.

But the crazy part is that my great uncle Marcel, the person who handed him this award, the person that like that put the medal on him, is a guy named Joseph Stalin.

Because Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union during World War II.

And so I've got an uncle who was given an incredible, prestigious award by one of the worst dictators in the history of the world in recognition for his help in defeating another one of the worst dictators in the history of the world.

And so my great uncle spent some time with Stalin, you know.

Interesting family tree, like I said.

I'm sure that a lot of us have very, very interesting ancestry.

But I don't know if I've ever heard of anyone who has a family tree quite as interesting as Jesus.

His family tree, it's it's pretty it's pretty nuts.

If you're ever opening up your Bible and you get to like Matthew chapter one, and I want you to know I'm not gonna read through this, I'm gonna skim through it.

So, guys in the back, you're gonna have to struggle to keep up.

I apologize.

I'm just gonna look at some names.

This is the the record of the ancestors of Jesus.

You've got Abraham, a guy named Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Tamar, Perez, Aminadab.

You've got a guy named Samon, verse 5, who's the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

You've got Ruth, Jesse, David, Solomon, Bathsheba, Rehoboam, Asa, Jehosaphat, Uzziah, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh.

Manasseh's the literally the worst.

He's really like a horrible human being.

Um Jehoikin, Zerubbabel.

I love Zerubbabel.

I love saying Zerubbabel, and I love the dude.

He's got a great name and a great story.

You've got Zadok and Elohid, you've got Eleazar, you've got Jacob, Joseph, the husband of Mary, and you have Jesus.

Now, look, I'm just gonna say this.

If you've never really read the stories in the Old Testament of the Bible, the first half, if you're not familiar with those stories, this is literally one of the most boring things to read in the world.

You'll open up Matthew chapter one and be like, the Bible is the worst.

It is the worst book ever written.

Who would begin?

Who would begin like their book this way?

But Matthew, you have to understand, Matthew, who wrote his account of Jesus' life, he was writing to the Jewish people.

And if you are a Jewish person in the first century and you start listing off some of these names, for you, this is not boring at all.

For you, this is like hyperlinking to some of the most incredible and interesting people who have ever lived.

These are people who have phenomenal stories, both good and bad.

Jesus has this unbelievable ancestry.

I mean, in Jesus' family, family history, you have you have kings.

You got a lot of kings, actually.

You have some really, really good kings, celebrated kings, and then you have like dictators, you have horrific, horrible people.

In Jesus' family ancestry, you have warriors, you have poets, you've got at least one prophet, but you got two prostitutes.

See, Jesus' family history, it's full of scandal.

It's not, it's not a history full of amazing, perfect examples, people that you should just follow and do exactly what they did.

And that's something we have to understand about scripture.

As a church, we teach from scripture.

I love scripture, but I have to understand this, and this is something we say from time to time, it should give us hope.

The Bible is not the story of amazing men and women that were useful to God.

The Bible is the story of broken, pretty messed up men and women who are still useful to God because our God is greater than our shortcomings.

And when we read scripture and we read the lives of the people that God uses, we realize, man, God can use just about anybody.

And so if you're here this morning and you have a pretty low view of yourself, I got great news for you.

God can use even you, believe it or not.

Because I guarantee you that some of the worst stories in the room, some of our low points, like y'all, some of your low points, they wouldn't even crack the top 10 of some of the people on this list.

And yet these are all people that God used in powerful ways.

Some of these people God used in their lifetime to make major impacts on the people around them and on their world.

Some of these people, not so much, but at the same time, God still used them to bring his son into this world, which has changed everything.

And so this is a list of the people that God uses, and it reminds us that God can use any of us and all of us.

The question is: do we want to be people that God uses?

And I know that not all of us in the room are Jesus followers.

I am, I'm a Jesus follower, and I want God to use me.

I just I want to be useful to Him.

Now please understand when I say this, I'm not saying that there are useless people.

You you might think there are.

And there are people who choose to be rather useless for sure, but God can use anyone.

But what I want us to understand is that God loves everybody.

Like God loves you.

He loves you.

I don't care where you've been, what you've done, what you've gone through, your greatest mistakes.

Like God isn't surprised at your mistakes.

You might be surprised at your mistakes.

You might think, man, I never thought I could have ever messed that up, and God's like, I kind of saw it coming.

You know?

Like, He's not nearly as shocked by your failures as you might be.

But here's the thing: we're all loved by God.

He has given us His love.

But it's one thing to be a recipient of something, it's another thing to receive and then put that to use.

I have received God's love as you have, but but I want to live using the love and the favor and everything that He's given to me.

I want to use it for Him.

I want to use it for whatever purpose He has for it.

I want to be useful to God as much as I possibly can be.

And this is a list of people who are so useful to the things that God wanted to do in this world.

And God is good, and the things that He wants to do in this world are good, and He wants to use you to do it.

And so for the next few months, we're gonna study some of the people on this list.

Not everybody, that would take a really long time, but we're gonna study some of the people on this list and understand what it was about them that made them so useful to the work that God wanted to do in this world, because we can learn a lot from them.

We're gonna start with a guy named Abraham because he's first.

So we're gonna start at the start.

Makes a lot of sense.

Abraham's a really interesting person.

It would take a long time for us to go through his story in detail.

In fact, we could do a whole series on him that could last months and months and months.

Here's the gist of it, though.

Abraham, when he first steps into the story in scripture in Genesis, he's you know, he's he's middle-aged by our understanding of that.

He's he's an adult and he's pretty successful.

He's got a wife, her name's Sarai.

At the time, his name's Abram, but his name gets changed to Abraham later, which means father of nations, which is ironic because he doesn't have any kids.

And his wife, Sarai, she gets her name changed to Sarah.

They're successful, they're wealthy, they have a lot of possessions, a lot of servants, a lot of livestock.

And in those days, that's how you knew how someone was doing real nice.

They had like lots of goats.

You're like, man, they've got a lot of goats.

You know?

Wish that was me.

That was their version of like BMWs and stuff.

It was like goats.

Okay, so Abraham just flush, flush with goats.

And uh and one day God speaks to Abraham.

And he tells him, I want you to leave.

I want you to leave your home, I want you to leave your land, I want you to take your wife, I want you to take everybody, all your servants, all your possessions, I want you to go, and I'm just not gonna tell you where you're going.

I just want you to go.

Just start going and trust that I'm gonna tell you where to be.

Because here's what I'm gonna do for you, Abraham.

I'm gonna give you the one thing that you don't have, which is a son.

In fact, I'm gonna give you a son, and your your ancestors are gonna become a mighty people, more numerous than than you can imagine.

And because they're gonna be so numerous, I'm gonna give them a land, a promised land, because they're gonna need it.

But first, I need you to just go.

And I'm gonna take you to that land, and I'm gonna give you that son.

And Abraham had the faith to go.

And so, if we wanted to give Abraham a nickname, there are there's there's a lot we could give him.

Every week we're gonna give one of these people a nickname, something we can kind of connect to them.

You could go with Pioneer, you could go with Explorer, you could go with Nomad, but but honestly, the the thing that really sets Abraham apart is just that he's a believer.

Abraham is the believer, he has tremendous faith.

Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1 says that faith shows the reality of what we hope for.

Hebrews 11:1

It's the evidence of things we cannot see.

Through their faith, the people in the days of old earned a good reputation.

By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God's command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.

Verse 8 says, It was by faith that Abraham obeyed God when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance.

He went without knowing where he was going.

And even when he reached the land, God promised him he lived there by faith, for he was like a foreigner living in tents.

And so did Isaac and Jacob, who inherited the same promise.

Isaac being his son and Jacob being his grandson.

Abraham is he's a believer.

He's a person with great faith, and and faith, faith is incredibly useful.

It's incredibly useful for us, gets us through some things, it's incredibly useful to God.

When God sees someone with faith, he like perks up.

In fact, there's only two times in the story of Jesus that we see Jesus amazed.

Two times where Jesus, it says, is blown away.

And that's a pretty amazing thought to like impress Jesus.

Like, wow.

Once he's amazed at the amount of faith that this man has that really he shouldn't have, because he's not someone that should have been on the inside circle of faith in Jesus' day.

He was a Roman centurion.

Jesus says, I was amazed at your faith.

I haven't seen faith like this in all of Israel.

The other time, Jesus is amazed at how little faith some of his people had.

Faith has this interesting way of moving God.

He notices it, it impresses him.

He recognizes it.

When you're a believer, when you're someone who has faith and you live by faith, Scripture actually tells us that we live by faith and not by sight.

That when you live by faith, it just puts you in a position to experience some things.

But faith's kind of interesting.

Because you you don't always need it when you think you do.

I mean, I think I think you always need faith, right?

No matter how good or how bad life is going.

But but it's interesting because when our when our lives are going really, really well.

Like some of you might be here today and you're on the mountaintop, everything is just clicking, everything is going the way you want it to go.

You're like, man, I don't even know why I'm in church.

I should be on the stage, I should be telling other people what to do, because look at my life.

Like, you know, if if that's where you're at, you you do need faith.

But you may not feel like you do.

Like in those moments when everything's just cloud nine, it's all going great, it feels like your plans keep working, you maybe start to feel like I'm pretty good at life, you know?

Those are often times that we don't feel like we need a lot of faith.

And then you have those other times, those other moments where you're in like rock bottom.

And when you're at rock bottom, you absolutely need faith.

But it's interesting because you can you can kind of get through rock bottom without it.

Right?

Like when you're at rock bottom, you've got adrenaline.

That fight or flight thing kicks in, and if you have any fight in you, sometimes you can just power your way through rock bottom.

You may not be able to go far, you may just get just above rock bottom.

But when you're in a crisis, sometimes instinct just kicks in and you just sort of find a way through it, even without faith.

But where faith is absolutely 100% necessary, is in between those two.

It's in the meantime.

I mean, again, you need faith when you're on the top, you need faith when you're on the bottom, but but a lot of times we forget about the fact that where we often need the most faith is when we're stuck in the meantime.

When we're in between the hopes that we have and the realization and satisfaction of those hopes.

That's the that's the meantime.

That's where we just have to wait and do life one day at a time, expecting and hoping that things are gonna break, that things are gonna get better, that things are gonna work out, but but oftentimes in those seasons that can be very, very long, we find ourselves sort of stuck.

We're just kind of stuck in between, we're stuck in the meantime.

But the reality is that's where most of life is lived.

Right?

Most of life is not at rock bottom, most of life is not on the mountaintop, most of life it's in the meantime.

It's just sort of being in between.

That's the truth of Jesus' life, by the way.

I mean, almost every story we tell of Jesus' life, almost every single quote of Jesus that we have, it all came from a three-year period in his life.

From age 30 to 33, he traveled around, he did miracles, he taught, and almost everything that we have of Jesus' life, it's in three years, but but the first 30 years of his life, you know what he did?

Meantime, we have a verse, one single verse, Luke chapter 2, verse 52.

Luke 2:52

And what it tells us is that Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people.

That's what he was doing for 30 years.

Just growing, learning.

And by learning, he was learning about God, he was also learning how to be a carpenter, he was taking care of his family, he was taking care of his siblings.

We're pretty certain that Jesus probably had to be the breadwinner for his family at some point in time, because when you get to Jesus at 30, his father Joseph is never mentioned, he's never there.

But when you see Jesus' birth, and Jesus even at 12 years old, Joseph's there, and he's a good dad.

But then he's just gone, and the reality is, and in the time period that Jesus walked the earth, the life expectancy was 40 years, and he was probably a good bit older than Jesus' mother Mary, and so it's very likely that between 12 and 30, Joseph died, and Jesus would have had to take over providing for his mother and his brothers, and so he just he worked a job day in and day out.

I love the idea that the author of all creation had other people tell him to build things and how to build things and and to spec, you know, and I imagine there were moments where Jesus is like, I I can think of a better way.

Um, but he didn't, you know, he just he just did what we all do for 30 years.

30 years.

It's interesting.

30 years is is about how long it took for Sarah and Abraham to have their son after God told them that they were going to.

They left everything.

And Abraham said, Look, I I heard from God.

And and he said, We're gonna have a child.

We just we just have to pack up and go.

That's all we gotta do.

And there was some other stuff for Abraham's circumcision, that's a whole different conversation.

He had to do that.

But uh, but other than that, you know, just we gotta go.

And so they left, and then, you know, ten years later, no child.

Ten years after that, still no child.

And can you imagine some of the conversations between Abraham and Sarah?

Like, ladies, come on.

Like, at what point would you say to your husband, I'm starting to question whether or not you really heard from God?

You know, I know you think you did, and that's great, honey.

I'm so proud of your faith, but like, can we go back home?

It's been 25 years.

It took almost 30 years for them to experience the fulfillment of that promise.

Just one of the pieces of that promise.

And so for 30 years, Abraham lived in the meantime.

And the meantime is hard.

It's hard.

Because you know, like when you're uh when you're on cloud nine, everybody's excited for you.

Everybody celebrates you.

Everybody wants to be your friend when you're a winner, right?

When you're on cloud nine, people want to meet with you.

It's amazing how many more people want to meet with me today than when I was a youth pastor.

No one, no one ever wanted to have lunch with me when I was a youth pastor.

Not one time.

And then I became a pastor, and people are like, can we can I'd love to just meet with you and talk?

And I'm like, cool, let's do it.

Rock bottom, when you're in really hard moments, there's people who will feel bad for you.

And they love you, and so when you're in those moments, you're just sort of like, you can you can actually get a lot of people around you helping you out, and that's a good thing when that happens.

We need that.

But when you're in the meantime, no one cares.

Right?

Because everybody's in the meantime.

No one cares that you're you're stuck in your job and you don't seem like you're moving forward.

No one cares that your marriage is not amazing and awesome.

And in fact, a lot of people probably would rather it be like that because that's how theirs is, and misery loves company.

Nobody cares that you don't really know what to do when it comes to raising your children and that they drive you crazy.

Because that's normal.

That's just the meantime.

No one really cares that you're just sort of stuck and you're doing one day at a time because that's what everybody is doing.

So when you're in the meantime, it's like there's not excitement, there's not celebration, there's also not a lot of sympathy and help because that's where everybody is most of the time.

And it's kind of a dangerous place to be.

I came across this quote as I was preparing for today, and it really, man, it hit me hard.

I emailed it out to a bunch of people.

It says, to wait is even harder than to be adventurous.

The hardest time of all is the time in between.

At the moment of decision, there's the excitement and the thrill.

At the moment of achievement, there's the glow and the glory of satisfaction.

But in the intervening time, in the meantime, we might say, it is necessary to have the ability to wait and work and watch when nothing.

It's then that we're most liable to give up our hopes and lower our ideals and sink into an apathy whose dreams are dead.

See, when you're in the meantime long enough, you just get tired of it.

So you have a tendency in those moments to lower your standards.

If you're a believer not a believer in yourself, not a believer in the universe, and not just a believer that good things are gonna happen, that's fine.

But if you're a believer and the one who makes everything happen, you can only make it through the meantime, you can master it.

Abraham, he was almost undone by the meantime.

If you know his story, he he has some interesting moments along the way.

Like he has tremendous faith.

Tremendous faith.

In scripture, by the way, says it is impossible to please God without faith.

Abraham has tremendous faith, but then in the meantime, in the waiting, it wavers like a couple different times.

This happened twice.

You'd think he would have learned the first time, but you know, men.

Um the first time uh they entered a really big city.

Abraham got really nervous.

You have to remember when we read the stories of people like Abraham and the this is 3,000 years ago.

It's a whole different world, whole different time.

That's why it's so important for us in the world we live in today not to read stuff in the Old Testament and like judge them for their morals, because like if you traveled back 3,000 years and you tried to say, hey, let's just sit down and talk this out, someone would just cut your head off.

Like that's what they did.

That was, you know, we talk about like the barbarians, you know.

If you ever hear people talk about barbarians, you know, that was 2,000 years ago.

And so Abraham would have looked barbaric to the barbarians.

Just understand that.

You know, these people, it was a different world.

And so they go into this big city, and Abraham's like, oh man, my wife Sarah is really pretty.

And that means someone's gonna kill me and take her.

Because that was like something that happened pretty often.

And so he's like, Hey, Sarah, when we go into this city, he's got a moment where his faith is wavering, he's not trusting God.

He's like, I want you to tell everybody you're my sister.

And they were half brother and sister 3,000 years ago.

Again, don't judge.

Okay.

So it wasn't a total lie, but he says, I want you, I want you to tell everybody that you're my sister.

And uh and she says, okay, but it kind of backfires because when people find out that Sarah, who apparently is very beautiful, is Abraham's sister, they go to Abraham and like, hey, we would like to pay you a dowry and have your sister as our wife.

And now he's stuck.

Because what's he gonna say?

Like, no, I don't want you to marry my sister because I don't want to marry my sister.

Um, but he's already married to his sister, but it's only his half-sister.

It's a really messed up scenario.

Okay.

But so she ends up actually marrying someone else the whole time being married to Abraham, and it becomes this huge mess, and it happened twice.

So his faith in the meantime, it wavered a little bit, he got himself in some trouble.

Probably the worst situation is Sarah got very, very antsy in the meantime.

She didn't really believe that this was gonna happen, and she wanted a child so badly, and so she had this idea, and her idea was that if Abraham got her servant pregnant, um, then that would be like a surrogate mother, and they would have a child through the surrogate, it would be theirs, and that would be the fulfillment of the promise, and let's do it that way.

And so she came to Abraham and said, Hey, I have this idea, and ladies, you're gonna be shocked when I tell you this.

He went along with it.

Like, it didn't even seem like he resisted at all when you read the story.

He doesn't go, you know, I just don't think that's a good idea.

He's like, Well, I mean, if that's what you think we need to do, and he does that again, he's a man and 3,000 years ago, men have actually come a long way.

So, ladies, please be grateful that you live today.

We are not perfect, but we're better than we used to be.

Okay, and so they do that.

Can you imagine?

Like, they they do that, and that that seems to be going really, really well.

There's a son named Ishmael until Sarah does get pregnant.

Now all of a sudden things change and it's a huge mess.

There's so many moments where where Abraham almost sabotages everything, and it's because he's just so tired of the meantime.

It's hard to wait.

It's really hard to wait.

But but Abraham at the moment at the end he endures his faith endures because he is a believer.

And so it tells us in Genesis 15, 6, that Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.

I want to go back to that quote that I read a moment ago, but I want to finish it out.

To wait is even harder than to be adventurous.

The hardest time of all is the time in between.

At the moment of decision, there's the excitement and the thrill.

At the moment of achievement, there's the glow of and glory of satisfaction, but in the intervening time, it is necessary to have the ability to wait and work and watch when nothing seems to be happening.

It is then that we are most liable to give up our hopes, to lower our ideals, and sink into an apathy whose dreams are dead.

Abram almost did that.

It says, Men and women of faith are people whose hope is flaming brightly and whose effort is intensely strenuous, even in the gray days when there is nothing to do but wait.

As we wrap up this morning, I just want you to recognize that I know in the room, most of us, probably all of us to some degree, we're in the meantime.

And I don't know what that is for you.

But you're somewhere in between.

You're not necessarily where you want to be.

And maybe you're also not where you used to be.

You're just, you're sort of stuck in the middle.

It might be like that with your career.

I've got a lot of friends, know a lot of people who just they're either in between jobs or they're in between where they used to be and where they are now, and that direction hasn't been great.

On the flip side, I've got friends who who have had career changes and things are going in the right direction, and they're excited and they're like, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, it's about to happen, it's happening, it's happening, but but it's taking a lot longer than they thought.

So when I meet with people, a lot of times we'll talk about work and I'll be like, hey, how's that one thing that you said was about to happen?

It's like, well, it's it's still about to happen, I think.

But the the confidence seems a little less than the last time we talked, you know, because they're in the meantime.

I want you to understand, as a church, we've we've we've been in the meantime, as a church.

There have been so many times over the years, I've been here for 13 years.

There have been so many times where I was like, this is it, this is when it's gonna happen.

It's all about to come together, and then it's like, oh, something, something comes, a curveball is thrown, and it's like, hold that, wait, or we just recognize that maybe we're not ready and I don't know what I'm doing, and we're just gonna have to wait a little longer.

It's the meantime.

Sometimes you find yourself in the meantime in relationships, that can be really difficult.

You know, I would I would prefer fighting with my wife, which we're pretty good at, I want you to know.

Uh, I would prefer fighting with her than just being stuck.

Because apathy is the worst.

You know, and sometimes in in your marriage, you're just kind of stuck in the meantime.

It's like it's not going poorly.

It's also just not like fireworks are happening, and you're sort of just trying to figure out a way through, and you're you're kind of going one day at a time and you're you're struggling a little bit.

You're in the meantime.

Maybe you're in between marriages, maybe you haven't been married, but you want to be, and you're just waiting.

You know, we have a lot of young people here in our church, and so if you're young and you still live at home, like that's the meantime, right?

You want to be out on your own, you want to be living life on your own terms, but right now you depend on your parents financially, and you probably depend on their wisdom more than you realize.

And you're in the meantime, and you just have to sort of wait.

And waiting is really hard.

But I want you to understand something.

Jesus, he gets it.

He waited, he spent 30 years of his life in the meantime, he knows exactly how you feel.

And if you will be a person of faith, if you will be like Abraham and you will be a believer and you will put your faith, not like I said, just in some random thing, not in some random hope, but if you will put your faith in the God who cares enough to come for you, in the God who wants you to know his name and have a relationship with you, if you'll put your faith in him, you will make it through the mean time.

Absolutely 100% with confidence, you will make it through whatever your mean time is.

Because our God, just like Abraham, our God has made us promises.

Jesus has made you promises.

That's what that's what Abraham could cling to.

He could cling to the promises that God had made him.

Jesus says in in John chapter 6, verse 37, that those the Father has given me will come to me, and I will never reject them.

John 6:37

Every one of us in this room understands the feeling of rejection, but I can tell you this: Jesus will never reject you.

Never.

He will never leave you.

He says, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

That's a promise that He's made.

He has promised you the Holy Spirit that he will actually give you his spirit to guide you and to empower you and to give you the ability to navigate life in a way you can never do on your own.

He's made a promise to you for that.

He's promised you joy.

He's promised you like legit joy, regardless of your circumstances, that you can live life with joyful anticipation of what's to come because of the things that God has promised you.

He's promised you this Bible word that a lot of times we don't use apart from the Bible, He's promised you glory.

That one day you will actually share in the glory that belongs to God.

Glory is like awe and wonder and splendor and majesty all kind of wrapped up together.

And you're gonna share in the glory of God.

That's a promise that He's made you.

That's why Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, he said that all the trouble that he was going through, that he considered it all worthless compared to the glory that he knew he was gonna experience.

Because that's a promise that God has made you.

So you might be stuck in the meantime, right?

But you've got glory waiting for you because that's a promise that God has given you and he never breaks his promises.

Jesus also promised problems.

He promised trials.

He never said, like, he never said, Follow me and you'll be rich.

He never said, follow me.

He never said you wouldn't be, by the way.

It's okay if you're successful.

But he never said, Follow me, and I promise you that everything's gonna work out the way that you want it to work out.

That's not that's not a promise that he made.

He actually said, I promise that if you follow me, you will have troubles.

You will have trials.

But he also promised victory.

John chapter 16, 33.

John 16 · chapter mention

He says, I've told you all this so that you may have peace in me.

Here on earth, you will have many trials and sorrows, but take heart, because I have overcome the world.

He has promised you victory.

And so, as we as we close this morning, we got a few people that are about to get baptized, which is awesome.

Um I want to, I just want to encourage you, I want to challenge you, I want to just sort of beg you, fine, I'll beg you to be a believer.

Because God, God can do something with your belief.

Faith is far more impressive to God than talent, than intelligence, than than ability, than than success.

You know, you might you might like if you're a person that feels like I'm really connected, like I know people, so does God.

But faith, faith, it just it catches his attention, he honors it.

So be a believer.

Be a believer, and and if you've never given your life to Jesus, start there.

Be a believer in him.

Because he will not let you down, he will not lie to you, he will not sell to you, he doesn't bait and switch.

You know, Jesus is so unique in that he leads with the fine print.

You know, every time you you turn on the TV and you see a commercial for someone who has moderate to severe something or other, that's always the language.

If you struggle with moderate to severe, whatever, take this.

And then the person, you know what I'm talking about?

And then, like, after that, it's like side effects include, and then like an hour later, when you find out that apparently I'm just gonna die if I take this.

You know?

I don't know what the like Jesus he does the opposite.

He leads with the fine print.

Like, no one does that.

Jesus says, hey, trials and problems and struggles, the world will hate you.

Jesus actually said that.

That's a promise.

The world will hate you sometimes.

Why?

Because the world hates him too.

So sometimes when people find out you're a Jesus follower, they're like, I don't like you anymore.

And you're like, well, I still love you, and then they don't know what to do with that, and that's okay.

Um Jesus, because he's honest.

He will tell you everything truthfully, but he promises you victory.

And he promises you the faith to make it through.

He grants us the faith that we need.

It comes from him, not from us.

It's not something we muster, it's the Holy Spirit in us that produces faith.

But he will give you faith to make it through the meantime.

So if you're stuck today, take heart.

Good news, you're not gonna be stuck forever.

Be a believer.

Put your faith in Jesus, whether it's for the first time or or the millionth time, he will never let you down.

Let's pray.

Jesus, thank you so much for this day.

Thank you so much for this church.

Lord, we're so grateful for you.

And God, we want to be useful to you.

We just do.

We want to be people who get you to live an adventure where we can say that God, our God, has used us to do his work.

So, Lord, as we spend the next few months studying the the lives of the people that I guess are related to you, which is which is kind of cool, that you would inspire every single one of us to truly believe, truly believe that we are a person that you desire to work with and to work through.

We love you, Jesus.

Make us believers.

God, if there's one person in this room that has not put their faith in you, I pray that happens this second, that right now in their heart, that they cry out to you and say, I believe in you, Jesus.

I recognize my need to be a believer.

Lord, we're we're tired of believing in ourselves, believing in our own plans.

There's so many of us in the room who have come to the end of that because we've seen where our plans take us.

We want your plans.

Make us believers, Jesus.

And as these people give their lives to you as their church, we're gonna come alongside them and help them however we can, Lord.

So help us do that.

We love you so much.

It's in your name we pray.

Amen.