Real Hope

If we've never met, my name's Justin.

Really nice to meet you in such a personal manner.

It really is.

We do a couple things.

I just want to make sure I kind of frame this up if you are new.

We exist to love people to Jesus.

That is our mission.

That is our purpose.

We want this to be a place that's defined by the real love of God.

Because it's real.

And so every Sunday we get together, we do a few things that are really important to us.

We worship Jesus.

We believe he's God.

He said he was God.

We think he backed that up with the things that he did, dying, getting back up again.

That was kind of a big deal.

And the things that he said.

Because honestly, for me, even more than the miracles and those stories is the fact that Jesus has the ability to speak into my life like I believe only the person who made me could.

And so we worship Jesus because we think he's worth it.

So when we're singing, it's not mass karaoke, it's us worshiping who we believe God is.

We dive into his teachings, into the Bible, because we want to live life to the fullest.

And we believe that living life to the fullest means living life the way that God has taught us to.

We want to learn from him.

So we spend time together talking about the Bible and we pray because we believe that God answers prayers.

And so if you need prayer this morning, prayer teams at the back of the room at any time.

We also have prayer request cards.

You can fill out at the back four columns, drop those in.

We'll pray for you all week long.

We love y'all.

So that's what we do.

Sound good?

We're gonna keep doing it.

Okay, so I have a question for you, very, very basic question.

Don't you hate being let down?

You know those moments in life where you get your hopes up, and it feels like something good's gonna happen.

It feels like something amazing is going to happen, and you you just put your hopes, you turn it to 11, like you're excited, you believe that victory is is all but guaranteed, and then the unthinkable happens, and it all comes crashing down.

Right?

Those are the worst moments.

And I'm trying to think of an example from the past seven days that illustrates that.

Like, there's just gotta be something.

Hopes get up, victory seems certain.

Crashing down.

Alright, so the Patriots won the Super Bowl again.

Whatever.

So, okay.

Number one, Patriots fans, if you want to live the rest of your life believing that the ball was past the line when the knee was down, you can.

You can live, you can live that way.

But the photographic evidence clearly shows that his knee is down.

His knee is down, and that white line is the line to the end zone, and that ball is not across him, and that's as clear as day, and I don't know why the officials didn't decide to review it.

It's just the last play, the deciding play of the Super Bowl.

If you want to live, if that makes you happy, if you're gonna take it, because we all know Patriots fans have had it so rough in football over the last 15 years that we gotta give them what they can get, right?

So I do need I do need to apologize to y'all.

Um, last Sunday, in I'll admit it, youthful and uh unwise confidence, I prayed up here that God would comfort Patriots fans.

And I feel like God didn't get the joke.

I feel like he didn't understand the context.

And so it was almost like God was like, Oh, I'm gonna comfort Patriots fans.

If that's what you're asking for, I will.

So I I apologize.

I'll I'll gladly take the blame.

Um I mean, I think we we prayed that as together, so really we all share in this plan.

And we should apologize.

That was rough.

That that Super Bowl was the first Super Bowl that my son, Liam, who's about to be seven, has ever gotten into.

We're a family that's really into basketball and football.

We we follow, we watch football games, but we're not as passionate about it as we are basketball.

Liam's really never gotten into football, but I think something about the Falcons being so good and the fact that they were in the Super Bowl and all of his friends were talking about it at school.

He was so excited for the Super Bowl.

Every single day leading up to last Sunday, he asked me, Dad, can we please watch the Super Bowl?

And I'm like, Yes, son, we actually watch it every year.

You just don't pay attention that we're watching it, but yes, we will watch the Super Bowl.

And so, you know, the Super Bowl happened and Liam's watching it, his heart is in it, and he doesn't really get football, he doesn't understand it.

He he thinks it's gotta be like the same as basketball, you know, just with a different shaped ball.

And so he tries to apply the rules of basketball to football.

So every time a Falcons player would get tackled, he'd be like, That's a foul! That is a foul! You can't do that, you know?

And I was like, no, football's kind of different, it's kind of different.

And he was so excited, you know, the end of the first quarter, excitement, end of the first half, just jubilation.

End of the third quarter, like, yeah, of course they're gonna score a touchdown or two.

I mean, it is the Patriots.

And then the end of regulation, fear, right?

The end of overtime, devastation.

Devastation.

That's the only word I can think to use.

Liam, he took it really hard.

He took it so hard, he was so excited just a few minutes before, and he was crushed.

And I hated to see that happen to him, but at the same time, I know that this experience that he's having, the letdown that he's experiencing is something that unfortunately will become commonplace for him in life.

Especially if he decides to be a fan of a sports team.

Because if you decide to go all in with some sports team, that being let down is just a normal way of life.

You just learn to live with that.

It's your new normal, right?

But sports or not, life is full of letdowns.

It really is.

That's just a normal experience for us to have these moments in life where we think something's gonna happen, something's gonna go one way, and it goes another way, and we are let down.

And the world that we live in doesn't really have a solution for us.

In fact, the only solution that our world has really come up with to offer to us as a means of protecting against this devastating, crushing feeling of being let down is simply to not get your hopes up.

Because if you never get your hopes up, you won't experience what it's like to be let down.

And so, if someone tells you, man, do not get your hopes up, that is generally considered good advice.

If you don't get your hopes up, you don't have to experience the letdown.

You're good, you're protected, you're safe.

Even that word hope in our world is this very, very desperate word.

If you ask someone whether or not something's gonna happen and they tell you, man, I hope so.

You don't hear, I am confident that this was gonna take place.

I have all the faith in the world.

By saying I hope so, I mean like, oh yeah, this is gonna happen.

No, when someone says I hope so, what you hear is, yeah, probably not, but at least I can hold on to some hope, right?

When someone says, Man, I really hope this happens, it's them saying, I can think of all the reasons it won't happen, it's probably not gonna happen, but but man, I can at least cling to some sliver of hope.

Hope is a is a desperate world.

It's a desperate word in a in a desperate world.

We we live in a hopeless world by choice.

In a world that has just decided there's no reason to hope, there's no reason to get your hopes up, bad things are gonna happen, it's only going to get worse, and so we should just expect it and protect ourselves from the devastation of being let down.

That's the world we live in.

Like it's it's a it's a hopeless world by choice.

If you if all if you just turn the news on, just turn the news on today, we're doomed.

We're all we're all doomed.

We have no chance.

It's terrible, it's awful.

Then just change the channel and you'll learn that we're still doomed.

It's just a different group of people that are the author of our doom.

Right?

It's just that's all it is.

We're doomed no matter no matter who you talk to, no matter who you look at, we're doomed.

We have no hope.

It's just a matter of who's the one causing all the letdowns.

But our world has chosen to be hopeless.

But God is different.

God is is completely different.

God is the most optimistic person that has ever existed or will ever exist.

Because God always has hope.

There's never been a time that God looked at the world and said, It's hopeless.

And he probably should have, from our perspective.

But he never has.

Even in the Bible, the story of Noah and the flood, probably the most hopeless time in human history, according to God's word.

But even in that moment, God looked at the world and He said, Well, there is that one guy.

I have hope for humanity.

God is never hopeless, and he offers us real hope.

We're in a series right now called a year of real.

We want to experience all the real things that God has for us.

Because the world we live in offers us this fake version of all the things that God promises to give us.

It gives us fake love, fake wisdom, gives us fake purpose.

All these knockoff versions of the real things that God has for us.

And I want us to know this morning that God has real hope for a hopeless world.

And to be a Jesus follower means that you live with hope.

In fact, sometimes, unfortunately, the church has been a group of people very, very quick to jump in the hopeless chance.

And sometimes it's been the church that has had the loudest voice of hopelessness in the world.

The church sometimes is the first group to say, hey, it's really bad.

Has everyone noticed how bad things are?

It's never been this bad before.

It's really bad.

It's way, way, way worse than it was 50 years ago or 100 years ago.

But but that's always been the case.

Every generation has believed it's worse than it's ever been before.

And the church should be the loudest voice of hope in the world.

Because God gives us hope.

In fact, I want to read this quote to you from an author that has passed away several, several years ago.

He was a theologian, and he said this it is almost a characteristic of the age in which we live.

Note that this is not our age, this is not our generation, this is uh a generation long past.

But it is an age of despair.

The novelist Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess of the Derbovilles, which was written in 1891, sometimes I think that the worlds are like apples on our stubborn tree.

Some of them splendid and some of them blighted, then comes the question: on which kind do we live, a splendid one or a blighted one?

And Tess's answer is a blighted one.

Between the wars, talking about World War I and World War II, the historian Sir Philip Gibbs wrote, If I smell poison gas in Edgeware Road, I'm not going to put on a gas mask or go to a gas-proof room.

I'm going to take a good sniff of it, for I shall know that the game is up.

The writer H.

G.

Wells once wrote grimly, man who began in a cave behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

On every side, the voice of the pessimist sounds.

So it was never more necessary to sound the trumpet call of Christian hope.

If the Christian message is true, the world is not, the world is on the way not to disintegration, but to consummation.

In other words, we, the church, the people who follow Jesus, we should be the ones saying it's going to get better.

Hope is not lost.

We should be the most optimistic people in the world.

We should be filled with hope.

How do we do that?

In such a hopeless world, in a world that's so quick to say it's over, in a world that's so quick to raise the white flag and throw in the towel, how do we live lives filled with hope?

Because just like you, I struggle with that.

I mean, it's so easy for me to look at my situation, my circumstances, and get fixated on what's going wrong and feel like it's it's all for nothing.

There's no coming back from this, there's no way to solve this problem.

It's so easy to feel hopeless.

And we're encouraged to do so, but not from God.

If you ever hear a voice telling you to give up or to pronounce that it's over, that someone's doomed, that is not the voice of God.

See, we have this choice, every single one of us, every day.

And the choice is not what's happening to us or what's happening around us, but the choice is what we put our hope in.

Hope is not foolish.

Getting your hopes up is not a foolish way to live, no matter what the world tells you.

What's foolish is putting your hope in anything less than God.

That's why we live in a world that chooses to be hopeless, because our world has tried putting its hope in things far, far less than God, and it's experienced the reality of letdowns.

But the issue isn't the hope, the issue is where the hope was placed.

You should never put your hope in something that does not have the perfect combination of both love and power.

Like, I could put my hope in my bank account, and if you saw my bank account, you would laugh at me.

Okay?

But I'd laugh at a lot of you too, let's just be honest.

Let's pretend for a second that I have a different bank account.

Let's pretend for a second that there are way more zeros, and I know what it's like to have zeros in my bank account, it's just usually zeros at the front, and then there's a number after those zeros.

Let's pretend like there's zeros at the end, several of them before decimal points.

Okay?

So let's say I had enough money in my bank account to do some things, like a powerful amount of money.

I could be tempted to put my hope and place my hope on my money.

And my money might be significant enough that it is powerful by the world's standards.

But here's the problem: my money doesn't love me.

My money is promiscuous because it's always leaving me and going to someone else every single day.

My money is not faithful to me.

So if I put my hope in my money, I will definitely be let down.

And there have been times, even recently.

In fact, I I had a meeting with with Megan.

It's weird to say I had a meeting with my wife, but when you have three children, sometimes you have to have meetings.

And so we had a meeting to talk about finances, and I have been working really hard to be a better manager of our funds, and and I was really proud because I had this plan, and this plan I showed Megan, over the course of the next several months, you know, the next three or four months, we were gonna be able to save this certain amount of money.

And it's not money that would blow you away, it's not money you could go buy a car with, but it's money that you could take care of Christmas gifts around Christmas and even have some left over to go on a little vacation or something like that.

And so I showed her, I said, isn't this amazing?

Isn't it look at this number that we can, this can be ours if we just follow the plan?

And I said, and what's really great is that this is even without getting anything back on taxes.

Whatever we get back from taxes will just be extra.

And then we got our taxes back.

And we owe money on our taxes, and it's exactly$2 less than the money I said we could save.

So my plan, we're two dollars richer than we were, and that two dollars is probably gonna find a way to leave us.

That's how it goes.

I could put my hope in my money, my my hope will not last.

I could put my hope in a person, and I am surrounded often by amazing people.

This this church, this family, this community is full of amazing people, good people.

But see, I I could put my hope in a person who loves me.

But unfortunately, no matter how much a person loves me, that person, no matter how great they are, how smart they are, how intelligent, how wonderful, how wise, like I think of Megan, my wife, other amazing people.

That person does not have infinite power.

So there will be situations in my life that no matter how much love that person has, they can't change what's going on.

You should never put your hope in something or someone who does not have both love and power.

God loves you.

He's crazy about you.

So much so that we watch people get baptized and come to Jesus, and often the story is the same.

I tried to run from God, but it's like God wouldn't leave me alone.

It's like God wouldn't let me go, like he kept pursuing me, because he does, because he loves us.

He loves you and he is powerful.

And when you when you realize who God really is, and you realize how much he loves you, and you make the decision to relocate your hope, to physically take your hope and move it from the things you've placed it in and put it on God and only God, you will not be let down.

But you've got to remember who he is.

David wrote this in the Psalms, Psalm 42, verse 5.

Psalms 42:5

He wrote, Why am I discouraged?

Why is my heart so sad?

He's talking to himself.

And if you talk to yourself, you're not crazy, you're in good company.

David did the same.

I will put my hope in God, I will praise him again, my Savior, my God.

Here we have David going through a really difficult time.

And if you're unfamiliar with David, he was a king, he did some great things, he's a very, very famous person in the Bible, and he wrote this collection of songs that we call the Psalms.

And they're basically David's prayer journal entries.

They're David writing about life.

David was kind of like a moody artist.

He just really got super depressed and he sunk low and he's like, Oh, woe is me, and all this stuff.

And he wrote it down.

And if you read the Psalms, you'll be blown away by how often David begins in despair and ends in triumph.

Like his Psalms will begin, Life is terrible, life is awful, we're all doomed.

And then it ends with, I will sing of the love of my God everlasting.

It's like, what happened?

He remembered who God was.

That's what we see happening right here.

He's saying, Why am I discouraged?

David, why are you so down?

Who is your hope in?

My hope is in God, my Savior.

David's frequently reminding himself who God is, and the beautiful thing is it allows us to be reminded of who he is too.

In Psalm 27, verse 1, he says, The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Psalms 27:1

So why should I be afraid?

The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger.

So why should I tremble?

When evil comes to devour me, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.

Though a mighty army surrounds me, and he's not being figurative, that's what was really happening.

When a mighty army surrounds me, my heart will not be afraid.

Even if I am attacked, I will remain confident.

Psalm 9:9, he says, the Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.

Psalms 9:9

Psalm 18, 2, the Lord is my rock, my fortress, my savior, my God is my rock in whom I find protection.

He is my shield, the power that saves me and my place of safety.

Psalm 28:7, the Lord is my strength and shield.

Psalms 28:7

I trust him with all my heart.

He helps me, and my heart is filled with joy.

I burst out in songs of thanksgiving.

Every single time we have David reminding himself of who God is, and remembering not to place his hope in the things of this world, not to place his hope in his circumstances, but to place his hope in his God, and his God is our God.

Our God is a light in darkness, our God is a fortress, he is a stronghold, he is a shield, he is a rock, he is strength, he is salvation.

That is our God.

And when you put your hope on that God, you will not be let down.

You will not.

And so, as followers of Jesus, our our choice is really simple.

And if you if you've yet to become a follower of Jesus, by the way, we recommend it.

It just means telling him in your heart that you love him and that you want to know him.

You don't have to know all the answers, you don't have to understand it all.

You really can't.

I've been following Jesus for years.

I don't I don't get a lot of things.

But I get that he loves me and that he's real.

Relocate your hope.

Just move it to God and then tell the world that the phrase, don't get your hopes up, is garbage.

And get your hopes up.

Like get them, get them way up.

Be a person bold enough to believe that we're not doomed because God is in control, and no one gets to dictate to God how the story ends.

God is the one who dictates how the story ends, and God has said that the story ends well.

It not only ends well for the world, but it ends well for you because he loves you.

So get your hopes up.

Be bold enough to believe that things are going to get better, not just in the world at large, but in your life.

Remember that your God, your rock, your stronghold, your fortress, your shield, your strength, your redeemer, your savior is for you.

And if God is for you, who can be against you?

No one.

No one.

So get your hopes up.

There have been so many times in my life where I have been fearful, full of anxiety, afraid.

Because I've put my hope in something else.

Usually some idea of my own or some plan.

And then something will happen.

Way out of my control.

And I'll freak out.

And I'll realize in those moments that I have not been placing my hope where it belongs.

And I want you to know that whenever I whenever I move my hope back to God, I've never been disappointed.

I would be lying to you if I even stood here and said, you know, sometimes it doesn't work out.

No, you know, it does.

I'm not saying it's easy.

God never promises us easy, He promises us good.

And there's a big difference between those two things.

It's not about having a smooth ride, it's about getting to the right destination.

In fact, if you look at the Bible, some of the people that that God favors the most, that God chooses, they have the bumpiest rides, but they end up in a place that we would all love to be.

When

You put your hope in God, it works out.

I want to tell you a story.

It's a story I honestly have been really wanting to tell, just waiting for the right time.

It's really, really cool.

It has to do with our church.

And so, uh, if you've been here for a long time, our church is a little over 10 years old.

I've been a part of it for 10 years this March.

Actually, yeah, a couple weeks.

I'll have been here 10 years, which is super cool.

And and God has done just amazing things in my life through this place.

I mean, honestly, it's it's I say this all the time.

It's a strange thing for me to be the one leading this church.

Very strange.

Because this is the place that changed my life.

So it's it's it's strange.

It's bizarre.

Does it feel weird to you too?

Good.

Bill?

Oh man.

So God's done incredible things here.

If you don't know the basic story of how his hand started, um, we had a we had two founding pastors, Steve and Susan, amazing people, and they were very, very, very successful in the business world.

They sold a business, they they had this fortune.

Small fortune would actually not be accurate.

It was a legitimate fortune, a decent sized fortune, let's say.

Okay?

And they did what anyone would do with a fortune.

You buy a Kmart, you start a church.

Right?

That's of course, like if you if you had millions of dollars, what would you do today?

You're like, I know what I'm doing.

I'm gonna go find a vacant building and I'm gonna start a church right now.

That's what they did.

That's what God told them to do, and they were brave enough to say yes, and we're all very grateful for that.

And so then they, yeah, I'm grateful for it.

And it's funny because back in the day, Steve and Susan would never like tell the specifics of this story because there was really no way for them to tell it without it feeling like, hey, look what we've done.

Um, but I didn't do it, so I can tell the story all day long.

Doesn't bother me at all.

So it's good.

So they invested heavily.

They they gave, just gave, over$10 million.

Just gave it to start this place.

The total investment, by the way, much, much more than that, but they gave that, and then they did some really cool financial things, things that I don't understand, because I don't have a lot of zeros in my bank account.

And so there's whole types of financial organizations that never call me and never make me aware of the options.

They they worked it out that we would have a 0% interest loan on the rest of the money that we owed on our building.

If you own a home, I did not know there was such a thing as a 0% interest loan.

Like, like, there's 0% interest for a year, right?

But no, it's a 0% interest loan that we owe on the rest of the building.

And they did it in such a way that we're gonna have the ability to pay this building off in such a short amount of time compared to normal.

It's really amazing, and when that happens, we'll have a freedom to do even more in our community than we can do now.

I cannot wait for that day.

So for years, we were living on their generosity and it was awesome and it was amazing.

And not only did we have this 0% interest loan, we didn't even have to pay it.

For like for a long time, we didn't have to pay it.

We were like 27-year-olds still living at home.

And if you're here and that's you, hold on as long as you can.

And if you're a parent of someone and that's you, we're praying for you.

But, you know, we were we were like, we were like these these kids who weren't really kids anymore who had not yet learned the way the world works.

And then there came the day, about a year and a half ago, that that had to change.

Now, we we were paying, and I should say, I share all this stuff with you.

We're open books.

I like to pull the curtain back.

I'm I love the things that God has done here, I love the way things work.

And so as I share this stuff with you, I think we as a church, I think we should understand some things.

I think that's important because this this is our church.

Like this is our responsibility, right?

I mean, I mean that.

If you consider yourself part of his hands church, this is ours to take care of.

That God started it for us, but it's ours to take care of, so we can hand it off to the next generation, to kids like Lisa, who, by the way, wow, so we can hand something to them that then they can take and do something greater than what we could do with it, all right?

So it's an honor to get to do that.

So we were paying$4,000 a month for our mortgage for a long time.

And and$4,000 is it's a decent amount of money.

Like if you handed me$4,000 today, probably wouldn't say no.

I'd say thank don't do that.

But I I'm I I could think of some things I would do with$4,000.

There's TVs I would buy.

That's probably all I would do with it, honestly.

I'd find a$4,000 TV.

I'd be like, but Megan, look at the picture.

Think about how much better the Falcons would have looked as they too soon?

It's too soon.

Okay.

I will say though, just just since we brought that up, if you will look clearly, guys, bring that back up.

The knee is down.

There's no question, the knee is down.

That uh, Pedri's fan is like, well, it depends on what angle you look at.

Like, that is the angle of the line.

That is what that white line saw.

His knee was down.

Okay, so we're paying$4,000 on our mortgage for a long, long time.

0% interest, so every dollar goes to the principal.

Really exciting things, okay?

And then in one month, that changed, and I was made aware that that would be jumping to$20,000.

Now hold on a second before you hyperventilate.

A lot of air just left this room.

So everybody breathe for a second.

Okay?

First, you gotta understand that, and I and I know I'm look, I'm 33 years old, and I don't have a degree in finance and all that kind of stuff.

So I don't know a lot, but I I'm I know enough to know what I pay on my mortgage.

And then I can like look around and be like, yeah, this is a little bigger in my house.

And I can think about the the kid spaces that we have.

And if you've never had a chance to take a look at what we do for kids, my goodness.

Like, kids don't get leftovers here, okay?

Because Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am you may also be, which gives us this idea that Jesus wants us to get to heaven one day and us to go, wow, it's like you prepared it for me, because he did.

And we want kids to walk into this space and go, wow, this is for me.

That's what we want them to experience.

And they do.

It's awesome.

Okay, so I can look around and be like, yeah, that's this is this is you know 20 something times more than than that.

That makes sense.

But still, it was some sticker shock, right?

So imagine how I felt hearing that news and being like, oh yeah, I mean, sure we can find 16,000 extra dollars laying around on a monthly basis.

Not a big deal.

We got it.

I acted like that and then I freaked out.

I just freaked out.

I freaked out hard.

Like poor Megan, my wife, she had to listen to me give the same conversation over and over and over again.

It was like, what are we gonna do?

I don't know what we're gonna do.

This is crazy, this is nuts, this shouldn't happen.

How could this happen?

We should be given notice.

Someone should have told us this a long time ago.

We shouldn't have to do it, we can get it delayed.

I was freaking out.

And then finally I started praying, God, you gotta do something.

And I had thoughts, I had ideas.

And honestly, all the ideas involved me talking to you guys and being like, some things need to change.

Okay?

And if you're new here, you should just know some things.

We have never passed a plate or a bucket for money.

We have never done a giving campaign in over 10 years, we've never talked, we've never had a whole message about money, we've never had a whole message series about money.

We don't do that.

We don't believe in manipulation and pressure.

We don't.

We trust God, we trust you.

It's that simple.

We ask that every single one of you who considers his hand your home would just pray and say, God, do you want me to give?

By the way, the answer to that question is yes.

And then you would go, it just is, and then you would go, God, what do you want me to give?

And he's gonna tell you something that will probably be one of two things and probably a blend of both.

Challenging but totally doable.

And if you will just say yes to God, we'll have all of our needs met.

It's that simple.

So that's how we've always done things.

But$20,000, like, we needed that to kind of accelerate.

And so I had all these ideas.

We could come to you guys and be like, look, here's our new, here's our new approach.

And uh, we could have graphics on the screen, and I could hit you guys hard and emotional, and it would just be like, let's do this, rah-rah, rah, come on, yeah, open up your wallets and your checkbooks and things like that.

And none of what I was thinking is weird in the church world.

Sadly.

But I knew, I knew that all those ideas were from me, not from God.

And I I I will not promise you guys many things because I don't I I take Jesus at his word, you know, let your yes be yes and your no be no.

But I will promise you that when we stand here and we ask anything of you, it's gonna be something that God has told us.

And we're gonna feel confident about that.

We might even be wrong.

Maybe we heard God wrong, but we're gonna believe if we ask anything that God has told us to do it.

Okay?

That that's a promise that we will make to you.

So I couldn't, I couldn't say, hey guys, we're gonna do this different thing because I hadn't heard that from God.

So I was mad at God.

Because he needed to like give me permission to do something.

So I'm freaking out.

Okay?

Did I mention it was$20,000?

Does that come up yet?

Okay.

So I'm freaking out and I'm going, God, what are we gonna do?

I mean, you won't let me say anything.

Everything I think about saying, everything I think about doing, you keep saying no to.

Eventually you're gonna need to stop saying no, say yes to something.

And in the midst of my freaking out, month number one, this person comes up to us and says, Hey, I've been praying and I really believe that God wants me to do this.

And he this person gave a donation, and guess how much it was for?

$20,000.

Now, here's what I want you to understand.

Oh, yeah.

I want you to understand a couple of things.

Number one, that's not normal here.

Maybe there are churches where it is normal, where there's just like lots of people that have multiple thousands of dollars laying around and they give it, and that sounds fun.

But that's not, that's not, that's not our normal, that's not us, and that's okay, by the way.

I do think there are people that God has blessed specifically here in ways to be able to do that.

And and let me, here's the thing.

I'm going on a lot of tangents, but you guys are loving people.

Wouldn't you love to be able to do that?

Like, I I I would love to be able to do that.

And what I will say to you, if you have that desire inside of you, every person I know that gives incredibly generous in big ways, they gave the the same way when they were, when they didn't have those means.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, they didn't wait until God had blessed them financially to be generous in life.

Not in church, in life.

And so I'm not promising you that if you give generously to his hands or some organization or anything, to a person on the side of the road, to a person in your family, that all of a sudden just money's gonna come flying at you.

Sometimes that message gets twisted in the church and it's it's used in a manipulative way.

We'll never do that.

But I will say that God does bless people who show God that they can be trusted with more.

And so sometimes there's this mentality of like, well, yeah, if I had all those, if I had all that money, I'd easily write a$20,000 check, no big deal.

If look, it's not easier to write a$20,000 check than it is to give$20.

It's not easier.

Okay?

And these people are just, they're generous people that God has looked at and said, I'm gonna bless you.

So this guy says, it's$20,000.

Now, the second thing I want you to know is that our our mortgage is not$19,997.

It's not$20,000 and 52 cents.

It is exactly$20,000, and this gift was exactly$20,000.

So I was very happy.

I was blown away.

I'm like, that's God.

Right?

That's that is that is God.

Month number two.

Freaking out again, because that's the crazy thing about mortgage checks.

They keep coming.

It's like they don't give you months off, it's just, and I'm I'm freaking out again because, hey, God, thank you so much for that generous help last month.

You really saved the day, but you know, it's a new month, and what are we gonna do?

You've got to give us a strategy, you've got to give us something.

This this woman walks up to me and she says, Hey, uh, I was aware of her situation.

She'd gone through some really hard things, very difficult things.

And things difficult enough that there actually happened to be a financial uh payback for those things.

It was really hard.

Um, and so there was really not much silver lining except the fact that there was there was money that came her way that helped her take care of herself and some things.

And she said, I really have been blessed with this and I want to give back.

I want to tithe it.

And I said, Man, that is awesome.

That is so generous of you.

Thank you so much.

And you know, just do that.

That's what we all do.

We just give whenever whenever God leads us to.

And so she gave that donation, and someone brought it to my attention because guess how much it was for?

Exactly.

To the dollar.

And I'm sitting here going, God, is this how it's gonna work from now on?

Like, this is easy.

This is awesome.

And then month number three, nothing.

No, no$20,000 donation.

And I'm sitting there going, okay, God, that look, two months, I'm not gonna complain, right?

Two months, you just if someone paid your mortgage two months in a row, you wouldn't be mad, you'd be excited, but then you still gotta figure it out.

And so I'm sitting there, month number three, nothing comes in, nothing extra like that, and and we're just doing our thing, figuring it out.

Month number four, person walks up to me.

And again, this is not our church, just so you know, this is not normal.

This does not happen.

Please don't believe that because it doesn't.

This is crazy.

This guy walks up to me, he's like, hey, um, I've known this guy for a long time.

He's like, I have all these businesses, and uh I sold a couple of the businesses and kind of merged the others together, but I want to I want to tithe on what what I sold the businesses for, and I was like, man, that's awesome, thank you.

Guess how much it was for?

$40,000.

Hold on.

To the dime, to the penny, the same amount that we needed that month and the month before when nothing came.

Exactly.

It was like God going, sorry I forgot.

Uh okay.

Month number five.

This was December, two years ago.

Month number five, a guy comes up to me.

This guy's my age, which made me feel really successful in life.

Uh and he's like, hey man, God's really blessed my business.

I'm really good friends with this guy.

He's he's awesome.

And he's like, God's really blessed our business this year, and I just I want to I want to do this.

Guess how much it was for?

This is getting a little old, right?

400, I'm just joking.

$20,000.

Exactly.

January.

Month number six.

So far, since our instantaneous$16,000 increase, every single month, God has exactly provided what we've needed, except for the one month when he doubled up the next one.

But I think that counts.

This this woman who had given a few months back because of the situations happening in her life came to me and said, Hey, um, for tax purposes, I wasn't able to tithe all of it last last year.

I had to break it into two different years, and so here's the rest.

And guess how much it was for?

$20,000.

Exactly.

Six straight months.

I didn't say a word to anybody, I didn't tell you guys, I didn't tell anyone, I just freaked out.

That's all I did.

And God provided and he showed up.

And what was really beautiful about that is over the course of those six months, we as a church were growing, not just in number, but in maturity.

And we were getting to the place where as a whole, as a whole, we were able to start to start making those payments.

But it but we needed that six months to get there.

And if not for those six months, with God providing exactly what we needed, I do not know where we would be right now.

I had a lot of ideas of creative ways that we could have made it work.

I've thought for years that if you took all the chairs out of this place, you could have a really awesome roller skating rink right here.

Okay?

We could call it his wheels, and it would be fun.

The only downside is when you would come here on Sundays, it would smell like a roller skating rink, which is uh it's a very specific smell.

Like I haven't been in a roller skating rink since I was in the third grade, but if I walked in one a day, I'd be like, yep, this is what that is.

That's feet and leather and all kinds of stuff.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

His wheels.

We could have a his hand lotion, we could do, we could do that, we can all kinds of all kinds of products we could produce.

Just in the name.

I learned in those six months that when you put your hope in God, you are not let down.

Because God is real.

He is powerful.

And he loves you.

He loves you.

This world will work really hard to tell you it's hopeless.

This world will tell you that it's too late, you're too far gone, you've missed your opportunity, you've missed your chance, you don't have time, whatever.

This world lies to you.

There is hope.

There is real hope in this world, and the the amazing thing is that that real hope has a name, and his name is Jesus.

Jesus is hope, and to live with Jesus means to live with hope.

So we don't have to be people who say, Oh man, don't get your hopes up.

Don't get your hopes up because if you get your hopes up, you get let down.

We can be people that say, no, no, no, no.

My hope is in God, the Redeemer, the rock, the restorer, the shield, the powerful, mighty God of this universe.

My faith, my hope is in the God that created all things just by speaking a word.

My faith, my hope is in the God who is my fortress, who is my stronghold, who is my strength.

And when I put my hope in him, my hope goes up and it goes up and it goes up.

So let's be people who get our hopes up.

I don't know what's happening in your life right now, but whatever's going on, get your hopes up.

Believe that God's gonna show up, believe that God's going to do something, because that's just what God does.

It is not hard for God to bless us, it is not difficult for God to do miracles.

That's just what he does.

We don't have to earn it, we don't have to do anything to deserve it, but there is something powerful about the fact that when you put your hope in him, things start to happen.

So, do you need some hope today?

Put it on God and be bold enough to believe that he's gonna come through and get your hopes up.

I want to finish by reading one more verse.

The worship team, you guys can come out.

Romans 15, 13 says, I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him.

Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And guys, leave that up for a moment.

God is the source of our hope.

We will put our hope in him.

He's the only one who has that perfect combination of love and power.

So relocate your hope, put it on him.

He's the source.

He will fill you completely with joy and with peace.

If you want joy and peace in your life, that's the result of having your hope in God.

Then you will overflow with confident hope.

You will be so filled with joy and peace that you start to overflow, and what's coming out of you is confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.

That's not meant to be some strange way of living for a small group of super spiritual people.

That's for you.

That's for all of us.

That's the life that happens when you put your hope in God.

And so we're gonna finish with one more song of worship.

And as we sing this song together, let's get our hopes up.

Let's believe.

Let's have faith.

Faith and hope are linked together.

You can't have faith without hope.

You can't have hope without faith.

They go together.

Let's get our hopes up today.

And let's watch what God does and let's be ready to be blown away.

Pray with me.

Jesus, thank you so much for your love.

Thank you so much, God, for showing up.

You are everything that we need.

You are our hope.

And God, we are uh we're real people.

We have real problems, you know that.

And we can admit to you, we don't have to be worried about looking bad in your eyes.

We admit to you that we put our hope in all kinds of flimsy things all the time.

We put our hope in politics, and we put our hope in economies, and we put our hope in our jobs and our careers, and we put our hope in all kinds of things that let us down.

And it's taught us, God, to be very careful and cautious when it comes to hope.

But Lord, when our hope is in you, we are never let down because you are not a God of letdowns.

You are not a God who fizzles out, you are not a God who runs out of strength or power or knowledge.

You are God.

You are mighty.

You are real and you love us.

And so we are saying, as a family of people today, our hope is in you, and we're gonna live with our hopes high.

So, Lord, get our hopes up.

Get our faith up.

Help us be people bold enough to believe that we're not doomed, that it's gonna get better, that we're gonna see you move, we're gonna see you work, we're gonna see miracles happen because we belong to you and you love us.

And we ask this in your name, Jesus.