By Faith - Walls

But man, man, we have we have so many amazing young people at this church, and today is a day that we wanted to give some attention and some focus to that.

We knew we wanted to do a God story to highlight some of our incredible young people that are involved here, and it was actually really challenging to figure out who to get in front of the camera.

Not because we didn't know who to pick, it was because there are so many incredible people.

And it has been honestly the greatest privilege of my life to be able to know so many of them.

And I say all that because, number one, those of you who are youth and kids, we are proud of you.

We are so proud that you're part of this church.

What happens in here on Sundays, it's part of the story.

But what's happening in their lives, what's happening right now in the junior high, what's happening right now in elementary school, I mean, that's every bit as real and powerful as what's happening here.

I think all of us got to see that.

Those of you who are parents, I want you to know that this is a church that prioritizes children.

We do not hold back when it comes to our kids.

We don't hold back when it comes to what we invest into them.

We believe that the quality they deserve is every bit as much, even more so, than what we deserve.

Over half of our staff is dedicated to kids.

That's how passionate we are about kids.

And so if you have children, even if you don't, be excited to be part of a church that is that is not just investing in the people that are here in this room, but in the next generation of kids, because they are they're incredible.

They're talented, and the quality of these kids blows me away.

Every single year, every single year I have parents come up and tell me that their kids have decided to stay home for college because they don't want to leave this church.

Isn't that crazy?

I mean, I that's incredible when you think about it.

Because when an 18-year-old is making a college choice based on church, that's that's a miracle.

And I don't know if those parents are excited for that or upset.

Like we were supposed to get rid of them, and then you guys came along, and now they want to stay.

I don't know.

I don't know, but that's a pretty good problem to have, if you ask me.

So proud of you guys.

I've got a couple quick announcements that are actually student related.

Uh, number one, this summer, for the very first time, we are gonna be doing a VBS here at His Hands.

We've never done that before.

Really excited about it.

I challenged the team to think of another thing to call it than VBS.

You know, summer kids, it's gonna be two years old through the fifth grade on several weeknights in July.

I mean, let's call it something other than vacation Bible school, because in my opinion, the word vacation and the word school, they just don't go together.

And we gotta think of something new, but sometimes you gotta go with what people know.

This is the really exciting part about it.

We're expecting between three and four hundred kids to be here as part of that, which is amazing.

And so that statistic might help you understand the context of my next statement.

Please help us.

Um, please, can you please there's a there's a desk at the Connect Desk.

You'll go out there in the main lobby and you'll see a sign that says Vacation Bible School.

If you would like to be involved, if you say, hey, I want to be part of that, I want to help with that in some way, uh, just sign up and we'll give you all the details.

It's gonna be in July.

We'll announce more about it soon.

But we could really use a lot of people's help because we're gonna make sure that those 400 kids know Jesus.

That's our passion, that's what we're hoping for, and I know that whole families in this community are gonna be affected by that.

It's really, really exciting.

Um, you heard Taryn and Madison talk about the youth group.

All the kids that were up here on stage have come through that youth group or are currently in it.

If you have a teenager, or if you are a teenager and and you're not part of what's going on in our youth group, you need to be part of it because that is a family of people you need to know.

They are amazing.

Every summer they have an experience called the road trip.

I think Madison talked about it.

Taryn did too, actually.

Um it's coming up really soon, actually.

It's in June.

I think it's June 8th through the 11th.

And this trip is it's phenomenal.

We've done it for six years now.

Over 100 kids have been baptized on this trip.

I mean, think about that.

That's amazing.

In fact, our high school students, they all wait to get baptized until they're on the trip and it's in a river and it's freezing cold, but that's what they want.

That's what they they long for.

Um every year, kids go.

We took 84 kids last year, 84 high school kids to Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Just think about that.

This year we're taking 100.

So that's really, really amazing.

It's exciting.

Um, if you ever go and talk to our high school students and you ask them about their their encounters with God, almost all of them will say the road trip.

The road trip I experienced Jesus in a way I never had before.

And so we've done this for several years.

Uh, we want to ask your help uh with one specific thing it's sponsoring students who can't afford to go.

We make this trip as affordable as possible.

And parents, if you have a high school student, or even if you're our student, there is still time to sign up for this trip, by the way.

There's a desk in the lobby where you can sign up to get more information.

You can grab a packet.

We would love to have you go.

We will make room for as many as possible.

The cabins we stay in are huge.

There's one for guys, one for girls.

They say they sleep about 60 people, but we can fit more.

You know, teenagers, they're small.

Um we'll fit them in there.

But uh but every year there are there are several kids that can't afford to go.

The trip cost$195, and that covers everything.

That's transportation, food, lodging, and that's really cheap.

We do not intend to make a dime on the road trip.

That's not why it exists at all.

Uh, but still there are kids that can't afford it.

Last year, we had 22 students that needed sponsored.

Everyone did.

Everyone got sponsored.

We have never told a student no because of finances.

We don't even say, hey, we'll wait until someone sponsors you.

We just say you're going and we trust God to take care of the rest.

If you would like to help with that, if you say, hey, we can sponsor a student, we can we can sacrifice$195 and send a kid, or even if you can do part of that, a portion, go to the four kiosks at the back of the room.

That's where all of our giving is done.

You can either write a check and just make a note on it that says youth trip, you can leave cash in an envelope, or at the kiosks, this is also online.

If you go online to give through our website, there's a category that says high school trip.

And so you can choose to give to that and sponsor kids that wouldn't be able to go otherwise.

And I just want to thank you in advance because I know this church is gonna step up and make sure that all those kids get covered.

Okay, with all that in mind, let's pray and let's let's jump into uh to the message this morning.

Jesus, thank you so much for what you're doing in this church.

Thank you for what you're doing through this church and this community, and thank you especially for what you're doing in the lives of young people.

Lord, we are we are a family.

We're not just a family here in Woodstock.

We're a family with every single believer that exists on this earth.

And so, Lord, we want to lift up people everywhere to you, people in every nation on this planet, people who are who are thriving, God, people who are struggling, we want to lift up what's going on in Nepal and in the Middle East and all kinds of places where people are really struggling right now.

We want to ask, Lord Jesus, that you would just cover those things, that you would take care of those people, our brothers and our sisters.

And right now, Holy Spirit, we want to ask that you would open up our hearts and make us ready to hear from you, to learn from you, and to apply your truth to our lives.

And we ask this in your name.

Amen.

Well, for the last several months, we have been on a bit of a faith journey.

We are exploring what it means to live by faith.

The Bible says we want to live by faith and not by sight.

And I think that's that's important.

I think it's really challenging.

Because if I live my life based on what I can see, in other words, what I know, what I can understand, I am living life in a very limited way.

Because there is a massive limit to what I can see, to what I can understand.

All you have to do is ask my wife that question, and she will say, Yeah, Justin doesn't get much.

If I live based on what I know, my dreams, my hopes, the future that I can envision, it is so much smaller than what God has in mind.

I believe that.

So we want to live on more than what we can see.

We want to live on more than what we can just comprehend with our own mind.

We want to live by faith.

Because when we live by faith, we don't live life based on what we see anymore.

We live life based on what God sees.

And her perspective is completely different.

It's totally different.

We want to live life with his perspective.

And so we've been going through Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It's a chapter in the Bible that gives us this list of amazing men and women who live lives of faith.

We want to learn from them.

We want to follow in their footsteps.

The story we're going to look at today, it's very fitting for a day that talks about what God's doing in the lives of young people at this church because in many ways this is a story that commends the faith of youth.

And it's also a story that serves as a warning to make sure that faith is never something that we grow out of.

It's easy to look at faith as something that is for children.

It's for naive people, it's for for young people.

And it is easier for young people to have faith.

It seems that way.

I've encountered that in my life for sure.

Young people are more trusting by nature and they'll believe what you tell them.

Children, I mean, they hear a story about Jesus walking on water.

You'll never hear a child say, What?

Walked on what gravity, physical laws.

Kids are like, that's awesome.

Can I do that?

That's what they want to know.

They'll try it.

That's what they're gonna do.

They're gonna try it.

You see them at the pool, they're like, I think I can make it.

They try.

They have faith.

But see, faith, it's so much more than something meant for childhood.

It's so much more than something that's meant to help us believe fantastical stories.

Faith is not something that is meant to be limited to a season in our life.

It's meant for all of life.

See, we get older, and there are many benefits of growing old.

The world likes to focus on all the downsides, the back pain, the stretching before really any activity that you can think of.

Those are those are true.

But the benefits of growing older, they're they're immense.

I mean, having more wisdom, having more knowledge, having experience, I would much rather have experience and wisdom and knowledge than than to be physically fit.

I mean, I would like to be more physically fit, don't get me wrong.

But I'd like the experience, the wisdom, and the knowledge.

I'd rather be 35 than 25 any day of the week.

Because I remember what 25 was like.

I remember the 25-year-old version of myself, and that young man was an idiot.

Just an idiot.

I used to, oh, I used to do things, and I would, I would finish up and I would look back on what I had just done and go, what was I thinking?

How could I not have seen that?

I was the youth pastor here.

We don't have titles, but that was my role.

And so I worked with the teens and the kids.

I did all kinds of stuff.

And man, I remember back in the day, we used to have like 90, 100 junior high kids on Wednesday nights, and it was exactly what you would picture 90 or 100 junior high kids, like after school, all you know, hopped up on caffeine.

They were just crazy.

And we tried to get their energy out.

We tried to play games with them to get them to mellow out for just five minutes or ten minutes during the message, just a little bit of focus.

And so we try all kinds of crazy stuff to get their energy out.

We used to play these games that most of the time would go really well.

Sometimes they'd end a little bit disastrously, would be the only word I can I can describe.

One time we had this game that we played out on the basketball court, and the kids divided into teams, and their goal was to duct tape one of their friends to the wall, right?

And and to do that so securely that the kids couldn't even uh use their feet.

They were actually up off the ground and they were just duct taped to the wall.

And so they had a time limit, they had to do that, and it was it was amazing.

The kids did a great job.

It took a lot of duct tape, but we had all these junior high kids duct taped to a wall, hanging off their feet.

But then one kid had this idea, it was something I did not foresee happening.

He picked up this little rubber chip, and in the back we have these rubber chips, they look like wood chips, but they're made of rubber, and he chucked it at his friend who was duct taped to a wall.

And all it took was that one kid doing that one time, and all of a sudden, 50 other kids like grab huge handfuls of these things, and they're just pelting the kids who are taped to the wall.

And these kids are defenseless.

They can't do a thing, right?

They can't even duck, they can't move, they're just like, no, no, and they're just getting pelted in the face.

That was not a good day.

I hated to start conversations with angry parents with like, well, we we duct tape your kid to a wall.

And things really went downhill from there.

A few months later, a few months later, we played another game.

This game was amazing.

Um, we put plastic spoons on the ground of the arena, our youth area, it's a concrete floor, and we used spoons, not forks, because we are all about safety here, okay?

Spoons.

And the kids again had duct tape, and they had to divide into teams, and they had to wrap one of their friends in duct tape, like a mummy, from shoulder to ankle, but they had to wrap them with the sticky side of the tape out, and then these kids were supposed to get on the ground and roll around and get the spoons to stick to their body.

And we would we were gonna count how many spoons they could get, and this served no point.

I mean, I just want to go ahead and say this.

There was no like tie-in to a story in the Bible.

This was just fun and craziness.

But then something happened that I also did not foresee.

I watched this seventh-grade boy begin to fall, and this question entered my mind.

I could almost see him falling in slow motion.

How do you catch yourself from falling if your arms are duct taped to your side and your knees are locked in a standing position because they've also been wrapped with duct tape?

And the answer to that question is you don't stop yourself from falling.

You fall like a plank of wood.

I mean, this kid just went boom, face first into the concrete.

It was rough.

I'm just gonna be honest, okay?

He's okay, he is with us to this day, good kid, right?

But again, that phone call with his dad that began with, well, so we duct taped your kid up, and then, right?

Those were not good moments.

But see, I was 25 years old, I was stupid.

And then I had this epiphany, I had this jolt of wisdom that hit me, and it was like, Justin, what if you don't duct tape the kids anymore?

What if that, what if that becomes a filter and you just live that way?

And so we have we applied that, and since 2008, we've had a strict no-duct taping humans policy at this church.

And I do want you to know, parents, that two things, we still don't duct tape your kids, don't worry.

And our our youth leader, Jacob, he is not 25, okay?

He's 31 years old, so he's got a lot of those filters built in.

See, I value those filters that I've learned.

That one seems like it should have been one I had to begin with.

But sometimes we have to make mistakes to become more wise, right?

That's how life works.

And I do not long for a time when I had less filters.

I actually long for a time when I'll have more.

I love growing older and getting more wisdom and more knowledge and more experience.

But there is a danger in that.

And the danger is that as we grow older, we can begin to rely on our wisdom and rely on our knowledge and rely on our experience to the point that sometimes we even replace faith with those things.

And we can stop living by faith and start living based on what we know, based on what we have experienced, and based on what we can envision, we live by sight.

And so this morning, for some of us, our prayer is that we reconnect with the faith of youth.

That we realize that as great as knowledge, wisdom, and experience are, they are no substitute for faith.

Because no matter how much we know, we will encounter situations in life where we do not know what to do.

No matter how many filters we have, there will be experiences we have in life where there is no filter.

There is no moment from our past we can look back on to have any idea of how to progress.

We are in uncharted waters, and that is where faith is vital.

It's vital.

Our story today is Hebrews chapter 11, it's verse 30.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It's just one verse, but it tells a pretty powerful story.

It was by faith that the people of Israel marched around Jericho for seven days, and the walls came crashing down.

The walls came crashing down.

Anyone have any walls that you'd like to see come crashing down in your life today?

That's what we're gonna talk about.

If you don't know the story of Jericho, it's a classic.

It's great that we're doing this on a kid's day because this is always one of the favorite stories of children.

It's just a cool story.

The backdrop is about 3,500 years ago, the nation of Israel have been slaves in Egypt for over 400 years.

Moses has led them, they've led them out of Egypt, and they're wandering around in the desert.

They're looking for land.

God had promised their ancestor Abraham about 600 years earlier that he was gonna make them a mighty nation, and he did, and he was going to give them land.

And so they're searching for this land because they've left Egypt.

They find the land pretty quickly.

But the land is occupied.

I mean, God promised this land to him.

He's like a real estate agent.

He found a beautiful property, he just forgot to put the under contract sign on the property.

So a lot of other people moved in and they set up shop and they had established themselves.

Huge cultures, barbaric cultures.

And if you know anything about these cultures, these are some of the most evil cultures that have ever existed, but they were powerful.

The Israelites see these people in the land God has promised to them, and God says, Hey, all right, just go take it.

It's yours.

And they have some hesitancy.

So they decide to send some spies into the land.

They choose 12 spies, one from each tribe in Israel.

They send them into the land to come back and have a scouting report of, hey, how do you think we'll fare if we go into that land?

Do you think the people will let us live there peacefully?

Can we coexist with them or are we gonna have to fight for this?

The spies come back and they report it's not good.

It's not positive.

They say, Hey, the land is great.

I mean, God knows what he's doing.

The land is beautiful, it is perfect, but these people, they are not gonna go without a fight, and I don't think we can win this fight.

Numbers 13.

We see their actual report.

It says, But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified.

We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak.

Anok was this legend, this man that was supposedly a giant among men, and his whole tribe, his whole family were supposedly amazing warriors.

And so they see these huge people, and they're like, Oh, they've got to be the descendants of this legendary hero named Anak.

The Amalekites live in the Negev, the Hittites, the Jebuzites, the Amorites, they all live in the hill country.

The Canaanites live along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and along the Jordan Valley.

So, in other words, there are a lot of people standing in our way.

Two of the spies have faith.

Joshua, who's gonna succeed Moses and lead the nation of Israel, and Caleb.

And they say, Hey, God is on our side.

Remember what God did in Egypt to free us.

God does miracles, he's with us.

We can take this land.

God has told us it belongs to us.

The other ten spies, they refused.

They said, No, there's no way.

It says in Numbers 13, 31, the other men who had explored the land with him, meaning Caleb, disagreed.

We cannot go up against them, they are stronger than we are.

So they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites.

The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there.

All the people we saw were huge.

We even saw giants living there, the descendants of Anak.

Next to them, we felt like grasshoppers, and that's what they thought too.

That was what they saw.

And they were basing their report, they were basing their predictions off of what they could see.

But like we said earlier, when we live by faith, we don't live based on what we can see.

We live based on what God can see, and his perspective is different.

That word grasshoppers, I love that word.

I don't know if that was like a put down in those days.

Ah, you're a grasshopper, you're tiny, you have really long legs.

I don't know what that meant.

But that word pops up elsewhere in scripture in Isaiah 40, verse 22.

Isaiah 40:22

The Bible says, God sits above the circle of the earth.

The people below seem like grasshoppers to him.

They forgot that God is the big one.

God is the giant.

God is the one that's powerful.

Their perspective was skewed.

They were living by sight, and so they chose not to enter the promised land that day.

They chose not to take it.

And think about that for a moment.

They've been promised this land for 600 years.

They have waited for 600 years because of fear, which is the opposite of faith.

They chose not to inherit what was theirs.

They should have, though.

They had seen miracles.

They had seen so many miracles.

They had seen God do incredible things in Egypt.

But see, these people aren't warriors, they're not soldiers, they've never fought battles.

They cannot envision themselves winning a war.

They can't see it.

So they choose to make their decision based on what they can't see, and they say no to their promised land.

All of us have promised lands because God has promised us many things.

He has promised a life for us that He describes as abundant.

He has promised a life for us that is full of joy, it is full of peace, it is full of passion.

He has not promised us an easy life, but he has promised us a good life that has purpose and meaning.

All of us have a promised land, and there will be a time in all of our lives where we have to reach out and take it.

And the only way we can do that is through faith.

That's the only way.

By deciding to stay out of the promised land, they paid a price that day.

And it was really sad.

That whole generation lost the promised land.

God responded to them in Numbers 14, 29.

He says, Because you complained against me, because the people were so upset, they were so unwilling to trust God that they said, We wish you would have never even freed us from slavery in Egypt.

We wish we could go back to Egypt and be slaves.

And God says, Because of that, because you refuse to believe, every one of you who is 20 years old or older and was included in this registration that had taken place earlier, you'll die.

And he's not saying he's going to kill all of them on the spot.

What he's saying is, your life, your life will be lived out in this desert.

You will spend the rest of your life wandering around with no real purpose, no aim.

You'll just be nomads.

You'll just go from place to place, and God does not desire us to be nomads.

He says the only exceptions will be Caleb and Joshua, the two that had faith.

So an entire generation, a generation of people that had grown out of their faith.

They were too experienced, they were too focused on what they couldn't see to have faith.

They lost the promised land, and that privilege would fall to a younger generation, one willing to live by faith.

And that generation came about.

Joshua succeeded Moses, and he led them into the promised land.

They crossed the Jordan River and they fought battles and they won battles.

And they were progressing through, and God was giving them everything he had promised, and then they got to Jericho, that place that Hebrews 11:30 mentioned.

Hebrews 11:30

And they ran up against a wall.

A literal wall.

See, in those times, ancient cities were surrounded by huge walls to keep them safe, to fortify them from attackers.

And your ability to thrive as a nation depended on really one of two things: your ability to build a wall or your ability to knock one down.

That's what warfare was really like.

And Jericho had a wall.

It had a wall, and there was no way that they could see around the wall, there was no way they could see over the wall, there was no way they could see through that wall.

And if they wanted the promised land, they were going to have to find a way.

They were up against a wall.

And how many of us in life have been up against a wall?

You know, we're living our life, we're progressing, we're doing what we think we should be doing.

Life seems to be going pretty well, and then all of a sudden something blindsides us, something comes out of nowhere, and it's like we're stuck and we cannot move forward.

We have hit a wall and we do not know how to get around it, over it, or through it.

And those walls can look like a lot of different things.

Those walls can be addictions, those walls can be depression, those walls can be relationship issues, they can be financial walls, those walls can be anything that holds us back from the promised life that God has given us.

Back in 2006, I ran into a wall.

I was newly married, taking care of my beautiful wife.

I had promised her six foot five-inch father that I would take care of her, and I really wanted to uphold that commitment.

She was a student teacher about to finish college, and I needed to provide financially for both of us because she couldn't work while she was student teaching.

But it was okay, I got a job.

And I got like a real job.

I was a salesperson at this at this firm, and and man, it was a commission-based sales job.

I was so excited, so excited about this.

I had a real commute to work.

I had an hour-long commute both ways, and I thought that was awesome.

I was like an adult.

I would drive and everyone would be all upset in traffic, and I'd be like, oh yeah, traffic's the worst.

Like, oh, adult life.

This is this is awesome.

I had business cards.

I don't even have business cards now.

We don't have business cards here because we're not a business.

So I didn't even have business cards.

But but I did then, I felt so important.

I'd hold these up, it has my name on it.

They never spelled my name right.

They don't always capitalize the T on my last name, but it's okay.

Business cards.

I mean, this was a real job, and I was not scared about it being commissioned sales.

You can make a lot more money in commission sales than you can on salary if you do it right.

Challenge is doing it right.

I had interned at this marketing company in college that was also a commission-based structure.

And I had interned underneath this guy that had a lot of clients.

And he'd had these clients for a long time, and I became very familiar with how he how he serviced his clients, how he acquired new clients.

So I had I'd sort of learned the ropes from this guy, and I felt like, oh man, I have learned what it takes to succeed in commission sales, and I'm going to this company and I am just going to take over the world.

And I was dreaming of how many zeros there would be at the end of my checks.

And as it turned out, there was only one zero that mattered, and it was the number of sales I had two months in.

Zero.

The way this company worked, you got two months of salary as you learned the ropes and as you made your calls to sort of get your sales rolling.

But then after two months, you went to commission and I had zero sales.

And I had two weeks left of pay.

Two weeks left until I was gonna be broke because my salary was going away and I was up against a wall.

I could not figure out how to do it.

I read books on cold calling.

I called people left and right.

I set up meetings, and all I heard was no, no, no.

I had nowhere to turn.

I didn't really know anyone in the area we were living in.

It was Kansas City, Missouri.

I had no clue what to do.

I was in over my head, and actually there was a song that was really popular back then by this band called The Fray, and it was called Over My Head, and it would play on the radio every day in my commute, and it just says the phrase, I'm in over my head, I'm in over my head, everyone knows I'm in over my head.

And I drove to work and back from work every day listening to that song and just going, God, I don't I don't have a clue what to do.

What do I do?

With two weeks left, God answered.

Because I'll tell you this, he has an amazing tendency to answer us when we're up against a wall and we cry out to him.

I got a phone call out of the blue from the man that owned the marketing company I had interned at.

He said, Hey, Justin, the man that you interned underneath and learned from, he's actually left our company.

He's going somewhere else.

And we need someone to come in to replace him and to take over all of his accounts.

And since you already know all of his clients because you interned with them and you're very familiar with the projects, you know how all of his clients work.

We were wondering if maybe you would come in and you would start, and you would start with all of his clients and all the commissions that go from his clients.

And I remember wanting to sound really dignified and proud, like I'll consider it.

I remember wanting to say something like, Well, things are going pretty well for me here, so I mean, let me let me think about it.

But I was like, Yes! Do you need me to leave my job right now and come there?

Because I'll do that.

I will do that.

I know that's not the right thing to do, but I was so desperate, I will, I'll do whatever.

I was so excited, and God just came in and rescued me.

That wall that I was up against, that wall came down.

See, we have a God that knocks walls down.

That's what he does.

He is a God who knocks down walls.

That wall at Jericho, he knocked it down.

It was very unorthodox, his approach.

He had the Israelites march around the city for seven days, and on the seventh day, after they marched around it seven times, they were supposed to yell and shout and make a lot of noise.

That was God's military strategy for knocking the wall down.

If I was Joshua, I would have said, hey God, this seems like a great time to invent the catapult.

You know, but all right, we'll march around, we'll make some noise if that'll do anything.

But those walls came down.

For years, that was actually a major disputed point in the Bible because it just doesn't make sense.

How could that be possible?

But in the early 1900s, they discovered ancient Jericho, they excavated it.

In the 1950s, they discovered this wall, layers deep, thousands of years old, and it was a wall that had fallen down in the exact way that Joshua describes in Joshua chapter 6.

Joshua 6 · chapter mention

And they couldn't tell how this wall had fallen.

Their explanation, their scientific, archaeological explanation is an earthquake.

And I do guess that hundreds of thousands of soldiers all shouting and yelling and playing instruments would sound like an earthquake.

But that wall came down.

God knocks walls down.

Once there was a wall named Goliath, and a young child stood in front of that wall, and that wall came down.

God has knocked walls like slavery down.

God has knocked down walls named oppression.

God has knocked down walls named racism.

And yes, there are a lot of walls in our culture that still need to come down, but we have a God that knocks down walls.

In the world that Jesus lived in, there were walls everywhere.

Walls that divided people based on their race, based on their gender, based on their status in life.

Galatians 3, verse 28.

Galatians 3:28

It says, There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female, for you were all one in Christ Jesus.

In other words, Jesus came and he knocked down walls.

Once there was a wall called sin.

And this was the greatest wall that had ever been constructed.

It was impenetrable.

And no man, no woman had ever been able to get across that wall.

It was a wall that kept us from God's presence.

It did not keep us from his love.

Never let someone tell you that sin separates you from God's love.

There is nothing in this world that can separate you from God's love.

But sin did keep us from his presence.

It did limit our access to God.

And so we got religion.

And religion gave us these little minuscule glimpses of what it means to know God.

But then Jesus came and he shattered the wall called sin.

And he opened up God's presence to all of us.

And so we are not held back from the presence of God anymore because Jesus knocked down that wall.

And I know that we all have walls in our lives today.

All of us have things that we're up against, things that are holding us back.

And we've got to be careful, we've got to live by faith and have the right perspective.

When you encounter a wall, that is not God saying, Hey, your dreams are too big, go back.

When you encounter a wall, that is not God saying, Hey, your hopes for your life, they're too great.

I want you to settle for less, turn back.

When you encounter a wall, that is God saying, Trust me, live by faith, and let's knock down this wall together.

Because if we live by faith, every wall we come across, every single one of them, there will be a day where that wall has fallen, it is laying flat on the ground, and you are standing over it.

That will happen when you live by faith.

I used to get upset when I'd hit walls.

And that makes sense.

It's not fun.

It happens all the time.

It happens even in the church world.

We'll try to do something and then, oh, didn't expect that.

We've got to figure this out.

It happens all the time.

And it's it's frustrating, but I've actually learned that it's necessary.

There's a man named Randy Pauch who gave this speech called The Last Lecture.

You should look it up on YouTube.

It's incredible.

He was a professor at this incredibly prestigious university, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and had a year to live.

And he decided to spend that year to encourage people, inspire people to seek those dreams they dreamed when they were children.

He'd actually experienced living out many of his dreams.

He wanted to encourage others to do the same.

And he has this quote about walls, about the fact that whenever we're pursuing something important, we run into walls.

We do.

And this is what he said.

I'll never forget it.

The brick walls are there for a reason.

The brick walls are not there to keep us out.

The brick walls are there to give us a chance, to show how badly we want something.

Because the brick walls are there to stop people who don't want it badly enough.

When you encounter a wall, if it's standing in the way of you and the life that God has promised you, you have to realize that that wall is also standing in God's way.

And there has never been, nor will there ever be a wall that stops God.

You are the children of God.

We all are.

And we're as kids.

Those of you that have had kids, you know when you when you have a kid and something stands in your child's way, you're not a fan of that thing, are you?

Even if it's like another kid.

My son was four.

I think he had just turned four, and I picked him up from this childcare experience he was having.

And uh I pick him up from it and he was all sad, and I'm like, Liam, what's wrong?

And he said, Oh, that kid over there called me a baby.

And I remember being his dad, first time I'd ever encountered someone discouraging him.

I'm like, What kid?

What kid?

You point him out to me, you know.

I'm like, he points, he's like, That kid?

I'm like, that weird-looking kid over there, you know?

I'm like, this is a little kid, but in that moment, that was not a little kid to me.

That was a punk that needed to be taught a lesson.

And, you know, then I got a hold of myself.

I'm like, Justin, that other kid is also four years old.

Okay?

He does not need a piece.

And so I just said, Well, Liam, are you a baby?

He was like, No.

I was like, Oh, then he's just wrong, no big deal.

And we moved on.

But even when we encounter something in our children's lives that's standing in their way, it becomes our enemy, does it not?

You are the children of God.

And as you're pursuing the life that God has called you for, the life that He's created you for, as you're pursuing the promises that He's given to you, and you encounter walls, whether those walls be people that are standing in your way, whether those walls be situations, remember that those walls are in God's way too.

Those situations are keeping his child from having the life that he promised, and God is not going to tolerate that wall.

Because he's on your side, because he loves you.

He loves you.

He has adopted you into his family and he loves you.

And I was listening very intently because that's my son's name.

His mom's describing that he's had asthma, he's had medical issues, he stopped breathing a lot when he was younger, had a hole in his heart when he was born, and every one of those things is a wall that that child has plowed through already.

See, all of us in this room, every single one of us here right now, God desires us to be people that look at walls and get excited.

Excited to see how God's gonna help us get through it, over it, around it.

We're meant to be people that look at walls and go, okay, this is gonna be an adventure.

God, what are you gonna do?

Do I just need to sit and yell at this wall like the people in Jericho did?

God, what do you want me to do?

Because I want to get through this.

I need to get through this, and I'm living by faith.

I'm trusting in you.

When we do that, there is nothing, nothing in this world that will separate us from the life that God has for us.

We are not meant to be people who dream small dreams.

If we, if we're pursuing a dream and there's no walls on the way to that dream, it just means we have not dreamed big enough.

We're about to wrap up with worship.

And I'm so I'm so just blown away again.

It's surreal for me personally, because I've known these kids for so long, to be led in worship by these young kids.

I remember Eliza who's who's singing up here in the seventh grade, playing a little pink guitar in youth group and asking if she could sing at our Christmas party in seventh grade.

And I remember going, like, oh, I don't know.

I don't, you know, I was like fearful for her.

I'm like, oh, middle school kids are mean, right?

They're mean.

And so if you get up there and sing and it doesn't go well, like that's gonna be hard.

I was trying to protect her, and I finally said, okay, okay, you can.

See, I was the one that lacked faith in that situation, not her.

She's like, hey, get me up there.

I want to be up in front of people, I wanna, I wanna use this gift that I have, I want to play my pink guitar.

I was the one that lacked faith.

Because sometimes as adults, we grow out of it.

But it's time today to reconnect with it.

It's time today to say, I'm not gonna live by sight, I'm not gonna live based on my experience, my wisdom.

Those are good things, those are great things added to faith, but they are no replacement for faith.

The walls in your life, they may not be scalable based on what you know, what you can see, your experience, your knowledge, but by faith, those walls will come down.

And you can declare that today, and you can believe that today, and you can write it down.

Today is the day that wall comes down.

You know, I had an addiction for 10 plus years, and I've shared that before.

You know the day that my addiction was destroyed?

You know the day that that wall came down?

It was the day Jesus died on the cross.

That's the day that wall came down.

That's all of us.

That's all of us.

We're called to live by faith.

By faith, there are no barriers, there are no obstacles that will keep us from the life God has for us.

Because our God is the big one.

And He's with us and He loves us.

Pray with me.

Jesus, thank you so much for this day.

Lord, I want to thank you for being part of this church.

The people of this church, they they amaze me, God.

They're unbelievable.

And Lord, we we want to come to you like children.

We don't want to be people that grow out of our faith.

We want to come to you like amazing kids who aren't afraid to believe, who aren't worried about about the what-ifs, who are willing to put it all on you and to trust you completely.

Children have an amazing capacity for trust, Jesus.

As we get older, sometimes our capacity for trust is damaged by other people and situations in life.

And we ask right now that you would restore our capacity for trust and make us a group of people that have faith like children.

A faith that can knock down walls.

And we pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.