By Faith - Distance

Amen.

Good morning.

How is everybody today?

Any uh if you're like me, you spent this whole last week uh enjoying the blessings of pollen.

Anyone have allergies in the room at all?

It's a stool and water.

See, Nathan knows.

Good man.

So I've been coughing like all week long, and so I'm gonna take one drink of this.

Hopefully that's enough.

But uh I just apologize for the this is like the raspy jazz version of my voice.

So, you know, well, if it makes it through the service, we'll be good.

But man, I'm so glad you're here today.

Uh last Sunday, Easter Sunday, what a day, man.

God is so good.

And he moved last week in such a powerful way.

But the great thing about God is that he moves all the time.

Because he's alive.

And we have the amazing privilege of being able to be in his presence every single day if we want to.

It's not just when we're here.

And so we want to ask, we're gonna pray that he moves and shares what he wants to share to our hearts through his word.

But we've got some uh some quick announcements before we get to the message this morning.

Uh, number one, something that uh something that we're really excited about is helping marriages in this church.

You know, we had a marriage series a few weeks back.

If you were here for Ken's marriage series, that was fantastic.

And we did some things during that series.

We did some date nights for all of our married couples with young kids.

You could have brought your kids and dropped them off with us so we could watch them for you, go out and enjoy a date night on us, and we're gonna do more of that in the future for sure.

We also did uh two free sessions of marriage counseling.

We don't have we don't have marriage counselors on staff here.

We actually have a really small staff if you're new at his hands.

We have a tiny staff, and so we have great relationships with counselors all throughout the area, and we said that we would be offering two free marriage counseling sessions during that series.

That if you and your spouse need that, want that, I've been there, I've been in marriage counseling, enjoyed it as much as you can enjoy that.

Um, but I needed it, and it was it was amazing and helpful for me.

We're gonna extend that throughout the summer.

And so from here through the end of the summer, if that is something that at any point you and your spouse say, hey, we we need this, we want to see our marriage change, that's on us, and we're gonna do that for you throughout the summer.

So just let us know by going to the info desk and we will uh we'll give you a card that has all the details there.

Next Sunday, next Sunday, we're gonna be having a newcomer barbecue.

Uh, it's really simple.

We're not we're not barbecuing any newcomers.

Uh I should probably that would be a very that'd be a very different experience.

But no, we're we're gonna have some we're gonna have some food.

It's just a chance that if you're new to his hands and you want to find out more about us as a church, about what we believe, what we do, we're really open books here.

You can ask any questions.

Uh that's what it's for.

And so I'd just like to invite you to that.

Um we don't really have a timeline on what new means.

If you consider yourself to be new, uh feel free to come, bring your kids, we'll have some fun stuff going on for them.

But it's just a chance for us to get to know you and hopefully answer any questions you have that would help you decide whether or not this is your church home because man, it's been a good home for me.

So I hope that's the case.

Um after we're done in here, home group signups are happening.

You may have walked past some tables with balloons, and you may have wondered what that is.

One of the most important things that happens here every week actually doesn't happen here, it happens in people's homes.

We have incredible leaders who've opened their home each week, and they're there so that you can come in and you can live life with someone else that's following Jesus.

You can make friends.

There's a verse in the Old Testament that says, two heads are better than one, and a cord of three strands is not easily broken.

All right, so we want to live life together.

We don't want to do it on our own.

We have groups for men, groups for women, we have married couple groups, we have an art group, we have a great outdoors group, a motorcycle group, and we also have a group for like 20 somethings that are post-college, but just do not want to be adults yet.

You know that whole phase of life where you're clinging to your youth as with everything you have.

So, whatever you call that group, 20 mid-20s, somethings, the somethings now have a group as well.

Uh, but just go out to those tables and interact with some of the people leading the groups.

We've got cards you can take and sign up if you'd like to be part of those groups, because those are gonna start this week.

We have a number of new groups kicking off this week.

Uh we're excited about that.

So as you walk by, take a few seconds and do that, because there are amazing people here that you don't know and you need to know.

You need to know.

Uh, anyone here a biker?

Like you would consider yourself by biker I mean motorcycle rider.

All right?

I'm not one of those.

But if I was one, I'd be here this Saturday at 9.45 for Bless the Bikes.

It's an event we do every year for all of our all of our bikers.

And so be here.

We're gonna pray for you and and pray for your experience on a motorcycle, because man, if you ride one of those things, do you know you need some prayer?

Um, so we want to pray for you.

It's gonna be a great event.

We do that every year, it's a blast.

And finally, before we pray and start the mess, I just want to say thank you to everyone that helps out around here, that's on a team, everyone that gives.

We've got four columns at the back of the room.

That's where our giving stations are.

You can take care of that there.

And I know that when you're new to a church, one of the first questions you have, and rightfully so, is how does this church deal with money?

And our our way is really simple.

We trust you.

We don't pass a plate, we don't believe in peer pressure.

There's a verse in the Bible that says that everyone, that each of us should give, and we should give from our heart.

We should give whatever God puts on our hearts.

So giving is between you and God.

It is part of your worship with Him, and as you trust Him, you trust Him in every area of life.

He blesses that.

But but we simply say this as a church.

We trust one another.

And if all of us pray and we hear from God and we just commit to doing what God has us do, we'll always have enough and we'll always be able to bless this community, which is something we are so passionate about.

All right, so let's pray and let's jump into our message this morning.

Jesus, thank you so much for everything that you do and are doing because you are alive.

We love you, we want to know you more.

We want to feel your presence, Lord, but even more importantly, we want to remember that you're not just a feeling.

We want to live a life that allows you to operate in every single way that you want to.

We want to give you free reign over our hearts and our minds and let you direct our steps so that everything we do is blessed by our Father in heaven, by you.

We thank you so much, Jesus, that you have done all the heavy lifting for us and that we just get to be God's kids.

And we pray this in your name.

Amen.

Well, a few months ago we started a series called By Faith.

We took a break from that series to do the marriage stuff, and then we had Easter Sunday last week, but I'm really excited to go back into By Faith because we need to finish it.

We're gonna finish it over the course of the next month.

The series is kind of based on a verse in 2 Corinthians which says that we live by faith and not by sight.

We live by faith and not by sight, and that is a beautiful sentiment, but it's often hard to live out because faith and sight, they fight each other a little bit.

There's a conflict between faith and sight, and we've all experienced that.

Sometimes we feel like we would believe if we could just see something.

Like if I could see something, if I could see like God as a person in the flesh, standing in front of me, talking to me, then I would believe.

And as it turns out, God did just that, and a lot of people still didn't believe.

Or sometimes we see something that makes it hard for us to believe.

Something rocks our world a little bit and it shakes our faith.

So there is a conflict between faith and sight.

And we have a choice to make.

We choose to either live by sight or to live by faith.

It's a conflict that the Bible describes as a battle between our spirit and our flesh.

And we want to live according to our spirit.

We want to live by faith.

Because if we live by sight, we can see every problem that exists.

Problems aren't hard to see, but solutions are often born out of faith.

When we live by sight, we can see the people in our lives exactly as they are for all of their flaws and all of their shortcomings, but it's really hard to see who they could become because that requires faith.

And when we live by faith, we live with more hope and more passion and more life than we could ever hope to live if we simply live by sight.

We want to be people that live by faith and not by sight.

So we've been looking at Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It gives us this synopsis of amazing men and women who have gone before us and lived lives of faith.

And if you have a Bible, you can turn to Hebrews 11.

We're gonna put the words on the screen, obviously, but there's something nice about having it in your hand.

We're gonna jump into Hebrews 11, verse 8 this morning and pick up where we left off the last time.

Hebrews 11:8

It says in Hebrews 11, 8, it was by faith that Abraham obeyed God, obeyed 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, like every man ever.

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 are Abraham's uh son and grandson, who inherited the same promise.

Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God.

It was by faith that even Sarah, who's Abraham's wife, was able to have a child.

Though she was barren and was too old, she believed that God would keep his promise.

And so a whole nation came from this one man who was as good as dead.

A nation with so many people that, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, there's no way to count them.

All these people died, still believing what God had promised them.

They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it all from a distance and welcomed it.

And then a little later in Hebrews 11, it talks about Isaac and Jacob, the sons, the grandson of Abraham.

It says it was by faith that Isaac promised blessings for the future to his sons, Jacob and Esau.

It was by faith that Jacob, when he was old and dying, blessed each of Joseph's sons and bowed in worship as he leaned on his staff.

I mean, obviously there's a lot there.

Abraham and his wife Sarah, their children, their grandchildren, they get about as much screen time in scripture as anyone else.

Because so much of the promises that God has made to all of us originated in the promises that God made to Abraham.

The promises that God made to Abraham in Genesis, they really set the stage for almost the rest of the story, for the rest of the Old Testament.

We see those promises in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

It says the Lord had said to Abram, that was the name he went by at that time, leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family, and go to the land that I will show you.

I'll make you into a great nation, I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt.

All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.

So there's two promises.

Two promises that require faith, and all Abraham and Sarah have to do is respond.

The first promise is that they're gonna birth a nation, that their offspring are gonna become a mighty nation.

That's a big promise.

But Abraham and Sarah, they're way past the childbearing years, and they do not have children.

So it's it's a promise that requires faith to believe.

And he says that they need to leave the land that they're part of and go to a new land that God's gonna show them.

So Abraham has to pick up all his stuff and move.

I don't think that was a very difficult thing for him to do.

They lived in a place called Ur.

You are.

That was what it was called, Ur.

And I I've never seen Ur.

I don't know exactly where Ur would be, but I just have this feeling that if it was a really nice place, they would have called it something else, right?

I just I envisioned the moment that Ur was founded and they all sat together and said, Hey, what should we call this land that we live on?

And someone said Ur, and everyone else said, Yeah, that that sums this place up pretty well.

I'm just guessing Ur was not a paradise.

So they have to leave Ur, find this new land, because they're gonna birth a nation.

You need land to have a nation, and you would think that, oh man, they're gonna see results fast.

Because we love quick results.

That's our that's the world we live in, right?

We want instantaneous results and everything, but that's not the way this works.

This is a faith journey for Abraham and Sarah.

It's years before they're gonna have their first child, who also happens to be their only child, a boy named Isaac.

And one child does not exactly sound like a good start for building a nation.

You'd want the story to play out differently.

Like Sarah wakes up the next morning, she says, Hey, I'm pregnant, and we're gonna have tuplets, and this is a really good start to building a nation.

One child, though, Megan and I, my wife, we have two kids, and we do not consider ourselves nation builders by any stretch, right?

I think you have to have ten kids to even qualify as a tribe.

So one child, one child is not a nation.

They've got a long way to go, and even when they get to this land, they see this land.

That's the promise God made to Abram.

Hey, I'll show you this land.

He sees it.

Abraham sees the land, and he doesn't live there though.

He doesn't possess it.

The people that are on that land don't come to him and say, hey, God told us this is your land now, so here's the deed, or however it is they did things back then, it's yours.

It's gonna be a long, long time before they actually possess that land.

And God sort of let Abraham know that in Genesis 12, 7.

He says, I will give this land to your descendants.

Now that may not be an encouraging thing to hear.

Because descendants is a little bit different than, say, children or even grandchildren.

Like how far down the line are descendants.

And as it turns out, it would be 500 years before Abraham's descendants actually owned that land.

And even then they had to fight for it.

This is a journey of faith.

And had Abraham and Sarah lived by sight, I don't think their journey would have lasted very long.

Because the evidence did not support some of the grandeur of the promises that God had made, but they lived by faith.

And we have to understand how long everything took because that gives us the context of Hebrews 11 13, which we read a moment ago.

It said, all these people died still believing what God had promised them.

They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it all from a distance and welcomed it.

I love that.

They saw what God was doing from a distance and they welcomed it.

One of our downfalls as human beings is that we can be incredibly short-sighted.

And it's hard for us to see much beyond the immediate because the immediate in our lives requires our attention.

And so we tend to live lives very focused on what's happening right now.

It's very difficult to see much beyond that.

That starts when we're young.

I have an amazing son named Liam, who's five.

Two years ago, as a three-year-old, I got this incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive him halfway across the country in a car for 15 hours.

Just me and him, just some quality father-son time, 15 hours.

And I I tried to explain to him before we left what this was gonna be like.

I sat him down, I said, Liam, we're gonna get the car, and it's early in the morning, right?

And he nodded his head, he understood that.

I said, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna drive, and we're gonna drive and drive and drive, and we're gonna get home way after it's dark.

Is that crazy?

And he went, yeah.

And I thought it sunk in.

I thought I had explained the concept of a 15-hour drive to him, but 30 minutes into our drive, I hear this question from the back seat: Are we almost there?

I said, No, no, we're not.

Well, how much longer?

He's already complaining.

He's like, How much longer is it gonna be?

I'm trying to explain to him 14 and a half hours, but it just didn't compute because when you're young, when you're a kid, time is it's irrelevant.

All he could focus on was the immediate that he was sitting in a seat, looking at the back of my head, and it was not fun at all.

I wish I could say that as we get older we become less short-sighted, but that's not always the case.

I have made so many mistakes, so many mistakes in my life simply by being short-sighted, by only being focused on what was happening at the moment and not thinking just a little bit ahead.

Some of them are humorous when I was in college.

I waited tables.

I love that job because I got to interact with people and I enjoyed that.

But you know, any job that you have where you do the same thing over and over and over again, sometimes you have to invent activities to do while you do that so it's enjoyable or bearable, right?

That's just how you get through it.

So, some of my fellow servers and I, we had some games that we would play from time to time, just so to pass the time, to make it enjoyable.

Um, some of these were inspired by movies.

There was a game we played called the meow game.

You ever heard of the meow game?

Anyone know about this?

Okay, a few of you.

This is where you try to say the word meow, like a cat meowing, and you try to say that as you're talking to the people you're waiting on, but you say it is you try to say it so fast that they can't catch it.

But see, the thing is they do catch it, but they're not gonna ask you if you just said meow, because that's crazy.

Right?

So you go up to the table and you say, hey, uh, welcome to Chili's, that's where I work meow.

My name is Justin Meow, but you're server meow.

And they just look at you and it's strange, and you're willing to sacrifice those tips just to have a little bit of fun every once in a while.

Well, one day, one day I'm working with my friends, and that was kind of our dynamic, and and one of my fellow servers had a had a new idea, a new game, because the meow game was old.

We needed something new, it was boring.

He said, Hey Justin, when your first table is sat, speak to them in a foreign accent the entire time.

And again, in the in the the thought process of having fun, I said, Yeah, why not?

Why not?

So I thought about which accent to use, and I picked Australian for a couple reasons.

It's the only accent I can do that even remotely sounds like it might be what it is, like it's a really bad impression of the crocodile hunter or something like that.

It's not good at all, but it's the only one I can do that I even feel like you might be able to identify that as Australian, and it's just a really epic accent.

And I think we can all agree with that, right?

Ladies, don't you wish your husband spoke in an Australian accent?

Just nod your head.

Of course you do.

It's awesome.

I was at a concert one time, it was a worship concert for a band called Hillsong United.

They're a huge worship band, they're from Australia, and I was a youth pastor at the time.

A bunch of my students were at the concert as well.

And halfway through the concert, the youth pastor from their church in Australia got up and he began to speak.

Now, I've I've spoken to my students hundreds of times, and I had seen a few times where they really seemed to engage and get it, but they were really excited.

They were hanging on to every word this guy spoke, and I got a little upset.

I'm like, what God, what's what's he got that I don't?

And then I realized an Australian accent.

You know, that was my obviously the fact that I was even asking that question showed that I maybe he had humility, maybe he had wisdom, and I like those things.

But in in the moment at 24 years old, I'm like, well, God, if I had an Australian accent, because if I say to you that the Lord Jesus wants the light of fire in your heart, you might be excited.

But if I said that tonight, the Lord Jesus wants the light of fire in your heart, you would cheer, you would cheer.

It's the accent.

Now, now you know how bad of an Australian accent I do, okay?

So picture me using that same accent, super exaggerated because it's the only way I know to do it, and and and handling this table's food.

But here's the problem that occurred very, very quickly as a result of me being short-sighted.

What I did not take into account that night is that that would not be my only table.

That halfway through their meal, another table would be sat right next to them.

That was also my table.

And I could not speak in an Australian accent as bad as it was to this table, and then two feet away from them use my normal voice, because that would just that would get me in trouble.

I don't even know what would have happened, so I'm like, oh no, I've got to speak in this awful accent to these people too.

And this continued on because every time one would leave, another would get sat.

Four and a half hours of me speaking in this horrendous Australian accent, all because of the fact that I couldn't, I couldn't think 20 minutes ahead.

That is how we are as people sometimes.

We are short-sighted people.

I wish that all of my stories of mistakes I have made, because I'm short-sighted, were humorous.

Were mistakes I could look back and laugh on, but but that's just not true.

There are many that I've made that sting to this day.

There have been financial decisions I've made because I was short-sighted, and things I thought were good ideas, but I just didn't think clearly enough, and I paid for those dearly.

Just because I couldn't see beyond the immediate.

See, when we live by sight, we'll never see beyond what's happening right now.

We can't.

We're just not we're not that good at that as people.

We don't see things clearly.

But if we live by faith, if we live by faith, we can see beyond the here and now.

We can see the things that God might be doing in the future.

And see, that gives us tremendous hope.

It gives us tremendous hope because right now things might be rough.

Right now, things might not seem like they're gonna work out.

Right now, things might be pretty bleak, but if we have faith that God is working at a distance, we can say, hey, God's not done.

God is not finished.

Because God is not short-sighted.

He's just not.

All you gotta do is look at look at the Old Testament, look at scripture that prophesies about things God was gonna do hundreds of years before it happened.

Jesus is spoken about so much in the Old Testament, He's not a new character that shows up in the book of Matthew.

Jesus is all through it.

I mean, look at Psalm 22, for example.

Ben Sykes spoke about this six months ago or so, blew my mind.

Psalm 22 is a song that was written by King David 1,000 years before Jesus.

One thousand years, and yet this song is pointing to Jesus the whole way through, the very first word.

Of Psalm 22 are, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

And if you know the story of the crucifixion, you may recognize those words.

Those are words that Jesus spoke when he was hanging on the cross.

And I remember being younger and reading that and being confused.

Why is Jesus seemingly unaware of what God is doing?

Why is Jesus so confused at the fact that he's on that cross and has God really abandoned him?

It never occurred to me that maybe Jesus was quoting Scripture.

He was referencing something.

The very last words of Psalm 22 are he has done it.

Those are the last words.

And those words are actually in Hebrew just one word.

One word in Hebrew, and it translates to he has done it.

Well, that same word can also be translated, it is finished.

It's the same exact word.

If you know the story of Jesus on the cross, the very last words that come out of his mouth before he dies are it is finished.

It was the same word that Psalm 22 ends with.

But the similarity is they don't just stop there.

In Psalm 22, verse 18.

Psalms 22:18

A thousand years before Jesus, David wrote, They divide my garments among themselves and throw dice for my clothing.

Matthew 27, verse 35, talking about Jesus, after they had nailed him to the cross, the soldiers gambled for his clothes by throwing dice.

Matthew 27:35

Psalm 22, 16, this is incredible.

David wrote, My enemies surround me like a pack of dogs, an evil gang closes in on me.

They have pierced my hands and feet.

Now here's what's crazy.

This is a thousand years before Jesus.

It's five hundred years before crucifixion was even invented by the Persians.

And in that time period, there were no methods of execution that involved piercing hands and feet.

This phrase must have sounded so strange to the people in David's time, but we see that and we go, yeah, the cross pierced his hands and his feet.

It's because these words, they were pointing to Jesus.

Even a thousand years before Jesus came, God was pointing the way.

Because God is not short-sighted.

God is always aware of what's happening now, but he's also aware of where things are going.

And the closer we are with God, the more, the more in line our spirit is with his spirit, the more we begin to have the ability to know that God is working out things in the future.

That what's happening right now, even if it's terrible, even if it's hard, it might be something that is going to be used for great good later.

My worst month, my life, and I've had a very, very blessed life, so I'm not complaining, but my worst month was September 2005.

September 2005 was hard.

I was a senior in college, just gotten married, had a lot of stress, a lot of new things going on in life, but one thing I was certain of was what I was going to do after I graduated college.

We lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and I had this dream job lined up.

They hadn't promised me that I would be able to work there, but they had hinted so, so strongly that I had a future at this particular place, and it was my dream job.

I wanted it.

I literally couldn't envision myself doing anything else, so much so that I didn't even consider applying anywhere.

I didn't even think about what I could do after I graduated because I knew I was going to be at this place doing this job.

It was my absolute dream come true.

And then in September 2005, it all fell apart.

And it wasn't my fault.

It literally just kind of crumbled.

And I was I was lost.

I was confused.

I was upset.

I was upset with people.

I was upset with God because I felt like it's what God wanted me to do, and it got taken away from me, and I didn't understand.

I spent the next year just sort of searching for what I was supposed to do in life.

I changed jobs, I think, five times that year.

Trying to figure out where I was supposed to be.

See, I didn't know it at the time, but his hands church started in September 2005.

Now I was a thousand miles away.

I didn't know anything about this church.

I lived in Kansas City, Missouri.

It wasn't even until 2007 that I heard about this church.

See, that year after September 2005, I looked back on that month with disdain.

But now I look back on that month with joy.

It's not because this church needed me, it's because I needed this church.

I mean, I believed in Jesus long before I came here, but I fell in love with him here.

I needed this place.

I needed to be part of this family, and God was working, God was moving.

He used the circumstances that were happening to me because it's not like God is always the author of our terrible circumstances.

He's not.

But he will use any situation, any situation that's meant for our harm, he can use it for good, and we have to be people that understand that God works often in the distance.

And what's happening in your life right now, it's meant for more than just right now.

So I don't know what your April 2015 is.

It might be like my September 2005.

But all of us have those experiences in life.

And if we live by sight, all we can do is look at those and say, it's not gonna work out, and why did this happen and what's going on?

But if we live by faith, we can look at these moments and we can say, God's not done.

God's not finished, God is gonna work this out.

God has a future for me.

And I'm gonna look to the distance and trust what God is doing.

One of the verses in the Bible that talks about a future with great clarity, and it's so encouraging.

It's Jeremiah 29, 11.

God says, I know the plans I have for you.

They're plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

That's encouraging, right?

That's great.

It's one of the most often used scriptures in the Bible.

It's also almost always used out of context.

Because the actual context of this verse is that Israel, God's nation at that time, has been told that they're about to endure a 70-year-long period of absolute, just awful circumstances.

They're about to have a 70-year-long struggle.

And God says, But don't worry.

Because I have a future and a hope planned for you, and oh nation of Israel, in 70 years, it's all gonna be better.

That's at least a little less encouraging, right?

I mean, if you're going through something really hard right now, if your 2015 is really tough, and I said, Hey, don't worry, 2085 is right around the corner, and it's all gonna work out.

You're gonna have a great 2085, I know it.

You're not gonna leave that conversation, be like, thank you.

Yes, yes, counting down the years, here we go.

It's funny, I was I was preparing for this message this week, and this is the verse that God really laid on my heart, and I actually didn't want to use it because I'm like, God, how is that actually?

I don't want to use it out of context.

I I hate doing that, refuse to do that, so I'm like, God, how how is that encouraging?

Just, I'm not saying you're wrong, God, I'm not saying you got the wrong verse or anything like that, but just explain to me how, hey, 70 years from now, everything's gonna work out.

How is that even remotely encouraging?

And when I ask God questions and he answers, it usually shuts me up.

It's like the only thing that does.

And man, God hit me right between the eyes.

I felt him speak to my heart, and this is what he asked me.

Justin, do you care about 2085?

How much time have you spent thinking about 70 years from now?

How much time have you spent planning 70 years from now?

God was saying that He loves us so much.

He loves us so much that He has our future planned, He loves you so much that He has the lives of your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren planned out.

He has a future and a hope, not just for you, not just for your kids, but just like Abraham and Sarah, your descendants.

How many of us sit around and think about the fact that we're gonna have descendants?

God does.

God cares about you so much that He has a future and a hope that's planned for you 70 years, a hundred years from now.

And whether or not we're still here in 2085 or not, our kids will be.

Our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren, and God, right now, right now, he is doing things in our lives to make sure that they have a good 2085.

Because he loves us that much that he plans that far ahead.

We have a God that is always working, and he is always working for the good.

And if we live by faith, we can trust that what's happening today is meant for something greater than just today.

See, all of us have a choice.

We can live lives whose impact ends the day we breathe our last breath.

Or we can live lives that have an impact generations from now.

And it may not be that we ever get credit for that impact, but through faith, by faith, we can live lives that are so important, that are so meaningful, that their effect will be felt long after our hearts stop beating.

I believe that there are people in this room right now who are experiencing blessings because of prayers offered 50 years ago.

And you may not know that.

You may not understand that you had a grandparent, you had someone that did something that secured your future.

There's an ancient Hebrew story of a man that was found planting a specific kind of tree.

It's called a carob tree.

And carob trees are interesting because they don't produce fruit for 70 years.

So this man asked him, Why are you planting a tree whose fruit you will never eat?

And the man responded and said, Because I eat the fruit from the trees my grandfather planted.

And I want the same for my grandchildren.

See, by faith, by faith, we can plant carob trees for the future, for our future, for our children's future, for generations to come.

But if we live by sight, we never will.

By faith, we understand that God is working at a distance, and we want to live lives that matter in the distance.

My son, he's five now, he's playing T-ball for the first time.

And he's pretty good.

I'm a dad, so I'm gonna say that, right?

Um obviously he's got a future in professional sports.

You know, genetically at 5'9, I've really I've really done my job to help him with that.

Um but one of the very first times that he ever stood at the plate, he hit the ball all the way to the fence.

It was awesome.

And that thing had some distance, right?

It it went to the fence.

Well, now that's his standard.

So now if he hits the ball and it doesn't go to the fence, he's like, he's dejected.

He sits on first base like this.

I'm like, Liam, you hit the ball.

He's like, it didn't go to the fence.

Doesn't count if it doesn't go to the fence, because we celebrated that so much.

See, that first that first hit, it had distance.

And so now he desires distance.

I mean, how many of us want to live lives that have that have some distance?

We have the opportunity to.

In our families, in this church, in this community, by faith, we live lives that go further and further than we could ever take them ourselves.

So, how do we do that?

What are some practical steps?

What's something we can do right now?

There's a lot that we can do.

We can pray.

You know, prayers, prayers are not limited by anything, right?

You you can pray for something happening far away.

You can pray for what's going on in the Middle East and all the atrocities that are happening over there, and God will hear it, and God will work.

There's not like a proximity to prayer.

God's never gonna say, hey, actually, you have to be 10 feet or less.

You gotta be close to whatever you're praying for.

I prayers don't stretch beyond 10 feet.

That's not how it works.

Prayers also aren't limited by time.

You pray for your family today, and God hears that.

That prayer does not expire.

That prayer does not end.

So every chance you get, offer prayers for everyone you can think of.

And don't just pray for them in the here and now, offer prayers for their future.

Offer prayers for the distant future.

Pray for your descendants, pray for your great-great-grandchildren because they'll exist.

And they may never know your name.

If Facebook is still around, maybe they can just look you up and that would be weird, but who knows?

But they'll feel your prayers because prayer is effective.

And we can go back to those last few verses in Hebrews 11 that we read.

And it was by faith that Isaac promised blessings for the future to his sons, Jacob and Esau.

It was by faith that Jacob, when he was old and dying, blessed each of Joseph's sons and bowed in worship as he leaned on his staff.

Have you ever been blessed?

I mean, really blessed by someone.

I don't mean blessed in the sense that they did something and you're like, they're such a blessing.

I mean, has anyone ever spoken a blessing over you?

It's powerful.

In the Hebrew culture, there were really two things you could speak over someone, a blessing or a curse.

And so if you're sitting here and you're going, I don't think I've ever had a blessing spoken over me, I bet you've had a curse.

Right?

Something that someone has said to you.

Something that someone said years and years ago that still sticks with you.

I have this memory, okay?

My greatest fear was shirts and skins.

That was my greatest fear growing up.

I played basketball.

I always just had a little bit extra.

I've had the body of a four-year-old man since I was 20, and you know, I'm just hanging on so that when I get there, it'll look like it's supposed to.

But one day we were doing a weigh-in, a weigh-in on our basketball team, and uh, and I weighed a little less than this other guy on the team who looked like he should weigh less than me.

And he just went, huh.

Well, I guess muscle weighs more than fat, you know?

And I was a 17-year-old guy, I should have been secure, but I wasn't.

And so, still to this day, that that phrase it rings in my mind, it drives me nuts.

That was a curse.

He spoke a curse.

I gotta let that go, don't I?

Okay.

Um, all of us know what it's like to have a curse spoken over us.

But have you ever had a blessing spoken over you, where someone said something to you that was so powerful, that was so filled with hope and belief in you and for you, that you have carried it with you your entire life.

And when things get hard and when things get rough, you go back to that blessing.

I didn't experience that until my late 20s.

But it shook something within me.

There's a woman that goes here named Irene, she leads our prayer team.

If you know Irene, she is someone that speaks blessings.

And I was going through something really hard.

There was a transition going on in my life that no one really knew about, and I was about to step into just more responsibility than I'd ever had before, and I was really nervous.

And Irene had nothing, she had no clue that that was going on.

But she came to me out of the blue and she said, Hey, God wants me to tell you something.

You are equipped.

You are equipped.

I want you to remember that.

And it almost made me cry.

I may have cried, I don't cry very often.

I think I may have cried like a very small, very masculine tear, but but there, I kid you not, there have been at least 20 times in the last year where I am struggling.

I'm having a really hard time believing that I've got what it takes to do whatever it is God has me doing, and those words, those words come right back into my mind.

You are equipped.

Have you ever been blessed before?

Have you ever spoken a blessing over someone?

Because you can do that today.

You can you can go to your kids, you can go to your spouse, you can go to a good friend, your parent, anyone, and you can speak a blessing over their life.

And you know what, at first it may feel weird.

But if you get if you get over that, that little feeling, and just say, you know what, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go past that.

I'm just gonna say, hey, I want you to know something.

And you speak life over that person.

You say something to that person that is so life-giving that they know the source is God, it'll change, it'll change more than you could ever realize.

As a church, as a family, as a community of people, let's be people that speak blessings.

Because when you speak a blessing, that blessing will never die.

The blessing that Irene spoke to me will live, will live long.

I'll keep it for all my days.

And you know what I've started to do?

I've started to speak that same blessing to my children, to my son, to my daughter.

Who is someone in your life that today you can go and you can speak a blessing to?

I know you've got someone.

I know that they would be, they would be moved and touched to hear it.

And how crazy is it that your life matters so much to God that that you have the ability, through just what you say, to live a life that has distance.

We're gonna pray and the worship team is gonna come back up and do one last song like we always do.

I know sometimes it's hard to give what you don't have.

And I understand that sitting in here, some of us might say, I've never been blessed before.

Maybe you should have been, maybe your parents should have spoken blessings over you, but all you got were curses.

And so we have people on the sides of the room, on both sides of the room, and during this last song and after, they are they are here for one reason, and that is to speak a blessing over you if you desire that.

If you would say to yourself, hey, I want to be blessed, I want someone to speak a blessing over me, that's why they're there.

So as we worship with one last song, as we kind of hang around and do our thing the rest of the afternoon, as you're hanging out to sign up for home groups, whatever it is, they're there for you.

To pray a blessing over you.

And if you've never had that experience, I mean at the very least, try it.

Because I've had it.

I used to be pretty skeptical of that kind of thing.

And I've taken those blessings with me for all my days since then.

By faith, we live lives that have distance.

By faith we pray.

By faith, we speak blessings over the people we love.

And by faith, the meaning and the impact of our lives stretches far beyond our years.

Let's pray together.

Jesus, thank you so much.

Thank you, God, for speaking blessings over us.

We are who we are because of what you said to us, because of the fact that you claimed us as your children, because you said that we're worthy.

That's how we know we're worthy, not because we have that sense within us, God, but because you spoke that blessing over us.

And it's a blessing that will never leave us, Jesus.

We just thank you.

For the fact that through you, through faith in you, we can live lives that have distance.

We can live lives, God.

Lives whose impact do not end the day we draw our last breath on this earth, but lives that have an impact that continues into generation after generation.

We want that for this church, for our families.

We want that for our children, Lord Jesus.

So thank you for caring so much about us that you've planned not just our future, but the future of our descendants.

We love you, Lord.

If there's anyone here that needs to hear a blessing, I pray that they would just get up and go and feel free to do so.

Thank you so much for all you do every day.

We love you, Jesus.

Amen.