More

Jesus, thank you so much for how you love us.

Um your love is it is overwhelming.

And just in this room this morning, I I'm certain that that we're all in your in your presence, that you're here, you're among us, and that your love is what we feel.

And I just pray that right now, Father, you would speak to us.

You would speak to our hearts.

God, use whatever I have to say.

Let it be what you have to say.

Um, and even if I'm what I'm talking about is something totally different than what anyone in this room needs to hear, that you would just just intentionally deposit whatever you have into all of our hearts.

Whatever we just want to hear from you.

That's all we're saying, Father.

We love you, Jesus.

You're amazing, and we're so proud to be your kids.

Amen.

Well, uh, you might have noticed that this morning's been a little bit different.

Uh, you know, the worship style and everything like that.

It's a little more unplugged.

This is our version of unplugged.

You know?

This is good.

Yeah.

His hand's unplugged, which is still plugged in.

But um, but you know, we're doing things a little different this morning.

We're like Nathan said, we're gonna have Lord's Supper toward the end of uh of our morning.

But uh but if you're one of our high school students or someone that uh was a part of our high school team that went on our recent high school summer road trip, this morning might feel a little bit more familiar to you.

We got back about three weeks ago, and uh Nathan in Dallas led worship for us on the trip, and and it was kind of similar to how this morning's been, the two of them with some people behind them and all that.

Uh but it was an incredible experience.

And this morning, actually, I want to spend a few minutes talking to all of us about our student group and uh and something that God did recently and how it's really something for all of us.

One of my big roles here at the church is I work with our teens.

And I guess I'll just start by saying this we have an absolutely phenomenal group of teenagers at this church.

I mean, we really do.

Right there, yeah, there they are, right there.

Um and seriously, guys, like I'm proud of you guys.

You guys are amazing.

I've been here a little over four years, and uh and so I've had a chance to get to know our students really well.

And some of them that are in high school now were in fifth grade whenever I first came here, which is really humbling because I'm not a tall man.

And you know, when you have fifth graders that a few years ago you're high five and they're jumping, and now all of a sudden they walk in and they're like here, and you're just and they're girls, it's really, you know, it's hard.

But uh it's okay, you know, it's okay.

Uh size of the heart, not the height, right?

There you go.

Um but we do, we have a phenomenal group of students.

Um, and I couldn't be more proud of the people we have.

The more I get to know them, the more I'm just impressed.

Because they are, they're just like us, you know, they love God and they are they're trying to follow Him and do things His way and in their life, just like we're trying to do it in our life, and and they're doing well.

And we're really blessed as a church to have the youth group that we have.

It's amazing in the last four years how many people have come from our student group to now be in a volunteer role here at the church, doing all kinds of stuff.

It's really cool to see.

And so I just wanted to say that.

And like I said this morning, we're gonna have a sign-up for anyone that's uh interested in being a part of our student team.

We do things a little bit differently with our students here at His Hands than I've ever seen in a church setting.

Um, it's just kind of structured a little bit differently.

We don't uh we still get together every week.

We we have you know a message, we talk about life and following God, we have time set aside for prayer.

But what we do a little bit differently is we spend a lot of time and a lot of focus on just getting to know our students and helping them get to know each other.

There's a lot of time that's given to just building relationships.

And and one level that sounds like it's not a big thing because it's just hanging out and getting to know people, but you know, it's really one of the most important things that there is for all of us to have people in our life that follow Jesus like we do.

It's such an encouragement.

It's one of those things that keeps us going whenever we're having a rough time.

And and for teenagers, it's invaluable because as they walk up and down the halls of their school every day to see people and know people that they're connected to here and be reminded that they're not the only ones following Jesus, and that even though it's tough to do in that environment, that they're not alone.

I mean, that's huge for them.

And so we spend a lot of time with our kids like that, and what's what's happened as a result is we have this really tight-knit group of students.

I mean, they're they're a very tight-knit group, even though it's not a small group in number.

On a high school night on Thursdays, we might have 75 plus high school students on a given night.

And three years ago it was 15.

And so it's grown over the last few years tremendously, but as it's grown, it's also grown in terms of its tightness.

And so our group now of 75 plus is actually closer than our group of 15 was three years ago.

It's a really cool dynamic that God has sort of created here.

Um, and we're always looking for people that want to be a part of that.

And so if you're here this morning and that sounds like something you'd like to invest in, um, I'll be at the table out in the lobby, and there'll be a little sign that says youth team sign up and you can come find us, ask questions.

It'll just take a second, we'll follow up with you.

But um I'll say this from personal experience, and I know from everyone that's ever helped with our kids, if uh, man, if there's something to invest time in that has an impact, that the time that you will spend you know pouring into our students, it will be repaid in full.

I mean, you'll see uh you'll see some awesome things happen, and and uh you'll definitely be blessed by it.

I guess that's what I'll say, because I'm blessed by it every week.

So if that's you know, if that's something you're interested in, see me afterwards, all right, I'm gonna stop rambling about how awesome our students are.

They're good.

They know it.

Um I said a few minutes ago that I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that God did on our recent uh high school summer road trip and how that is for all of us.

And so we took 50 of our high school students um to the Smoky Mountains, stayed up in the Gatlinburg Pigeon Forge area.

That's our our group that we went.

Yeah.

Good group.

Um and we had I mean, we had a blast.

I mean, we had an absolute blast.

It was actually one of the highlights of my year so far.

Um, probably one of the highlights of my entire time here at his hands, and I say that, I say that having driven a 15-passenger van, which in and of itself is an experience.

If you've never I know some of us in here have motorcycles, and that's great.

Motorcycles are cool.

But 15-passenger vans, there is an adrenaline that you feel.

When you pass a semi and the top heavy and the wind catches it, and you're just like, don't, that's it's it's amazing.

So, wind in your hair, that's overrated.

But not only was it a 15-passenger van, that's an experience in and of itself, a 15-passenger van, this is what I was driving, in which 10 of the 15 passengers were 15-year-old girls.

That is an experience that will change your life.

And to the, and then you guys know who you are, but to the three guys that I made sit with me in that van, I'm sorry.

Um, but I I needed you so badly.

So thank you.

There's only so much Lady Gaga I mean can take.

Um but man, no, seriously though, it was an incredible trip.

We had a great time.

We did a lot of great stuff.

We went to the Smoky Mountain National Park, went on some big hikes, did the Klingman's Dome hike, where you get to the highest point in the smokeies, and that was a lot of fun.

We had a group of students that got up at six o'clock in the morning for an optional, optional hike, a really difficult hike, up to the very top of one of the mountains in the Smoky Mountain National Park, and we got up there and the view was amazing, and I was terrified, but not showing it, and it was it was fantastic.

Um, and all that stuff was good.

All of our activities, they were fun.

We had a good time.

But what made that trip so incredible was the way that God showed up.

Because he showed up in a big way.

Every summer when we take our students there, we have baptisms, and we do it kind of in a really cool place that we found.

It's it's kind of out in the wilderness, and it's sort of adventurous, and the water is so cold.

Um but it's it's just it's cool.

And this summer, we had 15 of our high school students got baptized and just went all in with Jesus.

And that was awesome.

It was awesome.

And what was even crazy about that is I remember we were going and getting ready to do the baptisms, and I was thinking, man, how many of our students are gonna get baptized?

Because last year we had 30 students get baptized on the trip.

And so, you know, and I was looking around, I'm like, man, most of these students were baptized last year, and basically everyone that wasn't got it was it was incredible.

And um, you know, God just I guess I'm sharing all that just to share that God's doing big things with our students here at His hand, just like He's doing big things in our lives.

I wanted to give some visibility to that.

But the way He showed up on this trip for us, um, it really opened my eyes and reminded me of some things about God that I just got excited about sharing this morning.

Our theme for the trip was the word more.

More.

That was our theme.

And God gave my wife that that word through a little bit of Ephesians chapter 3.

Ephesians 3 · chapter mention

I want to share that with all of us this morning because this is what we took our theme from, and this is what I want to start with in terms of what we're thinking about.

It says, when I think of the wisdom and scope of God's plan, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the creator of everything in heaven and on earth.

I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources, he will give you mighty inner strength through his Holy Spirit.

And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him.

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love.

And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is.

May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great, you will never understand it fully.

Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Now, glory be to God.

By his mighty work, by his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we could ever dare to ask or hope.

And there's a lot there.

We could probably spend a month and talk about everything that's in there and not even scratch the surface.

But what God really impressed upon my wife and upon myself through that was the word more.

That it was all about God wanting us to have more.

I mean, some of the things it talked about was God giving us more wisdom and understanding.

And in the way that that was written when Paul wrote the word wisdom, that word actually in the Greek language meant wisdom as far as knowledge of things of God.

So an understanding of how God works and who he is.

And the word understanding that meant the practical things that we need to have a healthy and successful life here.

And so God wants us to have more understanding of him and more wisdom in terms of life to have a good life.

It talks about Jesus being more and more at home in our hearts.

He talks about how wide, deep, long, and high God's love is.

That there is more to God's love than we imagine.

He mentioned being filled with the fullness of the life and power that comes from God.

And I just think that's such a cool phrase: to be filled with the fullness of God.

And then finally, it said that God can do infinitely more than we could ever even ask for.

It was all about more, experiencing more of God in our lives, more of his love, more of his power, just more of him.

And so we talked about that with the students every single night.

We got together and we had two cabins, one for the guys, one for the girls, and every night we would cram into the living room of one of the cabins and worship.

And then I would talk for a little bit about more, about having more of God.

And we asked our students to ask God for more of him.

We just said, hey, if you want more of God, ask him for it.

And some of our students were just excited.

One of our guys, after our first night, went upstairs and just read an entire chapter of the Bible and wrote stuff and came and found me, and I was like, Oh, that was cool.

I was playing ping-pong.

That makes me feel bad, but you know, that was good.

Some of our students expressed frustration that they had asked God for more, and they felt like they'd never had that experience that they wanted to have with God, so they were a little frustrated because they felt like this was something they tried and it hadn't worked.

But the point is, their desire for more was there.

They may have been a little frustrated they hadn't had that yet, but they wanted it.

They wanted more of God.

And so every night we talked about having more of God.

And the last night we got together, God gave us more.

We got together for worship.

Uh, Nathan and Dallas sung a few songs.

I got up and shared a few words, and then we were supposed to have 10 minutes of worship just to kind of close out our night.

And that 10 minutes ended up lasting an hour.

And I didn't even realize it.

And I was in the back of the room and I was watching our students worship God, and they were connecting with God in a way that I have never seen them connect with God before.

And I was I was blown away.

I mean, they were worshiping God, and and I was I was experiencing God through seeing them worship.

And after that hour had gone by, I mean, looked around the room, and you know, there were tears in people's eyes, and you could just tell that there had been an experience with God, and what was great is that it wasn't some forced emotional thing.

It was just, we were worshiping, and God showed up.

He does that.

And after that was over, you know, everyone was sort of silent.

There were there was, you know, it was just it was it was a cool moment, and probably for one of the first times ever in my life, I didn't have anything to say.

Um and so I got up in front just to kind of close the night, and I was sitting there scratching my head, and the the only thing that popped in my head was just you know, I guess this is what happens when you ask God for more.

You know?

And that was my whole takeaway.

It was so simple from the entire trip with these kids, and we'd spent so much time and energy praying for it and helping kids get sponsored and all this stuff and planning, and then the big takeaway was just, man, we asked God for more, and he gave us more.

And for me, it was a personal reminder of his heart to give us more of himself, and it was a challenge for me in my life to make more room for him, to make room in my life for more of God.

You know, I grew up in church, and and I grew up in a church environment that actually was mostly really good, um, but most of what I heard in terms of more with God was how God wanted more of us.

You know, I remember God wants more control, He wants more commitment, He wants more devotion, He wants more time, He wants more sacrifice.

And I grew up very aware of the fact that God wanted more out of me.

And that was sort of my focus with God, was giving him more.

And so I was very familiar with that, and all that's true.

God does want more of us.

So one of the lines in one of the worship songs we had this morning was that he's jealous.

He is a jealous God.

He is so passionately in love with us that he does not want to share us with anything that would take our focus off of him.

He wants our life to be full and for us to experience things that we enjoy, but he wants to be our primary focus because he loves us that much.

And so all that's true, and I was very focused with God wanting more out of me, but the concept of God wanting to give me more of him, or the concept of me asking for more out of God, for more of God, and that was totally foreign to me.

In fact, I probably would have thought that that was out of line to ask God for more.

You know, he was the one that asks us for more.

But the truth is, it is it is his heart that wants to give us more of him just as much as it wants us to give him more of us, if that makes sense.

He he is just as passionate about giving us himself as he is about asking for us to give ourselves to him.

There's a scripture in Jeremiah that I'd come across a year ago, and it really stuck out to me in a kind of a big way, and it's Jeremiah chapter 31.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

And what it's talking about is uh is Jesus.

This is years before Jesus is gonna come, but Jeremiah is prophesying about Jesus coming and changing the way our relationship with God works.

And in Jeremiah 31, he says this in verses 31 through 34 The day is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah.

And just to pause for a second, you know, God here is talking to Israel and Judah, but one of the things that Jesus showed us is that he's opened up those same promises and all that stuff to all of us.

And so he's really talking to us here as well.

God goes on to say, This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt.

They broke that covenant, though I love them as a husband loves his wife, says the Lord.

But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel on that day, says the Lord.

I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they will be my people.

And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, You should know the Lord, for everyone from least to greatest will know me already, says the Lord, and I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.

It's a really beautiful description of God's relationship with us.

There was one line in there that when I read it, it just sort of stuck with me, and it was God saying, I will be their God.

And they will be my people.

There's this really cool possessive thing going on here because, yes, we are his people.

We belong to him.

He is our king, he is our savior.

So we are his.

But before he said that we were his, he said that he was ours.

He started by saying, I will be their God.

So while we belong to him, he belongs to us too.

He has given himself to us.

He's not just God, he is our God.

He's ours.

And that's incredible.

His heart is for us to have him.

He wants to give us more and more and more of himself.

And all we have to do is ask him and make room for more, and he will give us whatever whatever space we allow.

And the things that he wants to give us, I mean, that's the stuff that we looked at in Ephesians 3.

It's more life.

It's more of his love, more wisdom and understanding and power and grace and forgiveness and strength and more of his Holy Spirit.

Just more and more of him.

That's what he wants us to have.

More.

More of God, the thing is, is more of him fixes so many of the things that we struggle with and deal with on a practical level.

More of God is the answer for so many of our needs.

It's amazing how much frustration we deal with by trying to fill our lives and feel full with things that aren't God.

And there's nothing wrong with love, and there's nothing wrong with success, and those things are fine.

It's not to say that God's against those things, but those things can't fill us the way that God can.

They just can't.

There's a very famous conversation that Jesus had with a woman in the book of Luke.

It's the story of the woman at the well.

Actually, it's in the book of John.

Jesus is talking to this woman while he's getting water out of a well, and he makes this sort of odd statement to her about living water.

This is a Samaritan woman.

She's not someone that follows the Jewish religion at that time.

And so she's someone that the Jewish people would have looked at as far from God.

She comes to this well and she's talking to Jesus.

And Jesus says, Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again.

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

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

So after this, Jesus asks this woman to go get her husband.

And she responds, I don't have a husband, I'm not married.

And Jesus, being Jesus, knows that.

And he reveals to her that he knows everything about her.

And he says, Yes, you're right.

You're not married.

The man you're living with right now isn't your husband.

In fact, you've been married five times before.

And she's shocked and blown away that Jesus knows all this about her.

But when Jesus says this, it must have sunk in what he was talking about when he said living water versus going and getting the water and being thirsty again.

He was telling her, it wasn't talking about water.

He was talking about her.

And he was saying that she had spent her whole life going to relationships with men to feel full and to get what she needed.

But every time it didn't last, she felt thirsty again, and she came back for more and more and more, and it never lasted, and she was in that same situation again.

And what Jesus was saying is that if you let me fill you, if you will get more of me, I will fill you in a way that no one else ever could, and you won't need that to feel full.

He was talking about himself and having more of him.

And I can very much relate to the woman at the well because I've spent most of my life trying to feel full by getting more out of people in my life and more out of things.

You know, I can think of a million things.

I spent most of my childhood trying to do well in school and sports, so I felt like I had more approval from my parents.

When I was a teenager in school, I did some really dumb things to try to get more acceptance from my peers.

When I was starting to work, you know, my my bosses, I needed to feel like I was the best employee they had ever had.

And so I would just spin my wheels to do anything I could to please whoever I worked for.

Because I needed to feel that approval.

I needed more.

I was using everything in my life to get more, to feel full.

And when it was money, I needed more security.

And so the more money in the bank account, that meant more security.

And so I would stress myself out and still do sometimes stress myself out, say, oh, I've got to have another thousand dollars in savings or something like that.

Because what if this happens, what if that happens, and I needed to feel secure, I need more.

And it's relationships and it's stuff and it's jobs and all these things, it's so Easy to go to them, just like the woman was with the men in her life and try to get more out of that.

I can even look at uh my relationship with my son.

I have a one and a half year old, well, not quite one and a half, I have a 15, 16 month-year-old son.

His name's Liam, and he's awesome.

And I've even found myself so far as a father using my relationship with him to get more.

You know, I really love it when he smiles and laughs, and I really don't like it when he cries.

And so, whatever I can do to keep him smiling, even if it maybe isn't the best thing for him, I'll do that sometimes because personally I want to feel loved by him.

I didn't realize that I did that until a few incidents happened.

One of his first words was the word cracker, and what he actually says is crack crack.

He says it a lot.

And uh my wife is very good at keeping him limited to you know one graham cracker, or maybe, you know, he's gotten a little bigger, so maybe it's a little more now.

But a few months back it was one graham cracker a day.

Well, there would be days where she was at work and it was my day off, and I would be home, and you know, he would come up to me and say crack crack, and so I'd give him a little piece, a little piece, and pretty soon he will have eaten one, and then he'd come to me again.

And if I'd say no, he would just cry.

And I didn't like that because that doesn't make me feel full of his approval and love, and I want to feel full.

So I would give him another and another, and she would come home and he would feed eat dinner, and and she would be like, Why isn't he hungry?

And I'm like, I don't know.

That is weird.

You know how many how many gram crackers did he have today?

One or twelve, I don't know.

Sleeve.

It's really hard to keep track of those things.

They and I I didn't realize that until uh a few months had gone by, and I had this moment where I realized that my relationship with my son, in in his eyes, I was basically a human cracker dispenser.

And that was it.

Because he he would go to Megan, this is when it clicked for me.

He went to Megan one night and he went to her on, she was on the couch, and he went, he went, crack crackra?

Like, can I have one?

And she said no.

And so he turned to me and he went, crackra.

Like that.

And I was like, oh no.

You know, he is in that moment.

I realized, I'm like, man, okay.

All right, something has to change, but it was so hard for me.

And what made it hard, I was like, why is it hard for me to say no to my one-year-old son?

He's not even gonna remember this moment.

And the reason is, is because I I want to feel full of love and approval.

And if I can get that from him, then if I need that, that's what I was doing.

What I really need is more of that from God.

Because all the things that I mentioned, all the things that we can think of for the most part, that we need, more of God gives us those things.

More of God gives us more love.

It gives us more approval.

You know, he said, I will never again remember your sins.

It gives us more security.

You know, our bank account is not our security.

Thank God.

He'll give us more of everything we need.

More of him, it is the solution.

And it's kind of like that in other things in life.

Sometimes we look at our life and we look at stuff that we want to change and we think I need less of this, I need to cut this out, I need less of this in my life, less of this.

I drink a lot of soda, and so I'm trying to cut back on soda.

And if all I focus on is less, if all I focus on is I just need to drink less soda, drink less, less.

It's really hard.

But if I drink more water, more of that actually makes it a lot easier.

Because then I'm I'm full and I don't feel thirsty and I don't need that.

And there's a lot of things in life that we could think of like that, where what we might think of is we need less, but the answer is actually more of something else.

And when it comes to God, he wants us to have more of him.

He wants us to have more of him.

So how do we have more of him?

There's two really short things, two really kind of practical things that came to my mind.

And the first thing is this, it's just ask him for more.

There's something really powerful about asking God for something.

In Luke 11, verses 11 through 13, Jesus said, You fathers, if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead?

Luke 11:11–13

Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion?

Of course not.

So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask them?

How much more?

He is a how much more God.

And when it comes to asking for Him, He does not hold back.

We're asking God for something He already wants to give us.

When you ask someone for something they don't want to give you, your chances of getting it are not high.

But when you ask someone to give you something they already want to give you, it goes up.

And as far as having more of Him, more of the Holy Spirit, more of whatever we need from Him, we can ask Him and know that He already wants to give us what we're asking for.

We can ask Him every day.

He will never grow tired of us asking for more.

We can put reminders on our cell phones to ask for more of God.

We can put something in our car, something on our computer screen, anything we can do to remind ourselves daily, God, give me more.

Give me more.

Another thing that came to mind other than just asking for God is making room for more of Him.

It's amazing the times where I'm frustrated in life because I don't feel like I'm experiencing enough of God, or times that I have not allotted very much space to experience Him.

And I think all of us are probably in this boat.

I hope.

I tend to overcommit myself, and I have so much stuff that I have to do that there's very little extra time left.

And to be honest, oftentimes, unfortunately, it's my time with God is one of the things that gets cut.

It shouldn't be that way.

I'm just being honest, it is.

But there are so many other things that I fill my time with that aren't bad at all.

It's just, you know, I mean, America's Got Talent is a very entertaining show.

Um and there's the main night, and then the results night, and you're like, whoa, it's crazy.

But there are times where I view those types of things as like those are musts.

And then at the end of the night, I'm tired and I don't have much left to give God.

And I'm not saying that we need to look at our life and what do we got to give up for God?

It might just be cutting back one thing, one thing in our life that maybe occupies a little bit too much time, thought power, focus.

Not that it's a bad thing that we need to get rid of, but just something needs to scale back and give that time to God.

Give him that energy and space and see what he can do.

Because the thing about God is he can do incredible things with 15 minutes.

You give him half an hour, you have no idea.

And sometimes it can be hard to do that.

Just half an hour a day, that's tough.

But if we give him that room and that space and that time, he will fill it with more of him.

How much more of God do we want?

It's really how much do we ask for, how much do we make room for?

Because that's what he'll give us.

The thing about God is that he's not intrusive.

The Bible says that he stands at the door and knocks.

He doesn't kick the door down and barge in and take over.

He stands and knocks.

And when we let him in, he comes in and he occupies it.

And when we let him have more room, he takes that.

But he's not gonna force it.

And so if we will just open that door and give him some space, he will fill it with more of him because he wants to.