Whack-A-Mole – Knocking Down Insecurity

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

We are wrapping up a series that I have just loved.

The series has been called Whack-a-Mole.

And in the series, we're asking how do we knock down the stuff in our life that just keeps popping up and distracting us or messing us up or causing us to stumble?

How do we knock those things down?

Week one, at the beginning of the month, I did a message on stress.

And so many Americans are over it.

They're overworked, overtired, overexhausted, overextended.

We just talked about what do we do with stress.

Then week two, Pastor Isaiah brought an incredible message on what we do with our disappointment.

What do we do when we're disappointed in life?

And it seems to keep popping up.

Then week three, my wife brought an incredible message on what we do with our anger.

Because for so many of us, it's just that secondary emotion that's there waiting to bubble up and take over.

Last week we had a guest speaker, took a pause on the series, but today I want to talk to you about a topic that if I could just be honest, I know this one plagues all of us.

Like if you're here and this doesn't affect you in some way, we want your secrets.

You need to write a book because this is no respecter of persons.

What we're going to talk about today, it gets us all.

To get us started, when I was in high school, and um every time I say that, it feels longer and longer ago.

At the end of the Civil War, when I was in high school in the 1900s, you know, that was a long time ago.

When I was in high school, I played basketball.

And some of you are new to this church and you think I could tell by looking at you.

Thank you.

Um I play basketball.

And I went to a very, very small school.

My graduating class was only 14 students, but I was the valedictorian and um doesn't mean much.

And because I was in this small school, everybody made the basketball team, and I was one of the better players on the team, and I started varsity multiple years, and I loved it.

I loved playing basketball.

Well, we were a small school, and to be honest, uh we we were not very good.

Again, I know shocker.

We were just not good.

And and there was there was a team that I'll never forget.

This was a boarding school.

And uh, boarding school, if you're unfamiliar with this idea, is a school where parents send their kids off and the kids live there.

And this was an all-male boarding school, and so what that meant was this school who was known all over the state for having a good basketball team.

The kids would go to class all day, and then at night, they had like nothing to do.

So they'd play basketball and they'd have basketball practice and they'd play pickup games and they would just hang out and play basketball.

Like all their whole day was basketball.

And there was one kid on their team named JJ, and I'll never forget JJ because JJ was incredible.

Like he owned us.

In one season, my senior year, we played the school two times.

The first time we played them, JJ scored 47 points on us.

47 in high school.

Now, why does that matter?

Because my team only scored 33 points the whole game, my whole team.

Are you right?

Are you with me?

He's good.

Second time we played them later in the season, I'm gonna be honest with you, we all walk into the locker room, not the most confident, not feeling like we've got this, not feeling like there's any chance at all.

And our coach gathered us together.

And it is the coach's job to rally the troops to get everyone on the same page.

And he says, guys, how many of you remember what happened to us last time we played?

We're all like, everybody remembers.

It was in the newspaper, coach.

Like, we all remember what happened.

And he goes, Okay, listen, I have an idea.

He looked, he said, Ryan, you're starting today.

Now, this makes no sense to you, but let me explain why this mattered, okay?

Every team has players that are good and they're athletic.

And then you've got some players who are like the leaders on the team.

They've got the good work ethic, the best attitude, and you need both of those.

My team had both of those, and then we also had Ryan.

Ryan was neither good or a leader, but what he was was talkative and funny.

Ryan never started a game.

I'll be honest.

There was a lot of games that Ryan never even saw the court.

He was just kind of on the team.

And so there was the day coach says, Ryan, you're starting.

And we were like, Coach, JJ, 47 points.

Are you and he goes, here's Ryan.

Come here, Ryan, here's what I want you to do.

He brought Ryan up, he put his arm around Ryan.

He said, Ryan, the whole game, I want you to guard JJ.

We're like, what are you talking about?

He goes, when they have the ball, you guard JJ.

When we have the ball on offense, you guard JJ.

The whole time that JJ is in the game, you're in the game, and here's what I want you to do.

Stay with him.

Well, coach, what if we have the ball?

Stay with JJ.

But what if I'm open for a shot?

You will never touch the ball.

Stay with JJ.

What if I'm wide open?

You will never be open.

Stay with JJ.

And here's what I want you to do: I want you to ask him any question you can think of.

Talk to him the whole time.

I never want your face more than 12 inches away from one of his ears.

Talk to him the whole time.

So the game starts, ball tips off, and Ryan is right up in JJ's ear the whole game.

I'm gonna be honest, I had a hard time playing because I was laughing so hard.

Because I'll never forget Ryan backpedaling as he's playing, and he starts off with some softball questions.

He's like, all right, buddy, let's talk.

What is your favorite breakfast cereal?

Are you a life cereal guy, more of a frosted flakes?

Oh, you're probably a Captain Crunch man, aren't you?

Right?

Then it was any TV shows you like recently, any movies you recommend, favorite ice cream favors, I'll tell you my top three, and he starts naming all of his things.

At one point, halfway through the first quarter, I hear him backpedaling.

He goes, Let's get a little more personal.

Boxers or briefs?

The whole time he's in his ear.

At the beginning of the second quarter, I promise you it went just like this.

They're backpedaling Ryan's face no more than a foot away from JJ, and he says to him, Let's talk about your mom for a few minutes, shall we?

JJ pushes Ryan, gets ejected from the game.

He only scored three points in the whole game before getting ejected.

Okay, for context, game one, 47 points, game two, three points.

It brought his scoring average from 47 down to a measly 25.

Now, this feels like the moment in a sermon where a pastor gets up and he says, with God, all things are possible and we won that game.

We didn't win the game.

There's no moral to the story except for this.

I wonder how many of us are a lot like JJ in our regular lives.

We're good.

We sense that there's something special in us.

Your whole life you've been talked about with hope and promise that you're gonna do great, extraordinary things with your life, but then the voices in your head start talking to you.

It causes you to doubt your confidence, to doubt your ability, to doubt God even at times.

And I want to speak to the person in the room, there's probably lots of us today, who, if we could be honest, the voices of insecurity ring so much louder than the voice of God.

How do you know the difference?

The voice of God always speaks to potential.

The voice of God always offers hope and confidence.

The voice of the enemy, the voice you hear in your mind sometimes that seems to outweigh and out volume the voice of God often speaks of lack of confidence, lack of hope, lack of this.

But we are the most insecure generation imaginable.

And for a thousand reasons.

We compare our lives to everyone around us.

We see greatness all the time.

We have a heightened sense of awareness all the time of what's happening all around us.

And if we could just be real for a moment, don't we compare our worst moments to everyone else's highlight reels?

We're insecure.

I just want to say this to you.

If you are going to live the life that God has for you, you have to knock down insecurity.

Just so we're on the same page, insecurity simply means a lack of confidence.

And I wonder how many of us, as we look around the world around us, we are so lacking in confidence.

So what do we do?

It's Halloween week coming up.

It's the week of costumes.

We wear a mask everywhere we go, don't we?

How are you?

I'm great.

How are you?

Life's good, all up and to the right, everything's fine, everything's wonderful, everything's chill, everything's good.

We pretend that everything is okay.

Why?

Because we have this fear as an undercurrent and an underscore to our life that if you really knew me, you couldn't possibly love me.

If you're here and you battle insecurity, if you're here and you wish that God would just give you a healthy dose of confidence, today is for you.

And today I want to go to an interesting Old Testament story to see God's principles for how we can be people who battle off and knock down insecurity and step into tomorrow in holy confidence.

To understand this, we're gonna go to an interesting book in the Bible.

It's the book of Judges.

It's one of those books that's early in the Bible, and if you kind of get lost in some of the books like Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, you might have a tendency to skip, but it is a beautiful book.

And to understand the story, let me help you understand what's happening in the world in the time that the book of Judges was written.

The people of Israel are living between being held in captivity in Egypt and eventually becoming a nation and having their own king.

And in Judges chapter 6, where we're gonna get in just a moment, the people of Israel are living in this interesting cycle.

Judges 6 · chapter mention

This is what this is what it looked like.

The people of Israel would sin.

And when they would sin, God would remove his hand of blessing and protection from them.

He essentially says, if you're gonna do things your own way, you live with the consequences of the decisions you're making.

And they would sin, and the sin would cause them to live in struggle.

Now I could take a side note for just a moment and say, if I could kind of diagnose our country, I would say this is where our country is right now.

It's like we're dealing with the consequences of our sin, and we're like, God, where are you?

And God's like, I'm here the whole time, but you do your thing, you get your results.

You do my thing, and you get my hand of blessing and provision and protection.

And so sin leads to struggle, and the people of Israel would often find themselves in struggle.

Sometimes struggle looked like slavery, sometimes it looked like oppression, but they would find themselves in struggle, and eventually they would wake up and say, Oh, when we were doing this God's way, we got God's results.

They'd cry out to God for forgiveness, and God would send a way of saving them.

And they would walk in that for a season and then start the whole cycle over again.

Are you with me on this?

So here's what's happening.

The people of Israel, they're in this moment of sin.

Judges chapter 6, verse 1 reads like this.

Judges 6:1

It says, The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so they sinned, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites.

Sin leads to struggle.

Now, the Midianites were a neighboring country.

They were the strong, strong arming, marauding kind of army.

And they came in and they destroyed everything for the people of Israel.

Skip down a few verses.

Verse 6 says this Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help.

So there was a struggle, and then they turn to God for help.

They cry out to God for help.

Now, this is all happening, and then the story kind of takes a shift, and it goes from being the big picture of what's happening in Israel to a man.

A man who, if we could just be honest, and what I love about scripture is how honest it is, a man who lived with insecurity.

It says this just a few verses down in verse 11.

The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the yoke in Ophrah that belonged to Joash, the Abyssarite.

Now pause here for just one second.

I want you to understand something.

This is like, this is these are normal people dealing with normal challenges and problems.

And when it says this, it says the angel of the Lord came.

Some scholars believe that the way this is written in Hebrew actually refers to Jesus himself.

It says an angel of the Lord, or Jesus himself, came and he sat down and he says this.

It goes on to say this.

He's at this tree where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press to keep it from the Midianites.

I'm gonna pause here for just a moment.

Now remember the Midianites have come, they've kind of taken over, they're burning and destroying everything.

And we meet a guy named Gideon.

If you know the story, you have this tendency of skipping ahead in the story, but but stay here in the story.

It says he's threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites.

Let's pause here.

In the ancient world, wheat was a massive important product.

It literally was the source of a lot of the food and grains that they would eat.

And here's how the wheat process worked: wheat would be harvested and wheat would be separated into two parts.

There was the food part of the wheat, and then there was called the chaff.

The chaff was this really lightweight, kind of like it was the part that protected the food.

So what they would do is they would often go onto the highest point of the side of a mountain or a hill, and as the wind would blow off of the Mediterranean Sea, they would take pieces of wheat and they would throw it up in the air, and the wind would carry away the chaff because it was so light, but then just the food product, the meat part of it, would fall down and they would gather it up.

But what does it say about Gideon?

He's not up at the top of the mountain where it would be visible, he's hiding at the bottom where the wine press was.

The wine press is like the basement.

Why?

Because when they would press grapes, the the juice or the wine eventually would flow out of the grapes and it would just flow into the lowest part.

Why is he there?

Why is he not up invisible?

It's because he's scared.

It's because he's hiding.

It's because he doesn't want to be seen.

And I want you to see the next verse.

It says, When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, The Lord is with you.

Mighty warrior?

Doesn't this feel like a contradiction?

The Lord is with you, mighty warrior who's hiding in fear and shame.

Isn't it interesting that the angel calls him a mighty warrior?

Why does this matter?

We'll talk about this more in a moment, but here's a preview.

It's because what we tend to see in ourselves is our insecurity and our inability.

What God sees in you is your potential and the hope that he has for you.

God sees you for who he created you to be, not just who you see yourself as.

And he says to Gideon, you're a mighty warrior.

A few verses down, Gideon says, What?

Well, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up.

Pardon me, my lord, Gideon replied.

Like you sure you got the right guy?

How can I save Israel?

My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.

To contextualize it a little bit, he's like, How could you possibly use me?

I'm from Polk County, and I'm from the weakest of the week.

I'm from Bartow.

Like, how could I possibly touch the nerve there?

Like, how could you possibly use me?

I'm an NFL fan.

You know, like I'm from the weakest of the week, the NFC South, and I'm a box fan.

Like, how could you possibly use me?

How could you use me?

Please email your complaints to Ryan at access.tv.

He tells God who he's not, and the verse goes on to say this.

The Lord answered, I will be with you.

Side note, and if God is with you, that's all you need.

He says, And you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.

And Gideon replied, If I have now found favor in your eyes, here's what I want you to do, and this is what we all say.

Give me a sign that this is really you talking to me.

Please do not go away until I come back and bring an offering and set it before you.

So Gideon goes and he gets some meat, and he sets up some sort of an altar or a table, and he sets the meat on it, and he asks for a sign that the angel would somehow prove that he's real.

He goes on to say this.

Then the angel of the Lord touched the meat, and the unleavened bread, and with the tip of his staff that was in his hand, fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and all the bread, and the angel of the Lord disappeared.

That would be enough for me.

Wouldn't it be enough for you?

And when Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, Alas, sovereign Lord, I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face, but the Lord said to him, Peace, do not be afraid, you are not going to die.

To which I would have been like, I didn't know death was on the table.

What are you talking about?

And here's the problem with asking God for a sign signs never last.

You get a sign from God, and what do you immediately do?

Cool, but like what if I was wrong?

Like, what if I misread that situation?

I need another sign.

So the next few verses go on to say that Gideon asked God for more signs.

In fact, what he does is he says, God, here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna set out a fleece.

And tomorrow when I wake up, I want the fleece to be wet, but I want the ground around it to be dry.

He wakes up and that happens.

He goes, Ah.

What if I missed it?

Let's do it this time, but in reverse.

This time the fleece is dry, but everything else around it is wet.

And this happens again, and he's like, fine, fine, fine.

I get it.

I get the point.

I get it.

Maybe you're with me.

I'll do what you say.

So Gideon goes on and he assembles an army.

And I want you to see this.

He assembles an army of 32,000 soldiers to fight for Israel.

Maybe this sounds awesome to you, but what we know from reading the verses, it says that these are not like mighty warriors, these are like starving farmers.

So he's got this weak group of people.

And it tells us that the Midianite army was 120,000 people.

Okay, for context, I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit.

For context, I want you to look at this picture of the stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This is important for you to see.

This is the largest stadium in America.

107,601 fans fit in here to watch a terrible cheating football team every single week.

107,000.

So if we were to cover the field, this might be 120,000 people.

It's 120,000 versus 32,000.

Are you with me on this?

The odds are four men to every one that they have.

But goes on to say this.

It says, The Lord God said to Gideon, You have too many men.

And I think the Hebrew word here is, whoa, like what do you mean?

The too many men.

He says, I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, my own strength to save me.

Now announce to the army, anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead.

Now, if I'm I'm Gideon, I will get up and say it like this.

Brave soldiers, the Lord has said to me, If any of you are scared, you can go home, but probably none of you will leave, because we are the strongest of the strong, the bravest of the brave.

So 22,000 men left, while 10,000 remained.

Are you with me on this?

So we went from 32,000 down to 10,000, but then it says, But the Lord said to Gideon, Hold up, there's still too many men, take them down to the water and I will thin them out for you there.

This is the first drinking game in Scripture, okay?

So they go down to the river and they some of them drink water in different ways, and God says, The ones who drank this certain way, I want you to keep them.

The Lord said to Gideon, with the three hundred men that lapped, I will save you and give the Midianites into your hand.

What?

He went from 32,000 to 10,000 down to 300.

He says, Let all the others go home.

Okay, I want you to see the insurmountable odds stacked against Gideon.

Originally he had four men to one men odds.

Then it dropped to 12 to 1.

Now it's 400 to 1.

How is God going to come through?

And then God does what God does, and God gives Gideon an amazing idea.

He says, Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to get some clay pots, I want you to get some torches, and I want you to get some ram's horns that'll serve as trumpets.

Here's what we're going to do.

In the middle of the night, I want you to surround the army of the Midianites, and on my command, blow the horns, smash the pots, and light the torches on fire, and light different things around you on fire.

So here's what the verse goes on to say.

It says, dividing the three hundred men into three companies, he placed trumpets and empty jars in the hands of all them with torches inside.

When all the people were sleeping, they set off this plan.

There was so much noise and so much commotion that when the Midianites woke up, they were in a daze, disillusioned, they were all disoriented, and they turned on each other thinking they were being attacked.

Those who didn't die fighting themselves took off running in every different direction.

And it'd be really easy in this moment to blow past the point of the story, in my opinion, to pay attention to a secondary point.

What is the secondary point?

God always comes through.

He does.

He always comes through.

But I don't want to live in that for a moment.

I want to live where we are.

You see, it's easy for us to know the end of the story and to skip our part of the story.

We meet Gideon, and God has to say to him, I see something in you that you don't see in yourself.

So how do we do this?

How do we battle insecurity?

If you have your message notes, write these three things down.

Number one, we fight insecurity with proper identity.

Proper identity.

Gideon can't see in himself who God sees him as.

Verse 12 says it like this we just read it.

When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, The Lord Is with you, mighty warrior.

He says, I see in you something you don't see in yourself.

If I were to ask you to take an hour today, to write down everything that is true about who you are, what would your list look like?

There's lots of things that are true about you.

Your height is true about you, your eye color is true about you, your hair color might be true about you.

Right?

Your job is true about you, who you voted for is true about you, your family is true about you, where you were born, where you've lived, where you've been, what you've accomplished, all true about you.

But your identity is something different.

Your identity is the truest thing about you.

I want you to stay here for just a moment.

Because there are lots of things that are true about you, but if we're not careful, what we tend to do is we tend to elevate lots of things that are true about us to the place of our identity.

Let me say this to you.

You are not what you do, you are not what you've accomplished, you are not your best moments, and you are not your worst moments.

You are not who you voted for, you are not how much you earned, you are not the victim of that sexual assault, you are not the end result of that harassment that's happened in your life.

You are not beaten up and destroyed because of the divorce or because he or she left you.

You are none of those things.

Those things might have happened, they might even be true, but they are not the truest thing about you.

What is the truest thing about you?

The book of Ephesians is six chapters.

The first three chapters are on identity.

The last three chapters are on the stuff we do, they're on our works.

We tend to focus on that backwards.

We tend to think I don't feel good about myself.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna work on my behavior.

No, no.

Behavior flows from your identity.

According to Paul, and this is found 14 times in Ephesians 1 alone, your identity is found in two words.

In Christ.

In Christ.

You are a son or a daughter of God.

This is who you really are.

Lots of things can be true about you.

They come and they go, they change like the direction of the wind.

But the truth is, in Christ is your truest identity.

And I want you to get this.

In Christ, your identity is given, not earned.

So you can stop exhausting yourself trying to earn God's favor and blessing and approval when it's already been given to you.

In the book of Ephesians alone, there are five different phrases that Paul uses to tell you who you are in Christ.

He says, In Christ, we are chosen.

We are adopted, which means he chose to put us in his own family.

We are redeemed, which means our heart is returned to the way it was intended to be.

We are marked, which means we are set apart, and we are purchased, which means God paid a great price for you.

How much are you worth?

You're worth whatever someone is willing to pay for you.

How much did God pay for you?

His own son.

How much more valuable could you possibly be to God?

Like, what if in a moment we ended with like that moment, if you've ever known someone that's walked through chemo and they've been on the cancer floor and they get their final dose of chemo and they're declared in remission and they walk out and they ring the bell?

You know this?

It's one of the most beautiful moments.

It's moving.

People come from all over the hospital to see this and to clap and to celebrate the person because they came in one way with one condition, but they leave in a different condition.

How incredible would it be if in a moment we rang the bell of freedom, no longer tied to the wrong identity, no longer tied to what was said to us or about us or done to us, but instead we walk out of fear not just in our own confidence, but in holy confidence.

Number two, you need to understand this.

Confidence from anything temporary is temporary.

I know that's gonna seem so silly, but we tend to try to find our confidence in two places.

We try to find our confidence in signs and in comparison.

What does it mean?

Well, signs, we're always asking God for a sign.

God, if you want me to do this, show me.

God, if you want me to marry this girl or to ask this girl on a date.

Give me three green lights in a row.

You get two green lights, and you're like, oh, this is good, and you look and there's a red light.

So what do you do?

You just slow down a little bit and you get your sign, you get your green light, right?

We all do this.

The problem with tying your confidence to signs is signs are always changing.

They're always moving.

We never fully arrive.

It's what psychologists call goalpost syndrome.

You know what this is?

You think to yourself, if I can ever get to this place, I'll be happy.

If I can never get to this place, I'll be content.

And you get there and it's like the line moves.

Like you're never fully arrived.

Signs do the same thing to us.

We're always looking for another sign.

Instead of looking for signs, we should actually look back and we should build altars.

What are altars?

In the Old Testament, they're places where people would stack stones as a point of remembrance.

God, if I ever get back to this place, if I ever return here, I will know, I will celebrate, and I will remember that you are you, you are God, and you are good.

Altars point us to the faithfulness of God.

It's a big deal.

So we look for God in our we look for confidence in signs, but we also look for him in comparison.

Now, this is so funny.

For Gideon, he was looking for God in the signs.

We talked about his signs, but in comparison, remember he said, I'm the weakest of the weak.

Like my family's weak, we're a bunch of nobodies, and I'm like the most nobodyist of all the nobodies.

Remember this?

We do this too, don't we?

And here's the funny thing.

Did anybody have parents or grandparents that like to tell you how hard they had it as kids?

Remember this?

We had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow, and we didn't have shoes.

Remember this?

I was lucky to get a bread sandwich.

Like, what are you talking about, right?

Like it's a hard, they might have had it harder than us, but can I tell you one way our generation's had it harder than any generation in the history of the world?

Every single day you wake up and look at a device that's probably got multiple apps on it that feeds you a daily dose of discontentment.

You wake up and you look at it and you think, I'm not doing the best.

I skipped the gym today, and what do you what happens?

You get on and you see someone doing some sort of squat, perfect body.

They got abs, their abs got abs, right?

And you feel bad about yourself.

You pull it up and you look, and there's a mom who's like, Oh, just spent a few hours making my kids organic apple juice, and you're like, Yeah, I'll take a number seven at McDonald's, like you just feel bad about yourself, right?

We all do this, we all compare our lives, and the funny thing about comparison is we compare our worst moments to everyone else's highlight reel.

Why?

Because people only post their best moments.

I couldn't find it, but I went back looking the other day for a picture a few Easters ago.

We took our kids to the Easter bunny, and my kids were freaking out at the Easter bunny.

The picture is hilarious.

They're screaming, they want nothing to do with it.

And I went and I found another picture of them where they were happy and their faces were like almost in the same place.

And I photoshopped their happy faces over the screaming faces because I wanted everyone to think my kids didn't have psychopathic tendencies.

And you may not go that far, but we all do that.

We want everyone to see our best moments.

Comparison, Eleanor Roosevelt said, is the thief of joy.

And I wonder how many of us we've tried so hard to find happiness, to find confidence.

In comparison, it will always fall short.

Final point, number three confidence, real confidence comes from obedience.

Think about Gideon for just one last moment.

God says to him, I want you to do something that makes no sense at all.

Dwindle your army, which already is facing insurmountable odds, from 32,000 down to 300 and watch as I come through.

Okay.

Do you think you would have stayed and obeyed?

Do you?

Like, like if God asks you to do something that made no sense at all, would you obey?

And God gives us challenges all the time.

He asks us to be obedient to him, and we're like, oh, but God, it doesn't really make sense.

God's like, I want you to honor me with your sexuality.

But God, if you don't know what the rest of the world around me is doing, this is the 21st century.

It's different.

Okay, God.

God's like, I want you to honor me with your money.

The first 10% of everything you get.

Bring it back to me.

But God, that doesn't make sense in my mind.

God's like, I want you to honor me in every part of your life.

And we come up with excuse after excuse after excuse.

If Gideon offers God his excuse, I want you to listen to me.

He becomes nothing more than a footnote in the history of the Bible.

But he offers God a yes.

You want to see God come through for you?

Make a decision to just say yes, to just trust him.

Quick story and we're done.

When Access, before Access got started, I'll never forget, I was in the middle of a master's degree program, traveling all over the country, speaking to at camps for kids.

Had been married six months.

My wife called me one day, a little bit concerned.

She's like, I was doing my makeup and I found like a lump in my leg, and it's just it's just weird.

Like, I don't know.

I was like, babe, you're 23.

It's gonna be a bruise or something.

She went to the doctor, one test led to another, led to another, and pretty soon they diagnosed that it's stage two, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

That's the fancy way to say she had cancer.

She went through a whole battery of tests.

I flew home from one camp a day early to be with her.

And I got home like the night before she was to start chemo.

None of this on our radar, none of it making sense at all.

Never forget sitting with her on the couch.

She held her arm so tight because they put a pick line in and she was uncomfortable to even move it.

Gingerly held my arm around her and I said, Let's pray.

We just prayed.

We said, God, look, I don't know what you're doing through this.

But someday when we get past this, may we never forget how we feel in this moment, right here, right now.

I think that's the reason, by the way.

Some 17 years later, access is a place where people come and they feel valued and known.

And it doesn't matter if there's 50 people or 50,000 people, it's like it is the DNA, it is the fabric of our church.

It's who we are.

And from that moment, when things didn't make sense, we just said God, yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Can't tell you how many times over the last 16 years there's been Mondays where I just wanted to throw in the towel, quit, throw it all away.

But we gave God a yes.

Let me ask you a question for you.

What do you think is on the other side of your yes?

Like, how different would your life be if you just said, God, whatever you ask?

Yes.

Like whatever it takes, the answer is yes.

Here's my point.

I think it changes everything.

The point of this message isn't to try to get you to be more self-reliant and more self-confident.

It's not the goal at all.

Self-reliance and self-confidence is what I would call cockiness.

The goal of this message isn't that.

The goal of this message is to get you to say yes and to realize that your confidence doesn't come from your abilities, it doesn't come from having more grit or perseverance.

Real confidence comes from God.

So what if today, in this next moment, we made this decision to make a great trade?

We trade our insufficiency for all of God's strength.

We trade our insecurity for holy confidence.

We trade our lack, our fear, our worries, our anxiety, and we pick up the confidence that only He can offer.

Let's have one moment of group confession.

If you would say, Jason, look, if I could just be honest, insecurity, comparison, it's been a trap for me, and I have riddled with it and dealt with it my whole life.

I'm gonna be the first to raise my hand.

If you would say this is you, would you just raise your hand?

Because I need us to see that so many of us live our lives this way.

If this is you, I'm gonna ask you to do this.

Would you take your hands and just put them out to God like this?

I'm gonna pray over you now.

So, God, we today make this decision to ask you to make a trade for us.

May we trade our inability for your ability, our lack of strength for your strength, our insufficiency for all of your sufficiency.

God, today may we trade our insecurity for the confidence that can only come from you.

God, my prayer today is that we will leave today with a different identity.

May we not see ourselves as our failures, our mistakes, our worst moments, but instead may we see ourselves as people who are found in Christ.

God, may we not settle for just temporary signs or for comparison, that may we find our strength in you.

God, we love you, and I pray that today is a day of freedom for us.

That when we walk out of this place, we leave insecurity behind and we step in tomorrow with your confidence that only you can provide.

We love you, we thank you for it.

In Jesus' name.