What Do You See – When Your Dream Dies

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

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well, what a day, everybody.

Can we celebrate one more time?

All those people getting baptized.

What an amazing day.

Man, and look around.

We added almost 200 seats this week, and you keep filling them up.

You will not stop bringing your friends no matter what I ask you to do.

Thank you for being a church that cares about people.

We love you so much.

We are in part two today of a series that I've loved.

We started it last week, and the the series is called What Do You See?

What Do You See?

And what I believe for every one of us is that God has a vision for our life.

What happens is life has this way of clouding the vision.

Life has this way of hurting us, betraying us.

We walk through difficult seasons in our life, and what happens is we lose the capacity to trust God and to step into the plan, purpose, and direction He has for us.

But we said this last week.

God wants us to live with vision.

In fact, the word vision, we defined it this way last week.

Vision is a picture of God's preferred future for our life.

Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, said it like this in the book of Proverbs.

This is from the message translation.

He said, if people can't see, if you can't see with your heart what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves.

They trip over the present and they fall into the future.

And then there's this but, and I love this.

I love the word but in scripture because it tends to flip the script.

But it says, when they attend to what God reveals, they are the most blessed.

This word blessed in Hebrew literally means happy or content in their souls.

And I believe that God wants us to live a life that is not just full, but a life that is fulfilled, a life that makes a difference.

Let me tell you what we're gonna do in the series.

That was last week.

Next week, I want to talk to you about what is God's plan and purpose for each and every one of our lives.

Like what does God care about?

What does God see for all of us?

But today I want to talk about the middle.

I want to talk about the middle of when you have a vision for your life and then doing what God wants.

What do you do in the middle of all of that?

A few years ago, I had a weird experience.

Um, it was my birthday, and so I got a whole stack of cards from family and friends.

And you're I have the best friends in the world.

And someone gave me a gift card to a restaurant that's a unique restaurant, one that I don't go to very often, but I'm gonna be honest, I wasn't mad about it.

They got me an IHOP gift card.

And I'm not here to hate on IHOP.

Some people hate on it, but man, don't miss me with those pancakes.

I love their pancakes, it is so good.

And they gave me$50 to IHOP.

You are a king, you are royalty at IHOP with$50.

And so there was this one night when my wife and daughter were gonna be away.

And I said to my two boys, buckle up, boys, tonight is the night we become men.

That's what's gonna happen.

We rolled up into IHOP,$50 gift card, burning a hole in my pocket, and I said to my boys, listen to me, I want you to order anything you want.

If you want two meals, two meals.

Get the smiley face pancake, get the bacon and the eggs with the side of bacon and eggs.

Like, we're gonna do all of it tonight, you know.

And so we ate like kings.

We ate until our backs hurt, and then there was the moment the waitress brings me the bill, and I was so proud.

I was so, I was just so I was glowing in this moment.

Pulled this gift card out, gave it to her.

She scampered off and came back a few minutes later with that deer in the headlight look, you know I'm talking about.

Have you ever had your credit card declined before?

She comes back and she goes, sir, I am so sorry.

Um, the gift card didn't work.

It's like people love me.

This was a gift of love.

What are you talking about?

So I call the number on the back of the gift card, and the lady whoever works for IHOP said, sir, I don't see that this gift card was ever activated at all.

So I said, and so I paid for this meal.

We ate way too much.

I never would have spent that much at IHOP.

I spit all over the place.

I would never eat that much at IHOP were it not for this.

People can sometimes let us down, can't they?

People let us down.

Big ways, small ways, people let us down.

We understand that because we've walked through this life.

That's normal, right?

And then you ever buy something that makes a big promise and it lets you down.

I can't tell you how many things I've bought from as seen on TV commercials, and they all always seem to let me down.

They always do.

I have probably bought 20 items from the TV show Shark Tank over the years.

Almost every one of them has broken my heart in some way or another.

I have bought every piece of exercise equipment you can imagine.

When I was in high school, I saw a commercial for this ab roller, and the guy that they were showing had abs, and his abs had tiny little abs as well.

Like he was ripped.

I was like, that's gonna be me.

And I got the ab roller, and all I got from it was a sore neck.

You know what I'm talking about?

Put that thing on eBay.

I just did not want to mess with it anymore.

But there was this one time, a couple years ago, Liz and I were eating lunch together at Buffalo Wild Wings, and I love Buffalo Wild Wings, and I am starting to realize there's the theme of restaurants in this message, and it's gonna get better.

And so we're at Buffalo Wild Wings, and I love that place, but it's it's distracting, and there's TVs everywhere, and they're all almost always showing sports.

And I love sports.

So Liz and I go on a little lunch date together, and I'm I'm trying.

Boys, I'm trying, I'm focusing in on her, looking her right in the eyes.

No matter what Stephen A.

Smith is talking about over here, I'm just locked in the whole time, locked in.

And then there was this moment where I don't know what happened, but I kind of just drifted.

And I kind of am woken up by Liz going, babe, Jay said, like this, and I snap out of it, and she looks over her shoulder.

I'm not watching sports, it's nothing inappropriate.

It was an infomercial for the aero knife.

And I couldn't hear it because the restaurant was loud, but it had the captions on the bottom, and it said things like this Does your knife have holes in it?

And I thought, my knives don't have holes in it.

Is your knife aerodynamic?

I said, I don't think it is aerodynamic.

And they said, watch this.

And he took a grape and he went like that, and the top of the grape just slid off like it was nothing.

I was like, no big deal.

Then he took a tomato right off.

Then it was a pineapple, right off.

And I was like, whatever, whatever.

And then he pulled out a block of cheese.

And with my knives, you need at least six to twelve months in CrossFit before you can cut through a block of cheese.

And he put it on it, and the knife just straight through the block of cheese.

And Liz turned back around, she goes, You're gonna order this, aren't you?

I said, I'm literally on the checkout page right now.

Like, I'm getting this, I need this.

And then, because of my wisdom and maturity, before purchasing this, I made the decision to check the reviews.

And it was consistently one star, one star, one star, one star reviews.

People were like, I would give this zero stars if I could.

It doesn't cut through anything.

Someone said I bought it and it broke in half like a plastic knife the first time I used it, because there's holes in the middle of it, right?

All of us have experienced a product that let us down.

And you need to understand this.

This is how marketing works.

Marketing has the same formula all the time.

Here it is.

The formula is your life is incomplete.

It's not perfect, but it could be better if you add our product to the mix.

And if you if your life is incomplete and you add our product, your life will finally feel complete.

This is how all marketing works.

Ladies, does your man snore at night?

Aren't you dealing with the problem of not being able to sleep because of his incessant snoring?

If you just get snorex, you will rest easier.

Do you have a few pounds to lose?

If you get our ab roller, your abs will look like this.

You can do your laundry on your own abs.

Like that's what it looks like.

That's this is how marketing tends to work.

And all of us have experienced this.

We've been suckered into buying a product, something caught our attention at Walmart or Target, and we bought it, and we thought it would make our life better, and it came up short.

We've had people disappoint us and we've had things we purchased disappoint us.

Today I want to wrestle with this.

If you're in the middle of your dream, what do you do when it's God who disappoints you?

What do you do when it's God who lets you down?

What do you do with that?

And how many of us have had a dream for our life?

We picture a day when we're married and happy.

We picture a day when we have a perfect little family with two, three, four amazing, healthy, perfect little kids.

We dream up a perfect job or a promotion or a career opportunity.

We imagine a day when we feel financial peace, and it doesn't matter what happens to the stock market or the economy or inflation.

It doesn't matter the price of gas or the price of food because we have plenty of money, so we feel peace.

We have a picture of our life the way it's supposed to go.

But then life has this way of lifing us.

Life has this way of hurting us and disappointing us, and that marriage that we thought would be till death to us part, we get served papers.

And those kids that we thought would love us until they die, the moment they're able to leave, they leave and they go wayward on their own.

That job that we had all of our hope in comes crumbling down on us.

All that financial hope and all that financial peace that we had comes crashing down with the stock market.

We've all had moments when it feels like it's God that's been the one to let us down.

And what I think is even more difficult for some of us, like, like we understand that life happens, but here's the question I want to wrestle with today.

What do you do when your dream dies?

Like when the dream for your life has been so convoluted, so astigmatized by the pain of this life, when God seemingly has let you down, when circumstances haven't gone your way, when the bottom falls out under you, what do you do when your dream is gone?

What do you do in that moment?

If there's anyone who understands this, it's the person that I want to spend our time studying today.

If you have a Bible, turn with me to the book of 2 Kings, chapter 4, 2 Kings 4.

2 Kings 4 · chapter mention

This might, this might actually be one of my favorite stories in scripture.

The story centers around a hero, the protagonist.

His name is Elisha.

To understand the story, you need to understand where he came from.

Elisha was a great prophet in the Old Testament, but he followed a man named Elijah.

Elijah is considered by many to be the greatest of all time, the Jeepot, greatest prophet of all time.

He did amazing miracles.

He spoke to kings on behalf of God.

He called down fire from heaven, he raised people from the dead.

He was seen as the strongest, best prophet.

And at the end of his life, Elisha, his apprentice, says to him, Look, before you go, will you just pray that I get a double portion of what's on your life?

That anointing, that power that rests on you.

I want a double portion of it.

And God answers and God does it for him.

Elisha is credited with like 14 miracles.

Elijah is credited with 14 miracles.

Elisha is credited with 28.

It's just fascinating how this all seems to play out.

In the 2 Kings chapter 4, we meet Elisha, and there's two stories.

2 Kings 4 · chapter mention

What's fascinating is they're conjoined by this little conjunction word in Hebrew that ties the stories together.

The first story we're not going to read today, but it's a story of a woman who's down on her luck.

Her husband has died, and in that culture where women were seen as less than and not having much worth, all of her financial security rested on her husband, and now he was dead.

She was desolate and desperate, and she finds herself at the end of her food.

She has a little bit of oil left, enough to make like one bread or one piece of cake, and that was it.

And after that was over, they were gonna starve to death.

And she throws herself at Elisha's feet.

Elisha says, God's gonna do a miracle.

Go collect as many jars as you can, shut the door of your house, pour the oil into one, and when you do, God will fill.

And the fascinating story, the end of the story is God does what he promised, and literally, jar by jar by jar, as she pours it out, God fills it.

And there's so many lessons in this.

One quick lesson is the level of their blessing was directly proportionate to the level of their obedience.

So if they got two jars, God would have filled two jars.

If they got 200 jars, God would have fill two hundred jars.

Okay, you understand that's the story, God does a miracle.

And then at the end of verse 7, going into verse 8, there's a word in Hebrew that's a joining word, a conjunction word.

And it literally means that these two stories are tied together.

But what's fascinating is in the first story, we meet a woman down on her luck with nothing left to her name.

And in this story, we're gonna meet another woman, but it's like the opposite problem.

Second Kings chapter 4, verse 8.

2 Kings 4:8

One day, Elisha went to Shunam.

Shunum is this relatively innocuous city in scripture.

It's only mentioned two or three times, nothing really significant happens here.

So he goes to the city of Shunim, and a well-to-do woman was there.

Now, the reason I highlighted this word well-to-do woman is you need to understand that kind of conversely from the first story, she has everything she wants.

She has everything she needs.

She can go to the Shunum Mall, she can shop at Shunam Gucci if she wants.

She's got everything that a person could ever want.

She's got everything, all the money she could ever need.

She's wealthy, healthy, everything's taken care of in her life.

And a well-to-do woman was there from Shun'im.

Now, here's the thing you need to understand about people that have money.

I grew up in West Palm Beach, South Florida.

In West Palm Beach, it is fascinating how you can go from street to street to street and you can experience wild different realities as you go from street to street.

On one street, you can have the poorest of poor, people that are desolate sleeping on the street with not a penny to their name.

And you can literally go one intersection later and you can find a road with homes that start in the millions or the tens of millions of dollars that people buy, tear down, and build a new custom home because they don't want to live in the home that someone else has lived in.

I mean, there's extreme poverty and there's extreme wealth.

Abject poverty and unbelievable wealth, literally side by side.

And what I learned by being around people that have all kinds of money is people with lots of money don't feel needs.

Because they don't feel needs, they never feel a need for God, typically.

And so there's this woman who has all of her needs met, and I want you to see something.

She urged him to stay for a meal.

Now, the reason I circled this word urged is um you ever been invited to someone's house and they made a meal for you and they serve it to you, and you try to be kind, but it's nasty.

Has anybody ever had this happen to you before?

And so sometimes when people invite us over, I'm like, that's great.

Hey, let's how do you feel about Outback?

You know what I'm saying?

Like, let's do that.

And so he goes to this woman's house, even though she urged him, and the next verse says this.

So whenever he came by, he stopped there to eat.

Apparently, she was a good cook.

She was the wolf gang puck of Shunam.

She had it going on, right?

She used lots of butter for him.

And then she said to her husband, this is interesting, she noticed something.

She said to her husband, I know that this is a man, uh, this is the man who comes often, who comes our way, is a holy man of God.

This person is special.

He's set apart for a reason.

So let's do this.

Let's make a small room on the roof and put in it a bed and a table, a chair, and a lamp for him.

That way he can stay there whenever he comes to us.

Now, in old school kind of church thinking, there was a term that they associated with this.

They called it a prophet's room or a prophet's chamber.

It was kind of seen as a place that they built for him, set apart, so that when he came through Shunim, he didn't have to stay up at the hotel, the motel six at Shunim.

You know, he could just stay here whenever he wanted.

And they do this kind thing for him, but it's more than kindness.

She honors him.

Honor, in my opinion, is really kind of the currency in the kingdom of God.

Honor is what fuels love.

Honor is such a powerful tool that we have.

And honor isn't even about the people we honor.

Honor is about us.

And so, as Christians, we are called to honor everyone around us, honor our civil leaders, our social leaders.

We honor our president, we honor our governor, we honor our mayor, we honor our police force, we honor, we just we show honor to everyone.

This is what we do.

And she shows this extreme form of honor and she builds this room on her house for him.

So it goes on to say this one day, when Elisha came, he went up to his room and he laid down there, and he said to his servant, Gehazi, which, if you're pregnant with a boy and looking for a name, this is a boy's name, Gehazi, said, Call the Shunammite.

So he called her and she stood before him.

And Elisha said to him, Tell her you have gone to all this trouble for us.

Now what can be done for you?

Now I love this detail in the story because to me this reveals some of the heart of God.

You say, what does it mean?

A lot of us feel like we're trapped serving God.

We do do do things for God as much as we can.

We just want to serve him and do as much as we can for him.

But here's the funny thing about serving God.

You need to understand that as you honor God, he is conspiring for ways to bless you, looking for ways to honor you, looking for ways to bless you.

And he says to this woman, this well-to-do woman with all of her needs met, What can we do for you?

He goes on to say, Can we uh can we speak on your behalf to the king or the commander of the army?

Like, we'll do anything you want.

What can we do to bless you as you've blessed us?

And she replied, I have a home among my own people.

Essentially, what this means is all my needs are met, I'm taken care of, I'm good.

So she leaves the room, and then Elisha asked Gehazi again, so what can we do for her?

What can be done for her?

And Gehazi said, Hey, I've been looking around and I noticed she has no son, and her husband is old.

Like if you came into my house today, you would see pictures of my family everywhere.

Pictures of my kids everywhere because I love my kids.

And she's old, and her husband's old, she has no son.

You need to understand this.

In our day, there's lots of people who want to have a baby and can't have a baby.

Early on in the history of our church, I learned a really valuable lesson.

In the early days of our church, it was just all young families, and everybody, the joke I made was everybody was pregnant or a man.

It just felt like everybody was getting pregnant, and I made jokes like, don't drink the water.

And I said this, and one time I said that joke, and on the front row were two couples that just stared at me like a deer in the headlights.

And I found out later they had been trying for years and just could never seemingly get pregnant.

That's a big deal now.

In Jesus' day and in the time of the Old Testament, there was a morality laid on top of that.

People felt like if you couldn't get pregnant, that was a curse from God.

Children were seen as a blessing from God, so conversely, if you couldn't get pregnant, you were cursed by God.

And she was interesting because she was a well-to-do woman.

She had everything anyone could ever want.

All of her hopes, all of her needs, all of her dreams, everything she wanted.

Her shopping cart from Amazon was always empty, her pantry was always full.

She had everything she could ever need, except for the one thing her heart probably longed for the most.

A child.

She has no son.

Her husband is old.

Then Elisha said, So call her.

So he called her, and she stood in the doorway, and he said these words about this time next year, you will hold a son in your arms.

And I would think that this woman would celebrate.

Yes, this is what I've hoped for, this is what I've longed for, this is what I've prayed for, but look how she responds.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, my Lord, she objected.

Please, man of God, don't mislead your servant.

Why would she do this?

It uses such strong language.

It says she objected.

Why would this matter?

It's because when we go through hurt and when we walk through tremendous pain in our lives, what tends to happen is we tend to believe that that which happened is what's always going to happen.

We tend to think as long as things are going okay, we're nervous because we feel like the floor is gonna fall out under us.

We get nearsighted, astigmatized, unable to see, unable to trust God, and not able to dream.

Who can blame her?

Who can blame her if she's done everything she could?

She exhausted all of her resources at whatever primitive doctors they had in the Old Testament, trying to get pregnant but could never get pregnant.

And now this man of God stands before her and says, You're gonna hold a son in your arms around this time next year.

Of course she objected.

Because when your heart has been broken so many times, you don't want to risk it being hurt.

Again, she objected.

The story goes on, but it says, the woman became pregnant, and and what's interesting is she objected, but apparently her husband didn't object, whatever.

And um, it's inappropriate.

Don't laugh at that.

And it says, and the next year, about the same time she gave birth to a son, just as Elisha had told her.

Now, I would love for the story to end there.

I would love for you to high five five people on the way out and say, God is the one who answers our prayers, God hears our heart, God loves us, God meets our needs.

Come on, celebrate and we go home on a high.

The story doesn't end there.

It says this, the child grew.

And one day he went out to his father who was with the reapers.

They're doing some work outside, and he said to his dad, he said, Pops, my head, my head.

We all know how kids can be, right?

Kids can be whining, they cry about everything.

So the dad did what dad's do, and his father told a servant, Take him to his mom, get this little brad out of here, he says.

And it says, and after the servant, next verse, after the servant had lifted him up and carried him to his mother, I want you to listen to this.

The boy sat on her lap until noon.

I want you to see this.

And then he died.

Let's be honest.

What do you do with that moment?

She had a desire in her heart.

Circumstances never allowed her to get pregnant.

God answers a prayer, she wasn't even praying, she objects to it.

God intervenes, he does a miracle, she gets pregnant, and then the dream that she finally has.

The dream that she sees walking in flesh and blood, her little son, who her heart had so longed for.

And then he died.

What do you do with this?

Like, I'm of the opinion that there should never be tiny little caskets.

I'm of the opinion that no parent should ever have to bury their own child.

She was gonna miss out on some of the highlights of his life.

Yesterday, my son Joey passed his driver's permit test.

He he would never, she would never get to experience this with her son.

Her son would never graduate high school.

Her son would never go to college.

Her son would never grow up to be married.

So she sat on the boy's lap until noon.

Here's the verse.

And then he died.

I love the language of scripture.

The boy sat on the mom's lap until noon.

Noon, the sun is at its highest point, and the mom is experiencing the lowest moment of her life.

The sun is at the brightest part of the day, and her emotional capacity has never felt darker.

She's in the worst pain of her life in this moment.

God has seemingly let her down.

Her dream has physically died in her arms.

Now, most people in the situation would start to plan for a funeral.

But this woman is different than you and me.

Instead of planning for a funeral, she plans for a miracle.

As it goes on to say this, so so she went up and laid him on the bed of the man of God and she shut the door and she went out.

I just imagine this.

She puts on her Lulus, puts on some Nike Metcons, takes that eye black stuff and puts it on her face.

She looks like she's got war paint on her face.

And it says she called her husband and she said, Please send me one of the servants and a donkey so I can go with the man of God, go to the man of God quickly and return.

The husband has no idea what's going on in this moment, and he says, Why go today?

Like, why what's the big deal?

Why rush it?

It's not the new moon or the Sabbath.

That's all right.

Like, don't even worry about it, she said.

So she saddled the donkey and said to her servant, Lead on and don't slow down for me unless I tell you.

So she set out for the man of God who was out in Mount Carmel, this place where God had done a tremendous miracle just a few days, a few years before this.

And when he grew, when I'm sorry, when he saw her in the distance, the man of God said to his servant, Gehazi, look, there's that Shunammite woman, if she don't look happy.

Like what is with her?

Run to meet her.

You go deal with this.

This is your problem, not mine.

Run to her and ask her, Are you alright?

Is your husband alright?

Is your child all right?

I want you to listen to the faith, the courage, and the moxie in her voice.

Everything is alright, she said.

And when she reached the man of God at the mountain, she took hold of his feet.

Gehazi came over and tried to push her away, but the man of God said, Leave her alone.

This is okay.

She is in bitter distress, but the Lord has hidden it from me and has not shown me why yet.

And I want you to listen to this mother.

Did I ask you for a son?

Did I ask you for this?

I didn't ask you for any of this.

I didn't ask for any of this.

Did I ask you for a son, my Lord?

She said.

Didn't I tell you, don't raise my hopes?

My hopes have been burst over and over and over again.

And Elisha said to Gehazi, here's what I want you to do.

Tuck your cloak in your belt, take my staff in your hand and run.

Don't greet anyone you meet, and if anyone greets you, do not answer.

Lay my staff on the boy's face.

This was reminiscent of a miracle that Elisha had done just years before.

But the child's mother said, As surely as the Lord lives, and as you live, I will not leave you.

There is nothing in this world more powerful or forceful than an angry mama.

Can we be honest about this?

Well, there, there's my angry mama right there.

Anna Liz.

And so it goes on.

So he got up and he followed her.

He left and followed her.

He was going to do whatever she said.

Gehazi went on ahead and he laid the staff on the boy's face, but there was no sound or response.

So Gehazi went to meet Elisha and he told him, The boy, he's not woken up, he's still dead.

And when Elisha reached the boy's house, there was the boy lying dead on his couch.

I want you to see what Elisha does.

He goes in, shut the door on the two of them, and he prayed to the Lord.

He could have prayed anything.

I believe that he prayed, Lord, if you don't heal this boy, that mama's gonna kill me.

It says then he did something weird.

He got on the bed and he laid on the boy mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands.

Can we just take a moment of confession?

Is this weird to anybody else but me?

He does this.

And so I researched it.

Like, why is this?

Why did he do this?

And scholars have all these different opinions as to why it happened, like eyes to eyes.

It's like vision to vision, so he could see clearly again, mouth to mouth, so he could breathe in like the breath of God.

And I'm like, I don't know if any of that's true.

I just read it as weird to weird.

I don't understand why this happens.

But he lays on the boy.

Imagine this.

Imagine you get in a terrible car accident.

You're knocked into a coma, and a few days later you wake up at the hospital and your arms are stretched out, and there's a doctor laying on you, eyes to eyes, mouth to mouth, hand to hand.

You know the first thing that would go through my mind if that happened?

Lawsuit.

That's what would happen.

You know, getting me a new car up out of this thing is what's happening.

And what you see is as he stretched himself out on him, the boy's body grew warm, and Elisha turned away and walked back and forth in the room, and he got on the bed and stretched out on him once more.

It was it was weird one time, twice is just creepy.

And it says this, and then the boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes.

There is an ancient Jewish belief, it's been passed down as like an oral tradition, that when God created Adam and breathed the breath of life into him, Adam sneezed seven times.

That's not in the Bible, it's just a tradition passed down by Jews to really believe that like this is a moment where he's coming back to life.

And Elisha summoned Gehazi and he said, Call the Shunamite.

And he did, and when she came, he said, Take your son, and she came in and fell at his feet, bowed to the ground.

Then she took her son and she went out.

I want you to put yourself in this woman's shoes for just a moment.

There is a moment in her life when all she has is a dream, and yet because of the circumstances of life, her dream can't come true.

She's tried everything, exhausted all of her money, and it can't come true.

Pain has become her reality.

Her vision has been clouded by all of the hurt, all of the loss.

Who knows how many miscarriages she had?

Who knows how much she's tried?

Who knows all that she's done to get to this moment, and finally she gives up hope.

She washes her hands of it and she says, It's better to not hurt than it is to allow my heart to risk being hurt again.

God does a miracle in this situation instead of her objections.

And like her, many of us today have come to God with a bunch of objections.

We've come in today saying, God, why would I have vision for my life when this is the way my life is going?

God, why would I trust you when I've walked through so much intense pain in my life?

God, why would I take another step when it feels like every time I take a step, the floor falls out underneath me?

But here's what I want you to hear today.

God has this way of overruling our objections.

It's like this.

Um, I am a huge football fan.

If you're new to our church, get ready for the next three to four months.

I'm gonna pray for the Dallas Cowboys just about every Sunday.

I love football.

I love football.

And if you're not a football fan, you may not know this, but in every football game you watch, there's two different flags that you'll see.

There's a yellow and a red flag.

Let me explain these just briefly if you don't know football.

The referees and the umpires, they have these yellow flags.

And if a player commits a foul or a penalty, what they do is they take their flag and they throw it up in the air saying there's been a penalty.

When you see the yellow flag on the field, they're gonna call a penalty and assess some sort of penalty to it, right?

That's what the yellow flag is.

But over time, coaches were getting frustrated because there were times when their referees would make a decision based on one perspective of the play, and the coaches felt like it was wrong.

So a few years ago, they instituted a new flag, and a coach gets to have a red flag in his pocket.

And a couple times during a game, a coach can take his flag and they can throw it on the field.

And when they throw the red flag on the field, what they're doing is they're challenging the call that was made by the referees.

Essentially, what happens is this they see it and they say, no, no, they they usually do it in a cocky way, they usually throw it at the referee who made the call, and they throw it down and they say, Here's what you're doing.

I want you to take what you saw to a higher perspective.

I want you to take it to the booth, and in the booth, they see from a different angle.

They see from up high.

Beyond that, they have four, five, six, even ten, or twelve different camera angles of the same play, and they're able to see what you possibly couldn't see from your one limited perspective.

This is what I want to invite you to do today with your objections.

I want you to take your objections and I want you to throw the figurative red flag and I want you to challenge them.

You say, What do you mean?

I want you to approach every situation with a new form of confidence, a new form of faith.

The author of Hebrews says it like this He says, Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

And so many of us, we've lived a life that has literally just been defined because we can't see anymore.

Pain has caused us to be nearsighted, hurt has made our eyes astigmatized, we're unable to see, unable to trust, unable to dream.

So we become standstill people.

Not moving forward, not stepping into our divine destiny, we stand still.

How incredible would it be for you, and how incredible would it be for me if we just made this decision that we were to say to God, God, even when I don't see your hand at work, I trust your character and I trust your nature.

God, even when it seems like you are silent, I trust that you are still at work on my behalf.

And God, even when I've walked through difficulties and pain, when it feels like my soul has come caving in on itself from all the pain, all the remorse and all the regret, I'm gonna trust that you are still actively at work in my life.

What would it look like?

If all of us made the decision to take our pain, to take our hurt, to take our loss to a higher perspective, and to pray today, God, I don't know what you're doing, even when I don't see it, I trust that you're working, even when I don't know it, even when I don't feel it, I trust that you are good, and so I take this to your perspective, and I trust that if you are the dream giver, you will also be the dream fulfiller.

How incredible would it be for you and me if we just made this decision that listen, even when I don't understand, I trust.

Some of you came in today in the middle of your dream.

God gave you a picture of what could be.

For you, it feels like a vision.

A vision is a dream fueled by the conviction of what should be.

And you have a dream, a plan, a vision for your life, and you can see it, but what's happened along the way is you've been hurt so many times that somewhere along the way you just stop stepping forward.

You're in the middle of your story, but your your heart objects.

God has a way of overruling our objections.

So, what would it look like if today all of us made this decision?

We're throwing the red flag and we're saying, God, we're choosing to see this from your perspective.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes all across this room with me?

Come on, all across this room.

Let's pray.

So, God, today we make this decision that we're gonna be people of faith, that even when we don't see what we want to see, even when there's a gap between what our heart has seen and what we can see with our eyes, we're making the decision to trust you.

Trust that you are good, that you are still authoring and pinning a beautiful story in and through our lives.

And God, today we make this decision.

We declare that we trust you.

God, some of us today need to throw the figurative red flag of our lives and to say, I can't see it from my perspective, but I trust that from your perspective you are working all things together for my good.

And so we trust you.

Thank you for that, God.