We Are Access – Stack Some Rocks

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

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Let's get to work today.

We are in We Are Access Part 2.

A few weeks ago, had one of the coolest experiences of my life.

I turned 40.

That was not the coolest experience.

That is just getting old.

And um, but before that, my wife, she surprised me.

She came into my office with Pastor Ryan.

She goes, Hey, we need to talk to you about something.

And I was like, Oh, what stupid thing did one of our staff members do?

Like, what happened?

She goes, No, we want to we want to tell you about a birthday gift.

It's an adventure gift.

She goes, I want to send you and Pastor Ryan for your 40th birthday to Iceland.

And I was like, What?

Shut your mouth.

What are you talking about?

Iceland.

It's on one of a bucket list places.

And so we went a couple weeks ago.

One of the highlights of my life, here's a picture of me and Pastor Ryan sitting on ice.

It's like ice everywhere, Iceland, and literally it was beautiful.

It was amazing.

Like the scenery everywhere we went was covered in snow and ice.

It was fantastic.

We ate all kinds of weird stuff when we were there.

Ate fermented shark, zero stars.

Do not recommend fermented shark.

Ate reindeer, surprisingly good.

Sorry, Santa, but so good.

And um, yeah, had an opportunity to eat horse, passed on that.

I only eat my horse at IKEA.

And um, so I don't know, that joke didn't land.

Anyways, um, it was beautiful, beautiful.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was we did this this tour inside of an ice cave, and it was amazing.

It wasn't just any ice cave, it was this ice cave on top of a volcano that had a glacier on top of it.

I don't even know how that's possible, but they said when the when the volcano explodes, it sends this glacier 16 kilometers in the air.

And I was like, that would be awesome if it was today.

What an adventure! How fun is this?

One of my favorite things was the tour guide on this trip.

He goes, This ice that you're seeing is 800 years old.

And this lady behind me goes, How do you know it's 800 years old?

He goes, Hold on.

And he goes up to the ice and he goes, How old are you?

He put his ear up to it.

So funny, so funny.

I like that guy.

It was amazing.

Well, one day on the trip, we went to this place called the Blue Lagoon.

It was this beautiful geothermal spa, which means you're in like a pool of water, but it's heated naturally.

And it was so weird because the water was hot, but like everything above the water was freezing cold and windy.

So you can only take about two or three minutes of it before you'd have to dip back under the water to warm your ears up.

And it was fun.

And when we left, we were going to go somewhere else to another adventure, but we started down the road, and it was so unbelievably snowy and windy that there were people that stopped us and turned us around and said this road is closed.

I thought, uh, oh, hope we can get back to our hotel.

And so we turned around and I drove through the craziest snow I've ever experienced in my life.

It was snowing and it was windy and it was it was wild.

Now, this is not the day, this is the next day.

I wanted to get a video of this to kind of show you this is not, it was worse than this.

It was somehow way worse than this, and you couldn't see in front of you.

You like you literally kept your car on the tire tracks from whoever was in front of you, and you kind of like carefully rode the brakes because you didn't know if someone was gonna step on their brakes in front of you.

It was just weird, you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you.

Well, then we get to where we're going, and I looked out my side window, and this was the mirror on the side.

That's not helpful, that's not how this thing works, right?

And I had this realization, this is how many of us live our lives, isn't it?

Hands to the wheel, trying to feel like we're in control, we're gripping as hard as we can, and we can't see 10 feet in front of us, and we're unwilling or unable to look in our rearview mirror to see God's faithfulness to us in the past.

What do you do with that?

Like, what do you do when life is hard?

What do you do when life is challenging?

And what do you do when you have no vision?

And what do you do when you can't see the faithfulness of God?

What do you do?

Well, today I want to spend all of our time talking about what Scripture teaches us to do, and then what I believe our church has done for 15 years.

In fact, I love Eugene Peterson's line.

Our church has lived in what I would call long obedience in the same direction.

Long obedience, we just obey what God's asked us to do, and we just keep doing it in the same direction, and God's been faithful.

What do you do when you can't see?

When you can't see the past and God's faithfulness, you can't see a future of what God has for us.

I want to give you a three-word thing that you can do, simply this.

You stack some rocks.

You say, what does it mean?

Well, it means that all throughout scripture there are these moments where God invites people to do something that doesn't necessarily make sense and to trust him in those difficult moments.

You stack some rocks.

Now, this happens all throughout Scripture.

I think back, Genesis chapter 22, God speaks to a man named Abraham and says, Abraham, you have one son, his name is Isaac, but I want you to do something that makes no sense.

Genesis 22 · chapter mention

I want you to stack some rocks, and I want you to build an altar, then I want you to do something unimaginable.

I want you to sacrifice him on that.

And he's like, What?

What?

How does this make any sense?

Well, to understand it, you need to understand what an altar is.

An altar is simply this it's a symbol from the past that gives meaning to the present and faith for the future.

An altar is a symbol from the past that gives meaning to the present and faith to the future.

So God says, Genesis 22, Abraham, take your son, your only son, who you love, lead him up Mount Moriah, and I want you to sacrifice him on an altar.

Wait, what?

How does this make any sense?

How does this make any sense whatsoever?

So he says this, Genesis 22, verse 3.

Genesis 22:3

He says, the next day Abraham got up with his son and they went up to this place where God was going to ask him to do the unimaginable.

And he builds an altar.

And on the altar he lays his son.

I love my kids so much.

I can't even begin to imagine doing this moment.

But he lays him on this altar and he's about to sacrifice his son because God told him to, and God stops him.

And God said, I just wanted to test you to see where your heart was.

But here's the realization.

At that altar, Abraham experienced something.

And there's something that he experienced at the altar is that God can be trusted.

He can be trusted.

So some generations later, that there's a man named Jacob, and Jacob is running for his life.

And as he's on the run, knowing that at any point he could be caught and killed, he has this moment where he gets exhausted, he lays down with a stone under his head, and he falls asleep.

And when he falls asleep, he has this weird encounter with God, this big supernatural kind of moment with God.

And he wakes up and he goes, Whoa, God was in this place.

He literally named the place El Bethel, which literally means the house of God.

That God was here in this place.

And I didn't understand it, and I don't under, I can't explain it, but if I ever come back to this place, I will know that God is real.

Genesis 35, seven chapters later, he comes back and he he declares the goodness of God.

Because he understood something.

God can be trusted, but his altar meant that God can be encountered.

A lot of us live our lives trying to have an intellectual relationship with God.

But God can never be understood, nor was he even meant to be understood because he's infinite and you were finite.

You can't explain the infiniteness of God into our own simple minds, and yet for him, he understood something that God is not just to be understood, but he's to be encountered.

There's something so much more profound.

I think about Elijah, 1 Kings chapter 18.

1 Kings 18 · chapter mention

God tells him to go confront the king and queen for their wickedness.

He says, Have a contest to prove once and for all who the real true God is.

Here's what you'll do: you'll go up to this place called Mount Carmel, and you'll both build an altar.

And whoever's God is the real true God will send down fire from the sky to consume the offering that is on top of that altar, and we'll see who the real true God is.

Elijah does it and he builds an altar.

And when he builds his altar, something fascinating happens.

God shows up, sends fire from the sky, proves to everyone that he's the real true God.

And that day God proved at Elijah's altar that he is powerful.

And we could go through scripture and we could give a word that kind of defines every one of these altars today.

I want to look at one altar in scripture that really feels like symbolic for us today.

As we approach this 15-year anniversary, I just want to tell you that the altar we're building is this reminder that God is faithful.

That in every situation, in every season, even when it doesn't make sense, he can be trusted and he is faithful.

I want to take you, if you have a Bible, to Joshua chapter 3.

Joshua 3 · chapter mention

We're going to get a running head start into Joshua chapter 4, which is where we're going to spend today.

Joshua 4 · chapter mention

Here's what's happening.

The story of Joshua is interesting.

It starts in Joshua chapter 1.

Joshua 1 · chapter mention

Joshua chapter 1, God shows up to Joshua and He says, Hey, Joshua, fear not.

Joshua 1 · chapter mention

Now, why does God say that to Joshua?

Because he's afraid.

I think sometimes we put courage on people that are just like us.

He was afraid.

And God says it to him four times in Joshua chapter 1.

Joshua 1 · chapter mention

He says, Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, do not be afraid.

Have courage.

Why does he say these things?

Because he was afraid.

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

I want you to lead the people of Israel.

Moses, my servant, your leader, he's dead.

So you lead them into the land that I've promised to them.

Wait, what?

This extraordinary leader, Moses, the one who God used to get the people out of slavery, the people of God out of slavery, on the way towards this land that's promised to them.

He's dead, now you're the man.

Six chapters later, Joshua chapter six is the famous story in the life of Joshua, where Joshua leads the people of Israel around the walls of Jericho, and God does this miracle, and the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.

But Joshua finds himself between chapters 1 and chapter 6, and there's this interesting moment, and I want you to see what he does.

He does something that allows his heart to remember God's faithfulness in the past, to set himself up, to believe him for what he's going to do in the future.

Joshua chapter 3, verse 5.

Joshua 3:5

Joshua says to the people of Israel, Consecrate yourselves.

That word consecrate means to set apart, it means to purify.

He says, Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.

Here is what's happened.

The people of Israel, they're on their way into this promised land, but they come up to this interesting moment.

They are stopped by the Jordan River.

And literally on the other side of the Jordan River is Jericho, who they will have to defeat, and then they get to walk in to the land that's promised to them.

So they find themselves there at the foot of the Jordan River, and they don't walk around it.

They want to experience what the people of Israel, a generation or two before them, had experienced.

Skip down to verse 17.

The priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and they stood on dry ground.

Pause here for just a quick moment.

What's interesting about this to me is the Ark of the Covenant literally was the tangible presence of God.

And God could have said, guys, just walk around or build a bridge or build some boats or just swim or something, but no.

He says, I want you to experience what your ancestors had experienced.

Take the Ark of the Covenant into the Jordan.

And as they stepped into the ark into the water, the water subsided, and they stepped on dry ground.

It goes on and says, This while all of Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed crossing on dry ground.

Verse 4, chapter 4, verse 1.

When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe.

Tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, right where the priests are standing, and now you're going to stack some rocks.

He says, Carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.

Some translations say, pile them up or stack them up.

It goes on to say this.

So Joshua called together the twelve men that he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and here's what he said to them, and this is so important for you today.

He says, Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan.

Each of you is to take a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of Israel, to serve as a sign among you.

And here's the reason.

In the future, someday your kids are going to come back to this place.

Someday they're going to come to that place where you stack the stones, where you stack the rocks.

In the future, when your children ask, hey dad, what's up with those rocks?

Like what do those stones mean?

Here's what you do.

You tell them that it was the that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord when it crossed the Jordan.

The waters of the Jordan were cut off.

These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.

Some translations say that they are to be remembered.

It is a way for you to remember the faithfulness of God.

So here's what they do.

Joshua says, We've all crossed on dry ground.

The people holding the Ark of the Covenant are still in the middle of the river.

Why don't those of you who are able go, twelve of you go, and get some stones and sack some stones?

And there's a reason.

It's because God did a miracle today.

Let's keep reading.

Skip down to verse 19.

It says this.

The people crossed the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month.

Then they camped at Gilgal, just east of Jericho.

Then Joshua said to the Israelites, In the future, he says the same thing again, when your children ask, What do these stones mean?

Here's what I want you to do.

Then you can tell them, this is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground.

For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes, and he kept it dry until you were all across, just as he did at the Red Sea when he dried it up until we had all crossed over.

This is important.

Here's why.

So that all the nations of the earth might know that the Lord's hand is powerful, and so that you might fear the Lord your God forever.

Here's what Joshua does.

He says, God told me to give you instructions.

When we cross over through this miracle, I want you to understand something.

There's a reason God wants us to stack some stones, and here's the reason.

Altars remind us that the God who did it before can do it again.

Here's what you need to understand.

To every person who was walking across the Jordan River, they were experiencing something new.

Every person that Moses had let out of slavery, every person that had crossed over the Red Sea had died at this point.

So to everyone crossing the Jordan, all that they had was stories of God's faithfulness, but no experience of his faithfulness.

So here's what he said.

He said there's gonna be a day someday when your kids come to you.

They're like, Dad, what's that about?

Why the rock?

Why this why the statue?

Why the altar?

Why does that matter?

It's because it's a reminder that God is faithful.

And check this out.

If he's been faithful, he will continue to be faithful.

That this is this is my story.

And for many of you, this is also your story.

This is the story of our church.

This is the story of 15 years of God's faithfulness.

I think back to about 16 years ago.

I was six months married, living the dream.

My wife and I were just in love with each other.

Six months into marriage, she was diagnosed with stage two, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Six months into marriage, trying to serve the Lord, trying to start a ministry or do something with our lives that mattered, and she gets diagnosed with cancer.

And so, for no reason, unexplainably, all of a sudden our life comes to a screeching halt.

And I'll never forget.

I flew in early from a camp.

I was speaking in, I came home and she just had a pick line put in where they were going to inject chemotherapy into her body the next day.

She was trembling.

I held her on the couch and we prayed this simple prayer.

God, please, please let us never forget how we feel in this moment.

So that someday, when people come to us and have needs, we remember.

So that we remember how this feels in this moment.

And so what we did was we just we just said, God, we don't understand this.

We don't get it, but we trust you.

And so we stacked a rock.

Well then, fast forward some 10 or 12 years later, my wife and I had two amazing boys, Joey and Gavin.

We were in love with them.

We kind of felt like our family might be done.

We didn't know at that point exactly, but but one day my wife comes in with that look on her face, like, I don't what is going on?

She's like, she holds up the stick, she goes, We're we're pregnant, we're pregnant.

And I said, Girl, this is your fault.

Keep your hands off of me.

You know, I'm just like, I'm more than a body, you know.

I'm just like, keep your hands to yourself.

No, we're pregnant, we're pregnant.

It's like, what?

We weren't expecting to get pregnant, we had no plans of getting pregnant, and then we find out it's a girl, and I'm like, Oh, are you kidding me?

It's like my heart melted, and so did all of my credit cards at the same moment.

I'm like, she can have anything she wants.

And then 26 weeks into it, we had a name for her.

We were days away from painting a room pink.

26 weeks in.

Doctors couldn't find a heartbeat.

So 26 weeks in, my heroic wife delivered a stillborn little baby girl.

What do you do with that?

What do you do with that?

You trust in that moment.

That the God who was with us in the cancer season would be with us in one of the darkest days of our life.

You look back at the faithfulness of God.

I I think I think back to the beginning of our church.

Access started in my living room, and then we we moved to the Lakeland Center for a while.

There were some hard days at the Lakeland Center.

I had some yelling matches that God, God, you can have this.

I didn't ask you for all this.

I don't need all this.

You can have this back if you want it.

I don't need any of it.

It's amazing how God kept pushing us to keep going.

Well, then I think back, I think back to some of the funny days.

Like um early on, we were at the Lakeland Center.

We had all these college students coming.

It was a college Bible study.

I love college students.

It's spring break for college students, so they're not here, so I can talk about them for a moment.

I love them.

And they're fantastic.

Lots of energy, lots of life, lots of love, but they have like no money.

They have no money at all.

Our first offering ever was$5.

And I found out later that Liz is the one who gave the$5 offering, you know?

Before inflation, I used to make a subway joke.

You can even buy a$5 foot long for that.

And anyway, so$5 was the whole offering first night.

Anyways, we we felt like God told us to do this, start this thing.

So we emptied our bank account, gave all of our savings to start this thing.

And then we kind of ran out of money, and I'll never forget we were at the end of a month.

We still owed$1,186,$1,186 to keep this thing going.

And I had this faith.

God, it's the last Sunday of the month.

You're gonna provide miraculously.

We've never had an offering more than a few hundred dollars.

But God, you got this.

This is you, you got this all day, no problem at all.

Offering came that night, we counted it the next night, and it was just a few dollars.

So I had this plan.

My plan was to write everybody an email the next day, hey, thanks for coming.

It's been a good run.

We love you.

Here's some good churches to check out.

God bless you.

It's over.

That was my plan.

And then in the middle of all of that, a miracle happens.

I go to my mail the next day, was ready to shut the whole thing down.

And then it is a handwritten letter from my dad.

Now, my mom and dad, they've moved here, they come to church here.

I love my parents.

Um, they're the best.

And they gave me everything you can give a person that matters.

Growing up, we didn't have tons of extra money.

And so I get this letter, and inside of it is a letter and a check.

The letter is three paragraphs.

I still have the letter in my office to this day.

Paragraph one, Jason, your mom and I are so proud of you.

Paragraph two, you're gonna have critics and cynics and haters.

And boy, was he prophetic in that.

And then, and then paragraph three, your mom and I were praying.

We felt like God specifically told us to give this to you.

And it was a check for twelve hundred dollars.

My parents have never had extra money like that.

This wasn't like easy for them.

And the truth is they had no idea.

Liz didn't tell them, I didn't tell them.

Nobody told them.

They heard from God.

I made a commitment early on.

I'll never manipulate people for money.

I'll never make church into like what can I get out of you?

I'll never do that at all.

And God showed up in that way on that day.

So even in difficult days, financial stressful days, I just felt like we could we could trust God.

Well, then it even it even made more sense.

Just a few months later, our church had grown a little bit, our giving had grown a little bit, and this man sat me down and he said, Jason, I got some concerns I gotta talk to you about.

This man at that time represented 10% of our total giving as a church.

One person, 10%.

And he he used it.

He said, Listen, if you don't change what you're doing, I'm walking out the door.

At this moment, like, what do we do?

Everything he accused us of was wrong.

I checked my heart, my wife and I checked our hearts, we talked to our pastors, he was wrong.

And the question was do we succumb to the pressure or do we let him walk?

And in letting him walk, do we turn back to this altar and remember that God has been faithful, he's always taken care of us.

So that's what we did.

Let the guy walk, he walks, and it hurts so bad.

But we didn't have enough money as it was, and so to see the money walk out the door was so difficult.

But God has always been faithful, and you'll never believe what happened that summer.

Summertime, when summertime when all the college students leave and everybody's gone, our giving doubled.

It makes no sense to this day.

But every time I'm tempted to feel some sort of financial stress, financial pressure, I just go back to these altar moments and I remember that God's always been faithful to us.

I think back to the early days we moved from the Lakeland Center to the YMCA, and that was a hard season.

We set up in a gym.

Our auditorium was a gymnasium.

That meant that we literally had to do everything.

We had to clean, we had to mop and sweep the floors, we had to set up chairs and lights and sound systems and everything, all the lobby, all the kids' space, all of it had to get set up.

I'll never forget one day I showed up to church and the parking lot was full.

I thought, it's a miracle, it's revival.

People are hearing about us, it's awesome.

Little did I know that the YMCA double booked our church with the Polk County Senior Adult Swim Games.

So I'm preaching in a dark kind of gymnasium auditorium, and off in the back is a hallway where there's some light coming in.

And as I'm preaching, I look up.

I promise you, this is true.

I look up, and there's like an 80 something year old oxygenarian man standing there with his arm folded, nodding along as I'm preaching, wearing nothing but a speedo and a smile.

Who does

That?

Who does that?

Another altar moment for me.

Because those were some hard days.

But then the hard days, the altar moments, are what prepare you for the next season.

I think back to two years ago.

Two years ago, like right now.

The whole world shut down.

We were meeting in George Jenkins High School, which was amazing to us.

And they shut us down and they said it'll probably be for a couple weeks.

Let's just flatten the curve.

A couple weeks, right?

And I'll never forget that season.

I got such nasty emails from some people.

Can't believe you, succumbing to fear.

What is wrong with you?

I was like, nobody wants to meet more than me.

I love our church.

I love gathering together.

Are you kidding me right now?

But it was the faithfulness of God that led through other seasons that led us through one of the darkest seasons.

Not having a place to meet, walking with people through political issues and social issues and standing up for black people who were hurting in our country, making a big deal out of loving our neighbors.

Like we did all of these things really well and we took some shots, but literally what walked me through that was not courage.

It was looking back in the rearview mirror of my life and those altar moments and staring at the faithfulness of God in my life.

The God who was with me when the old man in the speedhouse was staring at me, was with me in all of the dark days as people left and threw stones on their way out.

Quick observation: stones tend to come from broken geography.

In the same way most of us, we're broken.

Our lives, or scripture teaches, are to become living sacrifices.

We are to build our lives into an altar before God.

And you have a couple options of what to do with the brokenness in you.

You can drag it around, but that gets really heavy.

Some people use their brokenness to throw it at other people, or you can turn your life into an altar before God.

Why does this matter?

It's because these moments, these alter significant moments in your life are actually where the vision for your life comes from.

Say, what does that mean?

Well, here's the point.

The point is the greatest indicator of what God will do is what he's always done.

If you want to know what God's going to do in your future, look back in the rearview mirror of your life and celebrate his faithfulness to you.

He's taken care of you, healed you, blessed you, succeeded you.

He's done all kinds of stuff for you.

So what does it mean?

It means now I live differently.

It means now I get to live with a holy confidence.

Not cockiness, it's confidence that God, who is going before me, has always been there with me.

He's been in every step, every situation, every season of my life.

My God has been good and He's been faithful and He's been there for me.

So how incredible could our lives be?

How incredible could your life be if you just made this decision that I'm going to trust in the faithfulness of my God.

Let me say this to you.

Our faith is in the faithfulness of our God.

Our faith is rooted in the character of who God is.

He's always been good, and he's always been faithful, and he's always been there.

And check this out, spoiler alert, he's always been good, so he will be good, and he's always been faithful, so he will always be faithful.

He's always been there, so he will always be there.

How incredible would your life look if you lived with the new sense of divine holy confidence that the God who's carried you this far will keep carrying you?

So what is your altar?

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

And would you take a moment and would you examine your heart?

Say, God, where are the places in my life where I need to look back to recount your goodness and faithfulness to me?

Where are those places in your soul where you've allowed yourself to get stressed out to try to take control of your life and you've missed the point altogether?

The point is always celebrating and remembering His faithfulness because it is the indicator of what tomorrow holds.

Let's pray.

God, thank you so much that you are good and you are faithful.

Thank you that we can trust you because you are always true to your character and nature.

God, some of us today we're struggling.

We feel like we have no vision for the future and we can't see the past.

God, open our eyes to how faithful you've always been so that we can step confidently into tomorrow, knowing that you hold all of it.

God, we love you.

May some of us have the courage today to go home and to build an altar in some way, to stack some stones, to remember and to recount your goodness and your faithfulness to us.

We love you, God.

Thank you for your goodness.

We celebrate it, we honor you today, and it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.