Life Message

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

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Since I turned 40 today, I thought I would preach a beautiful message called 40 Lessons from 40 Years with 40 points.

And we should be here for about three hours and then I'll dismiss you.

That's actually not true, but I do have a message for you today called Life Message.

And um this week, early in the week, I wrote a message, and then as I got into the week, I started realizing that there was something different.

So I got this message and I loved it.

I was I'll I'll preach it someday.

It's about stuff you should hold on to and stuff you should let go of and stuff you should lean into.

And I was excited about it.

But as I got into this week, a couple things happened, and I had this realization that I had something more important for you.

Now, on a big day like your birthday, you want to preach a big message.

I've got a really simple two-thought message for you.

But here's my hope.

If you and I can apply this, it will literally, it'll change everything.

Now, um, just out of curiosity, anyone in the room single, raise your hand.

Anyone single in the room, boys scan quickly.

Here's your moments.

Okay, cool.

Being single is kind of weird.

It just is, because you feel this pressure all the time, like you're always looking over your shoulder, always looking around, trying to find someone.

And if you're single, you know this.

One of the most frustrating things about being single is there's so many little cliche phrases that people say.

They say things like, oh, you'll just know when you know, and don't rush it, love will find you.

And doesn't it feel like the person who says don't rush it got married at like seven years old, right?

Like you feel this weird pressure.

You understand this.

And then I was living in that, like I was in college, you know, and then just wasn't working out.

And I felt all those cliches just felt dumb.

They felt like insincere, and then they all kind of happened.

It was just kind of weird because all of a sudden I met this girl named Liz, and it just pretty quickly I knew, like after two or three dates, I knew that she was the one.

And it was just, it was such a different kind of relationship.

And so pretty soon we were, I was pursuing her with all of my heart, and then and then I met her parents, and I love them.

They're amazing.

Culturally, we're different, but we have the same sorts of values.

And I remember one of the first times we met, um, I was with her dad, and we'd gone somewhere in the car, and I said to him, I was like, So uh out of curiosity, like if you had to give me one piece of advice, one piece of advice for the rest of my life, what would it be?

And I don't know if I actually meant it, I don't know if I was just trying to score points with the future father-in-law, but he said something to me now, some 18 or 19 years ago, that stuck with me all these years.

He said, I tell my daughters this and I tell everyone this.

If you'll just put God first, everything else in your life will fall in place.

Like if you'll just put God first in your life, everything else will fall into place.

And that's kind of been the story of my life.

Like, as I look back across the history of my life, that is really the story of my life.

And how how do we do that?

Like, how do we put God first in our life?

Well, the prophet Isaiah, some 700 plus years before Jesus came, he said this and I love this.

He said, Isaiah chapter 26, he says, Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you.

Isaiah 26 · chapter mention

Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts, and I love this.

And he starts with a little two-word refrain.

He says, Yes, Lord.

In fact, I would simply say that that we can just start by saying the way to make sure God is number one, the make sure the way to make sure he is first in our life is just to say yes.

And the problem is we love all kinds of other things, don't we?

I love all kinds of stuff.

I love my family, I love my friends, I love football, I love pizza, I love steak, I love vacations, I love travel, I love tacos, I love all kinds of stuff.

I noticed I had like one relationship and three or four foods.

I love all kinds of stuff.

I love stuff, but the funny thing is, God doesn't have any problem with that.

God wants you to love your life and love the things around you, enjoy this life.

Just make sure that none of them dethrone him in your heart.

Make sure that he's first.

Well, the way we do this is we just we learn to say yes to whatever he asks.

It's just our answer is just yes, our posture is yes.

And then he teases it out.

Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws.

Literally, what he's saying is we just say yes to whatever God asks, so we obey.

Whatever he asks us to do, we obey.

And the funny thing is, intellectually we know that we should be obedient to what God asks us to do.

But then the funny thing is sometimes what God asks us to do bumps up against our own desires and preferences.

Doesn't it?

Like, God, I I know what your word says, but but this is how I feel about social issues.

God, I know what your word says, but this is how I want to vote.

God, I know what your word says, but this is how I view sexuality.

God, I know what your word says, but it's my money and I earned it.

God, I know what your word says, but I really don't feel like loving the person who hurt me.

God, I know what your word says, but I really feel like holding on to an offense will help me.

That's how we live our life.

And you can't live your life that way and follow the way of Jesus.

So it says, walking the way of your laws.

It literally means I'm gonna say yes to whatever you ask me to do, I'll obey.

I won't delay my obedience because delayed obedience is just disobedience.

I'm just gonna obey.

And then it says, we wait for you.

The funny thing about me is I like to live at mock speed.

I like to like always be going.

I don't like downtime, I don't like to rest, I like to go and do kind all kinds of things.

But what's interesting is if we're gonna actually follow Jesus, he sets the pace.

And we follow him.

Let me offer you this interesting thought about following Jesus.

And I follow Jesus the majority of my life.

The pace of Jesus is often way slower than the pace I want to live my life at.

It just it just is.

You can't follow Jesus in a hurry.

The funny thing is, you can't really do anything that matters in your life in a hurry.

You can't listen to someone who's hurting in a hurry.

You can't love someone in a hurry.

You can't play on the floor with your kids in a hurry.

You can't sling the football with your boys in the front yard in a hurry.

You can't slow dance with your spouse in a hurry.

Moments of intimacy don't happen in a hurry.

Life and the things in your life that matter never happen in a hurry.

And yet we want to follow Jesus quick, as fast as we can.

We want to like do stuff and then we can get on with our life.

And you start to understand that to follow Jesus means I follow him at his pace.

And then he says, Your name and renown are the desires of our heart.

Literally, all this means is, God, I want what you want.

I want your name to be made great and your renown.

We don't use that word very much, but it means your fame.

It means the knowledge of who you are.

I want that to be the desire of my heart.

And this is what it means.

And so many of us, it's like, well, we'll say yes, so long as it doesn't conflict with our schedules, yes, so long as it doesn't conflict with our bank account, yes, so long as it doesn't cost me that relationship, yes, so long as it doesn't deny me that pleasure, and we don't understand.

Like if you want to live a life that leaves an impact, the kind of life that the rippling effect of your life has felt for generations to come, it's really two things we do.

Number one is we just offer God our yes.

Just say yes.

In fact, if you get nothing else today, if you fall asleep during the message because the heat's driving you crazy, if you understand, just just say yes.

Jesus, whatever you ask me to do, yes.

Whatever it costs me, yes, your ways are better than mine.

I'll live at your speed, I'll literally follow you.

I want your name and your renown to be made great.

Yes, it's just it's just that easy.

And this is this has been my life.

This week I've been all kinds of like introspective and reflective.

I've been thinking about things like you turn turn 40, like Pastor Randy said on that video a moment ago, half your life is gone.

And that was also super depressing.

Um But I just I just want this to be my story.

In fact, I want this to be the story of our church, and my hope is that it becomes your story.

So, so how do we live a life that leaves an impact?

Number one, we offer God our yes.

But here's the second one, and I want to spend most of our time here today.

We remember God's faithfulness.

We remember God's faithfulness, and and the emphasis here is on faithfulness, but we have to remember it.

Like faithfulness is something that we celebrate that's happened.

It's something that you always remember.

Our lives get lived in one direction, but they get processed and understood in the other direction.

We we live going forward, but we process and we understand things that happen in reverse.

The funny thing about the way our memory tends to work is this we tend to remember the things that we need to forget, and we forget the things that we need to remember.

Don't we?

Isn't this funny how this works?

Isn't it funny that we we remember the things we need to forget?

Like you can be sound asleep in the middle of the night and you can wake up going in the middle of the night because you remember something dumb you did on the playground in seventh grade.

Isn't it weird?

And we remember shame, we remember regret, we remember that that spring break that we wish we could undo, we we remember relationships we wish we would have gotten out of, we remember words that were spoken over us, we remember guilt and condemnation, and none of those things were we meant to carry and remember.

And we tend to hyperfocus sometimes even on our sin.

And here's what you need to know Scripture teaches that when we've been forgiven of our sin, God, check this out, He remembers it no more.

It's an intentional choice of God to choose to no longer remember your sin.

Okay, fun news for you.

Check this out.

If God doesn't remember your sin, you have permission to forget it as well and to move forward.

So we remember the things we need to forget, but then conversely, it's funny, we tend to forget the things that we need to remember.

Well, what do we need to remember?

What are the things that we should constantly be meditating on?

What are the things that we should constantly be celebrating?

I'm gonna offer it to you this simply.

It is the faithfulness and the goodness of our God.

Let me teach it to you in a really simple principle.

We need to never forget to remember.

We need to never forget to remember.

We need to remember to never forget.

It's really simple.

Some of you are like, I came to church for that.

Yes, because if we're not careful, what will happen is we'll we'll just forget stuff.

This is the reason if you came to my house or if you came into my office, there's pictures everywhere, there's knick knacks everywhere.

It's the reason we print picture books for our kids.

It's the reason now every year we save memories in a memory jar.

Why do we do it?

Because if we're not careful and if we're not intentional, we'll just forget stuff.

We'll forget.

In the Bible, they were also kind of characteristically similar to us.

And here's what's happening in the book of Joshua.

Joshua is this extraordinary leader.

He follows Moses, who's one of the most epic leaders in all of the Bible.

And what's interesting is when we think of Joshua, often we think of the word courage.

Joshua is this man of great valor and courage, but the first time we meet him, he encounters an angel.

And the angel of the Lord says to him, Hey, hey, hey, get up off the ground, fear not, fear not.

He's known as a person of courage, and the first words said over him are fear not.

I don't understand this, but it's interesting that phrase, fear not, is found in Scripture 365 times.

Almost like God wanted you to have a daily reminder that you don't have to live in fear.

Your heart doesn't have to live in the captivity, the prison of fear, but you can fear not.

The angel says, Moses, my servant, is dead.

I need you to rise up and I need you to lead the people into this land I've promised them.

Now Moses led the people out of slavery.

God miraculously divided the Red Sea so the people could walk across on dry ground.

And then Joshua's leading them.

Here's where we pick up Joshua chapter 4, it says this.

Joshua 4 · chapter mention

When all the people had crossed the Jordan, that's another river that God parted, the Lord said to Joshua, Now choose twelve men, one from each tribe, tell them, take twelve stones from the very place where the priests are standing in the middle of the Jordan, carry them out, and pile them up in the place where you will camp tonight.

The people crossed the Jordan.

Next verse.

The people crossed the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they camped at Gilgal just east of Jericho.

It was there at Gilgal that Joshua piled up the twelve stones taken from the Jordan River.

Now pause here for just a moment.

Here's what's happening.

Joshua's led these people.

They've come miraculously from slavery, across the Red Sea.

They've wandered in the wilderness for a long time.

And he's leading them into this promised land.

And Joshua says, I want you to do something.

Twelve men get twelve large stones, and when we cross through, we're going to take these twelve stones and we're going to pile them up and we're going to build an altar.

Now you need to understand, altars were very common in the time of the Old Testament.

They would be used from anything from like just cooking something or be used as a form of sacrifice.

They would be places of celebration, but ultimately, altars often served as a place of remembrance.

It was like a statue, it was like a monument to remember something.

It says it was there at Gilgal that Joshua piled up the twelve stones.

He made an altar, taken from the Jordan River, and here's why.

Then Joshua said to the Israelites, In the future, your children, they're going to ask some questions.

Here's what they're going to ask.

What are these stones for?

What do these stones mean?

And then you can interpret it for them.

Then he says, 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.

He did this.

And here's the reason why.

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

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

We'll forget that our forefathers were in slavery and captivity in Egypt.

We'll forget the goodness of God that He delivered us, that He helped us cross the Red Sea and the Jordan Sea.

We'll forget.

And this is also so you can teach your children, because if you're not careful to remember, you'll forget.

So don't forget to remember.

So this week I was here on Monday.

We had prayer from noon to one, and it was awesome.

And I was worshiping as Pastor Andy was leading us in some songs, and I was walking around worshiping and I felt my phone buzz, so I pulled it out to see what it was.

And I got a text from a friend.

His name is Dave.

Dave was on staff with our church like 13 years ago as we were just kind of getting started.

And I used the term on staff loosely because we didn't have any money or anything.

He just kept showing up for free and it was awesome.

But he texted us a picture.

I love this.

You need to know our church started as a college Bible study in my living room for my friends, and then it grew out of that into the Lakeland Center, which is now the RP funding center.

I'm going to show you some pictures in a second.

And then we moved out of there and we moved into a place.

It was the YMCA on Cleveland Heights.

And this is the picture in the gym on one of our biggest days, and it was like 12 years ago to the day earlier this week.

Here was the picture.

And it's all grainy because it's old and I'm old and I'm also grainy.

This is here's the picture.

And this was a huge day for us.

This was this epic, extraordinary day where I looked back and I was like celebrating the faithfulness of God.

And I look at that picture, and that feels like five lifetimes ago at this point.

And I look at that picture and I think, man, we had no idea what God had in store.

At that point, we were celebrating the faithfulness of God, that He had led us from my living room to the uh to the Lakeland Center and then to the YMCA.

We were celebrating.

We had this place where we could grow and we could see a lot of new people coming.

It was awesome.

And then I looked up from the phone and I looked around and I saw this building.

And I just celebrated the faithfulness of God, that He's He's just always been with us.

And then I think it was the next day.

I get a message, I'm tagged on some social media from Pastor Wayne Derry.

He was in Kenya, and he was literally on that day dedicating the tenth building that our church built in Kenya.

And I and I love this.

And it's funny to me because I look at the first picture and then I look around me, and I remember that for so many years I felt like I lived in the middle.

So what do you do when you're in the middle?

Between what you see in your heart and what you see with your eyes, what do you do in that?

Well, I believe it means that you look back at the faithfulness of God.

I think, as I've been thinking about this, I've been thinking about my story.

I grew up in a pastor's home.

My parents were evangelists and they traveled all over the country when I was a kid.

As I got a little older, they became children's pastors at a big church.

And when you're living in your story, you don't understand what's happening in your story.

All you can understand is that I'm living in my story.

But remember, you can't understand your story in the moment.

You can only interpret it in the future.

And so I'm living in my story, and at 13, 14 years old, my dad's a children's pastor.

I have no idea why it matters to my story.

But what I discovered in as I thought about it in retrospect in the future was God was preparing me at 14 to talk in front of people.

At 14 years old, I was standing in front of a couple hundred kids every Sunday sharing from the Bible.

I had no idea how God would use that.

People like my whole career of preaching, I don't I don't use notes.

I don't have any sort of like cheat sheet or anything in front of me.

People are like, how do you do that?

I don't know.

I've just been doing it for a long time, and I know now that God was preparing me at 14 for what he'd have for me at 40.

Like you don't understand until you look back and you celebrate the faithfulness of God.

And then I finished that.

I started traveling all over the country with my brother speaking at camps.

And then I went to college, did college, jumped right into a master's degree.

In the middle of my master's degree, as I'm preparing for ministry and a life of pastoring, I met this incredible girl.

I told you some of that earlier.

We fall in love, we get married.

Six months into marriage, I'm off speaking at a camp in Texas.

My wife is doing her makeup, and she like leans up against the counter and she goes, What is that?

And she looked down and in her thigh there was like a golf ball size, like bruise-looking thing.

And we didn't understand what it was.

She went to the doctor as a 23-year-old healthy girl.

And the doctor was concerned, and that led to another test, which led to another test, which led to another test.

She was with me.

I'd flown her to Texas after some of those tests just to hang out.

And she got she got a call from the doctor, and the doctor said, I'm so sorry.

It's cancer.

And I don't sometimes I don't understand.

Sometimes I don't understand what God is doing.

I had to put her back on a plane, she flew home.

I flew to another camp in Tennessee that I couldn't get out of.

I was able to get out one day early.

I flew home early.

I remember getting home.

They had put a pick line in sweet Liz's arm.

It was so painful she couldn't move her arm.

And I came home and I sat with her trembling on her couch.

She wouldn't even move her arm from this position because it hurt so much.

Put my arm around her and we held hands and we prayed.

And remember, you can't interpret your story in the middle of your story.

So we prayed and we said, God, we don't understand.

We don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it.

We just we just know that maybe you have something for us in this.

And so, God, please don't let us miss this.

Please never let us forget this pain.

Please never let us forget how we feel in this moment so that someday when people are hurting around us, we can love them and show them the empathy that we feel like we could use right now.

But what was crazy is she went through eight rounds of chemo.

It was brutal.

I came home one night.

I literally thought she was dead one night.

I came home, she was her hands were across her chest, her breathing was so shallow that her stomach or chest weren't moving at all with her breaths.

It was it was crazy.

I've got so many crazy stories from that season.

What's funny though is after that was over, um our phone started ringing again.

Before the cancer happened, and then after the cancer happened, we had job offers all over the country.

And my desire was to go be a youth pastor or a college pastor or an associate pastor, and I would start somewhere, then go to somewhere bigger, and then go to somewhere bigger, and eventually we would land at like, you know, we'd take over for whoever the largest church in America was, because that was my plan.

That was the American dream.

And the funny thing was, God had other plans.

In the middle of our story, cancer seems to slow us down, and cancer was actually the launching pad for what God had.

In the middle of the story, we don't understand, and then what's fascinating is we started praying and we started realizing that we had offers all over the country, but none of them felt right.

And what did feel right was we had friends here in our city who said they loved God, but they didn't love the church.

And I don't know how you say that.

The Bible calls the church the bride of Christ, and you could never say to me, Jason, I love you.

You're awesome, but your bride is whack.

You you can't do that.

We we will fight in the parking lot, is what would happen.

And I'll be honest with you, I would I would win that fight because you don't talk trash about my wife.

That's not how it works.

So all these friends that they love God but hated the church, and so we started this college Bible study for our friends.

And it didn't make sense, it was in our living room, and then and then we moved to what is now called the RP funding center.

This is a picture from one of our earlier services.

This was this was our church, and now now look around.

But but but we were we were here, and this this made no sense.

Here's another picture of kind of that same season of our church.

And I'll never forget we moved and we had our first service.

Look, this was like all the equipment we had.

We had these lights, a couple little cheap speakers, a screen and a projector, we set up chairs that we rented, and we hadn't not much of anything, but we just knew that God had asked us to do this.

Well, we started buying stuff, and so we had to have a way to transport it.

And so um I went to that place where you can buy anything reputable, talking Craigslist, and I found uh I found this trailer online and I bought it.

It was real cheap.

And I found out why it was cheap, it's because it was homemade.

Some dude made this.

The thing weighed roughly 7.2 trillion pounds, and it was so heavy that it literally made my car drive at a weird angle because it weighed the whole thing down.

Well, we get this trailer, and I'm I'm honestly proud of it.

You know, it was not very big, but it housed everything that our church owned in that season.

And I'll never forget, we had our very first service, right?

Trailers loaded.

After the service was over, I was honestly a little frustrated because it was the first time we did it, not everything went great, and so I was kind of just working hard.

And I went out to my car.

Um I had a Nissan X Terra that I loved.

I love this car.

It was the one that pulled this trailer.

And I remember I went out to my car afterwards, and there were some guys helping us put stuff away, and I pulled the little key fob out and I pushed the unlock button.

And when I did, it made the dome lights in the car turn on, and it looked like it had rained because it looked Like there was like beads of water all over the window.

But but when I got closer, I realized that it wasn't beads of water.

Someone had smashed in my window during the service and had gone through and ripped out stuff in my car, messed all kinds of stuff up.

You ever had that happen to you?

It is the most gross, invasive feeling.

Like someone was in my personal space.

They stole all kinds of stuff from me.

The funny thing is, my brother Mike, who's four years younger than me, he had um he had some clothes that he changed out of and he just threw them in my car, and he had a little bottle of per of a cologne.

It was called Aqua Digio.

It's like a Giorgio Armani cologne.

And I kid you not, like this bottle is not to size.

Um, but he only had like this much left.

They had the tiniest little amount, and and the guy stole it.

So I'm like walking around depressed, hurting, feeling like God has abandoned me.

And Mike's like, Yeah, man, they got my cologne.

I don't, I don't know.

So I'm gonna buy Mike.

If you're watching, I'm gonna buy you some later this week to replace that.

You can let that offense go finally.

Um so this happens.

So so I'm in a weird headspace in this moment.

I'm frustrated, I'm hurt.

And I walked out into the parking lot and I literally said this prayer.

God, I don't even care.

You can just have it.

You can just have it.

I don't need this.

I can go take a job somewhere, I can do this.

You can just have it.

It's just it's yours.

I'm I'm done with this.

And I prayed that prayer a lot of times.

But every time I would pray that prayer, I got a prompting from God to just, no, no, just keep going.

What do you do?

You just say yes, even when it doesn't make sense.

We we moved from that trailer, the next big purchase we made as a church.

I was so proud of this.

We bought this box truck, we bought it from Emmanuel Labor Ministries Inc.

And um, it was so funny.

You can't really tell from the picture, but there was like a cartoon picture of Jesus in a construction hat with a hammer and he's carrying a cross.

I don't know what he did.

It just makes no sense at all.

But but we love this thing, right?

And I had no idea when we were going through these difficult days and these difficult seasons that we would end up in a place like this.

But here's what I learned at every single step of the way.

You can trust the faithfulness of God.

Let me tell you a quick story too.

In some of the early days of our church, um, there was one night.

We had started this college Bible study, and then it was like summertime, and all the college students were gone.

So there was a night when there was like eight people total.

Like everyone, all of us were eight people.

Like this row was all we had.

That was it, and eight people.

And I remember there was a moment when I was worshiping God on the front row, and I had this temptation.

The temptation was I'm just gonna turn around and see who's here.

But I knew in that moment, if I turned around, what would happen is it would either inflate my faith or it would deflate my faith.

And I knew it was gonna be that one.

So I made a decision in that moment.

I said, God, I'm never ever gonna turn around and see who's in the room because I'm gonna preach to the room as if there's a hundred thousand people in it.

If there's ten people or ten thousand people, it doesn't matter.

So I'm on the front row worshiping, and I had one of the weirdest encounters of my life.

I'm worshiping, and it almost felt like I was watching like a video slideshow in my mind.

I closed my eyes worshiping, and I could hear the six or eight people behind me singing and worshiping, but as I was doing it, I felt like I started hearing more people in the room.

And I saw a picture in my in my mind, in my spirit, if you will, of the room getting bigger and there being more people.

And the stage changed, and there was more people, and the stage changed, and there was more people, and the stage changed.

And what was funny is for so many years I had this picture in my heart that God was going to show us some of those things in real life.

And what's been interesting, I saw maybe a dozen or 15 different pictures and scenes, and every once in a while along the journey, I would see another one of those come to life.

Uh, about five years ago, we had our 10-year anniversary, and it had one of the weirdest moments of my whole life.

Our worship team was leading a song that we never sang, it was just a special one for that day.

And I had this thought, I was like, I've seen this.

It wasn't like deja vu.

I was like, I've seen this moment before.

And I thought to myself, Liz is about to reach over and grab my hand, and I looked down, and Liz reached over and grabbed my hand, and I'm like, I've seen I've seen this moment before.

Here's what's interesting.

For years, after that first moment that I had this kind of picture with God, I didn't see a single one.

And then I started seeing a bunch of them.

And here's the fun thing as a side note for you the pictures keep coming and the pictures keep getting bigger and bigger.

I I've seen this room in my heart before I ever saw it with my eyes.

And I just know that because God has been faithful, check this out, he will be faithful.

Like when you're living in the middle of your story and you can't see a picture of the future.

Well, when you're living in the middle of the story and it makes no sense to you, you understand this.

Faithfulness is a proclamation of faith.

Faithfulness is the proclamation of God, I trust you.

You need to hear this.

God's faithfulness is defined by his character, not your circumstances.

So when you're in the middle of your story and you can't see it working out the way you think it's going to work out, here's what you can do: you can lean back into the faithfulness of God.

Let me say it to you like this.

God's promises, they can be trusted.

Because God's character is that of faithfulness.

Romans chapter 8 says, if God is for us, who can be against us?

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Three verses before this, he says that God works together all things for the good of those who love him.

Like these are the promises of God that you can lean into when your story doesn't make sense.

And so I think about my story as I'm kind of in this retrospective, reflective day, and I could sum up my story and the story of our church in four words.

So far, so God.

Not so far, so good, because there have been some days that didn't make sense.

But it's so far, so God.

Interesting story.

There's a prophet in the Bible named Jeremiah.

Pastor Ryan read from his book earlier.

Jeremiah also penned another book called Lamentations.

It's literally him lamenting over his story.

God, where are you?

God, I don't understand.

God, why did you allow the Babylonians to destroy the city of Bab the city of Jerusalem?

Why, why, why, why, why?

And he writes this book called Lamentations.

It's five chapters.

Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5 have 22 verses in it.

22.

The Hebrew alphabet, which he would have written in Hebrew, has 22 letters.

Every verse in chapter 1, 2, 4, and 5 goes sequentially.

It's the first one starts with whatever their A is, Alf, B, B.

It literally goes through it.

It's poetic.

Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5.

Chapter 3 is interesting though, because instead of being 22 verses, it's 66 verses.

It's three times as much.

Chapters 1 and 2, he's like, God, where are you?

Chapter 3, he's like, God, I trust your faithfulness.

You are great and greatly to be trusted.

Four and five, he's like, I don't even understand.

Here's what's interesting.

Scholars believe the reason he wrote them sequentially following the alphabet is he's saying, God, you're a God of order.

You're a God of reason.

Even when I don't understand, I trust your faithfulness.

God, you're a God of order.

God, I trust you.

What if that became our story?

That even when I don't understand, I don't get it, I can look back and I can say, So far, so God.

So far it doesn't make sense, but God, you've always been good.

Let me give you one last reason as to why this matters.

In 1 Peter chapter 3, Peter says this.

1 Peter 3 · chapter mention

He says, Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

Why can you live with such faith?

Because my faith isn't based on my circumstances.

My faith is based on God's faithfulness.

Why can you have hope for the future?

Because my hope isn't tied to what I see.

My hope is tied to who God is.

So how incredible would it be if you and I could live a different kind of life?

A life, number one, where I say, God, I trust you and I will obey you.

You get my yes.

And number two, I will live leaning back into your faithfulness.

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

Let's pray together.

God, we thank you for your faithfulness.

God, sometimes we don't understand.

Sometimes we struggle because what we see with our eyes doesn't match what we see with our heart.

And God, today we just declare that we we trust you.

And our trust isn't in our own circumstances, our trust is in your faithfulness.

So, God, thank you that you're faithful.

Help us to never forget, help us to always remember.

God, we declare today that we'll be people that say yes.

Whatever you ask us to do, our answer is yes.

Whatever it costs, our answer is yes.

We trust you.

And secondly, God, the reason we can have faith for tomorrow is because our faith is anchored in your faithfulness.

We love you, God, and we thank you for that.