Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
John and Bridget Nesser are back for a wedding. It's so good to see you again, and it's so good to hear you and see you again. Oh, they moved to South Carolina and we miss you, but we are happy for you. We love you, love to see you. Oh, sorry. Okay. And then we also want to— I like it better back there. Now you've sufficiently embarrassed me. Okay. It's all right. I forgive you. One more thing, we want to remind you that every Sunday there is communion available and Jerry Saber will be praying and Holly, Jerry and Holly together will be. Thank you. Did you want to finish?
Brian: No.
Jacque: I do need your help. Jerry and Holly will be serving communion today. Hallelujah. What a blessing. I think that I should go over there today. Yes, I will. And then some of us are going to be going to the Corcoran Park for a picnic today. I shouldn't say us because we have an internment for a family today in Hope cemetery, but several people are going to the Corcoran Park. So grab a sandwich on the way and have some fellowship. Oh, one more thing: it's so good to see you, Steve. Steve Chaffin and his beautiful wife are here. It's wonderful to have you here. I think you were in our junior high department when we started out in the ministry a few years ago. Yeah. Okay.
Brian: Thank you. You can stay here with me. I look much better when you are by me. Isn't she beautiful?
Jacque: Oh, stop it. Now, you have gone too far.
Brian: Now, I've gone too far. I've gone too far. Well, thank you Pastor Robert for that really great encouragement about faith today. Pastor Jeff is going to come and bring the message. I think Cheryl's going to be joining them. This week, Jacque and I were out of town for a few days. It was great to get away. We got word on Friday that one of our dear friends who was the best man in our wedding passed away on Friday evening from COVID. His wife is still in the hospital and we want to pray for the Kevin Norberg family and Rebecca. Our prayers go out to them, of course. After I got the news, I thought I'm really glad Pastor Jeff is speaking today because my heart's a little heavy again today.
I think this is the 15th or 16th person this year that has passed that have been very close to us. That's a lot of loss to have in a short period of time. The average is maybe about 2% of the congregation will pass over a period of a year. It feels like there is a lot more than that happening in our lives today. Uh, but we know God is good and we know that Kevin is in a much better place and we are grateful for the eternal life that God gives to us today.
We just want to welcome all of you. Thank you all for watching online. Your part of our community can't be unmeasured; it just can't be measured. Your encouragement to all of us, the cards and letters, and even the financial support that you give is so encouraging to us, and we thank you for that. Continue to pray for Hope Community. We have some wonderful things right on the horizon, some things happening with the city, and things that we've been praying for and waiting for a long time. We are so grateful for all the things that God is doing and is to do.
I'm anxious to hear what Pastor Jeff has to say, and so pastor Jeff, would you come? And then at the end of the service, we are going to pray for people. I want to pray for Jimmy Zell's brother, Jerry, who is in ICU down in Phoenix and whatever else the Lord puts on your heart to pray for, but we welcome you. Let's get Pastor Jeff a wonderful, welcome. Thank you for all of your support and love, buddy.
Jeff: Great. We'll go off mute. That's all working. You can hear me. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Before we get started— it’s so great to be up here with you. It was so fun. We've been talking a lot about these things, so it's great that now we can talk about it in front of you. I have a deep theological question to ask before we get into the message today. We were talking one morning in Genesis. We are going to spend a little time in Genesis today. In the earlier part of Genesis, it talks about how God saw that it wasn't good for man to be alone, so we made him a help mate. All of a sudden when we were talking, the question popped in my mind, how come women didn't need to help mate?
Cheryl: Okay. A lot of men cook, I'm sure right here, a lot of men cook, don't you?
Jeff: A raising of hands. I just realize women do everything, including working a job, taking care of the family, raising the kids, everything that they do, plus they help husbands. All we've got to worry about is ourselves, and we can't even do that by ourselves. God just did a better job on the second attempt. Figure that one out. So thanks. I need you.
Cheryl: I need you.
Jeff: Yeah, we need each other. Thank you, Jesus. It's good. It's good not to be alone. That was a wonderful thing that you did, Brian, when you gave us a moment for the Lord to speak to us. He just jumped right in there and he said, "I think I want you to share your conclusion first." All of a sudden, it made a lot of sense. How many of you have heard of the four spiritual laws? If you grew up with Campus Crusade for Christ, you probably used them to tell people about Jesus. Who can tell me what the first spiritual law is? Anybody? God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Remember that? How many have heard that before? God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. That is the first spiritual law of the four spiritual laws, that little booklet that Camps Crusade put out. It is true.
The only thing that I am beginning to realize is that in Western culture, we interpreted differently than God does because as Francis Schaeffer said, "Our, our focus tends to be on our personal peace and affluence, our personal happiness." And so what I'm starting to understand is that God's wonderful plan for our life is not about our personal happiness, but if we let Jesus bring us into his wonderful plan, we will be completely happy, but we won't be completely happy because we have all the things that we want. There will be something deeper and richer that he is going to bring us into.
A lot of this discussion today actually came out of your messages recently, Brian, especially the one where you, you talked about the difference between a setback in a setup, how every setback we experience in life is just a setup for Jesus to make us more like him are just going to continue on with that thread of thought. The key verse for this message is Matthew 5, verse 48. Why don't we start with that? This is in the New Living translation. Most of them are. I've come to like come to like that translation it's succinct. You go ahead.
Cheryl: Matthew 5, verse 48, but you are to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.
Jeff: Yeah. Do you ever wonder how a gracious, loving, merciful, forgiving God could require his people to be perfect? In the little teaser I sent to Rachel this week that she put out, the answer was well, he does even better than that. He works in us every day to make us perfect. The word perfect there doesn't mean what we generally think of when we think of the word perfect. When we say something is perfect, that means the paint job doesn't have a flaw. It's not to be unflawed; that's not what this word means. The word is Aramaic, and the sense of the meaning is that if you are perfect, you have come to an understanding, you have become mature. It was used oftentimes to describe heady teachers, men who had matured and seasoned and understood things.
What the Lord really wants to do is he wants to us to come to the same understanding as our heavenly father, to the same level of maturity as our heavenly father. If we even just change the word perfect to maturity, if we are talking about becoming like him, that's a daunting thing regardless, but that's the plan of Jesus. The wonderful plan that God has for your life is to make you perfect, is to bring you in to the same understanding and maturity as our heavenly father has. And so there is a process through which he does that, and that's what we are going to talk about today.
Cheryl: He said to do it, so we must be able to.
Jeff: That's right. That's right. He didn't set us up for failure. That's right. We are going to start in Genesis and we are going to go back all the way to Genesis three, where Adam and Eve were in the garden and they meet the serpent. I want to start with Genesis 3, verses 4 and 5. Let's go ahead and read that. Then this is the devil talking to Eve. We are just going to jump right into the middle of the conversation.
Cheryl: I always want to read this like a serpent, but I'm not going to today.
Jeff: Doing partial tongue, yeah.
Cheryl: "You won't die," the serpent replied to the woman. "God knows that your eyes will be opened, and as soon as you eat it, you'll be like God knowing good and evil."
Jeff: You know, I don't know. I might be the only one here, but as anybody else ever struggled with the whole concept of the fallenness of man and original sin, like Adam sinned, and so now we are all born with a propensity to sin and it's all Adam's fault because he disobeyed God, and so now we have a propensity to disobey God. This never made sense to me. I've always struggled with that concept that man has fallen because they understand we are made in the image of God and we've lost something, but the Lord began to unpack something for me here in Genesis 3 that really started to make sense to me.
You've got to understand that Adam disobeyed God before he ate the apple. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. He looked at them, and he said it was good. They had the ability to disobey the father long before the fall that was built into them. They could obey or they could not obey, and they disobeyed before they were fallen. This is not about they disobeyed, so now we are stuck. We have to disobey too. This is not the point. The issue of the fall is that their eyes were opened and they knew good and evil like the father does. That's the issue. That's what happened. That's what happened in the fall: their eyes were open and the devil made a promise to Eve. And he said, "Oh, if you eat this fruit, you are not going to die." He said, "God knows that if you eat this fruit, your eyes are going to be open and you are going to become like him."
That was a half-truth. The fact is they ate the apple and their eyes were opened just like God. Now they understood good and evil just like God. The only thing is they weren't like God at all. All of history has proven that since we ate that fruit and our eyes were open and we came into the knowledge of good and evil, the calamity, the harm, the suffering that we have caused to one another, all throughout history proves that we aren't like God at all. We got the knowledge, but we got it without any context. We got it outside of the rest of who God is. And so everything that's harmful that we do all of the wars, all of the genocides, the Holocaust, all of it that happened, all of the things that we see happening right now, the injustices and the harm that we do in each other, in this modern world, happened out of our knowledge of good and evil.
We have an understanding of what's right and what's wrong, and we are going to take action. We are going to get it fixed. Even if it means we got to go to war, even if we got to kill people, we are going to make it right. We see over and over and over again in history, we see these revolutions to right or wrong. The government that comes into power to fix the problem ends up worse than the government they replaced. When you think about the genocides of the world, they didn't begin or end with a Holocaust.
Cheryl was just telling me the other day that she saw an international news that there were mass killings happening in Nigeria again. Christians and Muslims have been fighting there for decades and thousands of Christians are dying right now. That's just one nation. Stories like that happen a hundred times a year in our world, in many, many nations we don't even hear about it, besides all the atrocities and harm that we see happening in our own hometown, the murders, the senseless violence, all the things that we see, all of that has come as a result of our eyes being opened. We've carried that forward, but we needed something to merger with it: the part that God has. The part that God has that we needed to merge with it is love.
See, God carries a knowledge of good and evil, perfectly. He responds to good and evil perfectly. He responds to injustice perfectly. He brings justice perfectly alongside of mercy. Who can do that? Only God can do that. Why can God do that? Why can he merge justice and mercy and deal with all of these things that we end up on one side or the other, but never in the right place? That's what ends up being. Something happens, I have a reaction, I get upset, I get angry, I've got to do something about this, and it's all coming out of my knowledge of good and evil. This is wrong. We've got to do something to make it right, but it's missing the component of father's love that allows me to respond the way that he would. And so the goal that the father has for us is to bring us into love. That's the setup. What he uses to bring us into love, unfortunately, is all of the hardness in life's experiences. I want to show you something again in Genesis. Let's go to the next section. We are going to read verses 14 through 19, and we'll start with 14 and 15.
Cheryl: Then the Lord God said to the serpent, "because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust, as long as you live, and I will cause hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, and he will strike your head. You will strike his heel."
Jeff: This is the first mention of Messiah, and I think— I don't have a lot to say about this because I believe that what the Lord is saying is bringing here as he is speaking to the serpent and to Adam and Eve is a solution to the problem that they just cause. Of course, the first solution is Messiah, who is going to bruise the head of the serpent, who is going to free us from his, who is going to liberate us from death, who is going to wash away our sins and our shame and all that we carry in terms of regret and make us new. That's the redemptive work of Jesus, obviously. That's what the gospel is all about that Robert wants us to become a visible community to share about. Amen brother. Let's look at verses 16 through 19, and you can just read them all together, Cheryl. We'll just do all three and then we'll comment on it.
Cheryl: Then he said to the woman, I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy and in pain, you will give birth. You will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.
Jeff: keep going.
Cheryl: And to the man, He said, "Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life, you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you though you will eat of its grain. By the sweat of your brow, you will have food to eat until you return to the ground for which you were made, for you are made from dust and to dust, you will return.
Jeff: How many of you have ever called this section of scripture, the curse, or heard it called the curse when people teach? I want to tell you something; this is not a curse. A father would never curse as children. This is the cure.
Cheryl: That's what we need today.
Jeff: We need a cure. We need a cure because their eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil and it caused all kinds of problems all through history. It made all kinds of problems for every single one of us. And so God provided in the same breath that he provided a cure, bringing Messiah to free us from the oppression of the serpent, he brought the cure in terms of a pathway in life to carry us into love because unfortunately, love is formed in the difficulties of our lives and our relationships.
Think about what he said here. You are going to have pain in childbirth. Let's just expand that a little bit. You are going to have pain in raising your children. Anybody here ever experienced pain raising their children? Your desire is going to be for your husband. He'll rule over you. Let's just expand that a little bit. How about pain in your marriage? Anybody ever suffered any pain in their marriage? Anybody find marriage can be difficult Brad and Paul are saying, "No, it's perfect for us." We'll get into this a little bit later, but when we got married, her pastor, he had a marriage sermon. I had actually heard it before our wedding, but he gave the same sermon for us, and in his sermon, he always says every couple fights. He says, "If I ever hear a man say, 'I've never had a fight with my wife', I know he is lying.
How about vocationally? Anybody ever struggle with their jobs? Anybody ever struggled with money? Anybody ever suffered pain trying to eke out a living? We live in one of the wealthiest nations of the world and we are all going crazy trying to make a living. What if you live in a place where everyone is starving to death? What if you live in a third world nation? What really doesn't make sense to me, I've said this many times; how can we live in the wealthiest nation of the world and have so much depression, so much mental illness and so much need for therapy and drugs? How can that be? We should be happy. We've got everything we want, but everything we want, isn't the solution.
And so the trials, whether you are in a third world nation, or you live in America, you have trials in life. That's part of living. We all suffer in life in one way or another. Some of us suffer more severely than others, but each one of us has a package that we have lived through in our lives. That package, God can use to form his love inside of us. Now because we are fallen because of all that we've done to each other, because of our knowledge of good and evil, we've increased the suffering exponentially.
The Lord didn't put in here that he is going to make wars happen. We made wars happen. They are the most horrible things that have ever existed on the earth. How many innocent civilians lost their lives in World War II, 500 million? For what? So a crazy man could be stopped. None of it makes sense. It's all horrible, but in your everyday life, without those things and in your life with all of the harm that could come to you as a result of living in this world, God can do something deeper and richer in you than you could ever have imagined. And he can bring you into something that he is. That's his goal: to bring us with our knowledge of good and evil into himself, into his love, so it can be folded into everything that he is, so that we can be like him.
Becoming like him includes the knowledge of good and evil, but that's not good enough by itself. It has no value without love, without being enfolded in love. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life, they were in the garden together. They are symbiotic. We understand now that trees talk to each other through their roots, you know? So these two trees talked to each other.
Cheryl: There is a lot going on in those roots.
Jeff: Yes, a lot going on in those roots. Let's just go to Jesus for a second, because what I want to suggest to you is that the pathway that God has for us to enter into understanding, maturity, perfection is the same pathway he had for Jesus. That's in Hebrews 5, 8 and 9.
Cheryl: Although he was a son, he learned obedience from the things which he suffered, and having been perfected, he became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey him.
Jeff: So Jesus, the son of God had to learn obedience. He had to be made perfect. I thought he was perfect. I thought he was God. Do you ever struggle with that verse? What in the world? What is this about? The answer's yes. Again, this is Greek now instead of Aramaic, but the sense of the word perfect is very similar to what we read about the Aramaic word. It has a sense of completion or maturity. It's not flawless. It's not like he was flawed and now he is been made flawless. It was like he needed to come to understanding he needed to come to maturity. The father brought him in his life to a place where he was like the father. Whoa, but that's what it says in Hebrews. The Lord was doing things. The father was doing things in his life to form his stature in him.
When it says from the things which he suffered, we tend to go immediately to the cross, you know, from the things which he suffered. But I got a feeling, he learned obedience and he became complete long before the cross. He had to live life just like you and I do. Cheryl and I were talking and we have different ideas and how this all works, but sometimes I wonder what it was like for him to grow up as a little boy. He was different than all the other kids. Anybody grow up picked on by all the other kids? I wonder if he was picked on. I don't know.
They had to eke out a living. They were poor. They maybe went hungry at night. He lived a human life. That's one of the wonderful things about the series 'The chosen'. You see a very human Jesus. If he lived a human life, he lived through the same hardships and trials and struggles, physically and emotionally that all of us do. The Holy Spirit used that same pathway to form in him, everything that he was. Do you struggle with that a little bit?
Cheryl: Just like us.
Jeff: Yeah. Just like us. That was the point: for, to him to live just like us, yet without sin. That's the point. He lived through everything we have and he came into completion. The pathway he took brought him to completion. I want to tell you the pathway God has for you can bring you to completion. It can bring you to perfection. That's his plan. That is the wonderful plan he has for your life: to change you, transform you, bring you into something that changes the way you see the world, the way you respond to what's happening in the world. It doesn't come out of just your sense of justice or injustice, right and wrong, what has or hasn't got to be done. It comes out of something much larger out of the very heart and love of the father. His response is so different. At least when I compare it to my responses, I fall away short of the father's responses. I'm so glad I got Brian because he keeps bringing me back to the father's love sometimes when I'm ready to rage. And then he talks and it's all right. Brian, thank you. I'm glad that every day you say, "Jesus, I need more of you."
This happens in every aspect of our lives, but let's just take one that's obvious for many of us, and that's marriage. As I said, our pastor, when he married us in his message said that every married couple of fights. You know what my response was to that we were pretty brand new Christians. We were filled with the Holy Spirit ghost. We were raging for Jesus. I said, no, that's not true. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit, you don't have to fight.
Cheryl: Did you say that out loud to him?
Jeff: No, I said it in my mind.
Cheryl: I knew he would say it.
Jeff: You are smarter than I am.
Cheryl: I didn't like what he said.
Jeff: Well, I proved him right on the third night of our honeymoon. We had driven all the way to Denver. We were going to go backpacking in the Colorado Rockies. We were in Denver. We were in a hotel and we thought, well, we need to go out to a nice restaurant. We picked some Asian restaurant. At that time, when we went to LeeAnn Chin's— her family was a big— it was not LeeAnn Chin. What was that place? Nankin, downtown. They would go to the Nankin and they had all ordered all these Chinese dishes and I ordered the steak. I was very limited in what food was good. She has changed me a lot, thankfully. So we get to this Asian restaurant in there and there is a menu. I can't understand the single thing that's on it. I started to get really crappy. I was like, why are we here? This is horrible.
Cheryl: It was a soup.
Jeff: It started with a soup.
Cheryl: Like a bowl of broth that you could see through with maybe one or two things in it.
Jeff: Well, in a matter of about 10 minutes, she left the restaurant crying.
Cheryl: Yeah. I was like, wow. I didn't know that he would be this way. I thought he was happy. What's this? I went out outside and I was just like, Lord, what shall I do? I don't like this. Help me to know what to do.
Jeff: We struggled through all our baggage in the early years of our marriage, just like a lot of young couples do, I think. And then we met some good friends from Ireland named Paul and Hillary Kyle. We spent a lot of time with them some time ago now, a couple of decades ago, actually. They did a marriage retreat one weekend and we went to it and it was the first time I would ever heard anybody suggest that the purpose for marriage was not to make us happy, but to make us Holy Spirit. Have you ever heard that?
If any of you have discovered Gary Thomas's book, 'Sacred Marriage', his byline to that is, what if God designed marriage to make us Holy Spirit, not happy? That book is the greatest devotional I've ever read. It changed my life forever, if you really want a good devotional. But that's really true. The hardships of your marriage, God has purposely designed to change you. We worked so hard to change each other so that we can be happy. We got it all wrong. The person God is trained to change in all your marital difficulties is not the other person; it's you.
In our hardest year— we had a couple of years that we really struggled. I was pastoring and I was really busy in ministry. The long and short of it, the Lord had to reveal to me that my mistress was the ministry and Cheryl was being abandoned in a lot of different ways. It took a couple of years to get there, and he did wonderful things in her during that time. But you know, it was really cool at the end of that, we found out we were both praying the same prayer and the prayer generally was Lord, please, whatever you have to do to change me, change me. And then we would always end it with, and if they need any change, you can do that too.
Cheryl: Yeah, true. But first, it was change me.
Jeff: First, it was a brokenness before the Lord and a willingness to let him transform my life. As much as we struggled with each other in that season, the Lord helped us not to blame each other, but to look to God to transform us. This is what God wants to do with you in your marriage, in your child-rearing, in your life, in your losses, in your pain. He wants you to come to him so that he can form his heart in you and change the person that you are. I'm sorry to say it; it's the pain that allows him to do that. Who would have thought his wonderful plan involves pain?
Cheryl: Pain is good.
Jeff: It's good. No pain, no gain. Or as we said over Butch last week, for momentary light affliction is have produced in you and eternal weight of glory. Church was suffering under Rome and Paul said momentary, light afflictions. They weren't just struggling with the normal things of life; they were struggling with the horrible things that men do to each other, and Paul called the momentary light affliction because he understood that it's in those afflictions that the father calls us to a deeper place of understanding, and he forms in us his love.
In order to make it through your marriage, you have to learn how to forgive. In order to make it through life, you have to learn how to forgive know. We understand when there is a deep tragedy and a great harm has been done. You just don't walk up to a person and say well, you know, you have to forgive them. But the fact of the matter is if you don't let the father bring you to that, and you allow bitterness and revenge and anger to fill your heart and carry you forward, your soul will shrivel. Jesus wants your soul to be whole. But all of these things are formed in the furnace of affliction. I'm sorry to say.
Cheryl: This is a very intimate thing.
Jeff: It is. It really is. He becomes so close to us in these times. We've seen that with good friends who we walked with through cancer, all the way to their parting to be with Jesus. You guys know people in their deepest sorrows; they were deeply transformed. They became so much like Jesus, it was amazing. It was crazy. John Thielen, Eric Jensen, and these guys who had— they didn't die suddenly, but in that journey, wow, Jesus got close. Deb Osc was another one, just watching the Lord do these things in their lives.
Here is the good news: If we let the father work out his wonderful plan for our life, we will come into a place of complete happiness. If we let the Lord do what he wants to do in our marriages, in me, we will come into happy marriages. The end result is happiness. It's just not the goal. The goal is godliness. He wants to make us like him. The way he makes us like him is he brings us into love. Make sense? Here is another scripture. I think we've got time for it: Romans 8:28.
Cheryl: And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
Jeff: It's easy to interpret that from our Western worldview, but let's fold that into Matthew 5:48. Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. God causes everything to work together for good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose. What's his purpose? You are called according to his purpose. His purpose is for you to become perfect, to become like the father. Everything that happens in your life, God works together for good. What's the good? To make you like the father.
From our Western worldview, it means like, oh, everything's going to be okay. The bills will all get paid. I won't be homeless. I won't lose the house. I won't lose my job. I'll get a better job. I'll find a better wife. Oh, God caused my divorce to work out for good; I got a better wife. I don't mean to disparage anybody that has been married again and you had a horrible first marriage and now you've got a wonderful second marriage. I'm very, very glad for you, and so is Jesus.
But from our Western point of view, we think that everything working together for good means that all gets fixed in the end, but it doesn't get fixed, not the way that we tend to think. It gets fixed by the transformation of our hearts. Interestingly enough, this very scripture— let's see here. I think someplace I have—I can find it 1, 2, 3. Here we are: Matthew 5. We are going to go back to Matthew 5:48, but I want to read verses 43 to 48 because they are going to fold be perfect into the context of what Jesus was actually saying. We are going to kind of wrap this up with it.
Cheryl: Matthew 5, 43 through 48. You have heard the law that says love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. In that way, you'll be acting as true children of your father in heaven for, he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just, and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that, but you are to be perfect even as father in heaven is perfect.
Jeff: The final statement is made in the context of love. How are you going to love? Are you going to love your friends only or your enemies too? Are you going to love those who are only good to you or those who do harm to you? Are you going love only those who are familiar to you or are you going to love strangers? Are you going to love only those who agree with you or will you love the people who think differently? Are you getting love only the people in your church or will you love people and other denominations too? Will you love only the Christians or where you love people of other religions too? Or will you love people who don't believe in God too?
The only way you can do that is for the father to form his love in you. I was contemplating one day, the Lord had done some random, wonderful thing like he always does for us, and I said, "Lord, how do you love so perfectly? How do you do that? You do it so perfectly." I can't even find words to describe it. He said, "It's not because I'm loving; it's because I am love." And then he said, "My goal is not to teach you how to be loving. My goal is to make you love." We struggle so hard as Christians. We want to learn how to be loving. We try to be loving. Loving is just something we put on top of ourselves or our old selves. Jesus wants to transform you. He wants to make you love like he is love. What does that look like? I don't know, but I want to go there. I want to go there. I want to become love. Say something.
Cheryl: Me too.
Jeff: It's a lifelong journey. It's not an easy journey. With every loss we experienced all of your losses this year, Pastor Brian, God is using every one of them to do something deeper and richer inside of you. We don't want it. Let's just not forget that in the middle of all this, God does miracles. He provides. He protects. He heals us. He acts in so many profound ways towards us. He makes our lives so wonderful in so many ways. He loves us. He is our father, and yet we are not exempt from struggles. We are not exempt from 1:21:00 pain. We are not exempt from suffering, and he didn't intend that we should be.
I remember Amber when she was like 17 she was having all these car troubles and she got stalled in the worst place, on a freeway entrance, you know? She called me, and I got there and she is in tears, and she says, "How come if God loves me my car won't start?" Anybody ever wonder things like that?
Cheryl: Good question.
Jeff: I was driving to run an errand yesterday and I saw this guy. He had a mini dump truck with a trailer on it, stalled at the left turn lane, going into holiday, right in the middle of the traffic. Before I even realized that I could help him, I drove by and, oh, well, I missed that opportunity, which is pretty normal for me. I miss all my opportunities. You know, I'm just on my way, but I ended up— I forgot something at home. I turned around and came back and there he was still there with a squad car behind him, and the thought came to me, you know, Jeff, you have Triple A; you could help him get a tow for free. I went home and got what I came for and came back. Well, in the meantime, somebody with a pickup had attached to chain and pulled him out of the intersection, into the holiday station. I parked there and it went over and said, "Hey, I can help you with a tow. Would you like me to call Triple A? I think they'll do it for free." He said, "Sure." I'm in the middle of calling Triple A and some other guy walks up, some random guy walks up and says, "Hey, I'm a diesel mechanic. Can I help you?"
Can you believe it? This guy, in a matter of 10 minutes, three people stopped to help him. That is the goodness of God. We are capable of those things, but for me, it was really a new thing to stop and help somebody like that. That's not what I do. So I told Cheryl, I said, "I kind of got delayed on my errand. I stopped and helped somebody." She said, "Really, oh, that's nice." I said, "Yeah. I'm starting to become love."
Cheryl: Step right in.
Jeff: What's that?
Cheryl: Step right in.
Jeff: Step right in. We see lots of acts of love. Love is something that the father put in us because of his image, so we see it in a lot of places in the world, but it's not the as becoming it, and this is what he is calling you to. What do you think, the place you want to go? Life is hard anyways. Why not let it produce something good. Let's stand together. I think we'll keep sitting, because I'm not sure that you can see us if we stand. Thank you, Lord. You can just join me. We are going to open our hearts to the Holy Spirit and give him permission to just bring us into this place that he wants to work out his wonderful plan for our lives. It truly is a wonderful plan, just not the wonderful plan that you envisioned. That's all. It's better. Just think what the church will be if he actually does this in our hearts.
Father, thank you for the journey that you have planned for us. Thank you for the cure that you created in the garden, the pathway to healing, to wholeness, to love. And we thank you, Holy Spirit, that every day, you know our struggles; you call us to look to you, to trust you, to yield to you so that you can form in us deeper and richer truth, and you can bring us from where we are to a place of love.
Lord, if it's your desire in all of these sufferings to bring us to love, then we say, yes, we want to go there with you. It seems impossible, but it seems so exciting to become the kind of people that Jesus was when he walked on this earth, to be like that in what we see and how we see it and how we respond. So we yield to you. We trust you and we ask you Lord, do your work. Work in our lives. Work when we are resisting you. Work when we are yield to you. Don't stop working. Don't listen to us when we are whining. Thank you for how careful you are as you bring this forward into the very things that you've called us to, and that day by day you form in us, your very heart.
There may be somebody here listening online; you've even met Jesus. That's the start. That's the start of the journey. And if you are one of those people or you've been away from Jesus for a long time and you needed to come back, right now, just tell him, I'm coming back to you, Lord. I opened my heart to you, Jesus. Please come in. Start my life again with your mercy, with your forgiveness and fill me with your new life and your Holy Spirit.
That prayer will change your life forever. Just breathe it to Jesus right now, and I guarantee he will hear it and he will answer it and your life will change. If you are in a place of need this message isn't designed to make you fatalistic and say, well, I guess I just have to suffer through it. Part of the pathway into this maturity includes trusting him in the most difficult times to bring his solutions. He works us through these times. Many times, he doesn't interrupt them, but he brings us through them, and in that process, we see miracles.
I thoroughly believe that many times we experienced miracles, we just don't see them or understand that that's what they are, but our father is always working in our behalf. He is our greatest advocate and he is our savior in many, many ways. So if you need a healing today, if you are short on your rent today, if you need a job today, if you need a relationship restored today, if you are struggling with depression or some other form of mental illness today, nothing is beyond our father's ability to do a miracle.
So whatever it is that you are carrying struggling with right now, if you want to ask God for a miracle, you have every right to do it because he loves to hear you come to him. So raise your hand and just say, Jesus, you see my need, and I trust you, and I ask you for a miracle. Lord. we think of Jerry; he is in the hospital and Arizona. We ask you for a miracle. We think of friends right here at Hope who struggling with cancer and other illnesses. We ask you for a miracle: Brian and Butch. We think of Nikki recovering from her surgery, learning how to use those legs again; we ask you for a miracle. We think of Chanson, and we ask you for a miracle. We are not hesitant to ask you, Father. We thank you that we can trust you and expect your hand of great goodness and mercy upon us. Amen. Amen, Amy. Pastor Brian, Jacque, why don't you come up?
Brian: Thank you, Pastor Jeff, a wonderful word. Thank you, Cheryl for everything. God bless you. I'm so thankful. This has been a year of a lot of loss for per many of us and for Jacque and I, but I'm so thankful today that in the midst of loss, God always plants a seed of hope. There is always a place of hope that can grow into a place of faith. No matter what the circumstances are, his grace is there to help us have hope and strength and faith for tomorrow.
We don't look at the circumstances, but as Pastor Robert said before about faith, you can have a large amount of faith, but if it's in the wrong thing, it's not going to really accomplish much. But our God is so big that all we have to do is have a mustard-size seed of faith. If that faith is placed in the right direction, our father in heaven, it can actually move mountains in our lives. So aren't you thankful today that we really don't need to be great men and women of faith? We just have to be people of just even small faith, just small faith in a big God.
So I just encourage you today to take this word; let the circumstances of our lives that might be a disappointment— One of the things that Jack and I pray regularly every day is helped me to really become one with you father, rather than— you know, I was praying this past week when I was up in the beautiful Itasca Park and just kind of walking and community with the Lord, and God spoke to me. He said something really interesting. I want you to kind of hear this. He said, "I don't need your permission, Brian, to do what I do in other people's lives. I only need permission to do something from you in your life."
Jeff: That's good.
Brian: He said, what I do in other people's lives and how I want to deal with them, I just want you to love them, but not necessarily try and change what I'm doing in their lives, but in your life, for me to work in your life, I actually need your permission to do that." We want to control at times that happens in other people's lives, but let's just trust that God knows what's best for other people. The best thing we can do for them is to just bring God's love and grace into their lives. As we bring love and grace into their lives, and we love in circumstances and situations that are challenging and hard for us, then we become that perfect that God is talking about here. We become that person that matures and becomes like our father in heaven. So thank you for this word. It was really good. Let's pray together. Let's lift our hands.
Now may the Lord bless you, and may the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace, and may you become like your father in heaven. This we pray in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Jerry and Holly will be over here to serve communion to those of you who would like to receive it. He and I were talking this past week and he said, "Pastor Brian, I really believe God's going to do some miracles as people take communion." If you need a miracle today for something, go over and receive communion and expect God to touch you in a great way. God bless you. Have a wonderful week and enjoy the picnic. I'm sorry I won't be able to be there today. God bless you.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 9-26-21. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.