And then the answer course is the Lord did it. The Lord brought us. I'm so thankful to Jesus. I never get tired of talking about Christ. There's nothing else actually worth talking about than Christ. A part of my message today is just kind of another perspective of helping us understand just the importance of Jesus, the importance of Christ in our lives.
Happy New Year, everybody. God bless you. Happy New Year. All of you who are watching online, God bless you. Thank you for being a part of this faith community. Ever since Covid, things have changed. Some people come to church, some people watch online and they connect in other ways with us. I'm just thankful that we have ways of staying connected. Aren't you glad for that? I know that this device can cause a lot of problems, but only when you use it the wrong way. But this device can be a wonderful blessing when it's used the right way.
Over the past few years, I've done a lot of teaching on the subject of faith and especially concerning faith, our faith in God. I've shared with many people about how this faith in God requires certain things on our part. Namely, there are three different areas. I believe when we say we are having faith in God. There are three areas that I believe that we are what we are confessing to. I believe that when we say we have faith in God, that we are trusting in who God is, in other words, his character.
There's a whole lot of stuff going on in the world, isn't there?
I should read some of my news feeds that I get every day from different news outlets. I just get headlines and the more I read the news headlines, the more anxious I become. That's what happens when you feed all that stuff into you, right? If all you hear is bad news, then what ends up happening is our hearts, our spirits become Debbie Downers. One of the things that can happen when all of the things that are happening in our world keep inundating our minds is that we can become fearful. We can start living in a place of anxiety and fear.
We've been talking about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and this morning we are gonna look at some scriptures that, at least for me, are hard. All for the last few weeks, I've been reading quite a lot, Matthew 9, 10 and 11. And I keep reading it and rereading it, and I almost feel like we should do a verse-by-verse Bible study, because there are hard things that Jesus said in those chapters.
My prayer today is that we're able to really deliver the message that I believe the Lord wants us to share this morning. I've been in full-time ministry for, let's see, let's do the math, 20 plus years now. I asked the Lord many times, why did you call me to the pastor? I kind of envision Moses sometimes like, Lord, why did you put me in charge of these people? But those of us that have been in ministry, that's been pastoring, we know the analogy that pastor is a shepherd caring for a flock. And in order to do that, you have to have what we call a shepherd's heart, a pastor's heart.
I want to talk to you today. This title of my message is called The Beautiful Middle. That might not make any sense to you now, but hopefully in a few moments it will make some sense to you. But as I've been pondering the season we are about to enter into where we celebrate the incarnation of Christ, we celebrate God coming in person to this world. If we really want to encounter God's word. If we really want to feel God's heart, if we really want to know God's will, and if we really want to understand God's intentions, get what I'm going to say here, we must let the words of God imprint, lead us to the Word of God in person.
Most of us think when we think of the Last Supper, we think of communion and that was a big, big part of what Jesus was doing there. But it was also at the Last Supper that Jesus talked with his disciples about, I want to use the phrase, about going home, going to make room with us or for us with God. We often read this portion of scripture. We find it in John Chapter 14 verses 1 through 4, and I'd like you to read that.
Obey and obedience, those are foreign words in our culture today. As a matter of fact, in this, “my truth generation”, nobody can tell me anything. Matter of fact, a few years ago, the number one song was “Can't Nobody Tell Me Nothing”. Obey and obedience is foreign to this culture. It signifies things that they don't want to do: follow rules, adhere to authority, follow instructions. It's something that goes against the foundation of our culture today that's taught to be self-reliant, that's taught to be rebellious to authority, that's taught to follow their own so-called intellect and wisdom.
The title of our message today is Doing the stuff. Doing the stuff. Do you all know where that came from? Anybody, anybody? One of my heroes of the faith, a contemporary hero of the faith is John Wimber. Some of you may have heard of him, some of you may not. He was the founder of the Vineyard Church, and he was someone who, for years, moved in powerful demonstrations of miracles and healing in a way different from the faith healers of the fifties and sixties.
As we said before, those who belong to Jesus are called to a community of believers who share a common experience in salvation. The scripture we just read tells us that this community is to never stop praying. Other translations say to pray without ceasing. To never stop praying or to pray without ceasing means to have our minds always on the things of God and to be in constant communication with Him.
Oftentimes, we miss the importance of that specific event because all of the scriptures point to Jesus. They all point to Jesus. God didn't give us the scriptures so that we could debate each other theologically. He didn't give us the scriptures so that we could begin to argue over every jot and tittle like the Pharisees and the religious leaders did. If we miss that idea, that concept, if we miss the whole purpose of the Old Testament, we are going to miss who Jesus is. We will miss who Jesus is. Nobody likes someone who acts as if they are the center of the universe. Do we?
If you look at that term community, it's defined in many different ways. Depending on how it's defined, it could indicate anything from a group of people as a whole or it could describe a feeling that comes from such a group of people. And I tell this community has, in the theological, scholarly, theological realms has fostered many discussions. They have been interesting, even in my seminary life, how much we can discuss what the nature of community is and means.
I realized this morning, a month ago, Cheryl and I shared about the, the, the young and the old together, and here we are this morning, taking a step into the very essence of that message with Steven on the platform. As I said, this is, I don't know, sometime in July, he sent me a long text and it was a message that the Lord had dropped in his heart. Cheryl and I read it, and we thought, wow, that's pretty amazing. We started talking, I said, and right away a scripture came to mind in the gospel, I thought, this is a Jesus way.
Last week I shared a message about giving our best. Today, the title of my message is The End Game. And it's not because today's the kickoff of the NFL season. But God has an end game in mind for all of us. Last week we talked about giving our best, even though we may suffer at the hands of others when we do. I use the metaphorical expression, even if you get kicked in the teeth, you still should give your best.
How many know that each of us is unique. You know that? Each of us is unique and each of us has something very special to contribute to the world. We don't often think that way. A lot of times we can think that our lives are insignificant, that the world wouldn't miss a beat if we were gone. But that's just not the truth because God has made every single one of us with a purpose, and there is something special to contribute to the world and all of the people around us. We make that contribution by doing our very best. That's how we make that contribution by doing our very best.
Pastor Jeff: I better get the box of Kleenex. This isn't a tearful word. I'm hoping this'll be-- well, I really believe this is a prophetic message more so than maybe some of the others we've had. Give credit where credit is due. Cheryl is the one who was inspired with this. It started with something that she said that she believed that Hope needed to hear. We are going to just dive right in, in the interest of time. I can't quite see the clock. I got one right here. Okay. Just don't want to hold you too long. It's been a busy morning already. But, uh, we want to wrap it up. The name of this message is the Jesus Way, because that's what we've been teaching: the Jesus Way. This one is the New and the Old together. And we are going to start out with Matthew chapter 13, verse 52. This is in the Passion Translation.
When we look at the story of David and King Saul, we see that this is actually not a new problem. It's been a problem that has existed for a long time. And it happened and it existed in the life of David. We see how an evil spirit came to torment Saul. Saul had been made king. Saul was really not God's choice to be king. In fact, it wasn't God's choice at all that Israel had a king because God wanted to be their king. But how many know that oftentimes God just will defer to our wishes? Doesn't he? He doesn't leave us, doesn't abandon us. He doesn't say, well, now you made your bed sleep in it. But he does defer to us. Israel wanted to be like all the other nations rather than all the other nations becoming like Israel.
Speaking of the spiritual, we often receive the things of the spirit as it's being filtered through our flesh. Like when we listen to a sermon, we all have a desire to be spiritual, but we have all the reality of fighting with all these fleshly things that's going on in our minds and bodies. In order for us to become spiritual conduits of spiritual revelation, we have this filter of the flesh. And so sometimes, we are struck or mesmerized or concerned or overly concerned about the outward appearance or how something looks or how something sounds before we even get to the content of what we are going to receive.
