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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Pastor Brian: I remember when I was young, the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants were always on television. I was always fascinated by the interviews that they would do with these young ladies who were hoping to become Miss America, or Miss Universe. They would ask them a question such as this: what do you want to do? What great aspirations do you have? And inevitably, the answers would begin something like this: Well, I want to solve world hunger, or I want to help the homeless.
Jacque: World peace.
Brian: I don't know if you are aware of this, but in the last decade, 40 million people in America have stopped attending church on a regular basis, 40 million people in the last decade. That's a lot of people. The average person, particularly the Gen Zs, and a lot of millennials are just saying no to the organized church, the structured church any longer.
Oftentimes, we make a big mistake thinking that how we think is how God thinks. But he says very clearly that oftentimes his ways are a lot higher than our ways. It's not that we never have the thought or mind of God. We do, but we are inundated with the fallenness of this world. That fallenness affects how we think virtually every day. It's a constant battle to take captive our thoughts and to think like Jesus.
Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who we reflect back on as heroes, they were not thought of as heroes at that time when they did what they did. Many of them were not the power brokers that we might envision them to have been in their day. They were, many of them ordinary people who no longer wanted to live under tyranny. There was an extreme amount of tyranny at that time. I don't need to go into the details of that. There was a tyranny of an oppressive government. What most of us sometimes failed to realize is that in virtually all the nations of the world, up until that time, most nations were governed by a monarchy, a king or queen, where they virtually were the supreme authority over everything. For our founding fathers to make a declaration that was so out of the realm of the understanding of most people, which was this: God has created all people equally.
Happy Father's Day to all you fathers. You are supposed to say thank you. You are welcome. I had a wonderful dad. My dad had a terrible dad. My father immigrated to Canada with his family when he was about five. By the time my dad was six, his father had already abandoned his family in a new country where they didn't know how to speak the language. It's amazing what God can do in somebody's life when you give your hearts to Christ. I still think that my dad had, I would call some issues because of the abandonment that he experienced, but he got so healed up in so many ways when he came to know Jesus that I couldn't have asked for a more wonderful Father. He broke the curse that was put on his family and that's what Jesus brings to all of us. That's what Jesus brings to this world. The older I get, the more frustrated I become with how God is perceived.
One of the challenges that we face in life is how to build relationships with people. How many have found that can be challenging at times to build relationships with people that last? Right. One of the things that sometimes we avoid in our relationships is we avoid being honest and frank with each other because we are fearful of rejection. We are fearful of what other people might think. And so oftentimes we are not honest or frank with people because it puts us in a position of being vulnerable because nobody likes being rejected. God made us so that we would thrive when we are loved and that we would thrive when we love people. That's how God made us. That's the optimum way for us to live, is to be loved and to love.
I'm going to talk about trusting God. It's a process. It's a process, so know that as I speak. We all have different emotions on Mother's Day, don't we? Some people, our moms aren't on this earth anymore, and we miss them. And we have so many memories. I'm wearing mom's bracelets today and her ring, and I'm just remembering my mom today. Some of you, your moms were not loving like they should have been. Some of you may have been abandoned by your mother and I, all I can think of is how deeply wounded that mother must have been to do what was so unnatural for a mother. But that has left wounds inside you. And then there is some women who desperately wanted to be a mom and never were able to. And that's such a loss. We come to Mother's Day from so many directions.
People often are illogical and oftentimes they are unreasonable. Most of us have experienced people who are very self-centered. I have a word of the Lord for you today: Love them anyways. Love them anyways. I confessed that one of the biggest challenges for me is loving people when they are difficult to love. It's not easy, is it?
Have any of you ever been in a position where you've said this or you've thought this, I didn't sign up for this. I didn't sign up for this. Being a mother, you know, being a mother. If you do good, there will be people who will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. And here's the word of the Lord, do good anyways. Do good anyways, that's the title in my message today. Just do good anyways.
