God of Devotion

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

These past few weeks, we've been going through the law in Exodus. And I know, thank you, I know whenever you guys first heard that we were going to go through the law in Exodus, boy, you're you just started licking your chops. You were ready. You were like, yeah, Exodus law. Let's do it. However, I've actually I've actually had a lot of fun with this. I was talking with Pastor Daniel on the phone a couple of weeks ago and I was like, you know, I had no idea what this is going to be like. We're just going to we were going through Exodus because we're being obedient. Right. Like we say we're going through Exodus. We're going to go through Exodus. We're going to cover it all. And I was I was kind of unsure about the 30s, you know, the Exodus 30s, all of that. And and here we are. And it's been a it's been a pleasant surprise and I've really, really enjoyed it.

And the premise of what we're doing as we're going through Exodus, really in the law part is really to see God more clearly, to know God. Right. And we've we've mentioned this before. The law can be a little tedious. I've heard a story recently talking with a buddy of mine. His mother as a girl was made to read as a punishment. Old Testament genealogy. So like all the begots, right. And so and so had so and so and so and so. So that was that was the actual punishment, actual punishment of my friend's mom. Look, surely. We can read about cubits and ifas for so long before we start nodding off. Right. Like it's just things that we don't have a placeholder for. Things that we don't exactly understand. The law, again, can just seem like reading an instruction manual to see the heart of the designer. And that's not impossible. It's just really hard. And you kind of have to know what you're looking for.

OK. You've got to wade through all of this, like this technical language and the specs and just all the stuff. You have to know how to read it. And that's really been our aim for the last few weeks is as we've walked through kind of ancient Near Eastern culture, we've walked through what it's supposed to look like, what it was back then, what was happening. And we've seen God arrange his law to protect the vulnerable. We've seen that we've seen we've grasped the weight and the gore inherent in paying for our sin. We didn't just say, hey, it's a big deal that God needs to pay for your sin. We talked through where you put all the blood after you kill the sacrifice. Right. That's the level that we've been in. In talking about Exodus, last week we saw God's desire. I was talking with one of our one of our people this morning and she was remarking on last week's sermon and she said,

you know, it reminded her, she had a discussion with a friend that that God doesn't lead us around it. God doesn't lead us under it. God leads us through it. Right. The God leads us through the trial, the suffering, the pain, the frustration. And we talked about this last week in particular, that God wants to sanctify us. Right. He wants to make us more holy. He wants to do that with us. He doesn't just point the way and just be like, have fun. He goes through it with us. And so today, as we talk about the law, we're going to be getting a glimpse into motivation.

Motivation. And I want to propose to you that God cares deeply about the motivation behind the action that we are doing kind of on his behalf. Motivation, though, can be a tricky thing. OK, so let me give you a very simple example how tricky motivation is. Let's say that I want my son to take out the trash. OK, and you guys been there? Y'all been there? Yes. I want my son to take out the trash. So I issue the command. Son, I want you to take out the trash. OK. Now, that's a very easy pitch and catch right there. That's super. That's linear. We're on it. But what if I want him to want to take out the trash? Oh, we have gone from linear to algorithmic in a minute right there. We have we have complicated things several times over by just adding a want to there. I want my son to want to take out the trash. It's a completely different thing because now exactly we're now we're talking about

motivation. We're talking about desire. And this look, it's low stakes when we're talking about take out the trash. Right. If my son doesn't want to take out the trash, but he still takes out the trash, whatever. Like it's not I'm not losing sleep over that. However, whenever we start talking about making sacrifices. For God, whenever we're talking about making sacrificial choices in Jesus name,

and when we know we should do a thing and we don't do the thing because we don't feel like it. Right. We got we got a command. We got God wanting us to want to. And then we don't have the motivation that goes with it. We don't have the want to. What do we do with that? So we're going to be getting into Exodus, chapter thirty five through thirty eight. We're going to be reading assorted things. We're not going to read all four chapters. And we're going to find it. We're going to we're going to open it up in verse four. And what God is doing is he is prepping the construction of the temple. OK, he's prepping the the putting together of the priestly garments. He's prepping all this stuff. OK, and and so he's calling his people together. This is Exodus thirty thirty five versus four and five. Moses said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, this is the thing that the Lord has commanded.

Take from among you a contribution to the Lord. Whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the Lord's contribution. Gold, silver, bronze. That actually keeps going. What is what is God saying here? He's going to take from among you a contribution. So talk to the people. Somebody is going to be giving things. And the qualifier is whoever has a generous heart. OK, literally whoever's heart is stirred or moved. So he's telling Moses, get everybody together. State the need and the ones whose hearts are stirred. Let them and them only bring the gold, bring the silver, bring the silver, bring the gold. Bring the silver, bring the bronze. He keeps going. Bring the skins, bring the oils, bring the onyx, bring all that stuff that we need to put together the tabernacle and the priestly clothes and the and the temple court and the bronze basin and everything. All that stuff that we need.

Let the ones whose hearts are stirred. Bring it. Look at the a little bit further down. Exodus thirty five twenty one. So same chapter, a little bit further down. And they came. Everyone whose heart stirred him and everyone whose spirit moved him and brought the Lord's contribution to be used for the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the holy garments. So you have two ideas being communicated here. They're back to back. Everyone whose hearts whose heart stirred him and everyone whose spirit moved him. And when you repeat that, it's an intensifying effect. Right. In ancient Near Eastern culture, in Hebrew, when you wanted to intensify something, you would say it a second time a different way. Those are two different words. One is like to be lifted up and the other one's to be stirred. You know, it's poetry. It's fine. But what the intent is, is to intensify it.

God wants people whose hearts are stirred, whose spirits are compelled. Moved. So we see it in verse five, and now we see it doubled in verse 21. Look at verse 22. So they came, both men and women, all who were of a willing heart, brought broaches and earrings and signet rings and armlets, all sorts of gold, object, every man dedicating and offering gold to the Lord. Okay, repeat it several times. And we see the effect here at the very end of 22, said every man dedicating and offering of gold to the Lord. So that they're dedicating it. So the effect of this is devotion. That's gonna be spelled out a little bit more clearly in a couple of verses, but I just want you to begin to see the connection here, that God is saying, whoever's heart is stirring, you guys do something. And the effect, what God gets in that, is a dedication,

a devoted offering. We're gonna peel this back a little bit. God is making room for people to listen to their hearts. God is making room for people to listen to their hearts. And we need to be super clear on this because you and I, we have a mixed bag history with motivation and people asking for things, okay? It gets weird real fast. God is not subtly guilting people here. He's not saying, well, you know, whoever really wants to, kind of lingers, you know, over that. That's not what's happening here at all.

Right, the text is way too clear. It's actually repeated, that phrase is actually repeated six times throughout this whole episode. Look at verse 26, Exodus 35, 26. It says, all the women whose hearts stirred them to use their skill spun the goat's hair. The effect of what we were talking about here is devotion. Look at verse 29. It says, all the men and women, the people of Israel, whose heart moved them to bring anything for the work of the Lord, that the Lord had commanded Moses to be done, brought it as a free will offering to the Lord. The only time you're going to get a free will offering is if you had the choice to do it or not. Free will offering doesn't happen when you're guilted. God is putting in an honest request. The text indicates that some actually didn't offer anything.

That in particular, you had people that opted into this enterprise. Moreover, there is no punishment made mentioned for anybody who didn't bring anything. This is an honest ask that God is saying. God is saying there are people that are among you whose heart has been stirred already or maybe your heart's being stirred now. And if that's true of you, I want you to make a choice to bring a free will offering to me. God is making room for people to listen to their heart. And when you do that, that really is the only way to bring about true devotion. If you're compelled to do something, you don't know if you would have wanted to do it or not because you're already being compelled to do it. If I asked my son to take out the trash, but I was secretly hoping he would ask first because I'm delusional, how would I do that? If I secretly, if I just wanted him to want to do it,

and I was looking for just a trace amount of evidence for that, right? As soon as I command him to do it, then I don't know if he wanted to or not. As soon as I command it, as soon as I say, you will face punishment if you don't do what I'm asking you to do, then any kind of like heartfelt devotion is out of the window. He might still take out the trash, but it's gone.

This lines up with our personal experience right, the only way we know if something is voluntary. And this is true if we're talking about, whether we're talking about taking out the trash or whether we're talking about making sacrifice to the Lord. That there is a process whereby we can listen to our heart and then make a devoted sacrifice to the Lord. But here is where we get tripped up a lot because our hearts can be hard to listen to sometimes. Like I said before, you and I have a mixed bag of history with motivation, okay? We've got a history of people cajoling us, people threatening us, people, it's not clean. It's not clean for sure. And for some of you, it's been a really long time since you have offered anything close to a free will offering from your heart. It's been a long time. There's a couple of things that get in the way. I wanna list three, there's probably 50.

I'm a list three because we can't be here all day. Coercion, when you feel like you have been strong armed or guilted or somehow made to do the thing that you're being asked to do, you might be serving the Lord, but you don't wanna. You're serving the Lord and it's because somebody made you feel guilty. And look, you know me, I don't wanna throw rocks at a bunch of other churches, but I'll just say this. When I talked to people that had a previous church experience where they got burned out, it's usually because that church overused this, like, well, if you really love Jesus, then you'd do it. If you really cared about the children, then you'd do it.

You know, if you're this, then you have to do this. I understand there's times whenever a church needs to just get before everybody and say, hey guys, if we're gonna make this happen, here's what it's gonna take and let's go forward. Let's move forward on that, that's good. But guilting people into something is no way to help them grow spiritually. And so when you sacrifice, you don't know what you're sacrificing for. You might sacrifice, but you don't want to and maybe you're just trying to make somebody happy. Maybe you're just trying to keep the peace. Maybe you're just doing like civil service, right? You're not sacrificing to the Lord. You're just keeping it peaceful. When you feel coerced, it's tough to bring a sacrifice, a free will offering to the Lord. When you have doubt, that's another one, it can be confusing because how do you mean something when you don't know if you believe something?

How can I mean it when I'm praising the Lord in worship? How can I mean that when I don't know if I believe it? And so your sacrifice is just mixed up. Like you're singing praise to the Lord and you're thinking like, maybe this will help Jesus be real today, like maybe this will be the thing that convinces me, maybe I'll have some kind of, I don't know, some kind of spiritual awakening where it's just all gonna make sense. It's all gonna click as long as I do the thing I need to do. But it's confusing. Doubt makes it confusing whenever your motivation needs to be in drive. Lastly, coercion, confusion, fatigue. Even whenever you are healthy, sometimes when you are exhausted it can overwhelm you. How can you mean it when you don't feel like meaning it? When you don't even maybe remember why you're doing what you're doing because you've just done it and you're kind of exhausted, you're kind of on autopilot.

Somebody asks you like, hey, what do you do? You know, like how do you serve the church? Or you're like, I mean, I do this thing, I don't remember why I started doing the thing, I don't remember it. It can really start to eat at your motivation. It can really start to confuse you. And then all these instances that I'm talking about with coercion, with doubt, with fatigue, I'm not talking about like a one day thing. Look, we all have exhausted days. We all have days where we're dealing with more doubt than less. We also have days where we're kind of just doing something to shut somebody up, okay? I get it. Okay, that's life, that happens. There's a difference between that being incidental and that being the arc of your life. If this is you the last three years, even if this is you for the last six months, it's gonna wear you down. You're not gonna know where your motivation is.

And we'll see why that's important in a second. Because your motivation to follow Jesus is no small afterthought. Last week we looked at this, that God in heaven when he saved you, went through the trouble of giving you a new heart. Why? Why not just take you to heaven? Isn't the deed done? No. Because God has work for us to do. Work that brings joy that's good, but work that can only be done out of a new heart. Work that can only be accomplished in communion with God and for that we need a new heart, right? God is interested in us being motivated to follow him.

And this is why, this is Stemming on the Mount, Matthew five, six, and seven. This is several, several points in there to talk about motivation. I'll just bring up two. Jesus says if you have a problem with your brother and you're at the offering, like you're at the altar to make your sacrifice, Jesus says stop, leave your sacrifice there and go and make things right with your brother first, then come and make your sacrifice. Why? Why not just like ask God to bless it, make it good and burn the bull? Because your motivation matters. The reason that you burn the bull, okay, the reason that you're making the sacrifice matters. Jesus said so in Matthew five. It's also why in Matthew six, your motivation matters when he says when you practice your righteousness, so when you pray, when you give to the poor, when you do all these things, when you're doing those things,

he says do it in private as much as possible, why? So that only your heavenly father can see it. Why is he making that distinction? Because it reveals your motivation. When you pray in front of people out loud and it's just all, and then somebody comes up to you and says like, that was a great prayer. I promise you, it at least confuses you on motivation. It's at least confusing. If you're, you know, if you're praising the Lord, you got two hands up, like you're really going for it, you're just killing it, you know, and you happen to be sitting near the front and you start thinking about the people behind you and what they think about you. It's out, right? It's messing you up immediately. It's messing you up, right? It's because it's messing with your motivation. I want you to see kind of how easy this is because your motivation to do what you need to do, your motivation is the crux of what it is to follow Jesus.

I realize that may sound like an overstatement. Let me go a little further and say this, that without wanting to follow Jesus, you cannot actually follow Jesus. Let's go over that one more time. Without wanting to follow Jesus, you cannot actually follow Jesus. Like disciples that say they follow Jesus, people, not disciples, people that say they follow Jesus and they kind of act like they didn't have anything else better to do or it's kind of this thing they do on Sunday or it's like, you know, my mom makes me or whatever. Who knows why somebody would say that. But to say that you follow Jesus but that you don't really want to, that doesn't work, that doesn't jive. That's not the same thing. To follow Jesus, a prerequisite for that is wanting to follow Jesus. Now you might come back with, well, Drew, sometimes I don't want to. Okay, that's real, that's fine. We're gonna talk about that in a minute.

Again, we're not talking about isolated incidents. We're talking about long arc of your life. If you've been like coming to this church for a year and you're like, I don't even know if I believe any of this stuff. I don't even know if I want to follow Jesus. I'd be like, hey, that's cool. But you gotta understand you're on a journey. You gotta understand that at some point you're gonna reach a point in your life where you will have to decide, I want to follow Jesus or I don't. And if you don't want to follow Jesus, it's a choice. Not a great choice, but it's a choice. But it's better than being in limbo. It's better than wondering. Without wanting to follow, you can't actually follow. And this is why we see in Exodus 35 and 36 and following, why we see God leave room for us to listen to our hearts. This is why Jesus, whenever he came, he came teaching and calling.

Jesus is not strong arming anybody. He's not saying, hey, if you don't, you don't perform three miracles, I guess you're not gonna be following me. Or hey, if you don't make somebody else become a Christian, then I guess you're not gonna be a disciple. Or that's not what Jesus does. That's not how Jesus treats me and you. That's not how he treated his disciples. He's not coercing people. He's not strong arming people. He's not guilting people. He's loving people. He's teaching people. He's bringing clarity, because sometimes there's things to be clear on. Jesus is bringing that clarity, but he is not coercing. And this is what it has to do with us. This is kind of where we come into the picture. Because as a church, right, as a group of people who have covenanted together, we promised together to be a family, to be on mission with Jesus, right? Us, a church. We're not just Christians in a room, okay?

We didn't all just happen to wander in here at the same time on a Sunday morning. As a church, the New Testament picture of that has everything to do with building a temple. The New Testament picture is that we are being built together as living stones into a temple for God to dwell in. Not our church building. Don't get it twisted. Not our church building. It's the people. It's the family, right? In the same way that God is assembling the tabernacle here in Exodus 35 and following, the same way he's doing that here, he is gifting people to work. He's bringing us together as one body to build his church

and build his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But Jesus here is, as we're all being brought together in one body, it's not through strong arming. It's not through guilting. It's not through bait and switch, okay? It's not through any of that. It's us being honest about what's happening and saying, look, this is what the Lord's doing. This is what the Lord's calling me to do. I'm gonna do it. And whenever I'm encouraging you, whenever our church leadership is encouraging you in any capacity, we're starting and ending with a question like, what's the Lord calling you to do? What's the Lord want you to do? How can I help you do that? And sometimes people come to me and they just say, Drew, there's a need. I wanna know where the needs are. I just wanna fill a need. Okay, great. That's still a free will offering, okay? That's cool. But if we're starting to say like,

I've made the joke several times and if you actually see this on social media, you'll know I've gone a little crazy. I've thought about running an ad campaign that our services are half price. That you can go like BOGO for church services here. Because at least it would make people wonder like, do they charge? That's really strange. Like just to highlight the fact that we don't. It's not that funny, so I haven't done it. If it were funny, it would have already happened. But I think it kinda points at this thing, right? That we all take for granted that what we are doing is free to us to do. And we do it of our own accord and we do it without cajoling. We do this without coercion. None of you were made to be here this morning if you're an adult. Other of you may have been made to be here, but your parents are training you, it's fine.

You and I, you and I are uniquely gifted in all kinds of different ways to build a family that is on mission with Jesus. And our personal motivation to make that happen is part of that plan. Let me say it again. We are uniquely gifted, we are brought together, this is Ephesians four. I'm not gonna quote a chapter verse, but it's Ephesians four, it's almost the whole chapter, at least one through 17. In Ephesians four, we are all gifted individually to be brought together to be one body, one Lord, one Savior, one God and Father of all, right? This is where we are. And, and our personal motivation to make that happen is part of the plan. It's not secondary to the plan, it's part of it. Let me say it a different way. God doesn't just want to use us, he wants us to be willing. God does wanna use us, he does.

But he wants us to want to be used, to put it slightly differently. He doesn't want us to just take out the trash. He wants us to want to take out the trash. And like we've shown already, that's tricky. It's much more complicated. You're talking about motivation, you're talking about how you're feeling in regards to what you're being asked to do. A few things, I just wanna say this, God could have made all of this temple, or this tabernacle, this priestly garments, the bronze basin, all that, he could have spoke that into existence just fine. Just like he did the earth, right? But he didn't. He has this weird insistence, it's not that weird, but it feels weird to us sometimes, this weird insistence on us having a hand in what's happening. And not just that, but on us being willing to have a hand in what is happening. And you see this with his temple being assembled,

with the priestly garments being put together with woven and spun and all of this work. That God is gifting people, but then he's saying to those very people, listen, some of you don't have a stirred heart. You're chilling. Everybody else, if your heart is stirred, be honest about that and move on it. And usually, usually whenever God does that, we resonate very strongly with that. Look at what the people did. This is Exodus 36, so this is after a lot of stuff has been brought, says the Lord said to Moses, the people bring much more than enough for doing the work that the Lord has commanded us to do. So Moses gave the command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp. Let no man or woman do anything more for the contribution of the sanctuary. That's a lot of words to say, people brought too much. People had to be stopped. There was overflowing. Whenever people just, whenever God said,

look, if your heart's stirring within you, they had more than enough. Look, this is why, as a church, we talk about being one body. This is one of our big values here. We wanna be one body. We wanna be kinda working together. And this is why we do offering the way we do offering. Right? Like, we do a, we probably go overboard a little bit on saying like, listen, no one's coerced into doing this. We're passing a plate so that you can give of your own free will. But the reason that we have to do that is because a lot of people are used to being cajoled in church. They're used to being guilted into stuff. And for some reason or another,

even with churches that do it great, even with people that were raised in a church that never, strong-armed people, never coerce people, sometimes, man, they're still feeling guilty before the Lord and they're really sensitive to being coerced into something. This is why we do offering this way is because we're trying to say, as a church, let's listen to our hearts. And if your hearts are stirred, then respond. If your heart's not stirred, wait. But if your heart is stirred, if there's something moving in you, if the Lord God is making something happen in your heart, you don't have to understand it, you don't have to document it, you don't have to, I'm not asking you to fill a card out or anything like that right now, but if the Lord God is doing something in your heart, that's your signal to do something, to make the move, to respond. This is why, for our ministry teams,

we serve with six-month caps. You can only serve six months at a time. And then you gotta re-up. We go through re-up period, that's a big pain for everybody involved, okay? The reason that we do it, Kimmy's laughing, the reason that we do it, it's a big pain for everybody involved, especially the team leaders. The reason that we do that is to make sure that people are choosing to serve on the team they wanna serve on.

And you might think, man, that kinda feels like overkill, okay. I think I'd just rather be on that side of overkill. I think I would just rather have, you know, struggle sometimes with staffing teams, right? Struggle sometimes with having people be ministers on ministry teams. We're gonna struggle through that sometimes, but I would rather do that than strong-arm people and say, if you don't serve, I would rather do that. This is why the Bible says whenever leaders lead, they don't lead under compulsion. And let me be real clear here. It's saying that the leaders should not be compelled to lead.

That's not saying that leaders don't tell people what to do. That's almost the nature of leadership, actually, just being clear on what people need to do. But leaders should not be under compulsion to lead. Jesus also says when he says, when you lead, don't lead like the Gentile rulers who throw their weight around and just make people do stuff because they have all of this kind of gravity in the room.

Don't do that. As a church, this should mark how we cooperate. We should err on the side of motivation. And to the best of our abilities, I think we're trying pretty hard. I know we're not perfect. We're trying pretty hard. So God, in his infinite wisdom, desires that we don't just accomplish the task, but that we do it out of devotion, out of a free will offering mindset. So let me end by answering the questions that I opened with.

If you are feeling coerced, and look, it might not be somebody coercing you or strong arming you. I mean, you might be making it all up in your head. I don't know, right? But if you're feeling coerced, you need to understand that is not from God. We serve a God who wants to make room. Galatians 5:1 says, it is for freedom that you have been set free. We are free people.

We don't use our freedom like dummies, but it's still ours to use. We have been given it by God. God has given you a heart, a conscience, a will to act, and a brain to put it all together of choices and consequences, okay? God has done this. God wants you to enter into complicated decision making where you have to understand your own motivation. God wants you to do that. And moreover, if you're feeling coerced, here's my encouragement to you. Begin to commune with God, remembering your freedom, and begin to commune with Him over the thing that you feel coerced about.

If you're feeling like, I don't know, like that, if you feel like your church is telling you, like, if you don't read your Bible every day, like, you're going to hell. Okay, that's rough. That's coercion. Spiritual coercion's super ugly, by the way. I mean, I just pull one kind of like out of the air. None of them are much better than that. Or maybe a more soft pedal version, like if you don't speak in tongues, you could lose your salvation, maybe.

By the way, none of that's true. Just making sure you know I'm lying. Okay, good, good, good. Just, that's not true. Okay, sometimes it's just like the soundbite gets out there and you're like, wait, what? So begin to take to God what you're going to do and what you are being coerced into and just ask God for wisdom on that. Go to pastoral insight. Get some wisdom from me and Pastor Daniel. Ask your home group leader. Ask somebody. Talk to somebody about what you're feeling coerced into because more than likely you have been given a lie that you believe that is now, I mean, it's forcing your hand on everything. If you're scared you're going to lose your salvation because you don't just do this one thing right, that's no way to live. It's not a biblical way to live. Tim Keller, got to throw it to Tim Keller again. He does a really good job with this. He talks about gospel motivation

and he talks about how there's not any coercion needed. We have three, it's kind of three-sided and it's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it's pretty poetic as far as I'm concerned. For the Father, we have a desire to please the Father. We want to put a smile on the Father's face. That's good motivation. We have gratitude when it comes to the cross. Jesus died so that we could live. If that doesn't make you feel a ton of gratitude, I'm not sure where you're at spiritually. It's just a lot of overflowing gratitude. When you consider the cross of Christ, it's a good source of motivation to know. Like Jesus died for me. I can make it through this difficult conversation. I'm grateful for what he's done for me and I'm gonna do this for him. Last, Holy Spirit, joy. You got some straight joy in the Holy Spirit. It doesn't all feel good, right? All the Christian life doesn't feel good,

but sometimes it feels really good. Even when you're doing a hard thing, you feel joy in the Holy Spirit. Not all those things are gonna be present all the time. That's not kind of what it's for, but it's to say at different times and different ways and different spaces, that gospel motivation can kind of come from a lot of different ways. And none of them are coercive. So if you're feeling coerced, that's not from God. Commune with God. If you've got doubt, I want you to understand. If you're dealing with doubt, maybe you're dealing with doubt this morning. Awesome. Doubt is 100% normal. Doubt's normal. Doubt's super normal. Here's why. I've preached on this before. I'm just gonna overview it. I'm just gonna give it two sentences.

If you're gonna grow in Jesus, growing in Jesus means you find the edges of what you believe is true or possible or right or rational or whatever. You find the edge of that. You know what's past the edge of that? You doubting. But you growing is finding the edge and understanding that Jesus calling you past that. Sometimes that edge is what you think you're capable of. Sometimes that edge is revisiting a past hurt and the Lord is gonna bring some healing in that. I mean, the edge is, it exists in a lot of different places and doubt can take all kinds of forms. But everybody thinks that doubt, we talk about doubt like it's some general malaise. No, no. Doubt is always particular. Doubt is always personal. When you have doubt, it's because you've gotten to your own bleeding edge of what you believe is possible or right or good or rational or whatever. And in that, you doubt that God is past that point.

For example, Peter, when he's in a boat, right? He sees Jesus on water. So there's something. You think he doubted before he stepped out on there? Maybe, maybe, because he started walking but then he started sinking. So who knows? Look, I feel like that's such a metaphor for everything that we do spiritually where we go to the edge and Jesus is calling us out in the water. We're like, I don't know, is this gonna be okay? And we kind of get out there and maybe we experience a victory and then we're like, we start to sink and we're like, oh no, and then Jesus has to save us, right? Look, it's a picture, man. It's really helpful. If you're in the middle of doubt, it's probably because you're at the edge of something that you believe is possible. And that the Lord, I promise you, the Lord is calling you on the other side of that and he's saying, take that step. Go ahead, I'm there.

But it's a test of your faith because you don't know. Haven't been there. Doubt is normal. Here's my encouragement. Bring your doubts to God. God does not clutch the pearls when you say, I doubt this is real. I doubt this can happen. I doubt, God's not freaking out. God's not worried. He's not like, oh, I just can't believe. You know, after all I did, you don't believe. Look, man, God knows you, man. God's known you since birth. He actually knew you before that, technically speaking. He knows all the hairs on your head. He knows what's gonna make you freak out. He knows where the edges of what you believe are. And he brings you there and he wants you to cross the river. Take your doubts to God. Don't be embarrassed. Don't hide. Look, man, if I were to ask everybody to raise their hand, I'm not gonna do it because it would just be too embarrassing. Have you ever experienced a season of doubt in your life?

I guarantee there would be like four people who wouldn't raise their hand. And it's because they became a Christian two days ago. It's not like, look, you go through doubt. It happens, man. It does. I mean, look, I mean, ask anybody that's been walking the Lord for like a year or more. And you're like, hey, do you have a season of doubt? Do you ever have any time where you're like, yeah, yes, of course. It's normal. It's not something to hide. It's not something to freak out about. Doesn't mean you're not a Christian anymore. It means you're at the edge of what you believe is possible. It's actually how we become a Christian in the first place. You find the edge of what you believe is possible. And the Lord says like, hey, look, I'm there. I'm on the other side. You gotta come on. You gotta take that step. Bring your doubts to God. Lastly, if you're fatigued, if you are kind of near exhaustion,

if you're burned out, if you're whatever. A couple of things to understand. Number one, life is seasonal. Okay. There's a reason that everybody feels exhausted in September. Because school started, summer's over. We're all fighting a little depression over that fact. And football can't get here fast enough. So there's a couple of things going on, right? Like it's seasonal. Sometimes it's hard to just want it all the time. Sometimes you go through a big stretch where things are going great and you just are exhausted from it. That's fine. The Sabbath that is commanded in the Old Testament is real for a reason. You need rest. I Sabbath every Saturday, right? It doesn't have to be Saturday, by the way, just in case you're, you don't, that's not, Tuesday can be your Sabbath, okay? But your Sabbath is a day where you're not thinking about work. You're not thinking about how you can get ahead

on the thing that you want to get ahead on. It's where you stop down. You don't do much. It's been said that if you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands, if you work with your hands, then Sabbath with your mind. There's all sorts of fun things to think through for Sabbath-ing, for resting. But you've got to rest. You've got to rest. And maybe, maybe like you just found that out like right now and you're already exhausted. So you're like, what's going to happen? I would encourage you in a couple of fronts. Take time to rest, be disciplined about it. It's a thing to be disciplined to rest, to not get ahead on the next thing.

If you have a job like mine, you can work all the time. I could work all the time on what I do. I don't know, most. A lot of your jobs are similar, right? I'm sure that, you know, for a teacher, there's a time where you're not in a classroom, but you could be lesson planning. You could be working on the curriculum for a little bit further on. You could be having conversations with parents. You could be whatever, right? You could still be working even if you're not in the classroom. You could be working all the time. Take time to rest. It's real. It's actually part of our life group curriculum. So we have life groups. Life groups are 18 month things that we do. We're gonna have a life group interest meeting on November 1st. It's gonna be amazing. But part of that is building the discipline of rest, of Sabbath, of taking the time to not do something so that you're not getting exhausted,

so that you can actually listen to your own heart. So you can listen to what the Lord is telling you, right? You can take in scripture and you can let that wash over your heart. And you can look internally and go like, what do you see? What do you want? What are we doing here? What's the next? You need time to do that. You need reflection to do that. You need to not work for a day to do that. And all these things that we've talked about, whether we're talking about fatigue or doubt or coercion or anything like that, talk about motivation. Your motivation is very, very big. It's something actually to be guarded, if you think about it that way. And all these things that I'm gonna call Christopher back up, and all these things, I just wanna encourage you, if you are in a situation where

you need to leave your gift on the altar, if you're in a situation where you need to, you're kinda stopped up spiritually. You've got some stuff going on. You have it dealt with. And I'm up here, I'm preaching the word, we're talking through, and the Lord's just got the finger just right on that nerve, right? If that's you, that's fine. We're not gonna do an altar call. I want you to be encouraged that the Lord is calling you to move, that the feeling that you feel is your heart being stirred. That's what's happening, your heart is being stirred. Our response to that is to begin to commune with God, to begin to, we're about to sing to him, it's gonna be amazing. But as you're reading scripture, as you're taking time to listen to what he's saying, as you're taking time to reflect and listen to your own heart, you need time for all of that. And if you're feeling kinda stopped up spiritually,

you need the Lord to move. Let that be your prayer right now as we sing, for the Lord to move, for the Lord to get you unstuck, for the Lord to speak to you, maybe in a way that you haven't spoken to in a while. Let's pray. Lord, we know that you're good. We know that you desire us to desire you. It's such a tricky thing to even know our own motivation, to even know our own heart sometimes. But God, you don't leave us. You don't just wait till our motivations are perfect, like that'll ever happen. You don't wait for that.

You meet us in the middle of it. You meet us amidst broken motivations, amidst weird reasoning for doing whatever we're doing. You meet us in the midst of us feeling like we've been guilted into something, or feeling like we've served you too long, or that our season is over, or that whatever. You meet us in the middle of that and you speak to us right then.

You want us to speak to you in the middle of that, not after our stuff is cleaned up, not whenever we're feeling good about ourselves. You ask us to come to you just like we are. But we love you, and praise you. Lord help us.