BYOG On-demand God. I think at a high level there are three categories all of us kind of find ourselves in: those who

Transcription

1 Transcript Aaron Brockett Mark 4:35-41 It s good to see you. I want to welcome those of you at the Northwest campus and remind you we have a whole bunch of people joining us on the other side of that camera. So would you please put your hands together? I want them to feel it through the camera. Let s show them some love. I want to greet those of you at our North, Downtown, and West campuses. We love you guys so much. I want to greet anybody tuning in with us online, and if you happen to be watching and you re in the Indianapolis area, we re glad you could join us, but we d like to say that online is a great place to start if you re checking things out, it s not a great place to stay. We d love to see you at one of our campuses sometime soon. If you are a guest with us today, you came on a really great day. I m excited about this series. We re starting a new one today called BYOG, and what that stands for is Bring Your Own God. What that means is that all of us, to one degree or another, have either invented or inherited some things about our perception of God that aren t exactly accurate, helpful, or true. They re actually holding us back from the One True God and what it is that he wants for us. In fact, there is this guy by the name of A.W. Tozer who said it this way, What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. I don t know how that statement hits you. Maybe you agree, don t agree, or maybe you re confused and maybe you haven t thought of it that way before. Even if you don t believe in God that statement still affects the way you live. It s going to influence your values and the decisions you make. So it s really important that our perception of God is accurate. As a pastor, it seems like I have a lot of conversations with people about their perceptions of God. It usually happens on an airplane when I sit down and introduce myself to the person sitting next to me. It s just a matter of time before they as the big question, What do you do? and I ll say, I m a pastor. And usually either they want to avoid the subject of God, or it s all they want to talk about. As I talk to people about their perceptions of God, oftentimes there are these things that come out that I hear and I m like, That s not exactly accurate, or That s sort of twisted up or out of proportion. I hear the gambit. I hear people say things that make it sound like God is their personal assistant or life coach, or maybe some cosmic vending machine in the sky all the way to, I think God is distant, silent, or never satisfied with any of my effort. I think at a high level there are three categories all of us kind of find ourselves in: those who

2 believe and maybe you would raise your hand and say, Count me in. I m in that category. I believe in God, and I ve submitted my life to Jesus. I m not doing this perfectly by any stretch of the imagination. I still have doubts, struggles, and setbacks, but I believe. Then there are those of you who would find yourself in this category: those who don t believe and if that s true for you, can I just say I m really, really glad you are here. Maybe you accepted the invitation of a friend or a family member to come to this new series, and you re actually a little irritated right now because they told you it was BYOB, and that s kind of what got you here. You re like, Wait a second you weren t being totally honest with me. Honestly, you look around and say, I don t understand what all the fuss is about. I don t really understand why I would change some things about my life for a God that I cannot see. And maybe that would be the category you re in. I think for an increasing number of us, especially for many people who have recently started attending our church, we find ourselves in this category: I really want to believe in God but something s in the way. I ve got some questions, and nobody seems to have any good answers. I ve got some painful experiences that don t really have some resolution. I ve got some baggage in my past I just can t get rid of. Some of us have inherited a view of God. Maybe we grew up in a Christian home or have some sort of church background. Maybe your parents dragged you to church every single weekend against your will but, honestly, you didn t get anything out of it. You didn t understand what that guy was yelling about up front, but you were pretty sure that whatever it was you weren t measuring up. Maybe you were told you needed to believe all the right things. And you needed to do all the right things. There were a whole bunch of things you were forbidden to do, and when you read through the list that was a real bummer because there were a whole bunch of things on it you really liked to do. And the things you were really good at, you were told to stay away from them. Maybe your whole idea of religion is confusing, confining, and condemning. So when you graduated from high school and got out on your own, out from mom and dad s watchful eyes you just didn t go to church much anymore. But that didn t keep your life storm free. So here you are and you still believe in God, or at least you want to believe in God, you re just not quite sure of what version of God you should believe in. Honestly, you re a little bit afraid of what God would ask of you, and you re not sure you re ready to give in even if you knew. Others of us have invented a view of God. We ve just picked up some things along the way in life and we don t really see ourselves as into God so much as into spirituality. Maybe we ve read 2

3 an article in a magazine, we picked up some stuff there, or we read a book over here that Oprah recommended and picked up some stuff there. Maybe we saw an Instagram post, it was one of those quotes and it seemed pretty good. You just kind of throw all that into your spirituality bowl and you cook it up and, wa-lah, you ve got your own customized spirituality. Maybe your understanding of God is that he s sort of anti-everything and you re not sure you want to believe in a God like that, let alone give your life to him. Others of us though, we have invented this idea of a rule-keeping God. We like that version of God better than the grace God. Messages on grace really make us nervous because they mess with our scoring system. We re constantly comparing ourselves with other people and we re like, I m not as bad as them. I m not as good as most, but I m not as bad as them. I m kind of keeping track of these things and I feel like I m pretty good where I m at. When you talk about grace it kind of levels the playing field, and I don t like that because I like to feel superior to other people when it comes to God. That view of God is just as messed up as any other. These invented or inherited views of God are actually holding us back from who he really is and what it is he wants for us. And you take all those things, and then you add to the fact that we live in a customized world. If you can t customize it, you re really not interested in it. You go to a restaurant. You re reading through the menu looking for a burger to order. If you can t find the right burger on the menu, you re looking for that build-your-own option. You can always be bailed out by that. Or you can customize electronics. You can customize your viewing preferences on Netflix. You know that you can even customize Siri on your iphone? Siri can either be a male or a female voice. You can give him any accent you would like him to have. And so Siri on my phone is a female voice with a British accent, because I just think that sounds more sophisticated and soothing. But it actually goes a little deeper than that. I thought the only way to explain this to you is to show you. I brought Siri up here with me. Hey Siri, what s my name? You re Aaron, but you asked me to call you my lord. So that s real. I didn t do that this last week as a sermon illustration. That s been on my phone for five years. And I can feel the judgment from you and I don t care because at the end of a long day I just need a British female to call me my lord. And everything s better. You should try it. My wife is going, Please don t encourage him. Did you notice how passive aggressive she was? You re Aaron, but you ve asked me to call you my lord. Since we re talking about Siri, have you ever tried to lead Siri to Jesus? You should try that 3

4 sometime. I ve tried multiple times and let s just say she has a very, very hard heart. So we live in this customized world, and as a result of that we bring that into our perception of God. And we think, If I can customize everything else, I should be able to customize God. And so I ll have some love and affirmation with a side of grace, extra blessings. Top it off with some healing, a wife who always agrees with me or a husband who always supports me, perfect kids, great friends, a roommate who doesn t get on my nerves, killer abs, a better job, more money, and less problems. Hold the judgment, guilt, conviction, personal sacrifice and anything else I really don t feel like doing. BYOG Over the course of the next several weekends, what we re going to be doing together is looking at some of the most common ways we have a tendency to customize God to fit our own needs, wants, and preferences, but it s actually holding us back. I m fully convinced that there are a number of us who walked away from God a long time ago. But you didn t walk away from the One True God, you walked away from a version of God you invented or inherited. I want to reintroduce you to the One True God. He is better than you can ever imagine. Let me show you the first way, maybe the most common way we customize God: on-demand God I want, and maybe you can relate to this, an on-demand God. What I mean by that is I want God to respond, act, and intervene according to my perspective and my timetable, So God, when I have a question I want it adequately answered. When I have a bad experience you d better give me an explanation. When I m walking through painful circumstances I would like an exemption. God if I just don t feel like it I d like to be left alone. I want an on-demand God. Now here s what s at stake. We all know life is not perfect. When storms come into our lives or when we find ourselves in the middle of a crisis we ll end up crying out to God. If we have this perception of God as being on-demand, we ll find that God isn t responsive in those moments because on-demand God doesn t exist. And in those moments we might come to the conclusion that God isn t real, that God doesn t care, or that he simply lacks the power to do anything about it. But that is a false perception that is holding us back. I want us to look at a passage of Scripture from Mark 4. So if you have your iphone or a Bible app, would you please meet me there? You can go to our church app to the live notes section and click on there to interact with all the slides I have on the screen, take your own notes and everything. Here in Mark 4, what is going on is Jesus has been doing some teaching with his disciples. It s late in the day and he is exhausted from all the teaching he has been doing. He has this kind of 4

5 unusual request. Look at what he says in verse 35, As evening came, Jesus said to his disciples, Let s cross to the other side of the lake. So they are going to get into a boat and cross to the other side of the lake. Now, what s unusual about this is it s the end of the day. The sun is going down and this wouldn t have been the safest time of the day to go on a boat ride. It s not safe to go out on the lake after dark. Now, just imagine in the first century they didn t have Google Maps, they didn t have flood lights. It would have been dangerous. Here s what s interesting to me. Most of the disciples were experienced fishermen, so they would have known this. They would have known how quickly a storm could have come up on the lake they were on. But nobody says this to Jesus. Nobody objects. Nobody says, Jesus, are you sure this is the safest thing to do? It s just purely conjecture, but I wonder if the reason they didn t question it was Jesus was with them in the boat. They are sort of thinking to themselves, What could go wrong? We ve got Jesus with us. And maybe that s the attitude or the mindset you had when you went into the baptistery years ago. Maybe when you prayed that prayer you submitted your life to Christ and you thought, I ve got Jesus with me now. What could go wrong? I ve got God on my side. Surely I m immune from the storms of life. That s just simply not the case. Verse 36 says, So they took Jesus in the boat and started out, leaving the crowds behind (although other boats followed). But soon a fierce storm came up. They always do. High waves were breaking into the boat, and it began to fill with water. Now I don t know if you ve ever been in a sinking boat after dark, but this would have been absolutely terrifying especially for the guy who d forgotten to take his Dramamine, poor guy. Just think about this for a minute. The wind was blowing. It was just blowing this boat around. What do you imagine Jesus would have been doing in this moment? He could have been doing a number of things. Jesus could have been on His knees praying. He could have been looking at the radar seeing where the storm was headed. He could have gone to the front of the boat and done his best Leonardo Dicaprio impression. I am literally the king of the world. He could have done that, he could of. But Jesus didn t do any of those things. Check it out. This is what Jesus is doing in the midst of the storm, Jesus was sleeping at the back of the boat with his head on a cushion. 5

6 I just get this mental image that Jesus is sort of tucked away. He s got the noise-cancelling headphones on. He s got that little neck pillow you get at Brookstone. He is just snoring away in the middle of this storm. Here is what I want you to consider. Why is Jesus taking a nap? There are maybe two explanations or conclusions you could come to. You could say, Jesus is taking a nap because he doesn t care. He doesn t care about the storm. He doesn t care about the disciples and their safety. That s one conclusion you could arrive at. Or you could say, Maybe Jesus is taking a nap because he is in complete control. Well the disciples come to the former conclusion. Look at what they say at the end of verse 38, The disciples woke him up, shouting, Teacher, don t you care that we re going to drown? Notice how definitive this is. It isn t, Don t you care that we might drown? Don t you care that this could happen? No, they say, Jesus we re going to down, don t you care? I know it may not have been the same circumstance, but you ve probably said some things to God like this some time in your past. Did you even shout at God, even to yourself? God, where are you? God, why didn t you intervene? Why won t you fix my problems? It seems so easy to me. Why wouldn t you do this? God, why would you let my child get sick, they didn t hurt anybody? God, why would you even let my wife decide to have an affair? Where were you? Why did you let my husband s heart get so cold? Did you not hear my prayers every single night for him? Why haven t you answered my request? Why did you let this happen? God, the storm is raging, the winds are blowing, and the waves are breaking. I m sinking here, God, and if you can t or won t respond to my emergencies, what good are you anyway? That s an on-demand God. If that s the case if you ve expressed any of those things, and I certainly have then you re right next to these disciples in a boat in the middle of a storm. Look what it says in verse 39, When Jesus woke up, and noticed the very first thing he did, he rebuked the wind and said to the waves, Silence! Be still! Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Now you might be tempted to read that and say, That s what I m talking about right there. That s my on-demand God. But I want you to see that Jesus did not calm the storm because he is just jumping to do whatever they say. Jesus is demonstrating who he is and the power he has and what he is capable of. Think of that. That s pretty awesome. He just told the storm to be quiet, and just shut it down. Look at what he says in verse 40. He asks them a question. Then he asked them, Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith? I think Jesus primary concern here was not with the storm that was blowing the boat around. Jesus primary concern was with the storm that was raging in the disciples hearts. That s what he was going after. 6

7 You almost get this impression that the storm they are in is sort of an afterthought, like it is just more of a nuisance, Would you pipe down a little bit? I need to say some things to my disciples. He is more alarmed by what he sees in their hearts than their outside circumstances. And Jesus just asks them this simple question, Where is your faith? And I don t know what you think of when you hear the word faith or about a person of faith, but faith does not mean that you no longer struggle. Being a person of faith does not mean you ve settled all your doubts, you ve got answers to all of your questions, you can be totally and utterly confident. No, faith actually implies you still have doubts. Faith implies you still have questions. Faith implies you are still struggling. Faith follows uncertainty and fear. And we see it over and over again in the Scriptures. It says it is impossible to come to God without faith. And at times you may be like, I don t understand. Why does God want my faith so much? And this is what Jesus is asking of the disciples as well. He says, You can dwell on your fears, or you can choose to replace your fear with trust that Jesus is capable of handling whatever storm you re in the middle of. And that trust will produce faith. Why is this so important? I think this is important because God, as your Heavenly Father, desires your devotion and affections, not just your compliance. Compliance says, I have no choice. I guess I d better. If I have to follow you, I guess I will. There is nothing that will kill a relationship faster than compliance. It will just harden your heart. That s what you and I want from our relationships as well. When I got down on one knee and proposed to my wife 19 years ago, the last thing I wanted from her was compliance. I didn t want to say, Honey, will you be my wife? And her to say, I guess so. I ve got no other options. This is the best I ll do. You ll do. That would just kill the relationship. No, I want her devotion and affection. Here s the thing. For many of us, we say, God, if I had evidence that you exist and that you re a good God, then I d give you my heart. Or, God, if you would give me an exemption from all of life s struggles, then I would gladly follow you. You know what? I don t think we would. I think if God gave us all the evidence we were asking for, I think if God exempted us from all the pain and struggles in life that would be no guarantee that he would have our heart. He might have our compliance, but he wouldn t necessarily have our heart. Why do the Scriptures keep telling us over and over again that it s impossible to come to God without faith? It s because God knows that faith produces something within us far more powerful and lasting than evidence or the exemption from life s storms ever will. And we don t 7

8 necessarily like it, but we ve got to know it s true. It s true in the world of parenting. How many of you have ever been around an over protective parent? Maybe you ve been an over protective parent and it s seated out of your love for your child. You don t want your child to fall down. You don t want your child to get hurt. You don t want them to be insulted. You don t want them to go through anything bad at school so you re constantly stepping in, constantly intervening, constantly cushioning them from anything in life that might be painful. What s the result? How many of you have ever been around the children of an over protective parent? Yeah, that s not very much fun, is it? Because they ve never necessarily learned to stand on their own two feet, they ve not necessarily grown and matured. There s nothing that s actually taken root within their hearts. Guys, it s the same thing with God. He is saying: Listen. Faith is going to produce some things in your life that my giving you all the answers, or my insulating you from life s storms just never will. Jesus says to the disciples, Guys, why are you so afraid. I m right here with you. And Jesus taking a nap did not mean that he didn t care, it didn t mean that he was out of touch with reality, and it didn t mean he lacked the power to do anything about it. It meant just the opposite. It meant he is bigger than the wind and the waves, that the water coming into the boat had nothing on him. And we get to this place where trust says, God, I pray you change my circumstances. I pray you would calm the storm down. I pray you would eliminate the wind, and eliminate the waves that are hitting my life. But trust says, Even if you don t, I still trust that you re a good, good father. I know you know what you are doing. In verse 41 it says, The disciples were absolutely terrified. Who is this man? they asked each other. Even the wind and waves obey him! That word terrified is just a sense of awe. They realized right then and there that the divine was with them right there in the boat. And they get it. Now the question becomes what are they going to do with this information about Jesus identity? And that is the question we re going to wrestle to the ground over the course of the next several weekends in this series. I just want you to wrestle with this question right here: Who is this man, Jesus to you? Who is this man, Jesus to you? Not to your spouse, not to your kids, your neighbors, your parents, or your grandparents, but to you. I m not asking what you believe. I m not asking about your religious preferences. I m not asking about the denomination you grew up in. I m asking this question. When you think about Jesus, what is his identity and what is his role in your life. Who is he to you? 8

9 And that s really the question of faith. Is he just a good moral teacher who lived 2,000 years ago and taught some interesting life principles that we can apply to live better lives? Did he do a few tricks and some miracles like change water into wine, and heal some people? Or is he the Son of God. Is he God in the flesh who actually didn t wait for us to get our act together, but he came to us realizing there was a barrier that existed between us and God that we can t scale no matter our effort, our intellect, or our intentions. God bridged the gap through Jesus Christ. Colossians 1 explains it this way, For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ s blood on the cross. Hear me. This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. Now I don t know about you, but that passage is incredible. I think I understand the concept of grace. I ve preached hundreds of sermons on grace. I could stand here and explain it to you, but I still don t know, personally speaking, I m talking about me now, if I can really get my head around how expansive and exhaustive the grace of God really is upon my life. Here s what I mean. I can understand it intellectually, but has it traveled down here to my heart? I can stand up here and say, Yes, God loves me. He saves me by his grace. But then I can go home when I m by myself and I can look in a mirror and not like what I see. I can think of a whole bunch of things to describe Aaron Brockett, but most of the time holy, blameless, without a single fault isn t any of them. I can sit there and say to myself, Maybe God has forgiven me but, I ll tell you what, he is just putting up with me right now. He s kind of annoyed with me because I m inconsistent, and I continue to break my promises, and I just can t get this thing right. And there re some things I ve hidden away in these dark corners of my life, and God has to be standing up there in heaven right now with his arms folded and just kind of nodding his head in disapproval. Aaron, when are you going to get your act together? Here is the thing. Your perception of God is largely how you see him when he looks at you. So what s the look on God s face when he looks at you? Is it disapproval? Is it condemnation? Is it shame? Then that s your perception of God. And this passage in Colossians 1 tells us that when God looks at you, he sees you re holy and blameless, not because you are holy and blameless, but because in Christ he sees you as holy and blameless. And he sees perfection, not because of anything that you ve done, but because 9

10 of his perfect Son Jesus Christ. Can I just say it as simply as I can say it? And somebody needs to hear this right now. When God looks at you he smiles. He smiles. You need to hear that he actually delights in you. That he finds pleasure in who you are, your identity. He created you. He loves you. You re one of his kids. Until you get to that point you won t break through this whole misconception of an ondemand God. It s because of the love and the delight he has in you that God will never allow himself to be turned into an on-demand God. He will never allow himself to be reduced as just simply a cosmic errand boy or a personal assistant. He ll never give you just want you want in order to prove to you he exists. An insecure god would. A god who was just constantly trying to prove himself to you would. God will never give you what you ask for just because you think is best, because he s got a perspective that you simply don t have. Has there ever been a time in your life and I want you to think back has there ever been a time in your life when you really, really wanted something badly and it just didn t work out for whatever reason? And you didn t understand why it didn t work out because, from your perspective, it seemed really good. It seemed like the right thing. You prayed and prayed and prayed for this thing, and you just didn t get it. As time goes by, maybe months or years go by, and you sort of gradually got over it, and then you came to see and you can t pinpoint the exact moment, it just sort of like happened you came to see that actually what you wanted wasn t the best thing. And you were actually glad it wasn t the thing God gave you because there was something better down the road. Maybe for some of you, you prayed and prayed for that relationship and you thought you met the one. You fell in love, but he didn t return that love and he broke your heart. And you prayed and prayed and prayed that God would keep that person in your life, but it just didn t work out. Only years later you bump into that person in the grocery store, and you walk by and let s just say life hasn t been very kind to him. And you walk by, say hello, and as soon as you pass him you start praying again. You re like, Dear God Almighty, thank you for causing him to break up with me. I dodged a bullet on that one. You really do know what you re doing. Praise God Almighty. It s sort of like that. You see, God actually said it this way in Isaiah 55. This is why he is not an on-demand God. This passage right here is like the whole sermon in a passage, My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the Lord. Like they are on a whole other level, And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. Like you can t even think of it, it s so great, For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. You can read that and go, That sounds like a cop out. Or you can read that and go, I find a lot 10

11 of comfort in that. I don t know. Don t you think part of the job description for God is that he would know more than you do? I would hope so. Like if the job description of God is that he doesn t know more than you, it s like any one of us could apply for the job. But we can t. And when I want an on-demand God, basically what I am saying is, God, I really think I can do the job better than you. I really think I have a perspective that you don t have. From my perspective this seems totally normal. God is simply saying: Listen, you re going to have to trust me in this moment that you just don t know what you don t know. And I do. And I love you. So trust me. But this can be difficult. Some of you know that I love reading presidential biographies. Regardless of the politics, I m just fascinated with that job, that role, that responsibility throughout history. One of the things I ve noticed as I ve read through one of these biographies is everyone thinks they know how to do the job before they actually get the job. We see this in presidential campaigns where the candidates make all these promises and they talk about the person who is running against them and how they don t know what they re doing. But it s very, very common for presidents to write about the fact that when they win the presidency, when they walk into the oval office for the first time and sit down behind the desk all alone, they say this incredible weight falls upon their shoulders. They say it s like the veil gets removed from their eyes and they realize this job was way, way bigger than they ever knew, and they ve got a perspective they didn t have before. You just take that tiny element there and expand it, and you begin to see what God is saying about his role in our lives and in the universe. In fact, in the Old Testament in the book of Job, maybe you are familiar with this story, Job is a good man, a righteous man and he had everything taken from him. The storm that hit his life wiped everything out: his family, his business, and even his health. His wife told him to curse God and die. That s how supportive she was. And Job is like wrecked and he begins to vent and complain to God. I think I would too. But listen to what God says to Job in chapter 38, verse 4, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? In other words: When I created the whole universe I don t remember seeing you there, Job. Tell me, if you know so much. Listen, I don t think God is being mean. I think he is just telling the truth. He is like: Job, I ve got a perspective you don t have. I ve got some information that you don t have. You re just going to have to trust me. What can we conclude from this? I want to leave you with two very simple applications. 11

12 Here is the first one: God s intentions toward you are always good. His intentions are always good, always. Now some of you may not feel this. Some of you may not buy this right now. I just want you to hold on to this promise. This is the reason the Scriptures give us so many promises about the intentions of God. There re going to be times when you re in the midst of really, really painful things. You ll be like, You know what? This is painful, this is hard. I wish God would remove this from me, but I m going to trust right now in this moment that his intentions toward me are good and this is pain with a purpose. You see, I ve learned this maybe not most effectively in any book or in any study in theology. I ve learned this most effectively by being a dad. Many of you know I ve got four kids between the ages of 5 and 15. Do you know what my kids want from me most of the time? They want me to be an on-demand dad. They want what they want when they want it. From their limited perspective what they want is always good and good for them. But I ve got a different perspective. I can see some things they don t see. I ve got some experiences they haven t yet experienced. So as a good dad, I don t always give them what they demand even though they really don t understand why. And as a result, I m constantly disappointing my kids in some way, but my intentions for them are always good. Let me just give you an example of this. A few weeks ago my son, he is 15, texted me and demanded something. He wanted the shoes. He said, Hey dad, I ve got to go to bed right now because it s a game night. Let me just stop right there. I ve been telling that kid to go to bed his whole life, and now his coach tells him to and all of the sudden he develops convictions around it. So, he goes, Can you order these when you re not busy. I wear a 9 ½. I get that and I m just like, What? He is right down the hallway. And so then I sent him this text back. It s just Adam Sandler doing the phhhht. And he s obviously disappointed. I don t know about you, but that is dad of the year award right here. That s just like some amazing parenting going on. And here s the thing. In every service I ve had people coming up saying, Did you get him the shoes? Well, yeah, maybe eventually but not like right in the moment. Here s the thing. It s not that I didn t want him to have shoes. I m more concerned about my son s heart than his feet. Like, sometimes I just say no. The other day we were in the car and I said no to something. He said, Dad, that didn t even make any sense. I said, It doesn t have to make sense to you. And honestly, don t tell him this, this needs to stay between us, sometimes I tell my son no and I have no good reason. I m just telling him no. And often times it s just because I want him to 12

13 learn to take a no and not whine about it. And actually, everybody under the age of 18 right now is like, I don t like this series at all. We re finding another church, mom and dad. It s that I want to develop some things in him. That leads me to the next point I want to leave with you. God doesn t just want to do something for you but something in you. And that s why he ll never be an on-demand God. He is trying to do the hard work within us that will yield some fruit in our lives. In other words, God is trying to develop some things within you that will last for all eternity. That might be the best explanation for this. I was talking to a friend of mine this past week and he just recently and unexpectedly lost his job. And I know many of you have gone through that. You know the pain and the difficulty of what that can be. And it blindsided him, which is worse because he didn t see it coming. So I m facetiming with him this last week and he said this to me. I wrote it down as soon as I got off the phone with him because I thought it was so profound. He said, Aaron, I m really hurting right now, but honestly I m grateful for this storm that I m currently in because it s allowing me, listen to this, a greater intimacy with God that I don t think I would have otherwise. Do you hear what he is saying? We might think that we want a storm free life and a pain free existence. But what if you got it? Would you be closer to God or farther away? My hunch is that we would sort of not really lean in much anymore, because we don t really need God. But in the midst of these storms, in the midst of these valleys that s actually where greater intimacy can arise. You know this to be true in your own life. Some of the people you re the closest to are the people you ve gone through crisis with, the people you ve walked through valleys with because in those moments you lean on each other. So the next time you re looking for an on-demand God, please know that on-demand God doesn t work because on-demand God doesn t exist. He s actually way, way better than that. And God has a perspective you and I don t have. He is a good, good Father. He delights in you. When he looks upon you he smiles, and he wants to do some things in you, not just do things for you. When you come to that recognition, the only response to that is to simply say, God, I trust you. I don t get it, but I trust you. I don t understand it, but I trust you. And here I am. Take my life. Here s the thing. Some of you simply needed to be reminded of that truth, but others of you here today are saying, Aaron, I m just not there yet. I m just not in that place. That s okay. I just invite you to come back and we ll walk through this together over the course of the next several weeks. 13

14 Let s pray together. Father, we come to you right now. Some of us are in the middle of a storm. If we re not, the clouds are on the horizon and they re coming. Father, I pray we would recognize that you are a much, much better God than an on-demand God. You don t just give us what we want, you don t just grant us all our desires, and you don t just remove us from pain because you want us to be comfortable. You desire to do some things in us and for us and your intentions for us are always good. God, if we don t feel those truths, I pray we would trust those truths and recognize that you are for us. You re in our corner. God I pray that in the course of this series those of us who maybe found ourselves in that first category, we believe, I pray that our faith would be strengthened through this series, that our understanding of who you are and your intentions for us would just be greater clarified. God, maybe if we found ourselves in one of the last two categories, I pray that over the course of this series our understanding of you would be deconstructed and then reconstructed so that we could fix our gaze on the One True God. And I pray there would be hundreds of people who would submit their lives to you because you re a good, good Father and how you re going to speak in the following weekends. So, do a work within us today as we spend a moment or two reflecting on the application of this message to us. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. 14