Fellowship Bible Church Coming to God in Humility Billy Almaguer

Transcription

1 Fellowship Bible Church Coming to God in Humility Billy Almaguer TEXT: Nehemiah 1:4-6 Thank you so much for having me here this morning. I may not know many of you here, but we have a common friend, Shane Freeman. Most of you remember Shane. When he came over to Charlotte to be the lead pastor at Southbrook Church that is the church where I was at and was on staff close to five years as a student pastor. So, my connection to Fellowship kind of came that way when he told me about the residency program. On behalf of my team, myself, and other church planters who come before me, the team that was with me on that program, and the ones who are coming in the future, thank you so much for pouring into us. You guys will never see probably on this side of heaven the impact that you are having as a church outside of your community and even outside of your state. Thank you so much for pouring into us. We I want to take some time this morning to look at Nehemiah 1:4-6, so you might want to open up there. I want to take you back a little bit in time, at least from my perspective and from my time going through this residency program, where I felt like God began to stir in my heart and bean to speak to me how to take a courageous and bold step of faith a step of faith where I did not have all the answers. It was a step of faith where I did not have everything lined up; and as Dr. Crawford Loritts said, I am an engineer so there is that analytical side of me. God was dealing with that and has been dealing with that over the past couple of years. Just to give you a bit of insight into how I am wired, when I was in the 6 th grade I was just one of those kids, an only child, and I was born in Houston, Texas. In my 5 th grade year, we moved to a very small town called Jewett, Texas, a town of about 400 people. My mom was working during these days, and of course this was in the summertime and my parents were working. I was left at home to do what a normal 6 th grade young man would do. You kind of just take things apart, you build new things, and you get creative. I was always interested in science, NASA, astronauts, airplanes, and things like that, so I took it upon myself one day to do something creative. It was in the middle of summer in Texas. It was hot outside. It was probably about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I was like thinking, I have a bicycle. I have 2 x 4 s. I have some cardboard boxes, and I have duct tape. I am going to make an airplane today. So, I make this airplane and I have it all designed in my head and make sure there was room for my legs to go up and down. I was thinking, this is going to be quite hard to do if we just kind of go down the driveway. The driveway really was not long enough, so I needed something better. So, I looked up and I saw the roof of the house; and parents this is a warning! If you have little boys at home, keep them busy. Keep them busy. Scriptures talk about keeping guys busy. Keep them busy. So, I hoisted this bicycle-airplane contraption onto the roof and I am getting ready for the pre-flight checks. I have my kneepads on because I am a skateboarder and I had my helmet. I was ready. I was getting ready to launch off the roof, and I see dust coming up the road. It is my mom coming home early. So, she changed the outcome of what could have been a potentially interesting situation, a bad situation. Hey, what are you doing? Get off the roof? So, I have always been wired that way, that when I see something, I just say, We just have to go at it full bore, 100%. As I moved into my high school years, and even into college, my dream in the 6 th grade year was to be an 1

2 astronaut, to work at NASA, and to live in Florida. God obviously had a different plan, and we are going to talk about that in a second. I knew if I were to do it, I needed to shore up my mathematics. I needed to get good at math. So, going through college, I was consistent through every math class; I made a C in every one. I was excited about that. My wife and I often talk, because you get to college and you have these dreams, and you want to make good grades; so, I made my first B. I was excited about it. It was my first B ever in college and in high school. I was excited to get into college. I started to excel, what I consider excel, and I thought, man, this is possible. I can kind of achieved this. So, I want to now parallel that story, because I was very driven. I have always been very driven and do things on my own. When we moved from Houston, Texas, to Jewett, Texas, I came across some family friends. My mom worked with one of my best friends. His dad was the mayor, so she worked at City Hall. His son s name is Jody and we were in the same grade. We skateboarded together. Let me tell you what he did. He invited me to church. That invite changed my eternal destination. It changed my eternity. It changed my legacy. It changed everything about me in a very slow and methodical way. You see he did not come up to me with a Bible and start pumping me over the head. He did not come up and say, Hey, dude, can I ask you a question of a spiritual nature? There is nothing wrong with that, but he said, Hey, Billy, do you want to spend the night? We will skate outside and tomorrow we will go to church. I was like, Sure. My parents and I at the time were going to a catholic church usually three or four times a year, not very regularly, so I knew of God, I knew of Jesus, but I did not know Him personally. So, this invite to church changed my life; and I believe there are people that God puts us in contact with everyday that are close to us but far from Him, that are one invite away from eternity and maybe that is to come to church. So, ultimately when I went to college, I graduated with an engineering degree. I worked in Dallas, Texas, actually Arlington, Texas, for Northrop Grumman for about a year and did some aerospace engineering work, but I felt like I wanted to go back to grad school. I ended up going back to Texas Tech for grad school; and that first week back at grad school I ended up going to a Baptist church, Indiana Avenue Baptist Church, and gave my life to the LORD. My life has never been the same. It has always been different. So, with that same drive, because God kind of wired me to be a driven person, I now have a relationship with Christ, but that perspective has changed greatly. You see I now know that I cannot accomplish everything on my own. As men, we can kind of fake that stuff and we can get so far, but if we expect miraculous things to happen on this planet earth, the LORD needs to be part of that. The Holy Spirit has to direct us. Now that I have a relationship with Christ, I know that really anything is possible. So, when I kind of look at the perspective of the local church, this idea of the local church, that God uses the local church to go into communities to share the gospel and to love on people unconditionally, when I think on that and the impact that it has had on my life, it makes me want to stand up on every roof and just yell out how awesome God is and how awesome the local church is. So, when I say thank you for pouring into us church planters, I mean that from the bottom of my heart, because you changed my life by what you have done and you have changed many others as well. So, what do I see on the horizon? What do I see as a church planter who moved from Southbrook Church or Shane s church down to St. Augustine, Florida? We moved there at the end of April. What do I see? I see in my community God beginning to lay on my heart that 62% of folks that live in our community, in our county, are dying and going to hell because they do not know Jesus. The rest of them say they have some sort of spiritual or religious connection but it may not be Christianity. So, God has put on my heart to go to a community, the oldest city in America, 450 years old this September, and to bring the gospel and to lock arms with other churches in the area who are already doing ministry there. So, we are excited about this. 2

3 So, what I want to do now is to specifically talk about, through the book of Nehemiah, the study, the devotion, where I believe that God began to speak to my heart. I want to talk about why St. Augustine and why now. You do not have to be a church planter and you do not have to be launching some sort of huge initiative. You can be a dad. You can be a husband. You can be a parent. That is a huge initiative. I know as we talk, as we discuss, as we pray to God that you know God puts things on our hearts that we need to consider. LORD, are you asking us to take a bold step of faith here? What does that look like? So, my prayer is as we look at this time in the Scripture this morning and what I share from my devotion from the beginning of this year in January, through the study, that the Spirit will speak to you about what your next step is. You, guys, are doing some incredible things here at the local church level. Well, what specifically might God be asking us to do? What I want to do is kind of introduce this idea. So, the first point I want to bring here is that sometimes we need to re-engage God with a fresh humility to help us see His will for us. You have to understand that last year when I started this residency program, it was not that I was not connecting with God. It was not that I was not having a quiet time. I was doing all of those things. I felt like there was a closeness there. I felt like for the past two years God had put on my heart to step out and either plant a church, to lead a church, and my prayer for the past two years had been, LORD, either open those doors or remove that desire from my heart. We, as a family, want to honor You. So, at the beginning of this year I decided I am going to spend some focused time on fasting and praying, and I just so happened to be in the book of Nehemiah. For whatever reason, God kept saying go back to Nehemiah, and I was kind of wrestling with that and I said, LORD, we are not building a wall. Why the book of Nehemiah? This sounds like a visionary type thing. He said, I want you to see Nehemiah s heart. So, I decided that I needed to step back and re-engage God with a fresh humility and say, God, you are directing me here. There is something you want me to see. So, I began to look at the book of Nehemiah. Sometimes we need to re-engage God with a fresh humility to help us see His will for us. So, we are not obviously going to cover the entire book. We are just going to cover a few Scriptures from chapter 1. Most of you are familiar with this book; but if you are not, I want to bring a couple of ideas here. Nehemiah was the cupbearer for the king of Persia. He held a very prominent position; and at this time, about 150 years before the book of Nehemiah was written, the Babylonians had come in and, destroyed Jerusalem, the temple, the walls, everything, the entire city, and they had taken the people captive. Seventy years after they were taken captive, they had been released. Some of them had gone back and done some rebuilding, but for the most part, this city lay in ruin. Nehemiah at this point, and we are going to pick it up in the Scripture, had just gotten a word, a word that this city some 800 miles away that he had never even been to. He did not even know the people there, but for whatever reason, God put this city on his heart. He gets this news of the status of the city and what was going on. We see how he is moved. One of the quotes that I have, and I want to read this before we get started, is from David Guzik and it says, We might think an important man like Nehemiah had more important things to think about than a distant city he had never been to and a people he had mostly never met. I love this part. Yet, because his heart was for the things of God, his heart was not on himself, but on others. So, when I approached this study I was fasting and praying like, LORD, give me a heart for a city. I was not into let s throw a dart at the wall and go wherever that is because I would want to aim for some tropical island or some place I knew that my family would really enjoy. We really enjoy St. Augustine, but we could have just done that and asked God to bless that. We were like, LORD, guide us there. So, when you look at the Scripture, we are going to see that Nehemiah had this heart for the city, for people he did not know, that 3

4 he was working a pretty gig. He had a great thing going, but he walked away from that because he felt God leading him away. He did not have all the answers, yet he stepped out in obedience. So, we pick it up in chapter 1 verse 4. It says, As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, O LORD God of heaven, Let s kind of break this down a little bit. So, Nehemiah had just gotten the news about the condition of the city. The walls are still in ruin. Things were not where they needed to be and so what does he do? He sat down, and he wept, and he mourned. If you go back to the original language, when I read through God s word and you read it several times, you kind of go back and see what the original context was. Nehemiah just got this word and so, he just sat down. This is interesting. When I get some bad news, sometimes I just do not sit down, but when you go back and look at the original language it means, he dwelled. He stayed put in that moment. There was a stillness in what he had just heard and what he was processing. I do not know about you, and I may be the only one who is guilty of this, but sometimes when I do not get the news that I am expecting to hear, or if I get something unexpected and it kind of rattles me, I am not really the one who says, You know I am going to sit and kind of dwell on that a little while. No, that is unexpected. I just want to kind of shove it off to the side. So, when I was looking at this and I was reading through this, I was like, God, I want a heart for a city. As a team, we want a heart for a city. We want to serve you, and Nehemiah just kind of stayed in this moment and kid of wrestled with that emotion a little bit. One of the things that I learned from the church planting program, and Tim had shared this with us on one occasion, God made us emotional creatures and when He gives you that emotion, man, let s write that down. Let s journal about it. Let s talk to God about that. You kind of see Nehemiah just kind of sitting here and he is dwelling in that moment and it says in the Scriptures, he also wept. He was moved emotionally but also physically. There was an expression physically that happened because of what he heard. Then it said, He sat down and he wept and he mourned. When you look at this original text and you go back to the Scriptures and you break that down, that word means, his spirit was down, that he was lamenting that. He was downcast, down in spirit. He was not jumping for joy saying, All right. The walls are still in ruin. Let s go in and do this. No, he is like; I am just broken. I realized that for me. As we were praying for cities and there were some other cities, and St. Augustine was really at the bottom of the list for us. There was Asheville, North Carolina, and there was Duluth, Minnesota. There was the Northeast. There were all of these other places, but God slowly but surely kept removing some of the places; but for whatever reason, he kept bringing that number 62%, the oldest city in America. He kept bringing that to me in my quiet time. I began to just break for the people that I did not even meet yet, that I did not even know yet, in the city of St. Augustine. So, he was moved by what he had heard. When difficult times come, we need to draw close to God so that He can move us to action. We see in the Scriptures that this lasted for many days. So, the point is, when difficult times come, we need to draw close to God so that He can move us to action. We see Nehemiah moved to action. In the Scriptures it says, again after he sat down and wept and mourned for many days, it says, 4

5 and I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven. So, we see Nehemiah taking action. Man, there is a burden. There is something going on, so, he begins to fast. He begins to pray. So, he is abstaining from food and he is now interceding. He is talking to God. He is communicating to God for a people that he did not know and for a city he had never been to. He was moved. There was an action there. He spent time with God. I love the way the Scripture says this. It says that he was doing this before the: God of heaven We often talk about that audience of One, and it really is what we do in our private life and in our private spiritual lives before God. For me, that was kind of that point where I realized that I need to bring this in total surrender. LORD, where do you want us to go? How do you want us to step out? How is this going to work? Really, what God was impressing upon my heart was that Billy, when you give this all to Me and when you start communicating these things to Me and we have that one-on-one conversation, I am going to begin to move your heart. You are going to see that your heart is going to break for people that you do not know. Your heart is going to break in a city that you have never been to before. I love the way Nehemiah did this. He did it before the presence of God. He did not go get with five or six of his friends and start lamenting over what was wrong with the world and how they were going to fix it. He went straight to the LORD. He was with God as he was discussing this. He was not in isolation. So, it made me kind of think, and I think it is a point of application for us, church, today. When we get the news that kind of shakes us, when the doctor comes back with news or a family member comes back with something like, Man, this life changing. This is real how do we deal with this? I look at our nation. Really, when you think about Christianity in America, I think a lot of times what we see on Sunday isn t always what we get the rest of the week, where there is a connectedness in the local body. For a lot of us, the rest of the week we become kind of like the nation of stuffers where we take what God is doing in our heart and the struggles we may be going through, we just start stuffing that away. Well, eventually the closet gets too full, doesn t it? Things just kind of like start piling up; but you see Nehemiah is not just talking with the people, he is going directly to God. So, I encourage you whenever you are struggling, whatever difficult news you might be going through, whatever step of faith God might be calling you to and you do not have all the answers, to get with God fast and pray. Bring it to Him. Our Father.if it is His will, He will continue to impress that on our hearts. If it is not of Him, He will change that. So, the point that I want to make here is that humility towards God demonstrates our dependence on Him. Humility towards God demonstrates our dependence on Him. You see, one of the things that I have learned, not only as a church planter but really as a dad raising kids between the ages of 5 and 10, two girls and two boys (they are crazy), the younger they are, the crazier they are. Some of you know this, but when I get up in the morning and sometimes I wake up and I feel like I am in a panic. It is 4:30 or 5 and I think, I need to get to praying. I need my time with the LORD today. If I have a chance to make it through today, to be the dad that the LORD has called me to be, to be the husband that the LORD has called me to be, to help plant and do the work of a church planting, if I am to do those things; then I have to wake up and I have to be humble before God. I have to show that each and every day and understand that my relationship is a cause and effect. I am going to pray, pull the button, and God is going to make that happen. I am going to pray and have a conversation with God; and I expect that as I am doing that, God is 5

6 going to move on my heart what it is He wants me to do and not to do. That is kind of the encouragement as we look at that. Looking at verse 5, Nehemiah says, And I prayed, O LORD God of heaven, oh great and awesome God, You who keeps Your covenant and mercy, with those who love You and observe Your commandments, Really, the first prayer here is we see Nehemiah wrestling with what is going on. He got some bad news. He sat down and he wept and he began to mourn and he was fasting and praying, but now he enters into this prayer. We know that because he says, I pray. Nehemiah recognized that this situation, like others, needed a conversation, a steady consistent conversation with God. We see Nehemiah doing that. It says, It might sound kind of trivial, but Nehemiah says, And I prayed, O LORD God of heaven, And I prayed, O LORD God of heaven, For whatever reason, I believe the Spirit put it on his heart as he was writing this out that there is a God and Nehemiah was not him and it was not some sort of idol. There is God, the Creator of all things; and when we pray, and because we are saved through faith in Jesus Christ, we can talk to the Creator of all things. Church, that is powerful! No matter what we are struggling with, we can get up and we can pray anytime of the day, whether that is in the morning, noontime, or in the evening, and have a conversation with the Creator of all things, who transcends time! Nehemiah is having that conversation and he says, oh great and awesome God, It would have been very easy for Nehemiah to say, And I prayed, O LORD God of heaven, and do you see what is happening over here, God? Do you see the wall? Do you see this city? Do you see the people? He could have easily gone there. I think in my own context, God, do you see that I just want to serve You? God, we want to serve You. We will go wherever you want us to go, modeling the prayer that Nehemiah had. Nehemiah says, oh great and awesome God. Before he gets into the stuff, he recognizes a couple of things. First, God is great, that there is importance, that God is distinguished. When we pray, we are communicating with the Creator of all things, the Sustainer of life. He says, You are great. You are awesome. You are to be held in awe. It would have been easy for Nehemiah just to get straight to the point, get right into the business of talking about what was wrong with the world, what was happening, and why he was distraught; but he took this moment. I think it is an encouragement to us this morning to always recognize that God is great. God is awesome. Bad things in this world are going to happen and we are going to come to God and pray to Him about those things, but we should never forget how great and awesome God is. He says, You who keep your covenants. So, in his own praying, Nehemiah was recognizing that God is faithful, that God is faithful. I am not sure about you, but sometimes I kind of let life creep into my spiritual world and I start thinking, There are some big mountains in front of me just on the horizon. I do not feel like I can even see the sun. Maybe some of you have been there, but I should always remember that back in 1998 at the back of a row of a Baptist church, a college student ministry in Lubbock, Texas, that the gift I received 6

7 that day changed my life forever. When I got Jesus, I got it all! God can choose to work out situations in my life the way that I want them to, but ultimately He is going to work them out the way He wants them to, and I need to pray that my heart matches His heart and His will. I love this about what we see in the Scriptures. We are reminded that we have a promise. No matter how difficult things might be and what God may be telling you to do, even maybe next year or next month, that we have the promise of Jesus. We have eternity with the Father forever. If you woke up this morning, and you did and you are here, sucking in oxygen, God is not done with you yet. He is not. So, the point I want to make here that sometimes the best times in our lives occur when we discover our need and complete dependence upon God. Sometimes the best times in our lives occur when we discover our need and complete dependence upon God. As a church planter, for me, that is very black and white. Obviously, when you are planting a church it is like, LORD, you called us here. It is hard to have a church as just with one family. So, LORD, we just know that as you call us here, you are going to start drawing families to us. We had four other families move down with us and two others praying about moving down to St. Augustine, Florida, with us. We are meeting with families in the community who have somehow found our website and they say, We love the heart behind what you are. We want to meet with you. We know God is going to bring people. I am going to be real honest with you. As I was sitting in my office earlier this year in Charlotte at Southbrook Church, even though I knew God had called me down there and had called me to take a step of faith, I knew there were going to be some difficulties, because I did not have all the answers. Oh, LORD, how do we pay the bills? We have to rent a place. LORD, how do we do this? How do we do these things? You know I am going to tell you that the most rewarding time in my life is right now. I know it is only going to get better, but I have seen this season of life with my family. My kids see their mom and dad take a step of faith to serve Jesus the way He has called us to do that and responding by planting a church has been rewarding, because they are talking about it. We think sometimes that a 5-year-old or a 7-, 8-, or 10-year-old that these things do not process through, but God is working on their hearts and he sees how God is moving in our family s life. So, you do not have to plant a church for your children, or your grandchildren, or for neighbors, or family members to see what is going on. Many times, and what this helped me to recognize, is the way we live our life might be the only gospel that some people ever see. They may never step foot into the local church, but I believe that God has put people in our lives that we can invite to come be a part of the local fellowship here, so they can hear the life-changing message of the gospel. As we continue to depend on God day after day with our jobs, with our finances, and what He has called us to do, there is going to be a richness there. There is going to be closeness; because as we completely surrender everything that we try to control, we just begin to draw closer and closer to God. God, here it is. I will go where you want me to go. I am not going to halfway hold on but I am going to let go in its entirety. In verse 6, Nehemiah continues on and says, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, that you may hear the prayer of your servant, which I have pray before you now day and night, for the children of Israel your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both my father s house and I have sinned. 7

8 So, we see Nehemiah continue on in this prayer. As I was looking at his heart, I was going, God, You have given this guy a heart for a city and a heart for a people. I was thinking about what God does in our life and how He moves us to a place where you and I, as followers of Jesus, can have a heart as the heart of God for people we do not know yet. The point I want to make is, Complete dependence upon God removes what we can do from the equation. You and I must come to a place and say I can go try and make a church plant happen. I can go try and I am going to will and I am going to strong arm and I am going to make these things happen, or I am going to make my kids love Jesus. We cannot make our kids love Jesus; but as a father and as parents, we can demonstrate that. We can raise them up. So complete dependency upon God removes what we can do from the equation and it really puts this whole aspect of, God, you are in control. You are sovereign over this and I am stepping out in faith because I believe that is a response to what you are calling me to do, but it is in response to Your sovereignty of what You are already planning to do. Nehemiah says in the prayer in the very first part, please let your ear be attentive. For me, as I was journaling through this and studying through this in January of this year, it kind of touched my heart, a time of fasting and praying for where God would have us go. But, Nehemiah says, Please let your ear be attentive. What I love about this is that Nehemiah knew the situation that he faced required God to be part of the solution and required a conversation with God. So, naturally it made me think, how am I living my life? Am I parenting in such a way that it requires a conversation with God each and every day? I ought to be because as a parent I have not arrived. When they get out of the house at age 18, I am not finished yet. As a husband, the same thing -- am I being a husband? Am I leading my house in a way that demonstrates that? I am coming to the LORD everyday and I am saying I need you to be the center of this and LORD correct what I am doing wrong and impress upon my heart because I want to honor you. I want to honor you. Sometimes what I think happens in our modern day Christianity there is this thing that we title, Conditional Humility. For those of you who are married, I will give you a quick example. You are husband and wife and sometimes you have a disagreement, right, about once a day, once an hour? It happens, right? You are the husband and you are thinking well I am not to let the sun go down and I really need to talk this out. We need to make sure the air is clear. By this point in time, it is 10 o'clock or 10:30 at night and you are sleeping backto-back, right. You know the situation. The wife is there lying there and I am not going to say anything, because he is supposed to be the spiritual leader. The husband is there and is like, I don't have to say anything because technically the sun has not gone down yet in Hawaii [laughter], so I do not have to say anything, right? We kind of get into this whole conditional humility where I will go as far as my pride will let me go but what if we surrendered those moments of conditional humility? You know what, man, I am messed up. I do not care if someone apologizes to me. I know I am messed up. I am going to own up to what I did and I am going to own up and I am going to talk to God and I want to have a conversation with this person that I have been at odds with and kind of release that. So, likewise, in our prayer what we see with Nehemiah is that he came to God with everything. LORD, I can t do this on my own. This is a conditional prayer. I am not coming to You with conditional humility asking You to bless part of the plan. LORD, You have to be in all of the plan because if you are not, it will not work. So, church, for you and I, whether we are planting a church, whether we are launching into a ministry, maybe we are going to Germany next year, whatever God is calling you to do, you are stepping up and serving, you can t do that on your own. It will wear you down. As we are praying to God, we need to pray to Him 8

9 unconditionally. LORD, I am coming to You with full humility. LORD, if this is what You want me to do, impress it upon my heart. Make it to where I wake up at 4:30 in the morning saying I cannot wait to be a part of that parking team. They dance [laughter] or go be a part of the children s ministry and speak Scripture and pray over them, to go on a short-term mission trip, to do whatever God has called you to do but to come to Him in full surrender. Let that also be a model for the rest of your life, with the relationships that you and I have. Then I love this part here, and it closes out. Both my father s house and I have sinned. Again, it would have been very easy for Nehemiah to say, LORD, there is a problem down there. They have this wall, this broken wall, and somehow you are giving me a heart for this city and these people. It would have been easy to say, Well, obviously LORD there was sin in the camp and they had all of these issues, but LORD you kind of wired me to be a leader and I really think you have called me to be kind of their little savior, if you will. It would have been easy for him to take that focused, oh me, that very prideful approach. Yet, what we see in the Scripture and what was as a reminder for me, is simply this. He said, Both my father s house and I have sinned. Nehemiah never takes himself out of that same circle, which is the circle of sinners, which we are all in. He never kind of says, I have arrived. I have some sort of status above other people. When he was praying, he was including everybody, including himself in his prayer. There was something about it that touched me, that reminded me, at least for me, and what spoke to me for my own time in devotion last year at the Starbucks right here close to the church, taking notes down. God revealed to me, If you ever think you are going to go to a city and win people to me because you have achieved something, then I will never let that succeed. However, if you go there and represent your total dependence upon me as a sinner, someone who needs me every day, then I can use you, then I can make sure you are used in some capacity. So, when I saw that from this book and how God spoke that to me, it reminded me it was at this point humility before God requires us to confess our sin. For me, it was like, God, I am sorry if I have ever let my pride get in the way of being the leader I feel like you called me to be because at the end of the day a leader for the LORD is nothing more than a rower. God directs us. As quickly as God can put you into ministry, whether that is serving with children or going into the mission field, or maybe being a supporter in some way or planting a church, He can take you out for a season. But everyday, we need to confess in humility, LORD, I need You. I need You to guide my steps today. So some of the things I want to share as we begin to close out this message, a couple of points here, which are really for spiritual leaders. If you are a husband, father, or a spiritual leader as a parent, or you are a single person, however God has wired you, and you have a relationship with Jesus, God has called you to something because you are sucking air. He has an assignment for you. This is what I want to leave you with because this is what was impressed upon my heart as I went through the Scripture and I knew that God has given us the city of St. Augustine on January 20 th at 1:20 p.m. at my office at Southbrook Church. He was very clear that day. This is what He impressed upon my heart. 1. As a spiritual leader, the very first thing, you and I must have a burden for is something that we, apart from God, cannot take care of. I must have a burden for something that I cannot go and throw some money at, throw some time at, or throw some of my wit at. You and I cannot go into a situation that we can conquer on our own, that as spiritual leaders, we have to have a burden for something that apart from God working through us will not ever get done. 9

10 2. The second thing we must allow, and we saw this in Nehemiah when he started fasting and praying, that as He gives us that burden, we must allow God to move us to action. We must allow God to impress that you need to move into action. I need to move into action because if we do not move into action, we are going to miss out on what God wants us to do. Because God is sovereign, if we do not do it, somebody else will. He already has that taken care of. We must have that burden. We must be moved to action, which means we must be spending time with the Holy Spirit. We must be praying to God and begging Him, LORD, I work 60 hours a week or I work 60 or 70 hours a week as an environmental engineer and part of my pathway going into ministry was this simple prayer. LORD, I am working 60 to 70 hours a week as an engineer. I am working 20 to 25 hours a week at the church volunteering. My wife is on staff. LORD, I have a heart for ministry. LORD, I pray that either you open the door or you remove my heart from ministry. Remove that ministry desire from my heart. Three months after I began to pray that, He opened up the door for me to go on staff at a church and to lead, really what I went to college for and what I went to graduate school for, but it was a calling of the LORD. Likewise, church, whatever your situation may be, you may be in charge of a company, you might be a stay-at-home mom pouring into your kids, always be open to the burden that God is putting in your heart and always be prayerful about how He is going to call you into action. 3. Lastly, you and I must have a vision from the LORD that is big enough that prayer is required and is always required. If your vision and my vision is doable, it is not from the LORD. It is just not from Him. I do not know about you, but you can simply be a parent. I look at my youngest. I was able to share with my youngest, Bodie, when he was 4-1/2 years old, while taking him to preschool. He received Christ, but do you know what? I have to pray everyday. He gives us a run for our money everyday. I mean God has just wired him that way. I am thinking, man, you are either going to be an incredible leader for the LORD or you are going to be behind bars. I do not know [laughter], but for me I have to realize that as God has given me a vision and my wife, us, a vision to parent and to steward these gifts that God has given us, it is not doable apart from God. We cannot ever say, We are going to take the week off. It is spring break. It does not work like that. He will give us an extra run for our money, but we constantly have to give that over to the LORD. I am now going to invite the worship team up, and I want us to think about something as we begin to close out. One of the most important things that I heard that kind of rattled me a little bit, I thought as I knew God had called me to go to St. Augustine; but because I am analytical, I began to still kind of process what does that mean, what does that look like? I had one of the overseers for my church, one of the guys who looks over the church who loves me, but loves the church more, who shepherds me, say. He said, Don't live your life with a spiritual regret. Don't live your life with a spiritual regret. I remember when he spoke those words to me it was just like something punched me in the heart and I was like, Oh my goodness. We have to do this. We have to be obedient. Here I am. I am realizing God has called us to do something and I am trying to model it all out in my head cash flow. All of the things that you think you would do as you are trying to make major steps for your family because it is not just me. It is a family of six, but we knew without a shadow of a doubt that we did not want to live our life as a family with a spiritual regret. So, church I will have you think about that this morning. Maybe you have seen that season like Nehemiah where God has just put a burden on your heart. It is bigger than you can do on your own. It is so big that you are thinking how can this ever get done? I want to encourage you to lead into that. Fast and pray. Let Him 10

11 continue to impress on your heart and to maybe break your heart for what it is He would have you do. When I hear stories about you guys building a Student Ministry Center and what you want to do in this community, I am just blown away of what God is doing here. Do not let that season slip by. Don't let the season come and go where God puts a spiritual desire and a burden on your heart. Don't live your life with a spiritual regret. Because as we take steps of faith with the LORD, what I am encouraged by is as we go because God is leading us there, He goes. He is already there. So, let me close our time in prayer. The worship team is going to close us out in song. I want you to prayerfully consider how God is impressing upon your heart to take that next step, whatever it may be. Fast and pray, come to God in stillness and spend time with Him. Where He is leading you, He is there. He is already there. He is waiting for you. Father, we just thank You for Your Word. We thank You for Your Word from Nehemiah this morning and how You worked in his life LORD and gave him a burden for people he did not know and a city he did not know. LORD, as I speak to this church that has poured into me and my team and countless other church planters, LORD, I just pray that we just realize the ripple effect, not just in the this state but across the U.S., even across the globe of where You have sent some of these residency folks out. LORD, be with us this week. Continue to impress upon our hearts the vision that You have given us that apart from You, it cannot be accomplished. We ask this in Your Holy Son s name. Amen. 11