Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] O Father of all glory. I call upon your name.
[00:00:07] I turn to you in hope.
[00:00:11] I seek you with all my heart.
[00:00:14] I pray today that your Holy Spirit would speak to our hearts in a way that only you can speak to our hearts.
[00:00:23] I pray that we'd have a spiritual awareness that only you can give.
[00:00:29] And then I pray that your spirit would do what only he can do. And you would call us into a richer partnership with you. That we could live lives that matter. And we could prepare our eternal souls to abide with you forever. In Christ's name, Amen.
[00:00:55] Moses was probably born under the Pharaoh Thutmose I.
[00:01:04] And Thutmose was intimidated by how large the Israel people had become in his country.
[00:01:16] And so, because he was an absolute monarch and he could do anything he wanted. He made an edict that if Israelite women had girl children, they could live.
[00:01:30] But if they had boy children, those boys had to be exposed. They couldn't live.
[00:01:36] And Moses was born after this edict.
[00:01:42] But the Bible says that there was something fine about the child.
[00:01:48] He was one of those babies that just won you when you see them.
[00:01:55] And his mom and dad hid him for three months.
[00:02:01] But he couldn't be hidden anymore.
[00:02:04] And so his mother, Yoshebel, weaved a basket of reeds and sealed it with tar on the inside and the out and put blankets in it.
[00:02:17] And she took that precious baby boy down to the Nile river and set him in the reeds. And asked her daughter Miriam to watch and see what would happen.
[00:02:32] I don't believe.
[00:02:36] I don't believe she saw clearly. Her whole way home. Her eyes must have been flooded with tears.
[00:02:44] But as Miriam watched.
[00:02:48] Little eddies of water pushed that little basket through the reeds and right to the most strategic place it could go.
[00:02:58] Where Pharaoh's daughter was bathing to cool off on a hot day.
[00:03:05] The term Pharaoh's daughter is not a description. It is a honorary title.
[00:03:14] Pharaoh's daughter meant that this young lady was seen by her father, the Pharaoh, as capable of ruling herself.
[00:03:30] Pharaoh's daughter was a title that meant the one that Pharaoh favors the most.
[00:03:39] And it happened to be Pharaoh's daughter.
[00:03:42] Who looked on that little baby in the basket and said, he's mine.
[00:03:51] I've recently read an archeologist named Scott Allen Roberts. This is the book the Pharaoh, the Exodus Reality. And there are two theories in this book about who Moses is. And I favor Scott Roberts theory that I'm going to share with you.
[00:04:14] So the Pharaoh's daughter looked at that baby and said, he's mine.
[00:04:25] She was probably 14 or 15 when that happened.
[00:04:30] And he was. Moses was raised in Pharaoh's household.
[00:04:41] He had the best education you could get in the world at the time.
[00:04:47] He lived with all the entitlements that a Pharaoh can give a grandchildren.
[00:04:57] And he became a great man.
[00:05:04] Hebrews 11:23 says, by faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents because they saw the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king's edict.
[00:05:22] By faith.
[00:05:25] This translation says when Moses was grown up. The actual Greek says by faith, when Moses became great, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter.
[00:05:39] Pharaoh's daughter was probably the queen who became Pharaoh named Hatshepsut. You can look her up on online.
[00:05:50] And Hatshepsut brought Moses into her government.
[00:05:58] And his, his Egyptian name was probably Cinnamut. And in fact, I can show you what a Moses might have looked like.
[00:06:10] This is a carving of Cinemouth with a Egyptian headdress on. And if the archaeologist Roberts is right, you're looking at the face of Moses here, a Sinamut. The name means mother's brother.
[00:06:32] And Hatshepsut treated him like a brother. In fact, he had 90 titles.
[00:06:41] And he was the builder for Hatshepsut's mortuary temple in Deal Deir el Bahri.
[00:06:55] And this is what the mortuary temple looks like today. Moses was the one who guided in building that mortuary temple.
[00:07:06] But something happened in Moses life.
[00:07:11] There came a time when he redefined himself and he said, my destiny is not to be the son of Pharaoh's daughter.
[00:07:26] And he chose a different pathway in life. Ironically, at the end of Hatshepsut's reign, Sinamut disappears. There's nothing of him left in the record. And it fits with Moses leaving Egypt and going to Midian.
[00:07:50] After he left Egypt, he lived in Midian for a while. And he redefined his life from being a prince in Egypt to being a common Bedouin shepherd shepherding sheep in probably what is today Saudi Arabia.
[00:08:11] And in his mind, that would be his life for the rest of his life.
[00:08:20] He could not see himself ever going back to Egypt.
[00:08:24] He married and had two sons. And in his heart, that would be his life for the rest of his life.
[00:08:33] But God had a different plan from Moses.
[00:08:37] And God met Moses one day in a burning bush.
[00:08:41] And he said to him, take the sandals off your feet, because the ground you're standing on is holy ground.
[00:08:52] And God said to Moses, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And I am asking you once again to redefine your lifestyle. And I'm asking you to go as my representative to Egypt and tell the Pharaoh to let my people go.
[00:09:15] I commonly hear, well, if Moses was so great and there were 10 plagues, why doesn't it show up on any of the Egyptian walls? Very simply, they carved it out.
[00:09:28] I can show you pictures where they carved out Hatshepsut. What the history they didn't like her own son, Thutmose III carved his mother off of walls all over Egypt.
[00:09:45] When they canceled you, they cancelled you royally.
[00:09:52] So Moses, under the direction of God, went back to Egypt. And in 10 plagues, God delivered the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage.
[00:10:04] The last plague was called the Passover.
[00:10:07] And God said to Moses, my death angel is going to pass over Egypt tonight because Pharaoh will not let my people go.
[00:10:17] Going to. I'm going to take his firstborn. But if you kill a lamb and you take a hyssop branch and you take some of the blood of that lamb, and you put it on the doorpost of your house, the death angel will pass by you.
[00:10:34] And so the Israelites began what they have celebrated ever since the Passover.
[00:10:41] And the Passover was created by Moses. It's been celebrated in every generation to remind people that when, when life was hardest for them, God met them and delivered them from Egyptian bondage.
[00:10:58] God met them and said, I have a destiny for you, and I'm going to redefine your lifestyle so you can participate in the destiny.
[00:11:12] This story of Moses is in the Bible not to just be interesting to us, but to teach us important life lessons. And I want us to consider five life lessons from Moses today.
[00:11:31] The first one is Moses came to a point in his life where he refused to be defined by. By the culture around him.
[00:11:41] Moses reached a point in his life where he was no longer content just to be like everybody else around him. Even though he lived in Pharaoh's court, even though he had everything anybody could ever ask for at the time, he said, this is not the meaning of my life.
[00:12:02] And when God. When Moses became great, he said, I have a different destiny. I'm going to use all my past experience to redefine myself and become someone new.
[00:12:19] Ah. We are starting the Adventure of Faith campaign. And it's moments like this where we get to ask ourselves some hard questions.
[00:12:29] We get to ask ourselves, am I content with the lifestyle I've been living?
[00:12:40] Am I content with that for the rest of my life?
[00:12:44] Or would I like my life to account for something more than it's counted for so far.
[00:12:53] Would I like to be part of doing something that has influence on the future? Just like Moses, life had influence on the future.
[00:13:04] Today, when you leave the service, we're going to give you a little pamphlet. This, this is the Adventure of Faith campaign. And you can read through it. If you're online and you'd like to have one of these, you can get it off our website or off our app.
[00:13:26] And basically what this little pamphlet does is it describes what we're calling the Adventure of Faith Campaign.
[00:13:34] So let me tell you what it is.
[00:13:41] For most of the history of our church, we've had what we call a Century Church plan. This Century Church plan means we make decisions today, ask ourselves, how will this influence the church a hundred years from now?
[00:13:58] So for example, when we were looking for land, we wouldn't even look at a piece of property that wasn't 25 acres or more. Because we know in a hundred years you won't be able to buy 25 acres anywhere around here. Do you see? So we bought this 32 acres and we gave the church property for future visions of what God might call them to do. And if we wouldn't have bought it when we did, it wouldn't have been here. Our Century Church plan means that we disciple young people to become the future leaders of our church. We don't leave it to random, we don't say, well, I hope in five years we have some good, some good kids show up. We have an agenda and we disciple our young people to be the future leaders of our church.
[00:14:52] All of the leaders in our church right now, all of the pastoral leaders, they were discipled in this church because we have a commitment not to hope about the future, but to create a future.
[00:15:12] And part of creating this future is we're going to have a 24 month campaign and we're going to pay off this campus and we're going to help west raise money to build their new campus. So right now this property is worth about $9 million and we owe $1.5 million on it. And in this campaign over the next two years, we're going to pay off that 1.25 million and we're going to help west raise some money because they're going to break ground this summer and build a new building.
[00:15:49] This campaign is also designed to help old Brooklyn become self supporting.
[00:15:56] We fund about half of old Brooklyn, but this campaign will help them become self supporting. As a congregation, we want to do this not in the Normal way our culture does it.
[00:16:15] We don't sell mattresses. We don't sell candy bars. We don't do raffles, okay? And there's a reason we don't do that.
[00:16:24] Because moments like this are opportunities for the Holy Spirit to grow our souls. They are challenges to our faith.
[00:16:34] They require us to pray and seek God.
[00:16:39] They make us think differently about our life. And so we want to do this campaign in the kind of way that our eternal souls grow and blossom.
[00:16:50] We also believe that when Jesus said, lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust don't corrupt and thieves don't break through and steal, this is one of the ways we lay up for ourselves treasures on earth. We start investing earthly treasures in a heavenly investment.
[00:17:12] This also gives us the opportunity to do another part of our mission, which is to teach the lifestyle of generosity.
[00:17:22] Everything you see here, people just like you paid for, we never got any big donation from some rich person from somewhere. Everything you see here, people just like you made a commitment. And month after month. And that's why we have this here.
[00:17:48] My generation, the people who did this with me, we learned the lifestyle of generosity.
[00:17:58] I defined a lifestyle. Sharon and I defined a lifestyle in the late 90s.
[00:18:07] We said, this is how we choose to live. No matter how much we make, if we keep, if we get raises, even if we get those raises, we don't change our lifestyle. You see, I drive a Ford pickup because I defined my lifestyle as a Ford level spender.
[00:18:30] I don't drive a Lincoln pickup because I defined a lifestyle that I don't want to put my money in a Lincoln pickup. I want to put my money in other things. All right, so when you define a lifestyle, when you have a challenge like this, it is an opportunity to define your lifestyle and start saying, what do I really want to do with my one and only life?
[00:18:59] This also allows us to transition from making interest payments to paying for ministry. Every dime we spend on interest on our loan is a dime we can't spend on the ministries. And over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to focus. I'm going to let you see some of the incredible ministries we are doing. And if we pay off our debt, the money will be able to go toward ministry and not to First Federal Bank.
[00:19:34] Okay, but we have a bigger motive than just doing this.
[00:19:39] If we can finish our past business, we're ready for a new challenge.
[00:19:47] And I believe there are thousands of people sitting at home today who would go to church if we could somehow or another capture their attention and remind them of how wonderful Jesus Christ really is. And we're going to set. We've already set a goal. Our staff leadership team has already set a goal. We're calling it Disciple 5000. And in five years, we want to be averaging 5,000 people in our. The three campuses we have now. And in a new campus, we're going to start.
[00:20:25] Okay, why do we want to do that? Because that's what Christ said the church is supposed to do just before he went to heaven. This is what he said. Ah, all power is given to me on heaven and earth. Go therefore, and make disciples.
[00:20:42] Jesus said it's the primary job of the church to make disciples. And so for the last 43 years, we've always had discipleship goals.
[00:20:54] When we moved into this building, our goal was Disciple 1000.
[00:20:59] And when we set that goal, we probably had about 150 people.
[00:21:07] But you know what? We had the day when we celebrated our church averaging a thousand people on any given Sunday, then we set the goal of Disciples 3000.
[00:21:18] And we only had a thousand then. And it is, it is not uncommon for us now to have every day, Sundays with 3,000 people.
[00:21:31] We also want, as part of this, Christ said he came to seek and to save those who are lost.
[00:21:40] As part of this, as part of this adventure of faith campaign, we've set a goal to baptize 1,000 people in the next five years.
[00:21:51] All right, now, as you can guess, we can't do this alone.
[00:22:00] Do you get this? If the staff and I work to the very best of our ability, we can't do it alone. But we're not supposed to do it alone. We're supposed to be the body of Christ and we're all supposed to do it together.
[00:22:15] It's God's idea for all of us to feel like we're on a team, that we're partners with God and we're going to define our lifestyle in the kind of way that makes it possible for us to be a partner with God.
[00:22:30] We're not going to let the culture around us define our lifestyle. We're going to consciously and personally define our own lifestyle.
[00:22:39] The second thing I can learn from the life of Moses is Moses considered Christ above the fleeting pleasures and the treasures of this life. Listen what he. Listen what the author of Hebrew said, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.
[00:23:03] He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking forward to a reward Listen. What Moses did, he reached a time in his life where he asked himself, what do I really value?
[00:23:22] He said, if I want to, I can spend the rest of my life pleasing myself. Here in Egypt, I'll be wealthy, I'll be respected.
[00:23:36] I'll have every leisure that a person can want.
[00:23:41] I will be in family, Pharaoh's family, and I will have opportunities to please myself in ways other people wouldn't dream.
[00:23:50] But that's not what his soul wanted.
[00:23:55] The fleeting pleasures of life weren't enough.
[00:24:01] Moses was a wealthy man in Egypt.
[00:24:05] The picture of, I showed you of, of the mortuary temple, Moses was building himself one right next to it. He was a very wealthy man. But it came a time in his life when he said, I want to live for something more than just the accumulation of wealth.
[00:24:28] See, what happened was Moses said, I'm going to consider what are my values? And I'm going to build a lifestyle around my values.
[00:24:39] In the next few weeks, I'm asking us all to pray together. And where we start praying is we say to God, would you help me clarify my values?
[00:24:50] Would you help me to look at my life seriously and help me to really determine what I value most and what falls under those. Those highest values?
[00:25:06] You can begin by saying this. Just the same thing Moses did.
[00:25:11] Do you value Christ above personal pleasure?
[00:25:17] Is Christ more do you want.
[00:25:21] Are you willing to let go of some personal pleasure to be. Do something meaningful with Jesus Christ?
[00:25:30] All right, and here's how you can answer that question honestly.
[00:25:34] Consider your pleasure budget and compare your pleasure, your pleasure budget to your spiritual budget.
[00:25:47] What does it cost? What did your last big vacation cost?
[00:25:52] And how does that cost compare to what you've been willing to share with Christ?
[00:26:02] What was the. What was the last big home purchase you made for your own leisure? And how does that compare to what you have invested in Christ? Do you see? I can just start looking honestly at my life and I can say, my budget tells me what I value.
[00:26:24] And if my budget is telling me I value my own leisure more than I value Christ, then I have to have, I have to redefine my lifestyle.
[00:26:36] The second thing Moses did is he really asked himself what he treasured.
[00:26:42] He said he considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.
[00:26:51] Do you believe that the rewards that Christ have for you are greater treasures than the treasures you can get in this life?
[00:27:00] Several weeks ago, I preached to you about the glory, the riches of the glory of the inheritance he has for us. And I wonder if you really Believe that.
[00:27:11] I wonder if you believe that what God has for you in heaven is infinitely more valuable than anything you can accumulate on earth.
[00:27:22] Or are you afraid to be generous with God because if you're generous with God, you might not get something in life that you want and then you die and go to heaven, and who really knows what you get there? I mean, I'm asking us as a church to do some spiritual evaluation where we make some simple comparisons and we challenge our values. What does Christ mean to me?
[00:27:50] Does he mean enough to me that I'm going to be his partner in doing something awesome in this church and creating a different future for the church?
[00:28:00] Or do I just like to have Jesus as an insurance policy and let me live my life any way I want, but I get a free pass from hell and I get to go to heaven.
[00:28:14] I want more out of life than then free pass past hell.
[00:28:24] This is the one life I get to live, and I want to live it in the kind of way that God says to me when I go to meet him. I was glad to have you on the team, son.
[00:28:37] I was glad to partner with you, son. I'm glad I could count on you.
[00:28:43] I was praying about this diligently. Whenever I preach these sermons, I pray diligently because some of you are going to hear this sermon and then you won't come back next Sunday.
[00:28:54] So I was praying diligently.
[00:28:57] And in my prayer, I reached a moment where I said to God, thank you for asking me to do this.
[00:29:11] Thank you that a hard task like this, you can trust me, church. I feel honored that God could have picked anyone to lead this church to do this next adventure of faith. But he said, I pick you.
[00:29:32] And now you know what? I don't want to let him down.
[00:29:36] I want to give him my very best.
[00:29:40] Second of all, I like the adventure of faith. I don't enjoy living a boring Christianity.
[00:29:47] I don't like showing up work. I don't like showing up at work and not having to pray my guts out.
[00:29:54] I like showing up at work and saying, dear God, if you don't help me today, this is not going to go well.
[00:30:01] I like what it feels like in the Christian life to be dependent on God.
[00:30:08] I like it when I have to pray. I like it when I have to recruit people. I like it when I have to ask for help. It is the adventure of living Christianity rather than that boring Christianity where you sit around and everything feels the same week after week after week after week.
[00:30:34] Your life will not be judged by what you consumed, your life will be judged by what you accomplished. Do you see? I've never done a funeral where people said, man, was this guy a consumer?
[00:30:54] I have done funerals where people said, this person's life made all the difference in the world. When I was in this hard time, they helped me in this way. When I was in this difficult time, they helped me in another way. Do you see? Your life is never judged by what you consume. Your life is judged by what you invest.
[00:31:18] I'm asking us all to start thinking of ways to value the eternal above the temporary.
[00:31:27] The third thing we can learn from Moses, Life. Moses refused to be defined by fear, by faith. He left Egypt not being afraid of the anger of the king.
[00:31:40] In this defining of a lifestyle, I want you to ask yourself, how much of your present life is guided by past fears?
[00:31:50] How much do your fears from the past affect your life today?
[00:31:59] I can remember being broke. Okay, when I say broke, I mean broke.
[00:32:08] Sharon and I worked our way through college.
[00:32:11] We were so broke, we scrounged up enough change to buy two Coca Colas.
[00:32:19] We walked to the store to get them.
[00:32:24] Ah, we couldn't wait to put some ice in a glass.
[00:32:30] Ah. We spent our last change buying those coats and somebody dropped one of them.
[00:32:48] I don't. I didn't like living that way. I'm going to tell you I didn't like living broke. But I'm never going to let the fears of the past define my future church. Because you know what I've learned?
[00:33:05] God doesn't rip people off.
[00:33:09] God does not rip people off. King David said I was young and now I am old. And I have never seen God abandon one of his people.
[00:33:20] Could I tell you I was young and now I'm old and I've never seen God abandon one of his people.
[00:33:29] I've been leading this church for 43 years, and I've never seen anyone who was generous with God be abandoned by God. We can't be guided by our past fears.
[00:33:43] Some of you are guided by your fears of the future. You just worry that you won't have enough. That's a misguided fear.
[00:33:52] The very same God who blessed you and brought you to where you are today. Why wouldn't he bless you and see you through to the end?
[00:34:01] The very same God who has blessed you to where you are at this moment. He's the very same one who says, I will never leave you or forsake you.
[00:34:11] If you're going to define a lifestyle and it's going to have A faith at its core. Then you have to let go of the fear of the past and the fear of the future. And you have to believe unreservedly in the wonder and the goodness of Jesus Christ.
[00:34:31] Moses reached a point where he let go and left behind his previous lifestyle.
[00:34:39] Some of you are at a strategic moment.
[00:34:44] You still have a meaningful life to live. There are still incredible things you can accomplish. You can still be part of something that has eternal value. But to do that, you're gonna have to let go of some of your past and you're gonna have to redefine who you are and what you value and live a different future.
[00:35:06] I'm asking all of us to make a fresh start with God this month. And we do that by setting time, setting aside time every single day and seeking God and praying a prayer that sounds something like this. Dear God, you are my God and I'm ready to do whatever you ask me to do. Would you please help me to understand what it is you want me to do?
[00:35:35] God whispers to our hearts.
[00:35:37] God's whispers to our hearts. Sharon and I have done every campaign we had in this church. The first one was in Parma and we did the 650 plan.
[00:35:48] We, there's little keychains around here. Rachel showed me one.
[00:35:53] We asked everybody we wanted to start saving. We outgrew our building, wanted to start saving for a new building. And we ask everyone if they would give their normal weekly giving plus $6.50.
[00:36:09] That $6.50 raised the money that we bought the Lun Road Church with.
[00:36:20] Listen.
[00:36:24] And then God filled the Lun Road Church and then we found this land and we had a campaign to raise $370,000 in four years because that's what the land cost.
[00:36:42] God was faithful. And we raised that in three years and paid the land off.
[00:36:49] This was a five and a half million dollar building in 2006 and we raised almost $3 million as a down payment on this building.
[00:37:06] We had to have phase two. That was a $3 million building.
[00:37:12] We paid off phase two in like, I can't remember, four years.
[00:37:19] Listen, people just like you got serious with God, asked God to whisper to their heart, did what God asked him to do, and his church has thrived because of it.
[00:37:32] I'm not, I'm not asking anybody for any amount that's between you and God. But I'm asking everyone to seek the Lord, go on an adventure of faith with God.
[00:37:45] 4. Lesson 4. Moses defined his lifestyle by contemplating the reality of God. He endured as seeing him who is invisible. Moses did what he did because he saw something other people didn't see.
[00:38:03] Do you see God as the source of everything good in your life?
[00:38:10] Do you see God as the source of everything good in your life? So if you give God anything, then what you're really doing is you're just sharing back with him what he's already shared with you.
[00:38:21] See, if you see God that way, it will be easy to do this program.
[00:38:27] But if you see God as something other than that, and you see that you're that it's all about what you're losing, you'll never be able to do the adventure of faith. Let me tell you a promise. Would everybody. If I've lost your attention, let me have your attention back.
[00:38:45] Listen what Paul wrote.
[00:38:48] My God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
[00:38:57] Okay, I want you to hear again. My God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. If you can see that God by faith, you can do something significant.
[00:39:12] But if you can't see that God by faith, it's going to be really hard for you.
[00:39:17] The adventure of faith is an opportunity to refocus.
[00:39:22] We have to turn our attention away from the merely visible things and we have to turn our attention on the God who is invisible.
[00:39:32] Let me remind you something about who this invisible God is.
[00:39:38] God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and unto Himself. He is all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he has made, or deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of being of whom through whom and to Whom are all things, and hath all sovereign dominion over them to do by them, for them, upon them whatsoever he pleases. In his sight. All things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible and independent upon the creature. So as nothing is contingent or uncertain, he is most holy in all his counsels.
[00:40:27] This is the God that we live with. This is the God we trust in. This is the God we serve. And if you know that God, it only makes sense to put your faith in him and go on an adventure with Him. If you don't know that God, this could be an opportunity for you to learn the reality of God in your life in a new and beautiful way.
[00:40:53] I'd like to talk to people online today. I preach real thoroughly to this church, but there are about a thousand people who are watching us online this week. I'd like you to pray about Being part of this adventure of faith, too. I'd like you to consider how you might be God's partner and join us and do something significant and beautiful for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.
[00:41:18] I want you to contemplate what you want to accomplish with. With your life. I want you to let God challenge you and be open to the adventure of faith.
[00:41:27] Ah.
[00:41:30] Ah. I don't want you to give a penny you don't feel like God asked you to give.
[00:41:37] I want to say that one more time. I do not want you to give a penny that you don't feel like God asked you to give.
[00:41:44] I don't want you to give anything because I'm asking. I want this to be a adventure of faith between you and God.
[00:41:52] The last lesson from Moses.
[00:41:55] Because Moses did what he did, he created the culture of Israel.
[00:42:00] The Israelite nation is today what it is because Moses did what he did 3,000 years ago.
[00:42:08] The life of one person has influence 3,000 years later, but it has influence because Moses was willing to live the adventure of faith.
[00:42:25] Be part of something bigger than yourself.
[00:42:29] Make a true sacrifice.
[00:42:32] In fact, this is what I'm asking. I'm asking you to make the biggest, most generous gift that you'll probably ever give in your whole life.
[00:42:44] I'm asking you for this to be a defining moment that you get serious with God and you find the faith to do the most generous thing that you may ever do in your whole life.
[00:42:59] Will it be easy? No.
[00:43:02] But will you be destitute? No.
[00:43:07] When Sharon and I had kids all over the place and our bills were the highest, and I didn't make as much then as I do now. When we built this building, Sharon and I did an adventure of faith with God. And we pledged $50,000.
[00:43:25] And we were probably making about $70,000 then.
[00:43:34] It was beyond what we could do, but it was what we were sure God was asking us to do.
[00:43:40] We made our pledge, and Do I look like I'm homeless?
[00:43:49] God has been faithful.
[00:43:52] When we built phase two, we pledged another $50,000.
[00:43:59] It took us longer than four years to pay it, but we got our second $50,000 placed. And. And God has not left me destitute. I have been on adventures of faith with God and the last son In June, on June 1st, I'll tell you what Sharon and I are pledging for this campaign.
[00:44:19] What I'm saying is, if you're willing to do something serious with God, it changes your spiritual life. It changes how you see God, it changes how you see church. It changes how you see what's meaningful in life.
[00:44:39] I want to do this. I want to follow Moses example and I want to transition this church into a better future.
[00:44:46] I want this church to have opportunities in the future that it would never have if we had not done something significant, trusting in God and seeing what he would do. I want people 100 years from now to look back at this generation and say, how in the world did they ever accomplish all of that?
[00:45:11] And it can happen if all of us, collectively and individually, will go on an adventure of faith with God.
[00:45:20] On June 1st, we'll take and initial adventure of Faith offering.
[00:45:27] We'll also collect pledge cards.
[00:45:30] These cards, they're in the pamphlet and basically they say, this is what I. This is what I'm willing to commit over the next two years to see this goal accomplished.
[00:45:44] So we'll take an initial offering and we'll take the commitment cards as you give every month. We will reduce the mortgage until we're debt free in 2027.
[00:45:59] I'm asking you to accept the adventure of Faith challenge and do something too hard for you and see what God will do. Our dear Heavenly Father.
[00:46:12] Oh, how I pray that your spirit would whisper to our hearts in ways that only you can.
[00:46:21] I pray that you would help people see the privilege it is to be your partner in doing things that cannot be done without you.
[00:46:35] Father, I pray that you would convince us that you're worthy of trust.
[00:46:40] And I pray that what we do in this adventure of faith campaign, it might grow our souls. We might come to know you better. We might come to trust in you more. We might come to be a serious part of what you're going to do in the generations to come.
[00:46:56] Then, Father, I pray that as we trust in you, you will keep your promise. When Jesus promised given, it will be given unto you good measure, pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. And I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
