PROVEN | Week 1 | Sermon

amen. So it's kind of crazy to think, but in a couple of weeks I will be married for fifteen years, which is absolutely wild, right? So

I mostly say that to let you know that although I wasn't always the expert that I am on women, I have actually become an expert now. So if you have any questions, let me know and I can answer them for you, Right? Like talk about an ignorant statement.

I feel like they should do this thing with newly married men where they take you on a retreat and they teach you all of the nuances of women.

Because it's a sharp learning curve when you're a young married man. You know what I mean? Like you walk in the door and you ask your wife how she's doing. And she's like, I'm fine. And your response is like, yeah, girl, you are fine.

You have to learn that that's not like an appropriate response because when she says she's fine, what she means is that she's really upset and you've done something to offend her and you just don't know what it is yet. Right? And so you're gonna have to figure out slowly what it is that you did. And so the funny part is is when we had been married, think it was our second Christmas together. Again, And my wife is like one of the easiest people in the world to be married to. Like she's just an amazing human. But when we had our first or second Christmas, we were sitting there talking about like what we're gonna get each other for gifts. And my wife says something to the effect of like, well, I just don't really need anything. You know, like I don't really need any gifts. I have everything that I need. And then she said something to the effect of like, you know, I have everything that I need in you. And I'm like, that makes sense to me. You know, like that

checks out. If I could give me, me, I would, you know, but I am the gift to you, right? I'm so dumb and ignorant that I take her at face value. So I literally don't buy a gift, right? So Christmas morning comes rolling around and I'm sitting there just thinking like, man, I hit the jackpot. Like my wife is awesome. I And don't have to buy her gifts like my friends do. Like their relationships are so superficial.

And then Christmas morning is like, we're passing the gifts around and the kids open the presents and she gives me what she got for me. And then that look happens again. And I've started to learn by this point, okay, this look means that I've done something. I just don't know what it is yet. And so she then just kind of flat out asked me, she's like, did you really not get me anything?

And I'm like, what was all that conversation a couple of weeks ago about like, didn't need a gift and I was the gift, like what happened? And I learned that women lie. Okay? Like that's it

was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. And so gentlemen, if you're dating or you're newly married and at any point they say that they do not want a gift, they are lying and the truth is not in them. Okay? They always

want a gift. And the reason that I started this morning is in that moment, my wife faced the stark reality that a lot of us start to see in those newly married years, right? Where we've been sold really kind of

a fantasy, a dream of what marriage is supposed to be. It's like Cinderella in Prince Charming and then you get married and you're like, this feels more like Beauty and the Beast. This isn't what I thought it was going to be. In moments in life, things happen where what you expected

become different than what you're experiencing. And that gap between expectation and experience is a really important one because oftentimes what that gap gets filled with is frustration and disappointment.

And when you don't deal with it and you don't address it, that frustration and that disappointment over a period of time leads to bitterness, that leads to resentment.

And I would say that a lot of the reasons that marriages and relationships break down is because we don't acknowledge the difference between what we're expecting and what we're actually experiencing. And it isn't just marriage relationships. It isn't just our

connection with each other where that's going to happen. In so many different arenas of our life, we're going to expect one thing and then life is going to happen. And it seems like I'm not experiencing what I thought I was going to, right? Some of you right now are sitting in seasons where you're like, I thought by this stage I would be married.

I thought by this season of life that I would have kids. I wouldn't still be bouncing around from jobs and I would be settled more into my career. I thought I would own a house by now. I thought I would be here, but it just seems like I'm here. And the truth is oftentimes that gap between what we experience

and what we're expecting, it leads to a lot of frustration.

It leads to a lot of times asking, God, do you just not see me? It seems like you're answering these questions for everybody else. It seems like you're doing these things for everybody else. Have you just forgotten about me? And sometimes we don't know what to do when we find ourselves in those seasons. We don't know what to do with frustration that leads us to doubt and actually ask the question, is God actually real?

Is he a good father that I can trust? Because it seems like based on what I'm experiencing, it's a lot different than what I was going to expect. And this is why theology or our belief of God is so paramount. Because what happens is if you've convinced yourself that who Jesus primarily is, is that Jesus is a spiritual guru.

He's a good teacher. He's a genie in the sky for you to go and get to do and perform a certain way. If you're convinced that that's who God is, what happens when he doesn't perform like you think he's supposed to perform? What happens when he doesn't give you the blessing that you think you're supposed to get?

Oftentimes those are the moments where we hit these crises of faith and we usually walk away.

See, here's why this section of Matthew is so important is because we're coming out of the sermon on the Mount and the sermon on the Mount, you can't read that and not go, okay, I agree with this. This is a beautiful way to be human. It's an incredible invitation to deal with yourself and to love your enemies. And even Muhammad Gandhi himself said that the teachings of Jesus in the sermon on the Mount were some of the most formative teachings he saw anywhere.

He says, I love this part of Jesus. But then we forget these next couple verses. We forget these next couple chapters where he goes, yes, sure. There's some good human principles and there's some good ways to operate as humans,

but also Jesus was the guy that said, he's the only path to get to heaven. That He's the only way to get to the Father. And what we often do is we do exactly what Gandhi did with Jesus.

And we relegate Jesus to being just a good spiritual teacher. And He's a guru that has some good principles, but we don't allow him to be the Lord of our life that we trust even when life doesn't make sense. See, Muhammad Gandhi famously said, I like your Christ. I just don't like your Christianity.

And you don't get to do that with Jesus. We don't get to take the parts of him we like and reject the overwhelming thing that he was trying to show us. Yes, he has some good teachings, but he did not come to be a good teacher. He came to be

God. And what we're gonna see in this series, we're gonna look at this today as we unpack Matthew chapter 11 is the idea, the big idea that Jesus is God, not a guru.

And the reason that that is so important for us to understand is when you find yourself in a season, when you find yourself in a moment where what you're experiencing is different than what you're expecting, if Jesus is just a guru,

if he's just somebody who's supposed to perform for you, you will become incredibly frustrated with God and you will be tempted to allow the circumstances of your life to dictate who God is. But if you can begin to realize that Jesus is God and he's outside of all of this and he's in control, it will allow you potentially to trust him in difficult seasons,

to lean into him in hard seasons and not run away from him in the middle of those. Okay? So Matthew chapter 11,

here's how the story begins in verse one. It says that when Jesus had finished giving these instructions to his 12 disciples, he went out to teach and preach in towns throughout the region. It says John the Baptist who was in prison,

he heard about all the things that the Messiah was doing. So he sent his disciples to ask Jesus. Here's the question, verse three, Are you the Messiah that we've been Notice the word he uses, that we've been expecting or should we look for someone else? Should we keep looking for someone else?

See what happens when what you expect is different than what you experience? For John the Baptist, this is playing out in a way that he never could have envisioned.

See Jesus in Matthew five, six and seven, the sermon on the mount, this beautiful teaching. And then eight through 11 or eight through 10, he's doing all these incredible miracles. And then in Matthew 10, he commissions the disciples to go and do this yourselves. You guys go live this way and expand the kingdom. And then in Matthew 11, it turns to this encounter with John the Baptist who's sitting in prison.

Now, again, if you don't know John the Baptist story, it's an incredible one.

John the Baptist is the byproduct of parents who were convinced that they were too old to ever have kids. His dad was a temple worker. His dad was essentially a priest in the temple and his parents were elderly and they never had kids. Their womb was barren and so they were just convinced they were never gonna have children. And then one day an angel showed up to John the Baptist's dad and he told him, You're going to have a son and your son is not just going to be a prophet, he's actually going to be the fulfillment of prophecy.

He's going to be the one that the book of Isaiah talked about. The one that will come before the Messiah, that will prepare the way for the Messiah. That's gonna be your son. To which his dad literally laughed like, that's crazy. Do you know how old we are? Like there's no chance this is going to happen. And God, I think with his sense of humor, he literally makes his dad mute. He's unable to speak for the duration of the pregnancy.

And some of you were like, can I get that gift with my husband? You know, like

he can't talk the entire time his wife is pregnant. And the Bible tells us that John the Baptist and Jesus were actually second cousins. They were connected. Their moms were first cousins. And there's the story where their moms actually go into the same room when they're pregnant with the babies and the babies actually start to like leap in the womb. They start to respond to each other. They had an incredibly

connected relationship. They grew up together. They knew each other from the very beginning, which again is one of those things if you're a skeptic going, is Jesus really actually God or is he just a guru? One of the evidences that I would submit to you is one of his cousins was convinced that he was God.

I think about my cousins and I'm like, that's the last thing that I'm gonna try to convince you of is that they are God, right? I can convince you that there are a couple things, but definitely not God. Yet John the Baptist grew up believing that his cousin was the savior of the world.

And John the Baptist really had one mission. He had one purpose. And oftentimes people mistake him. They mistook him as the Messiah. And he constantly had to say, I'm not the Messiah.

I'm the one that's preparing a way for him. And John the Baptist was a bold orator for the gospel. He was walking around preaching a message of repentance saying, you need to change, repent, turn around. The kingdom of God is near. And it's amazing if you read the Bible, you will see the first person ever in scripture to declare that Jesus was not just a teacher, was just not a good person, but that he was the lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world.

It was John the Baptist. When Jesus was walking down to the Sea Of Galilee to be baptized,

John the Baptist pointed and said, There he is. That's the Messiah. This is the one. This is the man who's going to be the savior of the world. John the Baptist had one mission. He was a weird dude that lived outside in the wilderness by himself. He never married. He ate locusts. Like he just was a wild outdoorsman

and he preached boldly a gospel of repentance. And he told people, you need to change your way, that what you're doing matters. Holiness matters, that God is here, Jesus is real, he's the savior of the world. He was so bold in proclaiming the truths of the gospel that he would tell a pagan king,

you can't marry your brother's wife. Like that's not cool. To which the king would throw John the Baptist in prison. And what we read in Matthew 11, John the Baptist has been in prison for about a year. He's been sitting in prison for standing boldly for Jesus. And now here's what's incredible.

He's been in prison for a year. He's been left in a cell, locked away with his slots to just think about all of the things that he's experienced.

All of the disappointments that he's sitting in the middle of. And it's amazing to me that a guy like John the Baptist, the one who had a public ministry who truly, if he existed today, he would have a mega church, he would have a bestselling book, he would have millions of followers on Instagram. He would have had a massive influential

following because of who he was. Yet that guy, a year into prison is sitting there asking, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe he wasn't actually who I thought he was.

And so he tells and asks his disciples, again, a lot of these influential guys, these rabbis, these teachers, they all had disciples. Jesus wasn't the only one. John the Baptist sends a couple of his disciples because he can't go to Jesus himself and he sends his disciples to Jesus and he says, Just ask him.

Ask him if he's the Messiah or ask him if I've got it wrong.

The reason I think this story is so important for us to see is if it's possible for John the Baptist to get to a point in his life, for his circumstances to get so dire and so drastic and so dark, for him to question if Jesus was actually who he claimed to be, it tells me it's possible for you and I to get there too.

And I think sometimes you and I don't know what to do with doubt. I think we don't know what to do when we get to a place where something is produced in our heart that we're not really sure what to do with. We go, yeah, I think I have faith, but I'm not sure. If God was real, why wouldn't he let my marriage get fixed?

If God was actually real and if he really was actually good, why would he allow this to happen again? It's one thing to do it for a week. It's one thing to figure it out for a month, but three sixty five days of unanswered prayers, it will do something inside of you.

It will produce things in you that we just have to be honest and say that are there. And what's amazing to me is if you look at almost every hero of the face, Moses almost walked away. Elijah, really powerful prophet for God almost walked away.

David openly talks in the Psalms about how he just isn't sure if he can trust God. I think you've abandoned me. I think you love my enemies more than you love me. And John the Baptist himself is sitting there going, what I'm experiencing is completely different than what I was expecting.

And what do you do when you're there? Because I promise you, if you're not sitting there this morning, at some point in our journey, we will get there ourselves.

And I think we don't know what to do with those things. We don't know what to do with doubt. We're not sure if we can actually acknowledge that we're doubting if God is good. If we're doubting that God is real and we don't, instead of running to God with them, we run away from him because we don't know what to do with it. And what I wanna try to do with the time that we have left is to go, I wanna show us some things in this story that I think show us here's how we potentially have the ability to overcome

what I would call this frustration expectation or this expectation frustration. When you're in the middle of experiencing something that's different than you thought you were going to experience,

what do you do with that? Because John the Baptist has just asked Jesus, are you the Messiah? And of course Jesus is gonna do the Jesus y thing. It's like, bro, a simple yes or no would be really helpful right here. But he gives them this like really elaborate Jesus answer. But in this answer, I think he shows us,

here's what we need to do when our heart is welling up, not with faith, but with doubt. And the first thing we're gonna see is we look at Jesus's response.

The first thing that we must commit our lives to if we're going to have a chance to survive hard seasons and not allow them to derail us and take us down dark paths is we have to learn to look for what God is doing. Because it will be very easy in certain seasons to look around and be convinced that God is nowhere around.

But I promise you if you look hard enough and if you focus on what God is doing, you'll begin to see him all around. Look at Jesus' answer to John the Baptist when asked the question, are you actually the Messiah? Verse four, Jesus told him, go back to John and tell him what you have heard and seen.

He says, the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured. The deaf hear, the dead are raised to life and the gospel news or the good news is being preached to the poor. Jesus gives again this very Jesus answer. Are you the Messiah?

He tells John's disciples, go back and tell them what you've seen and what you've experienced. What is Jesus doing? He's reminding us that some of the greatest evidence that you and I have for Jesus being more than just a guru, for him being more than just a teacher is what you've experienced

with him. Do not allow the enemy to rob you of what God has already done in your life.

Do not allow him to rob you of the miracles that he's produced inside of you. The addictions that you've overcome, the marriages that have been restored, the life change that has happened inside of you, wayward children that have come home. And some of the most powerful evidence that we have for Jesus being actually God in human form and not just a good teacher, It is subjective data for sure,

but it's real because you've experienced it. You've walked through it. And I could line up on this stage for days, hundreds of people that would stand here and say, I used to be a drug addict and I've been set free by the power of Jesus.

I used to be a womanizer and I'm not who I used to be today. I used to be a liar. I used to be a cheat and I'm not who I used to be today. But the problem is that you and I, we have spiritual amnesia. We forget

how good God has been to us. And if you look at the Old Testament, what God would often do with the nation of Israel is after he would do something powerful, after he would deliver them supernaturally out of a situation, he would tell them, don't just move on. Stop here. Spend a day here. Build a monument here.

Remember my faithfulness. Why? Because there's days that are coming where you will be tempted to believe that I'm not with you. And I want you to come back to this moment. And I want you to remember the statue that you've erected to my faithfulness.

Here's what I think this practically means for you and I, is we, if we're right now in a season where like things are going pretty good and we're watching the faithfulness of God, you need to do your very best to record what it is that God's doing. To literally start writing down the miracles that you're seeing God do in your business and in your finances and in your home and with your kids, proclaim the goodness of him, write them down because though you will, you don't need it today.

I promise you there's a day that's coming where you're gonna wake up and you're gonna wonder if God's around you.

And we will forget what God has already done through us. Jesus tells these disciples some of the best evidence you have for me being who I claim to be. It's not me giving you an eloquent answer. It's what you've experienced.

Now subjective data isn't enough for somebody to cross the line of faith because somebody said that they experienced something. You can chalk that up to emotionalism.

It can be true for you but it might not get a skeptic to believe that Jesus actually is who he says that he is. And so Jesus tells John's disciples, tell him a second thing. And right here in Matthew 11, he quotes from Isaiah chapter 41.

He tells him, remember that the dead have come back to life. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, the lame can walk. He's reminding John of the 300 plus prophecies that the Old Testament proclaimed about the Messiah.

300 different signs that this person will be the one that will be the one that we've all waited for. And Jesus was the fulfillment of all of those things. See, he's drawing John back to what John's message was. Most of what John the Baptist preached was Old Testament prophecy

and he would connect it to the fulfillment that Jesus was of those prophecies. He says 300 times, God told us what he was gonna be. God told us where he would come from. God told us how he would operate. And that was John's message.

What Jesus is saying is that there's all kinds of objective data that points to Jesus being who he claims to be.

But sometimes when you're in really difficult seasons, you will overlook all of those things and you will begin to think that they look different than you thought. And I know one of the prophecies for sure that John the Baptist must have been thinking about sitting in prison

is in Isaiah chapter 61. It says specifically that the savior, the Messiah, that when he comes, he will set the prisoners free. He will set the captives free. He will open the doors of the prisons. And John the Baptist is sitting there going, how can this be true

if every day I pray for God and for Jesus to open these doors and they don't open. And my circumstances don't change. See the hard part is, is when we read scripture, when we hear something, we assume that Jesus means literally. See the reason that most of the Jews missed Jesus

is because they were convinced that he was going to come back as a conquering king and that he was going to raise up an army and he's gonna overthrow the Roman government and the whole sermon on the mount was Jesus telling them the kingdom of God looks a lot different than you think it's going to look but you still better believe that Jesus is who he claimed to be.

Jesus still is the fulfillment of all of these prophecies. He's reminding John, don't forget what it is that I've done. Don't forget that the evidence of my hand is all around your life if you'll look for it. But you will have to fight against the temptation

when things get difficult and your prison doesn't seem to be going away

to not just look at all the things that God is not doing. You and I will have to figure out a way to look at what God is doing. The second thing that we will have to do to overcome this frustration in these seasons where it's different than what we thought it was going to look like. The first thing is we're going to have to look for what God is doing. The second thing that we have to do, if you're taking notes, I want you to write this down. You and I have to learn to fall forward,

not away. Here's what I mean when I say fall forward. It's kind of a play on words. If you look at the next verse in verse six, Jesus says, and he added, Jesus added this, God blesses those who do not fall away because of me.

Notice what Jesus is saying is kind of a funky statement, but he says, God blesses those who don't fall away because of me. He's saying that your natural tendency will be to fall away

because of what you think God is not doing because of me, because of my inactivity or what you see is me not moving or me not answering your prayers. You will be tempted to fall away, but God blesses those who don't fall away and account of me. Here's what he's saying is he says, this is the irony of what the enemy will try to do with your faith when life is falling apart.

The enemy will try to come in and tell you, this is the season where you should not trust God. This is the season where you should just go and trust your own ways and take back control and do this yourself. It's the seasons that we need God the most, that we are the most tempted to fall away from him. And what Jesus is saying is we must develop something that again, I kind of see in pictures sometimes, but it's almost like a first responder,

right? I think the reason that we respect and we honor firefighters and policemen and military so much is because they've developed this thing that is not natural.

It is not your default when a building is on fire to run towards it. Our knee jerk reactions, we run away from the chaos. We run away from the conflict. We run away from the danger. Yet I think why we respect and honor first responders so much is because they've learned those are the moments not to fall away, not to run away, but to lean in, to run forward, to run into the danger. Why?

Because there's a greater purpose. There's a thing that's happening. There's a moment that needs to be capitalized on and what Jesus is saying is in these seasons where it feels like the walls are crumbling around us,

we need to look for what God is doing and we need to figure out how to lean into God and not away from him. And I think sometimes what we've done inside of westernized American churches is we've preached

a gospel that is not to be found in the scriptures. We've sold people a bill of goods saying that what Jesus has come to do is to make you wealthy and to make your life better and to make you a better version of yourself.

And for every verse that a prosperity gospel preacher will stand on a stage and butcher out of context, there's three or four other verses in there that says, trust me, when you sign up for the kingdom, when you sign up to be a follower of Jesus, the world is going to hate you.

But remember, it's not you that they hate, it's me that's in you that they hate. And in this life, you will know suffering. I think we forget that the symbol of our faith is a rugged cross.

And it was on the cross of suffering that salvation was ushered in for the world. It was on the cross of suffering that freedom was brought to the world. And somehow in our churches and in our theology, we've allowed this thing to settle in that says the presence of suffering must mean the absence of God.

And I'm telling you friends, it's not the case. It is possible in the middle of immense suffering to lean in and learn from God in ways that you could never learn when seasons where life is good. There's scriptures that say that you can actually praise God and thank him for suffering because it produces something

in us. It's why it is so important for us to look at the people who've come before us and the incredible hardships that certain people have had to overcome because we can draw strength from them. If it's possible for them to overcome these circumstances,

maybe it's possible for me to endure this failed marriage for this broken relationship, for these disappointed prayers that have gone unanswered.

This week, I was looking at the story of a woman named Corrie Ten Boom. If you've never heard her story, I would encourage you go read her book, go watch the movie. It's called The Hiding Place and it's an absolutely incredible story.

It tells a story of a young girl. It's a picture of her on the left as a young woman and obviously her at the like later stages in her life there on the right.

But Corrie Ten Boom grew up in The Netherlands during World War II. She grew up in a devout Christian family that read the Bible and talked about the God's providential plan for the Jewish people and for the nation of Israel and how these were God's chosen people.

And so when a dictator like Hitler came into The Netherlands and started to say that these Jews were not God's chosen people, but they were the problem. They were the ones that we needed to get rid of. Her family had no choice. It wasn't a debate. They just started bringing in their Jewish friends and neighbors and they started to hide them. And they said, we'll do everything we can to protect you. And eventually the Nazis caught on. And then eventually the Nazis raided her home, arrested her entire family.

Within a couple of weeks, her dad and her mom both passed away. She was stuck in a concentration camp with her sister and somehow they smuggled a Bible into this concentration camp and they would hold Bible studies in the middle of this concentration camp. And her and her sister would proclaim the hope that can be found in Christ to people that were in the middle of the most harrowing circumstances.

She tried to get them to see their situation differently. She even would talk about the bugs that were in the barracks. And she said, I know these bugs,

they're horrible. And we're trying to get these fleas and these ticks out and we're ripping our hair out because they're driving us crazy. But she said, if you can see them differently, you'll see them as a blessing. You And know what the blessing was? The blessing was is that these bugs,

as they increase, it stops the Nazi soldiers from coming in here and taking advantage of us. And so you might see it as something difficult, but I'm telling you it's a blessing if you look at it differently. I look at stuff like that and I go, how in the world in the midst of suffering like that

can somebody have a faith that doesn't get destroyed but it actually grows. It actually grows with intensity. And there's a nearness and a closeness and a proximity that she could feel to God. Her sister kind of famously before she was drug off and killed herself, she told her sister,

remember, no matter how dark and deep the pit gets, you will always be able to see the glowing

light of God if you're looking for it. And her story is, again, a really incredible one. There was a literal clerical error that happened that they made a mistake at the concentration camp that allowed her to be released and about a week after her random release, the entire concentration camp is annihilated.

And she gets out and she now has an opportunity to go, okay, God, I just walked through the most horrendous circumstances. Her entire family is killed.

She could go through the process of becoming really bitter, going, God, look at my circumstances, look at my life. Where are you? I don't get it. Yet somehow she doesn't do that. She flexes the muscle of forgiveness. She chooses a path that I'm sure was not easy,

but she spent the bulk of her adult life going on Billy Graham crusades, preaching the gospel of Jesus, Saying that there is hope to be found in him no matter what today looks like for you. And I look at stories like that and I go, if it was possible for her, maybe.

Maybe it's possible for us too. But it's gonna require us to look for what God is doing even when it seems like he's nowhere to be found. And it's going to force us to learn to lean in in hard seasons and not allow our natural human emotion to kick in and to run away and to go, God, these circumstances,

these mean that I just can't trust you. And the truth is, is if all Jesus is is a guru to you, sometimes those are the seasons that we walk away. But if Jesus is much more than a guru and he's really actually God, where else are we gonna go? What else are we going to do?

And now again, this whole story, if you think about it, John the Baptist is this guy who's really influential, known for preaching the message of Jesus. He's now just had a really crisis of faith. He's had a moment of incredible doubt.

And the disciples, when they came to ask Jesus the question, the rumor mill in the church was probably going. Like John the Baptist just doubted Jesus. Like, what does this mean? This is a huge deal. This is a chink in his armor. And so now Jesus is gonna send his disciples back to John with this message. And then when they leave,

Jesus is going to talk about John the Baptist. And I wanna show you what he says

about John when he leaves. It says in verse seven, as John disciples were leaving,

Jesus began talking about him to the crowds. So Jesus literally starts to talk behind his back and look at what he says. He says, what kind of man did you go into the wilderness to see? Was he a weak reed swayed by every breath of wind or were you expecting to see a man dressed in expensive clothes? No, people with expensive clothes live in palaces.

Were you looking for a prophet? Yes. And he is much more than a prophet. John is the man to whom the scriptures refer when they say, look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you and he will prepare a way for you. He says, I tell you the truth of all the people who have ever lived, none is greater than John the Baptist. Yet even the least person in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is. And from the time of John the Baptist began preaching until now the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing

and violent people are attacking it. For before John came, all the prophets and the law of Moses looked forward to this present time and if you are willing to accept what I say, he is Elijah. The one that the prophet said would come. Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.

What does Jesus do with John the Baptist's doubt? He in front of all of the critics, in front of all of the church people, he reminds them John did not just have a moment of weakness. John just had a human moment.

He doesn't berate him. He doesn't belittle him. He builds him up. He says there's nobody that's greater than this guy. And the reason that this story is so encouraging to me is it tells me what God does with my doubts. It's what Jesus will do if you can run to him with your hard seasons. If you can run to him in the middle of your figuring it out in the middle of your mess and not sure, you can bring those things to him because he's not mad at you. He's not expecting you to be perfect. He says, did you think John was just a weed, a reed blowing in the wind? He's not weak.

He had a human moment and you and I are going to have human moments. It's what we do with those human moments that will determine the direction and the quality of our faith moving forward. Here's the last thing that I want us to do if we're going to be people who have a shot

at not allowing hard seasons to destroy us but we can actually be people who overcome this expectation frustration. The end of this story, Jesus is going to remind us something that we all inherently know, but sometimes we forget that God's ways, they're not our ways. You and I will never fully understand God.

We will have to get to a point where we just understand that I'm going to have to be okay not fully getting the whole picture.

There are going to be seasons of my life where I will not understand why God is letting certain things fall apart. But I know that there is a day that's coming where all of this will make sense but right now I don't get it but I trust that God is doing something that maybe I can't see. Look at the end of the story. The last couple verses.

It says, to what can I compare this generation? Jesus is saying, it's like children playing a game in the public square.

They complained to their friends, we played wedding songs and you didn't dance. So we played funeral songs and you didn't mourn. He says, for John didn't spend his time eating and drinking and you say he's possessed by a demon. He says, son of man on the other hand, feasts and drink and you say he's a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners, but wisdom is shown to be right by its results. Jesus is saying that you and I are like little children.

We expect when we play a wedding song that Jesus is supposed to celebrate and when it doesn't go the way we think it's supposed to go, we change the song and hope that Jesus responds the way we're expecting him to respond. And Jesus reminds us of a simple truth

that God is God even when we don't understand it. His ways are higher. His plan is bigger. His story is much more complex than we could ever understand. What it requires us to do is not to know it all but to trust the one that is holding it all together. Isaiah chapter 55 reminds us very plainly that my thoughts,

they're nothing like your thoughts says the Lord. For my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.

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. See, this is the freeing part of all of this is that we can trust that God is in control

and that he is a good father. And the reason again, that theology is so important is because I have a bedrock belief. I have a foundation that is firm based on what the scriptures teach about the nature and the character of God is that he is a good father. And my theology, it will not move based on my circumstances.

And when my circumstances would tempt me to bend the knee and to say anything other than God is good, go, no, no, I go back to the fact that he's good. Even when everything around me feels like it's falling apart, I trust that God, you are good. Your thoughts are greater than my thoughts. You're bigger than what I can see. You're outside of all of this. You're holding it all together. And it frees me to just trust

even when I don't see it. And what I'm not trying to do this morning is just to throw pleasantries and easy answers at what I know can be really complex in really difficult situations.

But I promise you, no matter what it is you're walking through, no matter what it is you're getting ready to walk through, there is a God that will meet you there in the middle of that mess if you don't run away from him and instead you run towards him. For me and my family,

at the end of 2019, we walked through what I would have said is probably hardest season of our life.

Our oldest daughter McKenna at 10 years old, she came home from school and she just was like a normal sick kid, right? She had a fever. The nurse called us and Hey, you gotta come get her. You gotta pick her up from school. And so we brought her home and for twenty four hours, she was just a normal sick kid. She sat on the couch and she watched cartoons and ate popcorn and didn't do much of anything. Well, then in the middle of the night, she got up to go to the bathroom and she basically just collapsed.

And we knew that something was really wrong with her, right? She couldn't stand, she couldn't speak her eyes, she just wasn't there. And so we just knew and we rushed her over to a little emergency room that's right there on Power and Germane right there by that EOS over there. And we sat there with the doctor as he tried to figure out what was going on. At first, he thought it was just a really bad case of the flu. And so he tried to give her Tylenol and Motrin, but no matter what he did, he couldn't get her fever to come down. She had ice bags all over her and eventually we knew that something was much more serious going on. And so she needed a spinal tap, but he couldn't do it in the office. And so he called an ambulance and she was transported to children's hospital and they would sedate her there and they would do a spinal tap. And we would meet with a team of doctors. One of them was an infectious disease doctor.

And he told us, he said, Hey, based on her symptoms, I think she has what's called meningitis. And he said, We're hoping that it's viral meningitis, but worst case scenario, it's bacterial meningitis.

And after they allowed her spinal fluid to be tested, he came back about a half hour later and he said, hey, it is worst case scenario. She has bacterial meningitis,

which basically is a really intense brain infection that causes immense swelling and the coma like state that she was in was because her brain was shutting down because it was so swollen. And he told us that she's probably gonna be in a coma like state for probably the next five or six days.

And our hope and our prayer is that we've caught this soon enough that we can stop the swelling of her brain to where

she actually survives this. And he said, but I just have to let you know that even if she does survive it, there's severe chances that she's not gonna be the same when she wakes up. And then he told us, just whatever you do, don't Google bacterial meningitis when I leave. So it was like, of course, the first thing we did

was Google bacterial meningitis. And man, it was a really scary season. I got a couple of pictures that I'll show you from her hospital stay. And it was one of the most difficult seasons of my life because there's nothing you can do.

And they had to put her arms in these little braces because she would wake up so confused. She would just rip everything out. She'd rip out her feeding tube. She would rip out her breathing stuff, all the brain scans, she would just rip all of it out. So we'd have to hold her down while she was sleeping.

And all we could do was pray and pray that the medicine would work, that God would supernaturally intervene, but we were trying to prepare ourselves to go, okay, number one, she might not wake up. And if she does wake up, she could be severely different. She could be incredibly mentally challenged. There's

she won't be able to see, she won't be able to hear. She'll never be able to do math again, but she's never really been good at anyways. But like there was all of these consequences that we were trying to prepare ourselves for. And it was really the first time that I found myself at what I would call almost a crisis of faith,

where everything that I knew was coming against everything that I was experiencing.

And I remember there was this song from Elevation Worship that was called, I'm gonna see a victory. And my wife and I would walk around that hospital room and we were with every ounce of faith that we have declaring that God we're gonna see a victory. But the truth is, is in my heart, there was these moments where I'm like, God, I'm hoping I see a victory. God, I have to see a victory. I don't know if I'm gonna see one, but God, I'm believing that you're good. And I had to get myself to a point of going, even if this doesn't look like I'm hoping it looks like, God, I'm trusting you And God, how do I ever get back on a stage and talk about the goodness of who you are? And yet I can't even change the circumstances for my daughter. And it forced me to kind of have this moment and it sounds a little dramatic, but in John chapter six, there's a story where Jesus, the disciples start to realize the incredibly high bar that Jesus has set. And a lot of them start to walk away. And Jesus looks at his closest disciples and says, Are you guys gonna walk away too?

And Peter looks at him and goes, Where else are we gonna go? Like you have all of it. You have the answers to life. And so I'm sitting there watching my daughter like kind of wither away and then go, God, where am I gonna go? I can't leave. I know that you're God. I know you're not just some teacher, but right now,

God, I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know what to do with this, but had enough. He gave me enough faith to stay connected to him, to lean into him. And again, I don't even like to share the story because it doesn't always work this way. But in this circumstance and in this situation, God supernaturally,

saved my daughter. And today you wouldn't even know that she was ever sick. She has not I mean, she's still not good at math, but other than that, she has absolutely no symptoms from this thing that was almost like it almost took her life. But what I also know is that that's not always the case.

John the Baptist never gets out of prison. There is no bow on the end of his story. He ultimately will be beheaded for his faith. He will die in this prison. I'm getting on a plane in a few weeks to help a friend of mine in California bury his 16 year old son that took his own life.

I go, how do you sit with a parent and try to throw pleasantries at that? See, here's where faith has to become something more than just these cheap words. If Jesus is just a guru, then what's the point of all of this? But if he's actually God,

if he really actually is the one that holds all of this in perfect balance, he is the one that is the pathway to get to heaven, Then when life starts falling apart, where else are we gonna go? And here's what I can encourage you is in those seasons where you feel like God is not doing what you think he's supposed to do,

I promise you, you will get out of those seasons and you will realize that God was doing something in you that you might not seen.

You might not have thought you needed but he was doing something that you desperately needed inside of your soul. God will never waste your hard seasons if you trust him but don't give up. Don't stop in the middle. Don't let your prison define your reality

because there is a God who is outside of it. If you can lean into him, if you can look for him even when it seems incredibly dark,

I promise you, you will learn that God's ways are not our ways and that is incredibly freeing because it allows us to just trust him and not have to know it all and put it all together. Amen. Let me pray for you, father. God, I thank you.

God, I thank you that you are still a miracle working God. That you are Jehovah Jireh, the one that is the great healer, the great physician

and so Father, I pray right now for every single person that's in this room that is desperate for a miracle. That God I pray that you would deliver that miracle to them and father I pray that I feel like there's people in this room right now who are desperate to see you move and father I pray that they would watch your hand move in supernatural ways but God, in the middle of the waiting, in the middle of the tension,

God, would you develop in us a faith that will be greater than treasures, that will be greater than rubies outside of this. That God, use this season to perfect us. Use this season to grow something in us and father for those of us who are here this morning where it seems like life is pretty good. God, praise you for that and we ask for you to teach us how to rest in you and to learn and flex the muscle of trust in the middle of good seasons so that we can get through the tough ones when they come.

God, in all of these things, we prayed in the mighty name of Jesus. All God's people said, amen and amen. Thanks for joining us online this weekend. Let us know if we can help you in any way. Make sure to follow us on social media and connect with us on the We Are Rock Point app for prayer and everything happening here at Rock Point.