Tag: Sermons

Waiting Is the Hardest Part

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God has an answer to all of the injustice and unrighteousness around us. It’s a pretty good answer too. The trouble is that the timing of His answer isn’t what we want it to be. This is what Habakkuk experienced in his conversation with the Lord about the brokenness of his culture. It’s what we often experience in our similar conversations and complaints. As we continue in our new teaching series, Asking God Hard Questions, we are going to see some encouragement God gave to Habakkuk and talk about why it is still important encouragement for us to receive today.

Waiting Is the Hardest Part

I grew up in the age of Nintendo. The Atari, of course, changed the world by ushering us into the era of the universally accessible video game, but the Nintendo took things a giant leap forward. And the most famous and most enduring icon of the age of Nintendo (that can still earn over a billion dollars at the box office, almost 40 years after its release), is Mario. Do you remember playing the original Super Mario Brothers game on the original Nintendo? Man, I do. I played every level of that game more times than I can even begin to count. I mastered the infinite lives hack in world 3 level 1. I made speed runs where I saw just how fast I could get through the whole game. I think the fastest I ever did it was 15-20 minutes. That’s not completely terrible, but it’s also not very good when compared with the world record. And, yes, there’s actually an official Guinness World Records category for fastest original Super Mario Brothers completion time. The current world record is 4:54:63. Well, the Guinness Record is a fraction of a second slower than that, but the guy who set it later unofficially beat his own record. For comparison, the fastest time possible to finish the game period (and which has heretofore only been achieved by a computer) is 4:54:26. In other words, a human is on the cusp of achieving what we previously only know to be computer-enabled perfection. 

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Ask Away

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This week we are starting a brand-new teaching series. One of the things I try to do as a preacher is to give my congregation a balance of more topically-driven series that explore one idea throughout the Scriptures, and more textually-driven series that see us working through a single passage of Scripture together. This is going to be one of the latter journeys. For the next four weeks we are going to be working through the record of the Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk. His little book is different from all of the other prophet and speaks to some of the tensions that have been present in every age, including this one. Let’s start this journey together as we see the prophet ask God some hard questions.

Ask Away

Have you ever asked God a hard question? Maybe a better way to ask that is like this: When was the last time you asked God a hard question? There were a lot of people asking God hard questions in 1755 and the next decade or so. Just three days ago in 1755 there was an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal. A big earthquake. A deadly earthquake. The total loss of life was somewhere between 40,000-50,000 people. The thing so many people struggled so much with in the wake of that particular earthquake was that Portugal was a really Catholic country. Portuguese were on the whole faithful Catholics. It seems like that should have earned them some points with God. At the very least a whole lot of folks were thinking they should have been spared from the worst of it. But, no, the epicenter was there, and it was bad. 

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Doubling Down

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We have talked about sacrifice. We have talked about surrender. We have talked about commitment. When we have pursued these three essential elements of seeing God’s kingdom advancing work increase and expand in our midst, there’s just one thing left to do: Celebrate. But how we celebrate matters. As we wrap up this teaching series and enter together into the glorious future to which God is leading us, let’s talk about the best way to celebrate kingdom successes. Spoiler alert: It is an entirely more active process than we might imagine.

Doubling Down

So, my baseball team is not playing in the World Series right now. We could have. Our pitching was certainly good enough. Our manager definitely deserves great credit for his part of the effort. The Royals are one of three teams in baseball history to have gone from losing more than 100 games in a season to making the Playoffs the next. That kind of a turnaround doesn’t happen on talent alone. And for most of the season, we hit the ball pretty well. We were way ahead in the runs scored versus runs allowed statistic. Almost 100 ahead in fact. That was a pretty dramatic change from last year all by itself. In fact, we scored more total runs this season than Cleveland who won the division. If we had won as many games as our runs scored versus runs allowed stat suggested, we would have won the division instead of them. But from the All-Star break forward, we gradually hit the ball less and less, and as a result, we scored fewer and fewer runs. We didn’t do the things that had propelled us to first place in the division more than once earlier in the season. As a result, our success waned. And our Cinderella run ended.

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Sticking with It

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Pursuing a path of sacrificial living and surrendering to God’s call on our lives are very good and important things to do if we are going to have any chance to experience the growth and expansion of His work in our midst. But as good and important as they are, they cannot be a one-off affair. They have to be something we do and then keep doing over and over again over the long haul of life. This doing and then doing again is the substance of a third thing that is necessary if we want to see God’s work in and through our lives become more than we ever imagined that it could. Let’s talk about this third thing as we continue our series, Together.

Sticking with It

I grew up listening to rock and roll music from the 60s and 70s. That was what my own dad had grown up with and he was either listening to it or singing it or whistling it almost all the time. I took to it about as naturally as walking. It doesn’t hurt that it’s mostly all really good music. One of the songs out of that era I remember listening to more than most is called Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin. I suspect many of you have heard the song. It’s about a man who is so busy with work all the years that his son is born and growing up that he misses all the key moments and milestones in the boy’s life. Then, when things have finally slowed down for him and he’s ready to start pursuing a relationship with his son, the son is so busy doing his own life that he doesn’t have time for his dad anymore. It’s really a depressing song to be one of Chapin’s most popular. 

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Letting Go

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If we want to grow God’s kingdom, walking a path of sacrificial living is going to be the key. But sacrifice by itself isn’t enough. There’s another step to take. In today’s continuation of our teaching series, Together, we are talking about what comes next once we have decided to walk this path. Helping us understand it will be two different stories, one of which ranks among the hardest in the Old Testament. Let’s dive in and see why letting go gives God a lot of room to accomplish His good work.

Letting Go

Some of the most incredible military victories over the course of human history have been won because one side simply refused to surrender and fought with courage and valor until their opposition was finally overcome. Even battles that have been lost have been turned into rallying cries for future soldiers to inspire them on to incredible feats of bravery. Consider the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” When the citizens of Texas were fighting Mexico for independence which ultimately resulted in their becoming a part of these United States, they were inspired by that cry to keep on pressing to defeat their foes until their threat was eliminated once and for all. But the fact is that Texas lost the battle for the Alamo that created that cry. It was their very refusal to surrender, though, that transformed them from being merely the losing side to immortalized heroes in the minds of their fellow soldiers and citizens. 

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