Faith Has Its Seasons VII, The Season Of Building Community

I'm preaching that week on a message about our country just prior to the election. I've been preparing this message probably off and on for four months, and I'm entitling it What's Ahead for America. And I want you to be praying about that, because that's going to be an important time for us to come into agreement about some things about our nation. So two weeks from today, What's Ahead for America. Today I want to talk about something much more personal as it relates to where each of us live. I don't know about you, but did you all listen to the news this week? Did you hear about the guy in Australia who introduced the cat legislation? Cat legislation. No. All right. Someone put your hand up. If I'm not lying, you heard it. Put your hand up. Okay. See that? Thank you. Yeah, there's a guy, a legislator in Australia who thinks cats have caused a national problem, so he's proposing legislation to eliminate them. No, he's just from Australia, which, hey, that... And he's proposing it by killing all wildcats, just, you know, out in the wild shooting them, and neutering all the rest, and they'll die off in 25 years. He's made the most wanted list in my latest Cats magazine. And I don't think the legislation will pass. It just sounded too cruel to me, but, I mean, it just shows how really upset some people are with cats. I'm not that upset with them. Some people misread it, thought I was endorsing that legislation. I don't. Not me. I get Cats magazine, remember? Someone was visiting our house today. They said, you really get that? Yeah, I do. My name. Not Carol. Not Amy. Today, it passed. When I get back, I'll tell you that there's a great story in here about how cats cope with stress, holiday stress. One of my favorite articles is about how they survive a fall from multi-story high-rise buildings. Truth? I'll read it right out of the magazine. All right. We better read the word here. I have people afterwards expressing their displeasure, just letting you know what's out there. Here we go. Matthew 11. Read it with me, please. It's at the top of your page. This is the scripture for today. Turn to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Over the last couple of weeks, with the presidential debates, interviews, and all the rest, and then the highly publicized local trial of Johnny Gammage, the endless sort of drone of the radio and TV talk shows, I began to hear sort of an underlying message emerge over and over and over again. The debates, which were supposed to be dealing with national issues and issues of corporate concern and challenge, really boiled down to this question over and over and over again. A mother of two would stand and say, I'm so-and-so from such-and-such a place in California. I'm a single mom, and I'm living in a declining neighborhood, and my tax burden is too high for me. What about me? What are you going to do for me if you're elected, Mr. Dole? Or then I'd hear of the senior citizen who would stand up and say, hey, I'm a senior citizen of fixed income, and I've got several chronic health problems. What are you going to do for me if you get elected? And then I'd hear a small businessman step up and say, I'm a small businessman, and I've got all this bureaucracy and red tape and tax upon tax. What are you going to do for me? And here more locally, I heard over and over again African American males calling in and saying, I can't trust authority in this city. I don't know what's going on here, but what's somebody going to do for me? And you know, none of these people appeared to me to be selfish. It wasn't out of selfishness. It was really more out of desperation. Isn't someone out there aware of what I'm going through? That's what I heard these people saying. Don't they see what's going on? Don't they feel my burden, my struggle? Don't they know my fears and my concerns? Friends, there's a huge apprehension in our culture toward anything institutional, the government, educational system, business, and even the local church. How many of you have wondered if even your local church cares about you when you go through something? Recently, one of our beloved members had a bout where he ended up in the hospital kind of unexpectedly, and a couple people heard about it and got over to see him, but some of the people he was sort of counting on didn't make it, and it made him ask the question. I understood this. You know, what about me? I mean, does anybody really care about me? How many of you have asked that question in the last couple of weeks or months? Don't put your hand up, but I know it happens, and you know what else? Some of us have asked the question of God, what about me, God? I mean, I'm a pretty faithful member or giver or witness to Christ or whatever you might be, and it doesn't seem that you care much about what's going on in my life. Don't you see what's happening with my kids or my marriage or my business or my health? What about me, God? And I'm sure that there's not a few of us who've wrestled with that just recently. Let me just share with you a few indicators that would say you're struggling with this just a bit. You're asking the question. Here's five things that just kind of rolled off my mind when I thought about it. If you're under mounting stress in your life, not just occasional stress, but the kind, you know, where your neck is just constantly aching, where there's this daily experience of some kind of manifestation of stress, some physical or emotional thing going on, friends, it's good likelihood that you're carrying doubt about whether or not anybody cares because you're deciding to carry it. The absence of joy, it's impossible to reflect that peaceful kind of confidence when you wonder if the world is out of control. Or uncertainty and a sense of just being constantly unclear, what am I supposed to do? I'm not sure if God wants this or I should do that, and you get this double-mindedness thing going. That's another indication that you're wondering about care and love in your life. Number four, the lack of concern for others. When things aren't falling into place, when you don't feel cared for, when you don't feel concerned for your life, it's almost impossible to express concern. Hey, I don't have time to worry about you. I'm too busy worrying about me. And it all kind of mounts up and ends in just this weight of fear that falls on many people. And as I look around in my community, the people I see, this profile, these five things that we've just listed, this describes some people out there that I know. But you know what? It also describes some of you seated here today, and I wonder if you'd just take a moment right now, if any of these are true for you, would you just put an X beside it right now? If you're really honest, in a moment of transparency, put an X beside it. And let's just see what God says about whether or not He cares for you. Let's measure, if we will, the magnitude of God's personal love. That's Roman numeral one. And I've never tried to quantify love before. This was kind of an interesting exercise. But let's just see if we can put some quantities on it, all right? What does God say about His love for us? Well, number one, the Bible says that God numbers the hairs of your head. Luke 12, 7. Now, that also tells me something about God's mathematics, tells me God is very good at subtraction. And you're only laughing if it's not true of you. I mean, hair is an incredible fetish in this culture. I don't know what the number, I don't know how many billions of dollars are spent in the hair care industry, but it's huge. I mean, there's money going out the door all the time for this look and that look and this product and that product and all these promises on hair, hair this, hair that. We're just, I mean, we are fanatical about getting it as good as we can get it. And if we don't have any of it, then we always can go the replacement route if we need to. And I have from time to time been encouraged to go that way by loving friends here in the church. But you know, it kind of confuses me some. People will say, well, you're prideful in vain if you do get hair replacement, and others say you're prideful in vain if you don't, because you really need it, and that kind of thing. So pride and vanity all get it, you know, kind of entangled in this, and then people start sending you cards. You ever have people that love you enough just to send you cards and they forget to sign them? Little, interesting little cards. One of my favorite cards about this subject, it was sort of a cartoon drawing of this guy that he's sort of standing on this mountaintop, and it's a cartoon now rendering it, and you can see that he's looking sort of like a man of destiny looking forward, you know, and you can see that there's like a wind blowing. And here's what it says on the front of the card, it says, happy birthday to one of my most dignified friends. Whenever I think of you, I imagine you standing on a high hill looking nobly into the distance, and then you open it up and it says, it's the wind blowing your hair, and you too proud to run after it, and nobody signs. What's God saying about hair? I mean, what's the deal here? Does God really know how many hair or hairs are on your head? Huh? Could he just say, well, right there, 47,615, oh, there's one that's 59,850, oh, there's a poor soul with 21,615, and there's one back there with, you know, four or six hundred maybe. Huh? What? What's God saying? This is really an interesting thing, isn't it? I mean, I don't believe it's sort of, nothing in the Bible is incidental, God's not teasing us with some kind of little cutesy joke here. What he wants us to know in context is that he loves and cares about you so much that every single detail of your life is noted by him. Every single detail, even the fact that this morning, a few of your precious hair went down the drain perhaps, he knew it. And it's not that God is caught up in like keeping track, okay? In fact, in the Bible, many times, there's references made to without number. But God nonetheless wants you to know that when it comes down to it, he knows the detail about your life. Nothing escapes him, and he's watching over you. And the other thing it teaches me is this, that you can't count somebody's hair unless you get real close to them and put your hands upon them. And God wants you to know that he's that close to you. He's so close that you could reach out and just sense his touch right now. He cares about you. So trust him, friend. Trust him. He knows the details that you think nobody cares about. Number two, the Bible says that God keeps your hair, your tears that is, in a bottle. Might keep your hair there too. God keeps your tears in a bottle. Look at this scripture on the backside of your page. This is from the New King James Version. You number my wanderings and put my tears into your bottle. Are they not in your book? When I cry out to you, then my enemies will turn back. This I know, because God is for me. Say that with me. God is for me. Turn to someone and say, God is for you. Tell them that. God is for you. You'd be amazed how many people come to me and say, I think God is against me. The Bible says God is for you. He's on your side, if you will. He loves you and cares about you. And you see, tears, dear ones, are not just the physiological expression here that God's talking about. He doesn't have an angel in the unseen realm that's coming and, you know, as soon as you start crying, the angel just like gathers up your tears and puts them in this little bottle and puts them up in heaven somewhere. In fact, when you cry, who picks up your tears? This isn't profound. Think about it. You do. I mean, don't you usually pull out your Kleenex or handkerchief or your pillow or someone else? You're the one that blots out and gathers up your tears. So the Bible is saying something more than just the physiological thing here. It's saying that God is noting what it is you're feeling. He's noting what it is that's causing those tears of emotion, tears of loneliness and rejection, tears of abuse, tears that some of you last night wept because you went to bed alone, tears that some of you have wept recently because someone that you cared about rejected you, tears for the violence that you keep enduring in your home situation that nobody knows about, tears for the failure that keeps stalking you in your career and you're so unsure about. The Bible says in God's economy, he records those tears, that anguish, and that he really cares about it. Back in the 70s when I was just coming into my understanding of God's personal love during the time of the Jesus movement, there was a song that went, come to the waters and stand by my side. I know you are thirsty. You won't be denied. Remember that song? I felt every teardrop that in darkness you cried and I strove to remind you that for those tears I died. Love song, 1972 or three. I felt your tears, Jesus said. I came that you wouldn't have to bear those alone. I love you. I care about your tears, Jesus says. And if you're shedding tears today because of sin and failure in your life, Jesus says you don't have to keep shedding those tears. I've died for those things. You're not under condemnation. You can just give it over to me. I care about you. And there's probably a few of you here today who've shed some tears for someone else, someone you love, someone you've been interceding for, wondering why doesn't God hear my prayer? Why don't they respond? What's keeping them from sensing how much I love them where God loves them? And the Lord says, I've noticed your tears, you're not forgotten. There may be a long delay, but just count on one thing, I've put your tears in a bottle. It's interesting to me, by the way, that there's no specific reference in scripture to Jesus laughing. We know he has a sense of humor from some of the things he's said, but there's no scripture that said Jesus laughed. But you know what? There is a scripture that says Jesus wept, John 11, 35. Our tears matter to God. Number three, the third way that we know God really loves us is that he says that his thoughts of us are beyond your numbering. Look at Psalm 139, verse 18, where I to count them, the Lord says, they would outnumber the grains of sand. Now in context, this is talking about the fact that David keeps waking up and wondering about different things. He said, when I wake from my bed, you're already there thinking about me. I don't know about you, but sometimes I can't go to sleep because I've got things in my mind. You ever have that happen to you? I say, I've got a hundred things in my mind, a hundred things. Last night, not knowing about my trip today and the message, and we had a long day yesterday, and so I just, Carol sent me to bed to get out of her way at 11 o'clock. She was packing and she said, I'll just get there when I get there. Well, at 1230, I was still up. My mind, all thinking about all these things and five o'clock this morning, I wake up, minds are moving, a hundred things in my mind. How many thoughts does this say that God has about us? 500? 50,000? He says, God's thoughts about you, and understand, he doesn't mean you like the human race. He means you, his thoughts about you outnumber the grains of sand. Now let's just do a little math here. How much sand is in one little handful, proximal? How many grains? Let's take a guess. Somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 grains of sand in a handful. Imagine how much sand. Just imagine. I mean, put a statistic on how much sand in Virginia Beach. And then just go on up and down the coast of the East Coast of the U.S., and then go all around in the Gulf, and all around in the United States, and then go down South America. How many, how many zeros of grains of sand are there? I don't know. But friends, the Bible is saying God's thoughts about you are beyond numbering. That's what he's saying. God thinks about you more than you can imagine. You're so important to him. You are so precious to him that you can't count the thoughts that God has about you. I find that fascinating, don't you? That makes me feel like I'm worth something today. I matter to God that much. I don't understand it, but I sure appreciate it. And by the way, just a little statistic for those of you who have skeptical friends and say, well, I don't know if God created the world. A fascinating thing. I did a little astronomy studying when I was in college. Astronomers will tell you today that according to all their calculations and their best theories, that there are more stars in the universe as we know it today than there are grains of sand in all the shores of this world. What a God, what a God we love and serve. And I think about how much he loves me. Then he says, just trust me, just trust me because I can take care of it. I'm thinking about your problem. For every thought you had last night, Jay, I thought about it 500 times. I'm working it out for you if you just trust me. That's what he's saying. I told this story a couple of years ago, but in 1991 and 92, we just had some tough times of transition near North Way. I went on my study break, just really kind of expended, kind of spent, kind of discouraged. I was shedding some tears about a few things, one about the church. I remember one very warm July night. I went up in the mountains and I was just kind of on my own. I was processing a lot of things and thinking, God, where are you in this whole deal? I remember this warm night. It was about 80 degrees at 11 o'clock at night, very, very balmy, and it was a moonless night. I went up in this open field, just kind of laid back and put my hands behind my head and looked up and just wasn't prepared for what I saw. Because I looked up in the mountains away from the city lights, there's a whole lot that you see that you wouldn't see when you're here near the city. I can tell you again from my astronomy, there's about 6,000 stars visible to the naked eye on a moonless night, on a clear night. 6,000. I looked up and I said, God, this is just phenomenal. I remember one handful of sand. And the Lord said, Jay, look at this universe that I've created. And you know, Jay, remember that the sun's going to come up tomorrow, just when I told him. And all these planets and stars that you see, they're all orbiting on cue, everything. He said, you know, Jay, how am I doing in just keeping my universe in order? Could you do a better job with this? I said, you know, Lord, I don't think I could do a better job than you're doing. He said, well, if I can handle this universe and if I can keep all these things going the way they're going, do you think I can take care of what's bothering you down at the church there? I said, I don't know, Lord. God melted my heart right then. And I'll never forget that. And I've had some ups and downs since then, but I'll tell you this, I'll never see the church the same way. Because the God who runs the universe can certainly take care of what concerns me and he can take care of what concerns you, too. Trust him. Number four, the Bible says this, God inscribes your name on his hands. Isaiah 49, 15, the prophet says this, and Isaiah is so powerful in his prophetic word. Let's read it together. Get that up, please, Dave. He's talking, he uses two analogies here. The first one is about a mother. He says, can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born? Though she may forget, in other words, the Lord says, can a mother forget her nursing baby? Well, of course not. But even if she could, then the Lord says, though she may, I will not forget you. Dear one, hear this. When you think no one cares, when you think you're forgotten, the Lord says, I will not forget you. See, the Lord says, I've engraved you on the palms of my hand. And here Isaiah is becoming messianic in his prophetic insight. And he's saying, he's foreshadowing Jesus opening up his palms and receiving the nails, saying, I have received in my palms what was necessary for your redemption, for your needs. I've received you. But as I studied that word, an interesting thing happened. The word engraved, how many of you remember when you were in elementary school, not junior high, but elementary school, and you had a crush on somebody, and you got to thinking about them in class, and every once in a while you just take your little pen and write their name? How many girls did that? Thank you. Very honest. In the first service, not one woman put up their hand. I didn't believe it, because I've seen some of you here, and I even know some of you here that put the name right on there. And I did a little study. And you know what that word means? It literally means, I have written you on my palms, so much so that the living Bible takes a little bit of a risk here and says that God, not only engraves, but he has tattooed your name upon his palm. So just imagine, in those moments when you feel alone, God hasn't forgotten you. In fact, right on his palm, he's written Matt. Right on his palm, he's written Deborah. Right on his palm, he's written Angel. Shell. You see? God knows and he cares, and if you think he needs reminding, you say, Lord, look at your hand again. Is my name still there? Because I love you. He's engraved your name in his palms. That's how much he loves you. So trust him. Put your full weight of trust upon him. Now, what do we do with this? Well, just two quick applications. Number one, this incredible love deserves responses. Let's give you two responses to this love. Number one, Peter says, cast all your cares upon him, for he cares for you. Or in other words, put the full weight of your trust upon him. Friends, I've said this before, but you know that the Christian life all comes down to, who will you trust? Will you trust you, or will you trust the Lord? Will you trust the things around you? Will you trust the institutions that let you down? Or will you put the full weight of your trust in the God who loves you? And I know I can say this, and you can hear me say it, but the question is, when you walk out of the doors today, will you put your trust there? That's the value he places on you. If you consciously and daily say, Lord, I know you love me. I know you care for me. I know that you've numbered the hairs in my head. I know you've taken my tears in a bottle. I know, God, you think about me more than the grains of sand on the seashore, and I know that my name's on your palms, so just take care of my day. I trust you today. There's one other response that's really gripped me this week. We know that God may value us. That may have gotten through. You may be sitting there saying, well, teach me something I don't know today, Pastor. But can I say this one other thing? How many people do you know that don't know this? I'm amazed when I have conversations with good people here in the North Hills, when I go to the football game and get into a little conversation with a person that maybe even goes to a church someplace, how much their view of God has been sort of formed by the culture in which we live. And they don't see God in a personal, loving, intimate way. They see God as, well, the God that's out there watching us at a distance, the God who maybe is ready to drop the hammer on them somehow for everything they do wrong, the God of judgment. And surely God is a God who will one day execute judgment. We're going to talk about that in December when I talk about the second coming. But right now, God is saying to everyone who will hear, my love for you is greater than anything you can comprehend. My care for you never fails. Who's going to tell the people? Who's going to go to the people and tell them? That's how God loves them. And friends, there are many, many thousands of people out there that need to hear that God really loves them. A couple of weeks ago, our furnace wasn't working, getting into this colder nights and so on. So we called the furnace guy that we've been using for years. And he was really delinquent in getting back to us. And I got a little frustrated, but he came finally. And there was a couple parts missing. And he said, well, I'll order the parts and I'll come back tomorrow. Well, he didn't come back the next day. So we called again. He didn't come back. Three days later, finally, he showed up and something else didn't work right. And I'm getting real frustrated. Carol said, man, this just isn't like him. Something's wrong. And so she went to him and said, gee, is there something going on in your life? He said, well, you know, my wife was landed in the hospital for the third time this summer. And it's kind of serious. And I'm having to take care of the kids and keep the business going and do this and do that. And, of course, I felt real embarrassed about my attitude. And I really appreciated my wife at that moment because God just did something in her heart. And so he went again to get something else. And a couple days later, he didn't come again. But when he did show up, Carol said, you know, we just wanted you to have this meal. And we want you to know that we're going to be praying for you and that if there's anything we can do to help you and your family in this time, we want to do it. And he didn't fall on his knees and say, well, I want to accept Jesus in my life. But you know what? He knows that somebody cares about what he's going through. And we all need to do that. And I want to just challenge you in this church. You have no idea who God's going to send across your path this week, maybe today, that needs to know a God of this kind of love. And you will be the one that will be so enriched. I want you to, as we close, hear from one man today who took a little bit of a risk, he and his wife, and they stepped out and they've discovered how God can use them in a powerful way. And I want you to meet my cell group leader, Dave Timberley. Let's give him a warm welcome as he comes. Dave, you may be thinking, did he say that this man leads my group? And the answer is yes. For about four months, Dave was in my group. And then we started a new group. And Dave's the leader, and I'm his intern. And it's going great. So tell us what's going on. Sure. Let me just step back a second. Pastor Jay did challenge my wife and I to be involved in his group. And it was a challenge because it was going to meet every week. And we thought about the time commitment with everything else going on in our lives. Could we really do that? And he said, well, it'll be 13 weeks. And we said, OK, we can probably bite off that and then go from there. And to be quite honest with you, there was many Friday evenings as we were driving there to go to the group. Our attitudes really weren't very spiritual. We really weren't very motivated at the time. And it was a long day, long week. And the last thing in the world we wanted to do was to go to a group and sing songs and talk and that kind of stuff. And then even sitting there in the beginning part, you're praying. And your heart's not really into it. But inevitably, going through it, the Lord would minister to us. And on the way back from the group, we're glad that we're there. And as we shared amongst ourselves, I think all of us probably had that common experience. The other thing that happened personally was we were having some pretty heavy family problems. And during the time we shared that, and it just meant so much for the group to just stop everything and just put their arms around us and just pray for us and really express love to us. And that really meant a lot to us. And then moving forward, Pastor Jay further challenged us to start our own group. And this particular group was going to be somewhat unique. It was going to be primarily African American with the whole vision of trying to make North Way a little bit more diverse and then have a gateway so that people joining this particular group would be more connected to the overall group. And again, we thought about the time commitment. But then Pastor Jay, he's being modest here. He actually agreed to be part of our group to take away some of our pressure. And one of the things that happened very quickly, my wife went to one of the members here and asked him to join the group. And that next Friday he came, and he shared something very profound. He said that he was praying, he was waiting to be connected, to be part of something. And he wasn't, of his own self, able to go out and step out and join anything. But it meant so much for my wife to come up to him and ask him and invite him to be part of it. And this guy has probably been the most faithful member of the group. And every time he says how much everybody in the group means so much to him. But he's meant so much to us in the way that he's been able to share. We've seen him grow. And just the things that he's been able to share with us has meant so much to us. So I guess I'll just wrap it up by saying that just for the love that was expressed to us and how God has allowed our love to share with other people has really made that weekly commitment really not mean a whole lot to us anymore. Thanks so much. Let's stand together. Lord, as we draw to a close here today, we thank you for your great, great love. Lord, I'm overwhelmed when I consider it. I thank you for people like Dave and Jay Toomer who are giving themselves in some specific way to enable others to come into that love. I pray right now as a congregation, Lord, that you can fill us with possibilities of what we could do, oh God, if we really care. I want you to look up for just a moment. You know, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5, he said, The love of Christ compels me. He said, I've got to share this gospel. And I want to just end with a little bit of a challenge before Pastor Dave comes and leads us in the closing couple songs of worship. These next ten weeks, you'll never find people more available to discover some things about God. As the holidays sort of naturally turn our minds toward Christmas and what is that about? I just want to encourage all of you who are willing to say, You know what? I'm willing to be used by the Lord to touch someone else. These next ten weeks, God, I'm just going to be a little bit more available. I'm going to respond to the love I've received by being a conduit to someone else. And how many of you would be willing just to say by putting up your hand, God, if it be your will, I'm available. Use me to touch someone else the next ten weeks. Let me see you. Father, I pray now with every hand that's raised, You'd make opportunity and give just, Lord, the simplest word, the simplest act, the simplest touch of love to lead someone else to the saving knowledge of Jesus and His love. We ask it in Your name.