Stepping Out in Faith: Trusting God's Provision

"Jesus was consistently pushing the 12 apostles in particular into situations that they weren't ready for, that they weren't prepared for, and they were really in over their head, and as you read, it's a little bit funny at times, they find themselves kind of flailing around, trying to figure stuff out, and in some cases just flat out failing, just failing. Like, Jesus says, 'Go do this,' or he puts them in a situation, and they just are like, 'We just, we can't do this,' and they fail." [00:00:25]

"Jesus' agenda for his first century followers, and his 21st century followers, is that we would not simply be people who believe things, but we would be people with a very active, all in, gritty, daily, relational, you know, in the thick of things faith, that basically our faith would not simply be cerebral. It wouldn't be just, we believe things about God or believe things about Jesus, that we would have an active, very activated faith." [00:05:19]

"Jesus invited people to follow him before he invited them to believe in him, because the follow part was the gritty part, the follow part was the active part, and the follow part is what he knew would ultimately build and confirm their belief in him. But believe, just believe is easy. It's much easier than follow, right? It's safer, it's less demanding. It doesn't require any change at all. You just make a decision in your head." [00:06:36]

"When our active faith intersects with God's faithfulness on the backend, our faith grows. But believing without doing, believing without doing results in a frail, failing, flailing, fragile faith. So people, I mean, Jesus didn't invite people to simply believe things. He invited people and he invites us to follow him. He invites us to ask this question, and a couple of weeks ago, somebody took the screenshot from the message and posted it and said this is the question they wanna wake up to everyday." [00:07:57]

"When we step out and do what we think God wants us to do with no guarantee of how things are gonna turn out, and then after we step out and obey God, whatever that is, and then we experience God's faithfulness on the back end, you know what happens to your faith? It grows. It's like a muscle. If you don't exercise it, you have the muscle, but if you don't exercise it, it doesn't get bigger. And our exercised active faith grows our faith." [00:10:45]

"People always talk about the first time they stepped out of their comfort zone to serve someone else or some someone else's in a way that they didn't feel prepared for, they didn't feel adequate, but they just knew they were supposed to do it. They stepped out and they served somebody in Jesus' name because they just felt that internal nudge. They, essentially, they tell the story of stepping into someone else's story or stepping into a group of people's story, a neighbor, maybe a nonprofit, a nonprofit that was doing something significant in the world and they had a burden for that, and they thought, 'I wanna help, but what can I do?'" [00:12:32]

"Pushing through, pushing through our inadequacy, pushing through our inadequacy in order to say yes to God for the benefit of other people, it just grows our faith. It grows enduring, strong, you know, gonna get through the next one as well, faith. When we push through our inadequacy, 'I don't have time, I'm scared, I don't have the resources, I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm not educated enough,' whatever it is, 'but I feel like God's nudging me,' when we push through our inadequacy, on the other side of that, that's when we experience God's faithfulness and our faith gets bigger." [00:15:17]

"You have no idea what hangs in the balance of your decision if you say yes or no. You have no idea what hangs in the balance in terms of what's gonna happen. But here is something I know for sure hangs in balance, the quality and the strength of your faith, the quality and the strength of your faith. Because saying yes to God is stepping to serve other people, it's one of the five things God always uses to grow our faith. If you don't believe me, just ask the disciples." [00:16:41]

"Five loaves of bread, two fishes for thousands of people, I love what Jesus says next. This, are you looking? This is how big problems are solved. This is how macro community-wide, city-wide, nationwide problems are addressed, and this is an invitation to all of us. And Jesus smiles and he says, 'Bring them here to me. I know it's one kid with one lunch. Bring them here to me.' And there I stand, and there you stand, with our loaves and our fish." [00:24:29]

"They did what they knew how to do, and they trusted that Jesus knew what he was up to. That's it. They did what they knew how to do, and they trusted that somehow Jesus was going to come through. They literally, we use this phrase out of context all the time, it drives me crazy. We don't, but I hear it all the time out of context. This is literally what they did. They walked by faith." [00:27:26]

"And their active, activated faith, intersected with God's faithfulness, and something remarkable happened. They were all, they all ate, and they all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up 12 baskets of broken pieces that were leftover. Now, this whole concept is so personal for me, and I so want it to be personal for you. It's so personal for me when I talk about it in this room, because 25 and a half years ago, a group of us felt the nudge to start a different kind of church that we were told wouldn't work in the southeast." [00:28:23]

"Somewhere in the world there is someone whose life, whose child, whose marriage, who's grandchild, whose faith will be changed once you step up and make available to God what's in your lunchbox. Again, there's a story that is yet to be told, and your Heavenly Father is sayin' 'Just bring me what you got. You do what only you can do, and I'll do what only I can do, and you'll be amazed at what we can do together. You give them, you give them, something to eat.'" [00:36:43]