I read a funny story this week. I wanted to share it with you as we open this message up today.
And it was a story about a man who was a climber, a rock climber. You ever see these people? They go out and they climb cliffs for no good reason. I don't get it. But they get out there, a little rope and a little hook, and they're just, you know, climbing and swinging from one place to the other, jumping from one ledge. I'm like, what? Do you think you're a mountain goat? I don't understand. Not my cup of tea. But they get the YouTube views and the Instagram likes. So that's what they do.
And so this gentleman, he was out and he was climbing. He was all alone. And he was out on the face of a very steep cliff. And he was way up in the air and he slipped. And when he slipped, he began to fall down the cliff. And as he was falling, he was able to grab a hold of a tree that was growing out of the side of the cliff. And so he found himself in the cartoon predicament with one arm above you and nothing, you know, and just dangling in free space. And what am I going to do?
And so he began to call for help. "Somebody, somebody somewhere help me. I hope somebody's there. Anybody up there? Can anybody help me?" he shouted.
And then suddenly this majestic voice, this is the voice of God, came booming through the canyon where he was climbing. And I don't know, it may have sounded like James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman. Not sure. It depends on which movie you watched last about God speaking. But a booming voice comes through the canyon and says, "I will help you. I will help you. You need to trust in me, my son. Do you trust me?"
"Yes. Yes. I trust you," said the man. "Please help me."
"I want you to let go of the branch."
And the man looked up to the heavens and he said, "Is there anybody else up there that I could talk to?"
Yeah. There are times in our life where, you know, we know we should have faith, but sometimes it's a little hard to come by, isn't it? Sometimes when we say, "God, I need you to help me with this." And he says, "Okay, this is what we're going to do." And you say, "Is there another way that we could do that? That's not what I had envisioned."
And so there are times in life where we believe so wholeheartedly, like we're full of faith and our chin is up. Our shoulders are back and we are braving the storm with no problem. "I got God on my side," and, you know, the tank is full and everything is looking up and, you know, it's easy to believe sometimes. Sometimes it is.
And then there's other times when we're not sure what we should believe or what we believe. "Do I even believe?" I don't know if anybody else ever gets like that. We know faith is important. Hebrews 11 and 6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God. So we want to have faith.
We know what we're supposed to believe, but we can't figure out how to believe it. Faith ends up feeling like something that we can just muster up. "I've got to have faith. So let me dig down deep in the depths of my soul and, oh, I'm going to believe." I mean, stop me if I'm not telling the truth. Is that how faith feels? Sometimes like, "I've just got to have faith. Oh, let me, let me just tighten up all the muscles of my body and maybe I'll believe."
Something that we just conjure up out of the sheer force of our will. But faith doesn't come like that. Faith is so important, but it does not come by the sheer force of our own will. It doesn't come from anything that you have the ability to do. That's not what faith comes from.
Faith does not come from your bloodline. Just because you were born into a certain kind of family that believes certain things does not mean that you're not going to believe. So let me dig down deep in just because you were born into that family that had faith. Your mama and your daddy could have been wonderful believers. That doesn't mean that gives you faith. Does it give you a leg up in the right direction? It sure could, but that doesn't mean you have faith.
You might've grown up in a house that had no faith. You may have grown up in an atheist household. You may have grown up in a completely different religious household. You may have grown up in a household that says, "Well, you can decide what you want when you get older." You're not held back from faith because of that. There's no reason that you can't have faith because of that, because faith doesn't come from your family, whether you had faith in your house or not.
Watch this. Faith does not come by doing certain things. Like, let's just pick some stuff. Reciting a prayer. Just because you recite a prayer after the preacher does not mean that you now have faith. Just because you got baptized does not mean you have faith. I know people who've been baptized and they've been baptized just because they thought it would be a start of a new chapter in their life. "I just wanted to turn over a new leaf." That doesn't require any faith at all.
You could go out and do good deeds, help little old ladies across the street, feed the homeless. You could do all kinds of great things. All of that's wonderful. That doesn't mean that that brings you faith. You could come to church and you could be faithful every Sunday and you could take communion. That will not give you faith.
Those things bring faith. And then faith doesn't come through your feelings. I know we hit certain notes in songs and you get the goosebumps. I like it. So do you. Your body likes it. That's why you get the goosebumps. It's a psychosomatic response. Does that mean the Holy Spirit is moving? It feels like it. Not always, because you can go to some other concerts where they sing other kinds of songs and you can still feel the goosebumps.
So feelings don't cause faith. Although faith does have a pretty indescribable feeling. Your feelings don't cause faith. Let me go a little further. It takes all kinds of preachers to be all kinds of reachers. In other words, some preachers are very eloquent with their words and they reach people who need eloquence. Some preachers are full of fire and spit and they romp and they stomp. And guess what? They reach people that need a little fire and spit and romp and stomp.
That's why Abraham Lincoln said, "I like my preachers to look like they're fighting bees." You wouldn't think. You think he likes eloquence. No, no. Abraham Lincoln, the man with all the stature and great presidency and all of those things, he liked his preachers a little wild. It takes all kinds to reach all kinds, doesn't it? That's because faith doesn't come by eloquence.
That's because faith doesn't come through the volume with which we speak. I change the way that I speak. Sometimes I speak softly. Sometimes I speak louder. Sometimes I speak faster. Sometimes I speak slower. That's just to hold your attention. That's a tool to make sure you're listening, that your brain stays engaged. That has nothing to do with your faith. Zero.
You say, "Oh, but pastor, I know the scriptures. I know that it takes a preacher. Because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God." That's Romans 10 and 17. Oh, you're right. Quoting that scripture. But it's not right. If you take that and you say, "So if people will just hear the gospel being preached, then they will have faith."
Yes, but not exactly. Let's read that in context in just a minute. Let's get there momentarily. I want to set this up a little bit because we need to understand what faith is. Faith is not one-sided. It's not something you just figure out how to do. Faith is not two-sided. Something that I say or something that you read and now you make some kind of decision and now you've got faith. It's not just that.
In fact, you may have come to church before and you're not really a believer. You may have come to church before and you're not really a believer. You may have come to church before and you're not really a believer. You may be watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast and you've heard the gospel message before, but faith remains to you kind of a distant thing. You don't really quite get it.
You may even have been coming to church for a long time, but you've never really felt like you had faith because faith has always been a little bit distant to you. It's just kind of, well, other people seem to have it, but I don't really feel it. I'm trying to go through the motions. I'm trying to do what I'm supposed to do, but faith just seems a little distant, like real faith. What is that?
I want you to think in terms of faith being three-dimensional. And you probably learned about the three dimensions in geometry class, three axes. You have the X axis for going this way horizontally, the Y axis for going this way, going vertically. And then if you get really fun, you have the Z axis that goes straight at you like that. Yeah. Did I just lose everybody because you hated geometry?
Okay. No, don't, don't, don't tune out. Tune in, tune in. You remember some of those things. Yes. Width, height, and depth. I remember the first time that I saw a 3D movie. Have you ever seen a 3D movie? I remember the first one I ever saw. I'm going back a ways. It was in Disney World. It was Captain EO with Michael Jackson. Okay. So I'm just, just telling you, I'm dating myself, but that was the first 3D movie I'd ever seen.
We went into this Captain EO facility. They don't, it's not, you can't, you have to look it up on YouTube. And we walked in and we sat down and the screen opens up and there's a big galaxy in front of you. And then way back in the back of the screen, it seemed like this little thing is just spinning and it seems to get closer and closer and closer. And until it just, it's an asteroid and it's coming and spinning towards me and it's just floating right out in front of me.
I'd never seen anything like that. I've never seen anything like that. I've never seen anything like that in all my life. This is amazing. Now I had seen on TV before, suppose it 3D. You put on the red glasses and the blue glasses, you know what I mean? And then you watch some movie that was supposed to have been turned into 3D. It never worked for me. Like I never, never got it.
So that, I was really intrigued by this. I was sitting in this theater and this asteroid comes out and floats right in front of me. Like I could touch it. It looks so real. And then it exploded because the spaceship flew by and blew it up. And then Michael Jackson did this thing and it was crazy. Okay. So the next 17 minutes of my life, I was enthralled by this 3D effect. It was amazing.
I was used to seeing things that were flat far away on a screen, but this seemed so real come right out of the screen to me. And it may be that you today stand in need of a faith that can have a little depth to it. It may be that you need a faith that comes off the page. You need a faith that comes out of the screen. You need a faith that comes out of the lives of others.
You need a faith that comes where it's like, well, I see that you have some kind of faith, but I don't really, and have it come closer to you where it becomes realistic to you. We need real faith. We need real faith because faith in the grace of God brings salvation. When I have faith in the grace of God, it brings salvation.
When I have faith in the power of God, it brings miracles. When I have faith in the love of God, that brings me peace. It brings me peace when I know that God loves me. Why? Because I know he's going to provide for me in every situation. I know that he's going to care for me in every situation. If I fail, I know he's going to have mercy on me in every situation.
I don't have to worry about what other people think about me or what I'm going to call myself or what label I'm going to put on myself because he's already given me an identity. And that is, "You are my child." So faith in those things is super important. Faith is vitally important.
So I want to dig into it today and see if we can take faith from being something that's just in the pages of the Bible and bring it right out into our lives. Something that we see X and Y, it's kind of flat on the page in other people's lives and come straight out of that and into our lives, into our minds, into our hearts and become real today.
I want to put faith on the Z axis today, bring a little depth to it, if you will. And so you'll find yourself today somewhere in one of these X, Y, or Z axes. Hebrews 11 and one, stay at Romans 10. We'll get back to that in a second, but let's go to Hebrews 11 and one. It says, "Now faith is the assurance." If you're reading other translations, it says the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
I want you to see what faith is. Faith is the substance of, it is the assurance of, it's what something is made of. What? Hope. How can you have hope? Well, you can have hope when you have faith. Hope and faith intertwined together very, very tightly. It is this first axis on which we start to diagram faith to make it real.
The first axis is desire. You thought it was going to be an X word. It's not. It's D. It's desire. I want to look at faith in 3D today, and this is the first D. Desire. Let me ask you the question, what do you desire? What do you want? You sat in the room today. You're listening to me. You want something. What do you want? What are you looking for?
Do you want God? Do you want God on your terms? Well, some people, you say, "Oh, no, no," but they do. Here's how you know. If you want God on your own terms, you'll find something, but you're not going to find him. Because if you're looking for God on your own terms, you'll always find that whatever you're looking for is constantly changing.
This is why you have people that, I'll use an Old Testament word today, idolaters. They're in idolatry. They're seeking a God who is what they like. An idolater says, "I want a God that I like. I want God the way I like him. So I want a God who supports this, and I want a God who supports that. I want a God who lets me do that, and I want a God who does this, and this, and this, and that. Unless God does that, I don't want that God."
And some of them will not, I say that outright, but they will go into the scriptures, and they will twist, and turn, and make it everything they want it to be. It's the same thing. They just say something different. I want a God who is what I want to like. That's what I want. Well, that's what you desire, and that's not faith. That's not the kind of desire that brings faith.
You could be like the Pharisees, very religious, know the scriptures, backwards and forwards, up and down, you do all the right religious things, but you want a God that fits into your understanding. Well, this is the scripture how I understand it. So therefore, God can't ever be any bigger than that. It's true. There's a lot of denominations like that, a lot of believers like that.
I only want a God who fits into my understanding of the scriptures. That was the Pharisees' problem. Jesus came and said, "Look, I am God walking among you. Look at the miracles I'm doing. Listen to my understanding of the scriptures. I can answer every question that you have." And they still thought, "This can't be him. That's not what we're looking for. That can't be what the Messiah is like. We have our own understanding of the scriptures."
Or you could be like the atheist who has a different desire. "I would believe in God if he did this." Be careful what you ask for. Really what you want, you think that God should be like a genie in a bottle. "Well, if there really is a God, he'll do exactly what I say to prove that he exists." No, he won't.
Unless you're like the guy that I saw years ago on YouTube at the time. He's a guy and he's driving in his car and it's pouring down rain. He says, "You know, if there is a God, then he would cause there to be lightning in three, two, one." And he looked around, he went, "Now this is concerning." It's funny, but that's exactly what people do.
"Well, if there was a God, then he would stop all the evil that's in the world." Well, who said that was evil? Where'd you get the idea of evil from? "If God really existed, then these bad things wouldn't happen." Well, that's what you think in your little finite brain that randomly came together somehow.
"Okay. If there is a God, then he would do this for me. He would show up in my room and he would say, 'I am God, believe in me.'" Okay. Could that happen? Sure. It has happened. Who has it happened to? People that actually desired God.
See, for an example, Saul of Tarsus, who was riding on his donkey, going to Damascus to kill Christians because he thought he was doing the will of God because he thought this is what God certainly must be like. But he, inside, he had a real desire for God. He'd been hearing some things that weren't quite square and got, and Jesus shows up and says, "Hey, hey, I'm going to knock you off that animal. I'll put you in the middle of the road. I'm going to shine a bright light on you. I'm going to blind you. I'm going to get your attention. You wanted a sign. Here's a sign."
Why? Because his desire was to actually know God and to please God. So here's the bottom line with this. You can have joy. You can have peace. You can have love. You can do it only on his terms, not your terms, his terms. If you want it your way, you don't get it. Part of faith is to desire God on his terms. I want what you want, how you want it.
So the question is, do you desire that? Or do you want to still keep doing it your way? Stay confused. Stay never satisfied in your soul. Stay chained with insecurity about who you are. Stay that way because you don't want to desire him his way. The first part of faith is to have the right desire.
Now, if any of that lines up with anything, the way you feel, okay, this is, I hope you hear me. It's important that you hear me. Let's go to Romans chapter 10 because hearing is not just quite enough, but I hope it stirs something in you.
Romans chapter 10. Let's go not to 17, which is what you quoted to me earlier in your mind when I said preaching doesn't bring faith. It's not just preaching. We'll get to verse 17. Let's start at verse 16. Take all this in context.
So this is actually writing about, speaking about the Jewish people who have not turned to Jesus. And this is what Paul writes. He says, "They have not all obeyed the gospel." How do you obey something you never heard? Obviously, they had heard it. This is what he says. Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?"
So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. In other words, you do have to have the gospel preached and you do have to hear the gospel, but it's actually more than that because these people that he's talking about had actually heard the gospel and yet they had not obeyed it.
Verse 18. I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have. They heard it. They heard the gospel. So where's their faith? Why don't they have faith? Because the way we take verse 17 so often is if I just preach the gospel to them, then they'll have faith. Well, you do need to preach the gospel to them.
But it's not just that. Look at verse 19. I ask, did Israel not understand? Moses says, "I'll make you jealous of those who are not a nation, a foolish nation. I'll make you angry." Keep on going down. Isaiah says, "I've been found by those who did not seek me. I've shown myself to those who did not ask for me."
But of Israel, he says, is where it comes home. "All day long, I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people." That's what he said. You heard the gospel. I'm taking this all in context now, beginning all the way up at verse 16. You have heard the gospel, Jewish people. You have heard it. It has been given to you.
And really, you wouldn't even know what to believe unless the gospel came to you. So that's important. Preaching is important. But it's not just that. All day long, I've stood here with my hands out to you, but you're disobedient and contrary. You don't want it. You don't desire it. You don't want it. You want it your way, not his way.
The bottom line is you can hear the gospel with your ears all day long. You can hear the gospel with your ears all day long, every day of your life. And you can even understand it. You can be raised in a Christian house. You could end up being one of those people on YouTube or TikTok or whatever the newest thing is. They say, "Yeah, I know what Christianity is all about. I read the Bible. Yeah, I went to Christian school. Oh, I grew up in a pastor's home. I was a youth leader. I was whatever."
Okay. You can hear the gospel, know the gospel, understand what's supposed to happen with the gospel, and still never get faith until you desire gospel promises on the terms that the gospel is offered. Until you desire the gospel on gospel terms, you don't have faith.
So the first dimension of faith is desire. To ask myself, what do I want? What do I really, really want? Do I want God on his terms? That's the first thing. Unless you want God on his terms, you can't have him.
Well, you know what? I'm there. I got that. I got God on his terms. I'm obedient. I'm trusting. All right. Well, great. You got the first dimension of faith. Let's keep going. The second dimension, the second axis, if you will. We got some width going on there. Let's go height-wise. This is a word. It doesn't sound real positive. I promise it is. Desperation.
Desperation. Desperation is when you have done all you know you can do, and that's it. You've done all you can do, and you know it. I can't do anything else. I can't go any further. I can't make anything else happen. I can't do it. And when you arrive there, now God is drawn to that.
The Bible tells us that he's drawn to a broken, a contrite spirit, a humble spirit. You can do a little Bible study this week on the words contrite, humble, proud, broken, and you'll find that wherever people are proud, God resists them. Wherever people are broken and desperate, God is drawn to them.
That's why Jesus said in Mark 10 and 25 that it's almost impossible for a rich person to come into the kingdom of God. Don't we all want to be rich? That's what you're supposed to be, right? No. Be careful, because if you're super wealthy, it's really hard for you to come to Jesus. Why? Because you're not desperate. You've got everything that you could possibly want. You don't really have any needs.
God is drawn to the demise of your abilities. When you get to the end and there's nothing else you can do, that's where God is drawn in. This is where miracles happen because of desperation. You can go to other countries, poor countries, where they don't have access to medicines and doctors like we do here.
If you get sick, you go to the witch doctor, okay? And they do a little dance around you and wave some incense and stuff, and then hopefully that works. Not quite the same. You go over there, you'll see miracles, signs, and wonders all over the place. Why? Because they don't have access to the kinds of things that bring us comfort and peace.
You get a headache here, you pop an Advil. You get cancer here, you get it cut out. You go on chemo. Is there anything wrong with that? No. I'm just saying we have solutions. Solutions for stuff. And when you have solutions for stuff, you don't tend to be as desperate.
But when you run out of solutions, that's a different thing. I've told this story before, but I'll tell it really fast. Tamara and I, years ago, before our son was born, in fact, she was with child at the time. What caused the problem? Thanks, son. Very beginning. We were traveling. We went to the country of Lithuania, and we'd gotten there, the middle of the afternoon, tried to stay awake because it's multiple hour difference.
So I can't go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, ruin everything. But we got to get up in the morning, go all the way across Lithuania, and preach in this other church, and then come all the way back. And so we need to get some good sleep. So we're just going to stay up until, not our bedtime, because it's already bedtime when we landed. We're going to stay up until Lithuanian bedtime.
So we did this. We stayed out with our friends. We went out and saw the town, all that stuff. And we get back to the hotel. And when I get off the elevator and making my way to the hotel room, I turn around and I'm like, "I'm going to go to the hotel." I'm going to go to the hotel. My wife's not there. She's still by the elevator, and she's in pain.
Ever since she had conceived, she had begun dealing with sciatica, painful, painful sciatica, where just couldn't hardly walk. And so a couple of times a week, go in to see the chiropractor, and they'd make some adjustments. And that'd give some relief, relieve some pressure here, take pressure off the nerves there. And that would give a little bit of relief. But then a couple of days later, time to do that again.
So it was just a constant thing, a constant battle with this sciatica. Well, here we are in Lithuania. We've been on a long flight. We've been all over the town. And it's late at night. And now we're having to get into the hotel room. I don't even know if they have chiropractors in Lithuania at this point. They do. But I didn't know that then. I didn't know. And I certainly didn't know how to get a hold of any. I don't speak Lithuanian. My friends don't even know if my cell phone's working right now in this other country.
So I picked her up, and I carried her into the room. And I laid her on the bed. And she was in tears, crying from the pain. And I just looked at her and said, "I don't know where to go. I don't know who we can call. I don't even have any Advil to give you. I got nothing. We're going to have to pray." And she agreed.
And so we prayed. "Lord, it was a very simple prayer. Lord, you know, we got to go in the morning to this other church. We got to drive. We got to get up early, all this. And you know, there's no way for us to take care of this sciatica right now. I need you to touch her. In Jesus' name, amen."
The moment I said amen, she said, "The pain is gone." Just like that. We got up the next morning. We went. All week, we were in Lithuania, traveling here, traveling there, preaching to different churches, seeing all the sites, doing all the things. It was great. Had no sciatica. We came home, went on with our lives, had a child, no sciatica.
Now that's been over 13 years ago. You ever had sciatica again? Never again. It was in that moment that God just said, "Okay, now you're in a place where there's desperation. Now you're in a place where there's nothing else you can do. Now you're in a place where, yeah, normally you just, you just go to not a big deal, but now you're in a place where you can't do anything about it. What are you going to do? I'm desperate, Lord."
And God says, "I'm drawn to that. Let me show you what I can do." And this is just another dimension of faith that we forget. Here, here's the thing about desperation. You don't have to work yourself up into a frenzy. "Oh God, I'm so desperate. I'm going to die." It doesn't have to be like that because the fact is you may not be dying right now.
You may not have anything wrong with you that's huge and out of control right now. You may not have anything wrong with you that's huge and out of control right now. You just feel so desperate. You don't have to worry about any of that, but I'll tell you what you do need to know is how much you need God right now.
You need, you may not feel super desperate, but you need to know how desperate your situation really is. What is that? That's a little bit of perspective. Let me give it to you. You could have perfect health right now. You could have a million dollars in your checking account right now. Not your savings account. That's got way more. You're going to have a million dollars in your checking account. Wouldn't that be nice? Thank you, Jesus, for that problem.
All your kids could be on the honor roll. You could wake up in the morning, look in the mirror without combing your hair and be exceedingly attractive. Please, Lord. All of that could happen. All of that could happen. And without God, you are in dire straits. You're in grave danger. And by grave danger, I mean, when you go to the grave, you in danger.
Yeah. You, the level to which you realize, "I need Jesus Christ." That's your level of desperation. Because no matter what your situation is in life, no matter how great it is or how bad it is, the anthem of your soul must be, "Thank you, Jesus, for this breath. Thank you, Jesus, for my life. Thank you, Jesus, for all you've given me. I need you every hour."
If that's not your anthem, you're missing this desperate part of faith. Your faith is lacking in dimension. You need to know how much you need him. You didn't wake up this morning without him. You didn't put your feet on the floor this morning unless he let you do it. You didn't put your clothes on and get in your car that you put gas in with the money you made at a job unless he let you do that.
You won't draw another breath in this room unless he lets you do it. That's how desperate your situation is. Until you get that, until you get that, you have to be a man of God. You haven't arrived at desperation. "I need you, Jesus. I know I can look good on the outside, but inside, I need you. Without you, I'm going to die."
I'm not going to, and not just physically, I'm going to die forever. I need this. And so maybe today, maybe today, maybe this is the actual dimension you need to add today because, you know, I'm doing the right things and I believe the right things and I desire the right things and all that, but maybe you just need to renew your sense of total dependence.
Dependency on Jesus Christ. Maybe that's what it is. And then we get to the third axis. And this is, again, when you get to all three of these things working, that's when faith jumps off the page. That's when you open up the Bible and it goes, "Whoa, faith. Oh my goodness, faith."
That's when faith stops belonging to other people, stops belonging to your parents, stops belonging to your friends, stops belonging to the people that you see on TV. And all of a sudden it's in your heart and it's live when you get all three dimensions. Here it is.
Let's turn here. Matthew chapter 15, verse 22. It was a story of Jesus. He's sitting at a table and he's having dinner with some friends. And while he's eating and talking with some other Jewish people, a Canaanite woman, somebody who was a Gentile, somebody that Jews despised, a Canaanite woman came out and was crying, "Have mercy on me. Oh Lord, son of David, my daughter. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon."
But he did not answer her a word. He just kept on talking to everybody else at the table. His disciples came and begged him, "Please Lord, send her away. She's crying out after us." It's not just you. She's like, every time we walk by, she's grabbing us. "Please take me to Jesus. Please take me to Jesus. Hey, what's your name? Peter. Peter, take me to Jesus. Peter, my daughter has a, Peter, I need help."
She's desperate. She had the right desires. And she had this third thing too. Because people were trying to resist her. "No, you can't, you can't go in there. You're a Canaanite. You're a Gentile. There's Jesus in there. He's clean. He's pure. He's holy. He's a rabbi. You can't, you can't go in there."
And she's still going. Just, it doesn't matter. You can give me all the resistance you want. I need to see Jesus. So finally, Jesus answered, verse 24, he says, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He rejected her. "Sir, you're not who I was sent for. That's going to come later. The Gentiles are coming to the kingdom after I'm crucified and after I'm resurrected and after my Holy Spirit is poured out. That's when the Gentiles will be brought in. I haven't been sent here for this just yet. I'm still in my earthly ministry. I'm not here to minister to you."
He rejected her. But she came, verse 25, she came anyway and knelt before him saying, "Lord, help me." And then he said, "Is it not right? Or it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." Now, now he embarrassed her. He just called her out. "You are not a Jew. You're a Gentile. You are not chosen by God. You have been held out from the things of God. I have not been sent to you. To me, you're like a dog. And these are like my children."
Jesus, that's mean. It's kind of racist. I don't know if it's Jesus. Jesus is just, he's just pushing some buttons, pushing some buttons. Why? I want to see. I want you to see. I want everybody else to see just how bad she wants this. She's pushed past resistance. She's pushed past rejection. She's pushing past embarrassment. Even she wants this. She desires this. She's desperate for this.
What's he doing? He's painting a picture of her faith. She's got this dimension and she's got that dimension and she's got the third dimension, which is she's not going to quit. She has determination. She has that doggedness in her. He called her a dog. She was acting like she was just after it. She was doing, she's, "I'm going to, I'm going to be here. I'm going to be doing this until you answer me."
And so then verse 28, Jesus answered her. "Oh, woman, great is your faith." See what he's doing? He was just painting. It wasn't just, "Well, she just desired it so strongly." Oh, she just, she was in desperate straits. No, it was both of those things together. But then there was this third thing. If she didn't have that, she wouldn't have got it.
She would have had her desire and she'd have been desperate, but she'd have stayed that way. But it was this third dimension that Jesus said, "Oh, great is your faith." I just, I wanted everybody to see that's what he was saying. I let all these things happen just so that everybody, because this is going to get written down. This is going to get preached one day. Somewhere in Revelation Frisco, there's going to be a church and there's going to be somebody listening and they're going to learn what faith really is.
It's not just desire. It's not just desperation. It's, "I'm going to do it until it happens. I'm going for it. I'm determined. I'm not going to let it go." And when you get this, when you do this, faith becomes something more than what you just read about. It's more than just stories of faith that you see on Facebook. It's like, "Wow, why can't we have that? Why can't I experience that?"
When you get that way, faith becomes real. Why? Your faith comes to life. That's why James chapter two talks about dead faith versus effective faith. You know, faith without works is dead and other, because you got to have, you got to have the doing. And you got to be determined in your doing, and you got to be consistent in your doing. You've got to keep doing it over and over and over again.
Somebody's walked in this room today. And you're a lot like the guy that I saw at the grocery store this morning. And what were you doing at the grocery store this morning? We needed eggs. So I got up and I went to Kroger. And when I got to Kroger and I parked, cause it was easy to find a parking spot. Wouldn't anybody there, you know, Sunday morning that early.
And I got there. And as I walked up, I was still about halfway out of the parking lot. And I got up and I got to the grocery store. And I got to the grocery store. And I saw this older gentleman there. And he's standing in front of the door of Kroger. And he's just looking at it. And I'm like, "What is he doing?" And he's just standing there.
And finally, he just shrugs and walks down all the way down to the building and goes in the other door. And I thought, "Well, maybe that door is broke." But I didn't see any signs that said it was broke. I just saw open. "Welcome to Kroger." So I walked up to the door.
And it did not open until I took one more step. I just had to be a little closer than he was. And the door opened right up. He was so close to the door opening. He was here. All he needed to do was go six inches more and it would have opened. Some of you are in the same place spiritually today. You are, you're ready. You said, "I've been desperate and I've been desiring and I've been doing, but I don't see it working."
And you're just, you're just six inches away from the door opening. You just got to keep pushing. You just got to keep doing. You just got, you got to go through the resistance. You got to go through the rejection. You got to go through the embarrassment. And then, and then, and then.
Let's stand in the room today. You need to decide today. I want to stir you today with this. I want faith to become real for you today. Faith that says, "Will you repent? Will you choose to desire what God desires?" That's what the Bible calls repentance. When I say in myself, "I don't want what I want anymore. I want what God wants. I don't want to live my way anymore. I want to figure out how God wants me to live. And that's how I'm going to live."
And the moment you do that monumental shift, faith is born in you. It's a little one-dimensional at the moment, but it's faith is born in you and everything begins to change. And you say, "And then you say, 'Well, will you be baptized? Will you wash away that old life? Will you wash it away and take on a brand new life?'"
Oh, that's wonderful. We'll celebrate with you. If you want to do that, you let us know. September the 15th, just in a couple of weeks, five-year anniversary, we're going to be baptizing people. You can be baptized. Let us know. Use the connect card. Tell me after service. "I want to do it." We already got people signing up for it. Needs more. That's wonderful.
But what about when life gets hard? Will you have faith then? What about when you don't feel like it? What about when you can't hear his voice? What about when somebody does you wrong? What about when your feelings get hurt? What happens when your feelings get hurt in the church by somebody in the church?
What happens when the pastor hurt your feelings? Cause he didn't look at you or shake your hand or smile at you. Or he said something in the pulpit. It was like, what about your faith? When you have unanswerable questions, will you just go ahead and decide right now that you're going to have real faith that you know what?
It doesn't matter if any of that happens. I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to stop praying. I'm never going to stop learning. I'm never going to stop worshiping. When you get there, your faith leaves the page and it leaves your brain and leaves your heart and enters the real world and they can start doing real work.
And here's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to go back into a song of worship.
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on Aug 27, 2024
