Finding Hope in Trials: Embracing Honest Lament

We start off a new series, and I haven't been up here in a long time. But I don't remember—like, I've heard all types of cars: Monte Carlos, and a Buick, a '68 Buick, like all types of Pinto. Yeah, yeah, rocking a Pinto for their first car.

Well, I wanted to show you guys my first car, and it's this car right here: a 1973 Baby Blue Beetle. Baby! Yeah! How many of you guys—anybody in here ever own a Beetle? Right? Nobody? Okay, all right, we got one, we got two, we got three. So we got a few people. The new ones don't count, right?

But this is a 1973 Beetle. Now, I'm gonna tell you how I fell in love with this Beetle. It drove up to youth group—not by itself. It wasn't a Herbie. Like, even though I watched that movie yesterday, it wasn't a Herbie. This drove up, and the person that drove it up, his name was Joe Jackson.

Joe Jackson, he was one of just the youth leaders. He wasn't a youth pastor; he wasn't on the worship team. He was just one of the adults—like some of the adults that are up there with students right now—that just showed up to care. He showed up to pray for me and other students. He showed up to play games with us, to make messes with us. He showed up to play security on me so I wasn't sneaking off with my girlfriend. He was there, and he helped. He gave me advice; he held me accountable. He read Bible plans with me; he got me devotionals. He, in all aspects, discipled me. He was willing to walk with me through life.

There was a youth group time where he drove up. Just a public service announcement here: your student needs somebody other than you helping direct them, helping point them towards Christ. I'm so glad we had a team of adult leaders that were here for prayer at 8:10 this morning, praying over your students, praying over their prayer requests, willing to come together to be up nice and early. These are 19, 20, 21-year-olds that are willing to give of their time, their talent.

Because I don't know about you, but there's a lot of people that are ready to influence your students. There's a lot of TV channels, a lot of TV shows, a lot of TikTok videos, a lot of different veins of social media that have a lot of influence on our students' lives. I want one that's grounded in the Word of God that's going to point them back to the Word of God.

In fact, we're actually revamping our student ministry right now to serve our church better. The way that it was going was not a direction that we could continue going. So right now, we have a breakfast club, and as you heard, the lock-in—there's actually a whole information about that on that what's happening page. There's a section that the parents show up, and you get to hear about that vision, you get to hear about that direction, you get to hear about that future of Innovation Youth and what's happening and how we can partner together as a church and as parents to disciple, to train up, to love on these students.

But back to this Beetle. This Beetle was different. This Beetle didn't look like anything else in the parking lot, right? It was something that caught my eye, caught my attention. And so I fell in love with the Beetle, fell in love with even that particular Blue Beetle. Joe would give me rides back and forth to church and to home, and he would pick me up and take me out. We'd go out to Taco Bell, we'd go out to McDonald's, we'd go out after youth. Joe Jackson was the one that was always giving me a ride in this beautiful Beetle.

In fact, I started collecting—I remember there was—I don't remember if you remember this or not, but Taco Bell used to give away Matchbox cars. Did anybody ever get one of those? I got one, and they had a Beetle. I got one, and I had it, and I had a whole haul after that where I collected Matchbox Beetles, and people would buy me them, and they're sitting in a box collecting dust somewhere. My kids are ready to break them out.

But one of the other things about the Beetle is my dad saw Joe bringing me home one day, and I walked out of the car and into the house. He said, "Billy, you know I used to have one of those." And we sat on my bed talking for hours, story after story about one time he was driving on the beach and a wave came up and actually took the car. He did everything he could to get out of the car, and the Beetle's still in the ocean today.

So between Joe and connecting with my dad, we didn't connect over many things. So when Joe ran that little Beetle out of oil on the side of the road and then put it up for sale because he put holes in the pistons—because running cars without oil is a bad idea, just in case you need to know that—I jumped into debt to get this car: a hundred dollars. I would have to make payments of mowing lawns and 50 payments, and he would give me a receipt. Slowly but surely, at 14 years old, I owned my very first car.

Now, what would I do with the car with the engine that had holes in it? It was ridiculous. I would wash it, I would wax it, I would push it up the driveway, I'd rinse it off, and then I'd push it back to its spot. I'd sit in the car on depressing days and listen to Matchbox 20, and I would also listen to whatever that band was that did "How Bizarre." That was on the fun days.

I would sit in this car. My dad was about 50 years old when we got this car—49, 50 years old. I would also bug him, and my dad would tell me stories about how he took the engine apart out of the car, took it, put it on his kitchen table, rebuilt it, and then went to work the next day. So I was like, surely we can do that with this car.

But a 50-year-old that's trying to take care of 60, 70, 80 hours a week, take care of the house, take care of the family—he probably didn't have all the extra time. Now that I'm a dad, I may understand that a little bit more. This would be like Grayson ready to buy a car.

So he got me a book. He got me a book—it's this book right here. It's "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Step-by-Step Procedure for the Complete Idiot." I don't know what my dad was trying to tell me, but I didn't know. And this told you step by step what to do. It says Volkswagen doesn't stop brakes, and it has a diagram for the brakes. This is not your Chilton's manual; this is your idiot's guide. It shows you everything, and it even has some cuss words.

And so I loved it. Because if you've ever owned a Beetle, you've said quite a few. Nine months later, after all the whining and all the nagging, we finally got it running. I put the engine back in myself because he was taking too long. It was four bolts; it was pretty easy.

We take it out for its maiden voyage. He's driving; we're going all around the neighborhood, and he turns to me and says, "Billy, you want to drive?" What do I ever? I'd only driven my sister's niece or her neon ever before, and I was too scared to even drive around over bridges. But here I was, 14 years old, and there was nothing within me that said no. I killed it about 14 times—so much so that he had to go and get another battery because I killed the batteries so much trying to start it.

But it was one of the most exciting times of my life, being able to rebuild that with him, being able to drive it, purchase my own car. How could life get any better?

Now, in the next few times we would take it out, we would drive it, and he had ordered a magnetic drain plug because we had changed out all the piston rings and the heads and everything like that. He wanted to catch any metal shavings so that they didn't go around in the engine. So he had installed this, changed the oil, installed this drain plug.

So we're driving around all the back roads, driving by every friend's house. Right? 14 years old, you're gonna slow down, you're gonna honk. Yeah, hey! That's about what it sounds like. Having the time of our lives, and a good old Oklahoma storm rolls in. You can't see the road in front of us.

And while this is happening, the oil light comes on and stays on. And that's never a good light to come on and stay on in your car. So I pull into the gas station—probably should have pulled under the awning, but I didn't. My dad gets out, and he goes in, he gets a couple quarts of oil, goes in and pours them in the engine, and he gets back in the car. He's like, "Okay, start it."

I go to start it; it starts. And then all—and then within seconds, the oil light comes back on. It goes off and comes back on. So he goes in and figures that he needs to get more oil and goes and gets a few more quarts, pours it all in, and then he figures it's just a faulty light.

After that, he's like, "Keep starting, keep starting, keep trying, keep going, keep going." Yeah, and then finally, the drain plug had come out, and the oil was just flowing right through the engine and pouring out. You couldn't see it because it was raining so hard; it was washing away everything.

It got blurry from that point on—the anger, the frustration. That's broken down. These nine months, I hadn't experienced too many lows in my life at that point, and so this was one of the lowest times of my life. I don't remember really much that happened after that point, but you can be—it's crazy how you can be at an all-time high, everything's going great, and then suddenly everything crashes.

It was like when I was 19. Mandy had just said yes to being my wife for life. I had proposed to her in a snow-covered beach at Sisters Lake on Christmas Day, getting ready to wrap up my final year in college, being accepted into advanced technical arts and worship school, getting a pay raise, a job advancement—only to receive a call from my brother while I was at work that my dad had just had a heart attack and died at the age of 56.

It could be those times, the times that I've been homeless, the times where we're told our son had diabetes, and then another son—the times of multiple miscarriages, the time of leading the first ministry that's growing and thriving, kids coming to Jesus, only for the pastor to say, "We're not here to reach those kids. We don't want those kids at our church."

I don't know if that's happened to any of you—if you've been at times on a peak and everything's great to everything crashing down. But that's exactly what the series is about: the rock bottoms in life and what do I do when everything just falls apart.

This series is dedicated to looking at those who have been on a roller coaster at times through life. Now, whether you know it or not, or whether you've been told it or not, like Jesus talked about these times in life. He talked about how we experience pain and trouble. This is not what the TV preacher—this is not what somebody that wants you to open up your wallet says.

Because in John 13:33, he said, "Here on Earth you will have many trials and sorrows, but take heart; I have overcome the world." That word that Jesus used for tribulation or trials can be talked about pressing or pressure or oppression or affliction or tribulation or distress. I'm sure that's something we've all experienced here probably a few times in our life if you're at least older than two.

There's also that Jesus quoted saying in Matthew 6:34, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." You see, when we choose to follow after Jesus, we don't get this exemption from life. We don't get this exemption from trials; we don't get this exemption from suffering.

Being children of God doesn't—it's not like our immunity pill or our emergency that we take, and it keeps us free from getting all the sickness and pain and diseases. Life can be brutal at times: rejection, betrayal, loss, abandonment, death, loneliness, failure. It happens, and it's going to happen to all of us: unemployment, evil, injustice, loss of income, depression. It runs rampant in our broken world.

But what do we do? What do we do when these things happen? And that's what I want to walk through in this series. Because I know what I've done—maybe you've done the same things that I've done. You detach, right? You just detach from things. Rather than facing the emotions, you just say, "Ah, I'm just gonna stuff it down. I'm gonna proclaim to myself and others it doesn't really matter. I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm fine, fine, fine, fine, fine."

Right? We can fake it, right? We can detach from everything. We can also just fake it. We can say, "Oh, everything's okay, brother. Hi, how you doing? Yo, everything's good. Everything's peachy." Right? We can distract ourselves. Instead of confronting the pain, we can attempt to escape it—whether it's through drugs, the night at the bar, through porn, through more alcohol, through more shopping, through more work. We can just escape it.

And then God invites us to cast our cares on him, for he cares for us. For decades, the idea among Christians and the church has been just deny those negative emotions, just pray them away. The troubles will be totally absent, right? They're foreign to those people that are in the Bible.

But if you've ever read your Bible—at least two pages of it—you've seen that that's not the case. Placing our faith in God is pouring our heart and all of its emotions to God. This is where Psalm 62:8 comes in, where it says, "Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us."

One who's known for doing this—and one of the writers of Psalms—I don't know if you've ever read Psalms. There's lots of them, lots of them. And if you get stuck on 119, it's going to take you days. And so, but you go and you read Psalms, and most of it—they say at least 50 to 70 percent—I don't know how somebody says 50 to 70 because that's a big jump between. I guess it depends on what mood you're in, right?

50 to 70 percent of the Psalms are lamenting, are just the "woe is me," all the lamentations. So if you're on that in your Bible reading plan, I'm sorry. But what we see is this man named David.

Just a little bit of backstory on David: he was a shepherd boy that watched his father's sheep. He was about his father's business. He was the youngest in the family of 12 brothers, and he was the smallest as well. One day, though, Samuel showed up and anointed him to be the next king of Israel.

We see a little bit more about his life as he is protecting the sheep one day from a lion, and he's protecting the sheep one day from a bear. He just takes care of them with a slingshot, with a rock, with his bare hands. He fights to save these sheep. He later on defeats a giant. So we see this upward trajectory of his life. Everything is going good. He becomes the number one harpist in all the land, just rocking it out for the king.

I don't know how to play a harp, but crash! If you read through the story, it all crashes down. And now David is forced to flee because the king is ready to kill him. He saw his being told by Samuel, "You're no longer king."

On one occasion, while hiding in a cave, David writes this. He says, "With my voice I cry out to the Lord; with my voice I plead for mercy to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my troubles before him. When my spirit faints within me, you know my way in the path where I walk; they've hidden a trap for me."

He's crying out; he's pouring out his heart to God. See, as followers of Christ, there are going to be rock bottoms in our lives. There are going to be valleys in between the mountaintop experience. But today, I'm here to remind you that God longs for us to reach out to him in the midst of those valleys, during those trials, during those pains.

Can we pour out our hearts with all of our emotions? He's a big guy; he can handle it. We have to learn to enter our pain, embrace the darkness with God. John Mark Comer, he actually wrote this book. It says, "My Name is Hope." He said, "God took David's raw, brutally honest lyrics, gushing with fear, anxiety, doubt, depression, and questions about God's faithfulness, and made them a part of the inspired scriptures."

What could God be doing in our lives, even in the rock bottoms? They're going to happen to us all because we live in this sin-ridden world. But God wants to take them and use them.

Remember just a couple years ago, Mandy's speaking in front of the Salvation Army to a group of women who had all lost babies. She probably never wanted to be there, never thought that she would be there. That's not something that you imagine growing up. She was able to be there for them, able to speak hope, able to speak life, able to direct them towards a God that loves.

And God gives us freedom to talk to him this way. A lament is a form of worship and prayer—not venting to God, crying out to him, our heartfelt and honest conversation with him. Psalms 13 ends with David declaring, "But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation."

It's Psalms 13:5-6 where it says, "I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me." That even in all of this mess, I'm going to sing to him. It may not be pretty; it may be one of those ugly things and those ugly cries, right? And maybe that time of worship where you're pouring out your heart to him.

And today, I wanted to give us that chance. Today, we're gonna close with the song that we've been singing around here called "Fear Is Not My Future." You are—that's something that David understood. He understood that it was okay to come to God in lamenting, in crying, in pain, in agony. He knew where to go, but he also knew how to get out of that.

He knew who to trust in the midst of that. And I'm wondering if we can do some of the things that we see David do in the Psalms. In Psalms 142, he says, "I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him."

In verse two, it says when we experience pain and darkness, we see him experiencing pain and darkness and sorrow and troubles and trials. We're not going to detach; we're not going to fake it; we're not going to distract ourselves. We're going to run to God, and we're going to turn to God with our raw emotions.

We're going to cry out for help. David passionately prayed, "Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me."

Psalms 13, at the beginning of that one, he's saying, "How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?" He feels forgotten by God. Anybody else in a dark time that you felt forgotten by him? He's saying, "God, you say, 'Hey, I'm still here, still on this Earth. Don't you forget about me!'" Right? Like, he was the first one to write that song.

And he cries out for help. He cries out for help; he speaks the truth to God. He doesn't hold back. He says, "I cried to you, Lord; you are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living."

We speak the truth to God, and then we place our trust and confidence in God. "I've trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me."

See, when we learn to lament instead of just hide it, instead of stuff it down, we can go on a journey from despair to delight. How long is that journey? I don't know. But will we be honest? Will we be open? God's not shocked by our emotions, no matter how you feel.

Can we pour out our heart to God? Can we lament? Do we understand that he's listening, that he's here to meet us in our pain and our trials?