Faith | The Call - Genesis 12

Pray with me. Father God, we come before you right now in weakness. We are only made strong through our Savior, Jesus' love. Cornerstone. He's who we built our life upon. So Father, that's why we're here. We're here first and foremost to celebrate who you are and what you've done, and then we're here in expectation and hopes of receiving something even more from you. As we open up these scriptures today, Father, I pray that you will do what only you can do, that your Holy Spirit will move in our hearts, in our minds, and in our lives today. It's in Jesus' beautiful name I pray, amen. Y'all grab a seat. What's up, we good? Woo! Yeah, yeah, hey, happy Father's Day, fellas. Happy Father's Day. Hey, here's the thing. Glad you're here, really glad you're here, because you know this, that's why you're here. The living God is not going to ask you one day how you stewarded your golf swing. He's going to ask you how you stewarded your home, your family, your kids, your wife, and all the other things that he entrusted you with. And so the fact that you are here right now while golf courses are full, it makes my heart full that you are here.

So ladies, let's thank the men, the fathers in our lives being here today. Good news, this one's super easy today, y'all. We're in a new book of the Bible. We got a new key word. For those of you who like to stare at me and not turn in your Bibles, you got no excuse today, because guess where we're going? Genesis, you can find that one. All right, so we're going to go table of contents and just hang a right, and you're going to be there. All right, so that's the good news. It's Genesis chapter 12. We got a new key word today, and that key word is faith. That's what we're going to be diving into. Now, if you're a child of the 80s, you hear the word faith. This is unfortunate, but for some of you, you hear a George Michael song that immediately begins going off in your head. We're going to try to erase that tape for you for the next several weeks, okay? If you're a child of the 90s and you went to church camp like I did, maybe you immediately think of a faith fall. Sometimes you call them a trust fall. Anybody experience that as a little team-building exercise that sometimes goes bad? I've seen it. I've seen it go bad.

What I think about when I think of faith is something we used to have in the before times called high dives. How many of you are old enough like me, and you remember you could go to a public school back in the, or public pool back in the old days, and they would have these diving boards that were no less than 15 feet off the water. Anybody remember that? Show of hands that's right. We didn't care back then, man. We just let kids just fling themselves out into oblivion over a highly chlorinated pool. That's what we did. It was awesome. It was the best. It was the greatest. When I was a kid, I used to visit my dad every other weekend and then I'd spend five or six weeks with him in the summer, and for several years, he lived in Indianapolis, and so what he would do when he had me in the summers is he would literally sign me up for every camp the YMCA had to offer. Didn't matter what it was. It could be basket weaving. He would sign me up for the thing, and so I remember vividly, he signed me up for this camp. I don't even know what the thing was, but it culminated, but with the last day of camp, they took us to this big inner city pool,

and this pool did not just have a high dive and a regular diving board. This pool had Olympic platforms. Remember these? How many of you have a memory of going to a pool and they had these? Every 10 feet up to 40 feet, they had these platforms, and the wild thing was, again, this is before the internet. There was no online waiver that your parents signed, but there was some sort of a permission slip that was signed because they issued us these bracelets based on which platform we were allowed to go off of, and so I can only presume that on the first day of camp, when my dad dropped me off, someone presented him with a piece of paper that said, do you allow your child to jump off of the following distances off of the water, blah, blah, blah, and my dad checked the box that said, any and all, I don't care, let him jump off of whatever he wants. Now, I gotta tell you, and I remember this vividly, they issued us purple bracelets for those of us whose parents didn't love us, and I remember getting the, I was nine. I remember getting the purple bracelet and thinking, I didn't want the purple bracelet, man, because you know what that did? It took away all my excuses. If they would've issued me like a pink bracelet,

I could've complained about my dad all day. I could've gone, well, I would've jumped off the 40-foot hideout if my dad loves me and stuff, I don't know, and so I didn't have any excuse, and so I had to climb up, and I'm telling you, every 10 feet, it just looked worse and worse and worse, and I got to that 40-foot one, and many of you remember the feeling. When you get up there, you're like, this looks so much higher from up here than it looked from down there, and then you add your height to the equation, that's a few more feet, and then you go out there, and it's not like a diving board. There's no give to it. You're just standing on a big old thing of concrete, and you're looking down, and you're thinking, I'm gonna die if I do this, but if I don't, I gotta go face my. My buddies, and so I guess I'm gonna die. I guess that's what's gonna happen. Because here's what you can't do. You can't get up there and look down and then climb down and say to all your friends, I totally believe that I would've been fine. I just didn't wanna jump. But I totally believe that I would've been fine. Here's what faith is.

Write this down. This is so important for the rest of the series. It's demonstrable trust that God is who he says he is. And will do everything that he's ever promised to do. Faith is not standing on the edge of the platform going I believe I'll be totally fine. I believe God is who he says he is and he'll do everything he's ever promised to do. Faith is jumping. That's what faith is. And we're gonna literally dive into a case study of faith in this series. I couldn't be more excited. It's about a dude you've heard of. His name was Abram. Later his name becomes Abraham. And we're gonna just kinda track with him on his faith journey that we have so sanitized in the church because he's in the hall of faith. It's mentioned in Hebrews. We just pretend like he always got it right all the time. And what we're gonna watch is we're gonna watch Abram, later Abraham, wrestle with his faith literally at every turn. And so that's what we're gonna dive into today. Check this out. Genesis chapter 12 beginning in verse one. Now the Lord said to Abram, in some translations many actually said had said to Abram. This is actually past tense.

And what we learn from reading the previous chapter and the chapter in the New Testament is we find out that this command that's about to come from God came to Abram while he was in his hometown and his hometown was called Ur. Everybody say Ur. This is kinda fun to say, I know. And it's called Ur of the Chaldeans and it's actually modern day Iraq. And we've done a lot of archeological digging there and here's what we've discovered. Ur of the Chaldeans was actually a really happening place. It was a thriving area. People were literate and well read and highly educated and don't miss this, they were pagan moon worshipers. They worshiped a created thing instead of the creator. File that away. Now the Lord had said to Abram while he was in Ur, go, here's what he wants him to do. Go from your country, you gotta leave your country behind and your kindred, that means like your extended family and your father's house. He's about 70 something years old. You talk about failure to launch, like bro, time for you to get out of your daddy's house. To the land that I will show you. He doesn't say where to, he just says here's the three things you're supposed to leave behind and I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I'll make your name great

so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and in him who dishonors you I'll curse and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. That's the point of this whole thing, that you bless others. So Abram went as the Lord had told him and Lot went with him. Now here's what I want you to notice. Casual reading makes it look like God said go and Abram's like I'm in. Because it goes from verse three to verse four but that's not the way it went down and I also want you to notice his nephew Lot went with him. What we find out, again if you read in the previous chapter and you read the New Testament, is the message came to him while he was in Ur and we don't know if he went to his dad and was like hey, here's the message from God that I got, I'm supposed to go and his dad's like uh-uh, you ain't leaving without me but either way he leaves Ur but he takes with him his dad and his nephew. So he's only one for three. He leaves his country behind but he takes some extended family with him and he takes his father with him. He's being partially obedient. You ever go to the pool and watch little kids go off the diving board? It's one of my favorite things to do.

It's the funniest thing ever especially if it's their first time going off the diving board because some kids what they'll do is they'll scoot out there on the edge of the diving board. Some kids will roll off the edge. I've even seen kids dangling off the edge, hanging on to it by one arm while there's a parent underneath dog paddling and trying to yank them off the diving board. Now if that's how it goes down, do you really get to go back to the pool deck and go I jumped off the diving board today? No, you got pulled off of the diving board today. That was like partially going off the diving board today. And here's the thing I want us to understand today. Partial obedience is complete disobedience. Partial obedience is complete disobedience. Don't expect God to bless complete disobedience that we like to veil as if it was just partial obedience. Let me get real personal here for a minute. Don't pray to God bless this relationship that you know is against his will for your life because you're sleeping with somebody that you're not married to. It doesn't matter that you sit next to each other in church. Why would he bless sin? He's not gonna do that. He's not going to aid and abet you in sinning. Just because your business is in a little pamphlet

that says. Christian businesses doesn't mean that he's gonna bless you as you steal from your employees. Because you put a little fish on your logo. God doesn't bless our partial obedience because it is total disobedience. And you may be right now going, well but here's the thing, it looks like God blesses people who do things like that. Like you may be looking at somebody going, I know that dude is cheating on his wife and everything he touches turns to gold. I know that as she leads her business, she is cheating on her taxes, she is misrepresenting everything, she's stocking away money that's illegal, she's doing all the things and nobody's caught her and she's getting ahead. And here's what I need you to understand. Yeah man, that has an expiration date, you understand? God doesn't miss anything, he is not mocked. And here's what we do, we so often do this. And here's the challenge, don't mistake God's judgment for God's blessing. There's a dynamic that we miss in the New Testament that it would really help our culture right now and especially our Christian culture if we would remember this dynamic as we look out over the landscape of what's going on in our country and around the world.

And Paul talks about it in Romans chapter one. Look at what he says about, this is just people in general. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore, watch what God does. I think these are the scariest words in the Bible. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. He gave them up. Here's one of the scariest things that God will sometimes do. In his judgment, he will say to us, you want that more than you want me? Thy will be done. You want him more than you want me? Go ahead. You want her more than me? Go ahead. You want what you claim to be your sexual identity more than you want me? Thy will be done. And he gives people up in judgment to the lusts of their flesh so that they can find out that that is a dry well that will not satisfy.

And for a minute, it's all fun and games until it's not. And we run away going, thank you, God. And we got all the money and we got all the wealth and we got all the status and we got all the power and we got all the sexual fun. We got all the stuff until we don't and we end up in squalor. And it's all fun and games until it's not. We gotta be honest and we gotta admit that sometimes what we do is we literally go before the living God and ask him to bless our sin. And because he's so kind, he will not do that. That would be the most unkind, unloving thing that he could do. For Abram, in his partial obedience that is really just total disobedience, he picks up shop, he leaves Ur, he goes with daddy and nephew, and he lands in a place called Haran. Here's what Haran means, parched. It's a desert, it's a dry and weary land. Anybody ever been in a spiritual desert? You're just dry, you're just weary, you're just hungry, you're just thirsty, and you're just going, God, I feel so dry, so weary, so thirsty, and I just don't know when this is gonna end. We've all been in that place. And here's the thing we have to understand, sometimes the most loving thing God does is allow us to learn that the thing we want more than him

will not satisfy us. Sometimes he takes that thing away from us that we desire more than him, and that is his love and his kindness and his grace and his mercy that does that. So here he is, he's been told where to leave, he's been told where to go from, but he has not been told where to go to. And here's my question, what do you do when you've been given the from but you haven't been given the to? You know what you're supposed to leave behind, you just don't know what you're supposed to pick up. So maybe right now you're like, man, I know I'm supposed to leave that relationship behind because we're told to flee from sexual immorality, and that's what this relationship is, and so you know who and what you're supposed to leave behind, but you don't know who and what you're supposed to run to. It's a legitimate question. What do you do when you know you're supposed to leave behind an addiction, but you're like, man, my entire community revolves around this addiction, if I leave that behind, I leave them behind, and then who will I have with me in my life? Legitimate question. You know your job is killing you, and it's destroying your family,

so you know that you should leave it behind, but you don't know what you're gonna do next. You know you're called to abandon the pursuit in your life, maybe it's a career path, a degree program, an athletic pursuit, but you don't know what you're supposed to pursue now. Those are all great questions. I'm not gonna pretend today that those are easy answers and it certainly wasn't easy for Abram. Verse four, Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. We learned in the New Testament the only reason is because his dad died. He's 75 years old, he's been hanging out with his dad, hedging his bets, and finally Abram took Sarai, his wife, but he still got Lot, Lot, his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered and the people that they had acquired in Haran. He left dad behind, but not Lot. Left his hometown, finally he's impartial, obedient still. And this is easier said than done. If God tells you to leave everyone and everything, leave everyone and everything. But that's a lot easier said than done. I'm like, remember that rich young ruler, that avaricious young man we talked about a few weeks ago? Like Jesus says, hey, go sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and then come follow me. And what did he do? He walked away sad, why?

Because the things that he had, he treasured more than he treasured Jesus, that's why. So here's the question I have for all of us today. Are you trying to take something with you that needs to be left behind? For Abram, it was Lot. What is it for you? And why are you holding on to it? And again, we're gonna see this dynamic that because he holds on to Lot, this comes back to bite him again and again. And they set out to go to the land of Canaan. And when they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem to the yoke of Morah, and at that time, shockingly, in the land of Canaan, the Canaanites were there, they're in the land. And then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, check this out, this is very important, to your, circle this word, offspring, I will give this land. So here's the two big obstacles. So now he's been making clear, like, okay, not just from, but here's where you're going to, you're gonna go to Canaan, and here's what's gonna happen, I'm gonna give this land to your offspring, and if you're Abram, your objection is like, well, okay, God, but I've noticed a couple things that seem problematic about this whole proposition and promise that you're making. Number one, in Canaan, there's the Canaanites,

and they're wicked, and they're evil, and they're violent, and it's like me and Lot and our family. Like, that's it, what are we gonna do about these Canaanites in the land? Secondly, I noticed you said you were gonna give this land to my offspring, only one problem, I don't have any offspring, I'm 75, my wife is 65, and we learn in the previous chapter, Sarai, his wife, was barren, they're infertile, she had no child. So if you're Abram, you're just going, how in the world is this gonna pan out? And here's the thing, like, he doesn't have the benefit that we have, like, we can look back and go, the tomb is empty, anything is possible, he doesn't have that, he just has the promise of God. And faith is demonstrable trust that God is who he says he is, and will do everything that he's ever promised to do. And here's one of the things I just, I sense that a whole bunch of us need to hear, and it's this, the obstacles to God keeping his promises are his obstacles, not yours. You with me? I'm preaching to myself here. The obstacles to God keeping the promises that he's made in his word to you are his obstacles, they're not yours. We've got one job, obey God and leave the consequences to him, but here's what you and I do. We try to do the things that only God can do and ignore the things that he's doing in our hearts

in the process. And we try to intervene, we try to fix the things that only God can fix and forget to do the only thing that we can do, which is to obey him. And it shows up all over the place, like, parents, look right at me. You can't fix your kids, did you know? The thing that you want most for your children is the one thing you can't do for your children. You can't change their hearts. You can do behavior modification, you can make threats, you can read all the books, you can go to the seminars, you can do all the things, but the thing that you want desperately the most for them is the thing that you absolutely can't do. All you can do is be faithful on your knees in prayer to your children and for your children, but you can't change your children. And I don't know about you, but man, when I find myself in circumstances that I don't like, what I do is focus all my attention on the circumstances, and I try to get a hold of those circumstances and manipulate them and change them and get ahead of them and work them out for my benefit, and one of the reasons I do that is because that's a distraction tool from what God is trying to accomplish in my heart in those circumstances. And I have a choice, am I gonna trust and obey? Because that's really, at the end of the day, all I can do. So here's Abram, he's got all these questions, he's gotta have all these objections, like he's looking

at the. Land of Canaan going how in the world is this gonna happen and he's just he's in a place where he gets to choose am I gonna trust God or not? so He built an altar to the Lord Who'd appeared to him and from there? He moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and he pitched his tent and watch the circle these words these are so important with Bethel on the west and I on the east and there he built an altar to the Lord and he watched what he did he called upon the name of the Lord Bethel means house of God I Means destruction and all your AI conspiracy theorists you're like there it is in the Bible It's gonna kill us all like I mean go with it if you want to but here's the deal We know exactly what it's like to live between these two places. Don't we? This every day of our life We got a choice am I gonna move towards what I know is true and right and best and God's will or am I gonna Move to what I know is gonna lead to my destruction and we live right in the middle of that every day I mean, it's from cover to cover in the Bible choose this day who you will serve. I Present to you life and death choose life Jesus says there's this broad road that leads to death a narrow way that leads to life Choose today who you're gonna serve. Are you gonna move towards the house of God Bethel? You're gonna move towards destruction. Are you gonna move towards? I and what did he do while he was living right there in between the house of God and destruction? He built an altar and what did he do? He called upon the name of the Lord. What's that called worship? Next year, here's what we're gonna do We're gonna spend the first half of the year journeying through Genesis It's a big endeavor. And then we're gonna spend the second half of the year journeying through Revelation And here's what we're gonna learn. This is the theme from beginning to end Worship is war Abram is warring for his faith in the middle of these circumstances

When he has all of these choices in front of him He decides to fight his battle like we do on our knees in prayer with our hands held high and singing We offer a sacrifice of praise when life feels out of control We defiantly worship him no matter the circumstances because we are gritty disciples committed to following Jesus No matter what we are resilient faithful followers of Jesus and so we sing and we pray and we bring ourselves and Everything we got questions doubts and all to him and especially when we're living in the land in between You see Abram don't forget this. He's building an altar to the Lord and he's calling upon the name of the Lord He's worshiping the Lord. Who did he used to worship? What did he used to worship? He came from earth. What did they worship there the moon? He was a pagan idolater see ultimately this is about leaving idolatry behind And for us we may go. What do you mean leaving idolatry behind? We're not idolaters You know what CS Lewis called that? chronological arrogance Chronological snobbery, but we look back at all those primitive people go. Oh, we're so far superior We're so much smarter to them. We would never bow down and worship a created thing instead of the Creator We would never devote all of our life to something that's temporary instead of devoting our life to the one thing that's eternal We would never do that. I mean what kind of a primitive person worships the moon. I don't know We worship what we see in the mirror. I Mean at least the moonlight keeps the waves at bay. That's pretty cool. You don't do anything like that. I Don't do anything like that And let us not pretend We worship so many created things we worship what we see in the reflection of the mirror how many of us Let's just let's just get real personal how many of us we get our identity and our worth from the Color of the jersey or the name on the front of the jersey of our sons travel baseball team They all say elite ten thousand teams in this town. They're all elite newsflash. No, they're not Right, you know who's elite? Point zero one percent are actually elite But that's not about the kids. That's about us trying to get our identity through our kids

I was preaching in Indianapolis last week right up the road Traders Point from this huge park Many of you know exactly the one I'm talking about that every weekend through the summer makes bank off of us And I told them was like man. Y'all got a great thing going on around here because here's what happens in my town We seed the town with all these different travel baseball teams and put put elite on the front of them And then we drive three and a half hours to come play baseball in your town Sleep in your hotels pay money in your restaurants buy gas over here and then when they hand us the bracket on who we're gonna play all teams from Kentucky and Somebody still hadn't figured out you know what we could have done We could all slept in our own beds Saved a whole bunch of money ate our food and played better baseball, and I said all them y'all are killing it good job of you're making a ton of money off of my people. And the reason it's quiet here and they laughed there is because both places knew it was true. And I'm not throwing stones, by the way. I'm just saying this is the reality of my heart and yours that we will try to get from temporary things what we can only get from the eternal. And when you put that kind of pressure on your kids, it crushes them because they can't be your God. They can't deliver your identity and your worth and your status and they feel the pressure of the whole thing, man. How many of us can say, oh, the journey of my life is trying not to take good things and turn them into ultimate things because they always end up becoming destructive things. Worship is war and there's a constant competition for our hearts. Any of y'all ever watch America's Got Talent? Anybody?

You're afraid to admit it, I get it, I understand. I watched, yeah, big, right here, proud of it. I watched it for the first time a couple weeks ago with my family. I chose it, so it's all on me. But you know what my main conclusion from watching America's Got Talent was at the end of the evening? It was not that America's Got Talent. That was not my conclusion. My conclusion was America's in real trouble. That was my conclusion. In fact, on the night that I was watching, there was this lady who they brought out a sofa and they had her doodle dog on it, some sort of doodle. And her whole thing, Simon's like, all right, what are y'all gonna do? And she's like, I sing opera and he sings with me and it's beautiful, he matches me note for note. And we're like, I bet that's not gonna happen, but let's just watch this train wreck ensue. And it was a train wreck, okay? So she grabs, she's got this dog and she starts singing opera. She's pretty good, she's pretty good at opera. And the dog is just doing this. And you could just sense that he's like, she does this to me every day. Like, she does this to me every day. And he's doing nothing, no response, no singing at all.

And so after a couple minutes of her just trying so hard to get this dog to sing, she stops and they call time out and they're like, hey, this doesn't seem to be working. She's like, give me one more chance, let me try harder. And they're like, all right. And so she scoops up this poor dog. And now she's singing in this dog's ear, forgetting like they can hear frequencies we can't. And I'm like, you're giving him a migraine. That's what's happening right now. And nothing happens. She pours everything into this performance and nothing happens and it reminded me. My favorite prophet, his name's Elijah. That's who I named my oldest son after. He looked at the nation of Israel and went, how long are you gonna go on limping between two opinions if Baal is God, worship him, but if the Lord is God, worship him? And he summoned all the people of Israel and all the prophets of Baal. And he said, come to Mount Carmel, join me. We're gonna have a little competition. And he looked at the 450 prophets of Baal and he went, okay, here's what you're gonna do. Y'all are gonna build an altar. You're gonna sacrifice a bull on it, but you're not gonna set fire to the altar. I'm gonna build an altar.

I'm gonna sacrifice a bull on it and I'm not gonna set fire to my altar. You're gonna call upon the name of your God who, by the way, is supposed to be in charge of the weather, lightning, rain, all the things. And I'm gonna call on my God and the God who answers with fire is the one true God. And he looked at the people and goes, and so y'all gotta decide today whom you're gonna worship and whom you're gonna serve. And they're like, we're in for this. They grabbed their popcorn and he goes, y'all go first. And so then the prophets of Baal, they get to work. They build their altar. They sacrifice a bull. And then they start dancing around the altar. And they, six o'clock in the morning until noon, they're dancing around the altar, pleading and praying before their God. They're working so hard. Meanwhile, Elijah has pulled up a lawn chair and he's got a little fruity drink and he's kind of in and out of consciousness. And every now and then, he just kind of wakes up and watches what's happening. And then finally, he just goes, time out, it's noon. He goes, I know what the problem is. He engages in the ancient spiritual work of trash talk. He's like the Larry Bird of prophets. He goes, I know what the problem is.

Baal doesn't hear so good, yell louder. Oh, no, no, no, you know what it is? He's napping. This is his nap time. If y'all just wait a little longer, I bet he'll wake up at some point and answer you. Or maybe he's away on a trip or my favorite, he's like, oh, I know what it is. He's on the toilet, he's constipated. It's gonna be a while. That's what it is in the Hebrew. Promise. No, it really is. So what do they do? They try harder. And it gets dark really, really quick because they start cutting themselves. There's no water, there's been a famine in the land, there's been no rain, there's a drought. And here they are, dehydrated and bleeding and dancing and running around this altar, just working themselves up to a fever pitch and a frenzy, and no one answers and no one responds until finally, Elijah's like, enough. And he calmly approaches his altar with his sacrifice on it and prays a simple prayer to his God and that God, the. One true God sends fire on the altar. And the people fell on their faces and worshiped. Here's the thing, I want you to understand, false gods always demand that we bleed for them.

Only our God has bled for us. Only our God has bled for us. So here's Abram, right in the land in between, he used to worship false gods, now he worships the one true God. And he called upon the name of the Lord. And that's where we arrive today. I had another high dive experience, one of my favorites. My family and I used to get to travel every now and then together. Back in the day when I was in Colorado, I would travel and I would speak to these youth conferences all the time, these high school conferences, and they'd send me all these different places. I'd preach for a night or two and then I'd fly home. But every now and then they'd get to go with me. There was a location in Durango, Colorado, beautiful spot in the southwest corner of Colorado, at Fort Lewis College. And a couple times I took my family with me. And so I'm preaching at this conference and they had one of these indoor natatorium things where they had a big pool and they had a diving board and then they had a high dive, a 15 foot high dive. And so it's me and my wife, Allie, and we got our two older too, and I think maybe my third one, Silas, was a newborn. And we're standing there on the pool deck and there's all these high school kids,

they're just flinging themselves off of the high dive. It's awesome, it's epic, it's great. And then my son, Eli, Elijah, he comes over to me. He's three, at the most he's four, okay? And he looks right at me, he goes, dad, can I go off the high dive? And I look right at him and go, buddy, absolutely. Go jump off the high dive. And he trots off. And then I turn and I see my wife. And she's looking at me, she's giving me a look that she's given me a few times in our marriage. She doesn't say anything, but I know exactly what she's saying, she's going, I cannot believe I had babies with you. Like, I can't, why did I do this? Why did I choose you, you're an idiot, you're a moron, what are you doing? And I remember looking at her and going, just trust me, there's no way he's jumping off that high dive, he's bluffing. And so he trots off and he gets in line and here he is, this tall, and he's standing there next to these 17-year-old dudes and he's just got his arms folded, he's looking up at them, yeah, yeah. He's like, what are you gonna do? Oh yeah, I'm gonna do that too. I'm gonna do a reverse flying squirrel full gainer, whatever, you know?

And I'm watching him like, it's all fun and games while your feet are firmly planted on the pool deck, right? But then I'm thinking like, what's gonna happen is he's gonna start to climb that ladder, he's gonna get about five or six rungs up that ladder and he's gonna go, no, no, no, no, I'm out. So he gets on the ladder eventually and he starts to climb, but he just keeps going. And then I'm starting to like, I'm wavering a little bit, so I'm just walking towards the deep end. And then I'm thinking, okay, here's what's gonna happen. When he gets to the top of that thing and he's standing there, he's not gonna dare walk out to the end of that. He's gonna see, whoa, this is so much higher from up here than it looked from down there. And he's gonna go, hey, everybody, let me off of this thing. He's gonna climb down the ladder and it's all gonna be well, it's all gonna be good. But when he got to the top, he didn't even really stop. He just started walking. And so now I'm trotting to the deep end. I jump in and I'm holding on to the edge and I'm watching him. I'll never forget this. I'm watching him and he just, he just walks confidently out to the edge and here's what he does. He looks down, he looks at the water,

and then he looks at me and he just does a cannonball. And did I mention that he had the body composition of a cannonball? Because he sunk immediately, it's 20 foot deep. And so, I mean, he just goes straight down. And so I dive down and he's sinking, sinking, sinking, and I'm swimming, swimming, swimming like Dorian Nemo. And I get down to the bottom and we lock eyes like 15 feet down. His eyes are this big and my eyes are this big and we lock eyes and then he starts to rise to the surface. And so we go to the surface together and I'll never forget what I heard when we came through the surface of the water. There were two things I heard. The first thing I heard was just the raucous cheering of everyone inside that natatorium, like cheering, feeling like, yeah, great job, Eli, just going crazy. And the next thing I heard was his little mouth say, dad, and he reached for me and we swam together to the side of that pool. And here's what I know. You can say all day long that you believe that God is who he says he is and he will keep all his promises, but faith is demonstrable trust. It's going all in. There was something in Eli's heart that as he looked at the circumstances

that he was about to jump into, the thing that trumped those circumstances was the fact that his father was right there. And here's what I know about you. Your father. is exponentially better than me. He's a good, good father. And so if he's calling you to it, he will be faithful to you. And so for some of you here today, let's all stand. For some of you here today, here's the deal. Today is the day where you're gonna burn the boats. And you're gonna take a step of faith and you're gonna be baptized today. And you're gonna finally surrender your life fully and all in to Jesus, come what may. And you're gonna get to find out from this point on that he is faithful to do in your life what he's done in so many people's lives. And for some of us right now, you're at the bottom of that ladder and you're looking up and you're going, I can't even take the first step. Because this is too heavy, this is too hard, this is too much. Some of you here, you're at the top of the ladder, you made it this far, but you're thinking about going back down. You're thinking about retreating. And some of you, you're right on the edge.

But the thing that you're carrying, the thing that's going on in your life is just too much. And so what you need to do today is you need to come forward and meet with one of our prayer team people and go, here's the thing, and I need help with it. And would you help me take a step of faith today? We all have a way that we can respond as we look to the faithfulness of our Father, who's done so much in the lives of his people, and we can be confident as we sing these words. He will do it again. He will do it again.