Know My Name | Message from Katie Hauck

Good morning. How's everybody doing today? Good. Good. Good morning. My name is Katie Hawk. I have been a part of Revolution Church for about five years now. I moved here from Chicago about eight years ago with the love of my life and my family. I want to show you a picture of my family. They'll put it up on the screen. That is some of them. We have 12 kiddos all together, but those are the six that are still in the house with us. Aren't they cute? Yeah. How many of you have kids? Have you ever tried to take a nice little walk with your kids? You have this great idea that you're going to spend this quality time with them, and it's going to be fun, and it's going to be peaceful, and this is what I think that looks like. Everyone's smiling and holding hands and peacefully enjoying nature together, but how many of you know that's not really very realistic? This is just what you post on social media. Let me show you a picture of what it's really like when I try to take a walk with my kids. My oldest daughter and I joke that we should have two albums on Facebook, like the pretty family pictures that we want everyone to see, and then the real, raw, unedited pictures of what life actually looks like. Because to be honest, taking a walk with your kids as much as you love them can kind of be a little bit of a nightmare sometimes. Kids don't really listen, and they run ahead, and they can't keep up, and they want us to carry them. Two years ago, I took my family to Costa Rica.

We were staying in this beautiful resort, and we had a morning free, and I discovered that this resort had a sloth trail, like with real sloths just walking around, hanging in the trees, and I was so excited. I was like, kids, there's something really cool I want to show you. Let's take a walk. And it started off okay, but my kids have a lot of different personalities, so my one daughter, she ran ahead. Like, she had to be at the front. I had to keep calling her back. We didn't know what was around the next corner. There could be a cliff that she could fall off of. Another one of my kids stopped to look at everything, everything. They were so slow. And then another one kept going off the path and was running all over the place, and I'm just trying to keep everyone together. A few times I found something really beautiful, like a waterfall or a cool plant, and I tried to turn it into a teaching moment because I'm a homeschool mom, and that's what we do, but the kids were distracted and not really that interested in learning. They wanted to just keep going. So we're walking, and pretty soon, guess what they said? I'm thirsty. Do you have any water? Yes. I'm hungry. Do you have a snack? Yes. I don't like these snacks. Do you have a different snack? Yes. I'm hot. I'm tired. Are we there yet? This hill is too big. I'm bored. Why aren't we seeing any sloths?

And eventually, they said, can we just go back to the resort? And I got so frustrated and tired of all the whining that I said, yes, let's just go back, and we never got to see any sloths, and as you can tell, I'm still a little sad about that, right? So why am I telling you this story? I want you to keep it in mind as I share a different story, a story about Israel, but really, it's a story about identity and about what happens when people forget God's name, and in forgetting His name, forget their own name. After God created the world, sin entered, and He was separated from His people. He wanted a relationship, but His people were so far from Him, they didn't know Him anymore, so He came up with a plan to use a man named Abraham. Abraham was a man who came to know God. He walked with Him and talked with Him and trusted Him, and through Abraham's descendants, God wanted to show the world His glory and His goodness. Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac had a son named Jacob, and Jacob had a lot of dysfunction, okay? He ended up with 12 sons from four baby mamas, right? He fought with God, right? After fighting with God, God actually changed His name to Israel. So the 12 sons of Jacob became the 12 sons of Israel, or the 12 tribes of Israel, or the Israelites. Okay, now Jacob loved his son Joseph the most, and 10 of the other brothers were really jealous,

so they sold Joseph into slavery and told their dad he was dead. Like I told you, there was some dysfunction, right? God still used them. Joseph went through trials, and he ended up becoming the second in command of Egypt, just under the leader called Pharaoh. There was a great famine, and because of his position, he was able to rescue his family despite what they had done to him, and it's a beautiful story of forgiveness. So the whole family moves to Egypt to be with Joseph. Eventually, Joseph dies, and so did the Pharaoh who loved him. New Pharaoh came and decided that the descendants of Jacob's 12 sons, the Israelites, would make really great slaves. They remained slaves for 400 years. 400 years, that's a long time to be in bondage. It's long enough to forget. Long enough for an entire group of people to lose sight once again of who their God was. So God decided to use a man named Moses to remind them. When Moses was 80 years old, God appeared to him in a burning bush and told him to rescue the Israelites. Moses was afraid, but God promised to be with him. So with the power of God, Moses demanded the Pharaoh let the Israelites go and eventually led possibly as many as 2.4 million people out of Egypt across the Red Sea in one of the greatest miracles of all time. And then God said to his people, let's take a walk. I have this amazing place I want to take you. It's called the Promised Land. It's flowing with milk and honey.

It's more beautiful than you could possibly imagine. It probably had sloths, right? Yeah. So they start their walk and he takes them to the base of a mountain and he said, let's stop here for a bit so I can teach you some things. He gives them the 10 commandments and he begins teaching them about how to live in a relationship with him but the people were distracted and not really that interested in learning. So he takes them a little bit further and pretty soon, God, we're thirsty, do you have any water? So God brings water from a rock. God, we're hungry, do you have any snacks? God rains bread down from heaven. God, we don't like this food, can you send something else? So God sends them quails and then they're like, God, that's too many quails. Can you stop sending the quails? And God's like, come on guys, let's keep walking. So they're walking and they're complaining and eventually they said, God, can we just go back? This is too hard, we don't want to do this anymore. Literally, the Israelites are asking to go back to Egypt, back to slavery and bondage because the walk with the Lord was just too hard. So after so much complaining, God finally said, fine, have what you want. I love you too much to let you go back but I'm not taking you into the promised land.

You can wander here for a while and I'll try again with your kids. And that generation never made it to the promised land. They wandered in the wilderness with no direction for 40 years and they missed out on the incredible destination the Lord had for them. I wonder how often is our life like that where God says to us, let's go for a walk. And sometimes we get way ahead of God and that's a little bit dangerous. We're going too fast and he can't protect us when we're that far ahead. So God is trying to call us back but we're like, God, you're not moving fast enough. Things aren't happening quick enough. I'm in a hurry. This is taking too long, right? Sometimes we stop to look at the world around us and we get distracted and we get a little bit stuck in a place, right? And sometimes we get way off path. We go our own way, we try to discover our own things and we end up walking much further than we ever needed to. And most of the time, we spend the whole walk complaining about the walk. This is hard. I don't like this. This is uncomfortable. I don't wanna be here. Just let me go back.

How many times do we need God to just take our hand like a child so that we can stay on the path? If we could just learn to walk with him, to be with him, to enjoy the lessons, to trust his provision, how much more peaceful would our lives be? Do you know on my sloth walk in Costa Rica who never left my side? My husband. Not once, and do you know why? First, he trusted me. He trusted that I knew where I was going and he trusted that I had a plan. And second, he just wanted to spend time with me regardless of what we were doing. He loved me. He wanted to walk with me. He wanted to talk with me. It doesn't matter where we're going. What if we could look at our father that way? Right, trust where he's taking us and just enjoy being in his presence. But you see, my husband could do that because he's mature, but my children, they're just babies. But sometimes we are those babies, right? But God needs us to get to a point where we grow up and we become the bride of Christ and we hold his hand walking next to him. Whatever comes, whatever trial, whatever is around the next corner,

never leaving his side. That's where God wants us. How many of you in here, and you don't have to raise your hand if you don't want to, but how many of you in here read your Bible regularly? I love how there are so many different ways to read the Bible. It's so unlike any other book. Right? Some people can meditate on one scripture for like days. And other people study a specific topic or a word. But that's not how I can do it. I'm not that way. I feel this need to see the big picture of the Bible, the whole story. Right? So I read the Bible over and over and over, trying to understand the people and the structure and the timelines. And so every year, I start in January with Genesis. And Genesis is an amazing book that explains creation all the way through that story of Joseph that we talked about. And then in Exodus, it describes Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt and giving them the Ten Commandments. And then it goes downhill a little bit, OK? You get to Leviticus. Leviticus is a lot of laws. And that's a little bit challenging to read, right? And then you get to numbers.

And God tells Moses to number the people. So there's a lot of names and a lot of numbers, right? And then you get to Deuteronomy, which means repeated law. So you literally get to just read all those laws over again, right? And I usually just kind of hurry through those three books, right? Because I want to get to where Joshua finally leads the people into the promised land, OK? But this year, I was a little bit more intentional about reading those books, OK? And when I'm in the book of Numbers, something jumped out at me. I had been missing a very important part of the story. And it blew my mind, OK? On the walk that God had with the Israelites, do you know how long it took God to bring the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the edge of the promised land? Two years. Two years. Not 40 years, two years. After giving them the Ten Commandments, God brought them to the edge of the promised land. And they're standing there looking across the Jordan River where they could see what was in store on the other side. Less than two years after being rescued from slavery and crossing the Red Sea, they're standing there staring at the amazing promise of God like it's right there.

And God, who I'm sure was so excited, was like, here you go. Look. Look where I brought you. Go. Take possession of your land. And guess how the people responded? They were like, eh, I don't know. I'm not so sure. I mean, it looks OK from here, but what if it's really not that great? What if we came all this way, and then we cross over, and it's really not that good? And God's like, no, guys, it's great. It's awesome. Go get it. And the people were like, I don't know. We're still not sure. Can we send some people over to check it out before we make that decision? So God agreed, and he told them to send one spy from each of the 12 tribes over there, and they did. And the spies were gone for 40 days, and they came back, and they said it was the most beautiful land they had ever seen, better than you could possibly imagine. They brought some fruit back from the land that was more delicious than anything they had ever tasted. But they said there were some people in the promised land, people who weren't like them. 10 of the spies came back terrified. They said, the people over there are huge.

They are giants. We cannot defeat them. Compared to them, we look like grasshoppers, grasshoppers. I want you to think about what that word implies. It implies that something is insignificant, weak, inferior, small, easily crushed. That's how the Israelites saw themselves. Two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, disagreed. They said this in Numbers 14, verses 8 through 9. They said, and if the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us safely into that land and give it to us. It is a land rich, flowing with milk and honey. Do not rebel against the Lord, and don't be afraid of the people of the land. They are only helpless. Pray to us. They have no protection, but the Lord is with us. Don't be afraid of them. But the people were. They were terrified. They tore their clothes, and they cried out, and they begged for God to take them back to Egypt. They asked God, why would you rescue us and provide for our need, walk us so far just to kill us? They actually said they wished that they could have just died in the wilderness. So they're standing on the edge of their promise, looking at it, but they couldn't take the step to get it. God was literally handing them a gift of hope and a future, handing them blessings, but they just wanted to go back

to where it was comfortable. In that moment. All of them, except Joshua and Caleb, forgot who God was, so they forgot who they were. Now, their main complaint is they weren't like those people. They said, we are insignificant and inferior. Their fear caused them to make excuses, they complained some more, and this, this is when God said, fine, have what you want. Die in the wilderness and I'll try again with your kids. Makes me wonder how many of us have ever let fear stop us from doing something God called us to do, or maybe being intimidated by other people. Can I be honest with you, fear is something that I used to struggle with a lot. Like, I used to be afraid to talk to people. The idea of standing on a stage would make me absolutely sick, and sharing Jesus with someone else, like, no way. Zero, zero chance I was going to do that. But about six years ago, the Lord invited me to know him more, and to walk with him in ministry. And I wasn't exactly sure what that would entail. It started as just posting fun facts on Facebook, of interesting things that I learned when I was reading the Bible. But the Lord slowly began to stretch me. And he would say things like, talk to that stranger, offer to pray for your server, start praying out loud in this group. And I actually enjoyed it. And it didn't take long, and I started to get way ahead of God, right? Like, I had all these ideas, and all these things that I wanted to do, but it didn't usually turn out like I thought it was, because I was sort of all over the place, right? I started a blog, no one read it. I started a Bible study, no one came.

I started a YouTube channel, no one watched the videos. I started a class, no one showed up. And this went on for years. And guess what I did? I complained. Why isn't anything happening? Why aren't people coming? This isn't fast enough. Why am I wasting my time? And then one day, the Lord spoke to me and he said, Katie, I'm ready for you to speak. And I literally, I was sitting in church, I laughed out loud. And God said, it's time. So I began arguing with him. How many of you argue with God when you think his ideas are super ridiculous, right? And this was absolutely ridiculous idea. So I'm arguing with him, and all of a sudden my hand starts moving. And it starts writing. And it's writing so fast I could barely keep up. And I didn't know what it was writing, but it was writing. And when it finally stopped, I looked down and I saw a list. And the list had all the things that I had tried that didn't work out. And I was like, cool, God, thanks. Thanks for reminding me of all my failures, right? And he said, Katie, I allowed you to do those things. I allowed you to get off the path, but I promised to work all things together for your good. And I didn't understand. But he gently and lovingly explained to me, that time you wrote a blog, I was teaching you to write. That time you started a Bible study, I was teaching you how to study my word.

That time you made videos, I was teaching you how to share your faith. That time you taught a class, I was teaching you how to speak. I used each and every one of your so-called failures to get you where I needed you to be because I have a plan for your life that will glorify me. You see, we had taken a break so he could teach me some things. So I took that step of faith and I began to speak. And my first time was in this tiny church. There were maybe 25 people there. And I was so scared. I was shaking. I almost threw up. But each time that I did it, I got a little bit more comfortable. And I started telling God, I want more. I want more. And then one day the Lord spoke to me and he said, okay, you want more? Go to celebrate recovery. And I was like, I don't even know what that is, right? And I was like, God, I know you brought me this far. And I know that you have provided for my every need. But I don't know about this because those people seem a little scary. I'm like, they're not like me. Those people are giants. Those people are intimidating. Lots of those people have been in jail, right? I'm just a grasshopper. I would be completely insignificant. I don't have a background in addiction. And I think this is our problem. Letting fear and intimidation stop us from our calling, right? Throughout the entire Bible, people struggled to trust God.

It has been thousands of years and we have heard thousands of stories of God's faithfulness. Yet we still struggle. For three years, I stood at the edge. I could see where God was calling me, but I could not take that step. And so I pulled back and I got behind God in our walk together. And I went back to where it was comfortable. And I tried to create some of my own paths and do things my own way. But God is so gracious. He would just stand on the path and wait for me to catch up, gently trying to direct me back to him. And then one day, my daughter came to me. She had a friend who was struggling with addiction. And she said, I'm gonna take my friend to celebrate recovery. Do you wanna come? And I said, why don't you go check it out first and tell me what it's like? Literally, like Israel, I sent a spy, okay? So my daughter came back and she's like, it's better than you can imagine. It is amazing, like the Lord is there and it's powerful and it's incredible and you have to come. And in that moment, I had a choice. I could keep wandering around in my comfort zone complaining that God wasn't using me the way that I thought he should, right? Or I could trust that the God who rescued me, the God who provided for me, the God who taught me to read, write and read

and study and share my faith, that that God might know what he's doing. And so I took that step. And today, celebrate recovery is one of the greatest blessings of my life, right? But back then, fear stopped me from going. I didn't go because I thought it was a grasshopper. I thought it was insignificant and not qualified and not like those people. I wanna show you something that Israel couldn't see and something that I couldn't see about myself either. 38 years after the Israelites refused to enter the promised land and God told them to go wander in the wilderness, Joshua is finally ready to lead the next generation in. So he sends men across the Jordan River to prepare and they meet a woman there named Rahab. She's lived there her entire life and when she talks to them, she reveals something shocking to them. You have to read this. It's in Joshua 2 9-11. This is Rahab speaking. She says, I know the Lord has given you this land. We are all afraid of you. Everyone in the land is living in terror for we have heard how the Lord made a dry path for you through the Red Sea when you left Egypt and we know what you did to Shihon and Og, the two Amorite kings east of the Jordan River

whose people you completely destroyed. No wonder our hearts have melted in fear. No one has the courage to fight after hearing such things. For the Lord your God is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below. But hold on. The Israelites thought they were grasshoppers but the people on the other side, they were afraid of them. Not just afraid, terrified because they thought mighty warriors were about to come in and defeat them. Isn't that crazy? Rahab knew God's name. She knew his reputation. She knew what he had done and because she knew who he was, she knew who the Israelites were even when they couldn't see it for themselves, right? Because the Israelites could not see themselves the way everybody else saw them. They couldn't see what they looked like with God on their side and maybe that's the same for you. Maybe you can't see what you look like with God on your side because how many of you have felt like that grasshopper? Insignificant and weak and inferior and small. How many of you have seen what the Lord has in store for your life?

Like it's right there and he's called you but you're stuck because maybe you aren't like those people. Maybe you think those people are better than me. Those people are stronger than me. Those people are smarter than me. Those people are more experienced than me. I'm not good enough. Listen to this. You know how Moses, God gave Moses the 10 commandments, right? One of those commandments is do not take the Lord's name in vain. Do you know what it means to take the Lord's name in vain? Most people think it's cussing, okay? The definition of in vain means disrespectful or irreverent. Okay, so cussing fits, right? But there's more. It says don't take God's name in vain. So you have to ask what is God's name? Okay, and you could say God has lots of names because he does, right? God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim. But what did God tell Moses his name is? When God was talking to Moses in the burning bush and Moses was afraid to go tell the Pharaoh to let the people go, what did God say his name was? Exodus 3.14.

I am who I am. Say this to the people of Israel. I am has sent me to you. When God told Moses his name was I am, he wasn't just giving him a title to put on a business card. He was saying, know my name. Really know it because when you do, everything changes. So if he tells Moses, my name is I am, and he tells Moses don't use my name in vain, then don't you think saying things like I am just a grasshopper is taking the Lord's name in vain? What about I am weak, I am not good enough, I am sick, I am tired, I am a bad mom, I am ugly, I am a loser, I am nothing, I am an addict, I am a felon, I am alone, I am too far gone. Those words are disrespectful because they make God a liar, because that is definitely not what God says about you. We have got to start using words that line up with God's Word, which is truth. And guys, it goes deeper today than it did in Moses' day, because if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you. And don't you think when you say things like I am stupid, you're actually calling God stupid, right? The Israelites didn't know who they were, and most of you don't either, because you don't truly know who the great I am is. So if you want to know your name, if you want to know who you really are, you have to start by knowing his name, because when you do, you can attach the right words to who I am, right? Words like I am chosen, I am beautiful, I am forgiven, I am free, I am prosperous, I am healed, I am strong, I am worthy, I am called, I am victorious, I am complete.