Overflowing Hope

Well, hello, my crossing family, how are you this weekend? Good to be with you, good to see you. Oh my gosh, it is so good to be with you. My name is Jared and I have the privilege of speaking now, I think this is the 16th time that I've spoken here. And every year I say someone clearly fell asleep when they booked this weekend because I don't know why y'all keep having me back. But I say this every year, hi Kenny, I say this every year and I really do mean it. These are some of the finest folks, the staff, the pastors of this church are some of the finest folks I know. And the people of this church are some of the finest folks I know. In fact, to that point, Friday night, we had some friends over for dinner and there was a couple of there who were a part of this church for a long time, moved up to Chicago, they're now part of our church. And we got to talk about Miss Judy, we got to talk about all the people we love here. It is such a special relationship that we have. So if you are maybe new here at any one of the locations, you're checking this church out, here's the great thing, you've been church shopping for a while, you're done. You don't have to shop for another church because you literally have found the best one here. We're so, so glad that you are here. And I actually not only come from Chicago

and come from Soul City Church, but I come from my family. And we are in a really big summer this summer because our daughter just graduated high school. And so we will have this fall two kids, I think we brought a picture of them, two kids in college. And we are very excited. One is at Baylor and one is gonna be at Pepperdine. And so if you know anything about those schools, pray for our finances, pray that God will provide. We need a miracle to do it, but we are so, so excited. And people ask us all the time like, oh, are you so sad about Empty Nester? And the truth is we are so very excited. We don't wanna offend our daughter, but we cannot wait. And so we are enjoying every second that we have this summer. We are hoping for her to have a great launch into this next season of her life. What I'd love to do is I'd love for you to think about something that maybe you are hoping for right now in your life. What's something that maybe you're kind of holding onto some hope, you're maybe wishing you're hoping it would happen. It could be big, it could be small. Is there anything that you're hoping for right now in your life? Maybe you're hoping that your team will advance in the World Cup. Like maybe you are hoping that that will be,

maybe you're hoping that the friend of yours who's so into the World Cup will stop talking about it so much. Maybe that's what you're hoping for. Maybe you're hoping that it won't rain on the fourth. Maybe you're hoping that your kid will stop making dumb decisions and make some wise decisions. My hunch is you probably have a bunch of things that you are hoping for right now in your life. I've got things I'm hoping for. I'm hoping that this summer, maybe the Cubs can beat the Cards once. I'm not asking for a sweep. I'm just saying one more time, this season would be phenomenal. I have some hopes for any Chicago team to actually bring home a championship. It has been a long time. We used to bring them home every other weekend, but now, you know it's been a while when we celebrated the 40th anniversary of our Chicago Bears Super Bowl win last year. It's been a minute, right? We're, I'm hoping, I'm hoping that when our kids are through and graduate from college, I'm hoping they move back to Chicago to live near us. Let me be very clear, near us, not with us, near us. I'm hoping for a lot. My hunch is that you are actually hoping for a lot too, but my hunch is also that sometimes,

as much as we have things that we are hoping for, it's also really, really easy for things to feel hopeless. Like you just kind of look around at the world around you, and it's really easy, maybe even easier than you ever thought it should be to just kind of feel hopeless. Like when I close my eyes, I can hope for all kinds of things, but when I open my eyes and I look at the world around me, it's really, really, really easy for me to feel hopeless. And this is not just sort of a unique thing to maybe you or to me. This is actually a nationwide, a global, actually, epidemic. There is a rise in hopelessness around the world. The CDC actually studied high school students a few years back, and they found that 40% of high school students say that they regularly feel hopeless and in despair. 40% of our kids. They had the same study. 33% of adults say in the last month, they have felt hopeless or overwhelmed. And I don't have to read you stats to figure any of this stuff out. I just, I wonder if you'd be honest right now in this space, wherever you're with us right now, would you raise your hand if at any point over the last month, you have felt maybe a little hopeless, a little overwhelmed, a little defeated,

a little discouraged, raise your hand right now. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of us. And if you came in here tonight, you're like, not me, everything's going great. Well, I can help you feel hopeless real quick. I'm like, if that's you, you're not gonna leave feeling the same way. All you have to do is pull out your phone and just go through your social media feed and you'll begin to feel real hopeless real quick. Just turn on the news and watch the headlines for five. Five minutes, and you're gonna feel real hopeless, real quick. Just go to Uncle Frank's Facebook post, his most recent post. No, don't actually, don't go to Uncle Frank's post. You don't wanna do that. There are lots of ways to feel hopeless in our world. And what I want us to look at tonight, what I want us to just spend some time around tonight is how do I, how do you and I actually stay hopeful when it all feels so hopeless? How can we possibly stay hopeful for all the different various things that we're hoping for in our lives? How can you stay hopeful when it's so easy, when it seems so hopeless around you? How do you hang on when it feels like you've got nothing to hold on to? How do you believe for something bigger

or better for your life? When it seems like maybe for you, things are just getting worse. How do you stay hopeful when it feels so hopeless? That is what we're going to go after. And my hope is that when you leave this space tonight, you will walk out of the space, actually not only feeling hope, but filled with hope. In fact, my prayer for you has been for the last couple of weeks that you would walk out of the space overflowing with hope. Now to understand sort of what that looks like and how that works, I need to understand, like we need to understand what we're talking about when we're talking about hope, because all of us just said, we all have things that we're hoping for in our lives. Let me just be really clear, the kind of hope that I want you to have overflowing in your life that I believe God has promised can be overflowing in your life. What we're not talking about is that kind of cross your fingers, wishful thinking kind of hope. That's not what we're actually talking about. We're not talking about some sort of optimistic outlook for the future. Why? Because that kind of hope is completely conditional

on your circumstances working out. If the bears win, I will then be happy and fulfilled in my life. If this person does that, if this job, it's very conditional, it's very circumstantial, that is not actually the hope that we are talking about. The hope that I'm talking about is actually the kind of hope that holds you precisely when it all falls apart. The kind of hope that can literally hold you up when everything feels like it's falling apart around you. And I believe that there are some folks here today that need, desperately need that kind of hope. And I know that there are folks in your world, family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, that desperately need you to be overflowing with that kind of hope. And so how do we get it? How do we have that kind of hope? We're gonna look at one verse. There is a bunch of verses in the Bible about how we can put our hope in God. We're gonna look at one tonight. And so if you brought your Bible, I'm gonna encourage you to open to Romans chapter 15. If you have it on an app, awesome. We'll make sure to mark you down for extra credit if you brought your Bible today. But we're also gonna put it up on the screen.

And in a moment when it's up on the screen, I'm actually gonna have you shout out a couple of different words because I really want you to pay attention to not only like where you can have, where you can draw this kind of hope from, but where it's actually supposed to go in your life. So when I pause on a certain word, if you've ever been here before when I've been here, you know that I want you to engage with God's word and I wanna make sure that you're still awake. So we're gonna look at Romans 15, 13. This is what it says. All right, we'll put it up on the screen for you as well. It says, may the God of what? May the God of? Yeah, let's say it again though, like we mean it this time. May the God of? There you go. Fill you with what? With all joy and peace as you what? Trust in him so that you may overflow. I love the, thank you for the graphics. With hope by the power of who? The Holy Spirit. May the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Now that's one verse, but there is a lot in it. Let's break that down for just a minute.

May the God of that first phrase, the God of hope. What that means by saying that this is huge is hope is God's character. Hope is God's essence. God is actually what hope is rooted in. My hope is not rooted in anything of this world. My hope is rooted in the one who is my hope. Does that make sense? Hope is who God actually is. And it goes on to say, Paul goes on to say, may this God of hope actually fill you. And what I love about this, he says to fill you with all joy and peace. What he's not saying is God will just give you some joy and peace or just a little bit of joy and peace. Fills you up all the way up with joy and peace, no matter what it is that you are facing. As you, I love this, trust, as you trust in your circumstances. Nope, that's not what it says. As you trust in landing that job. Nope, as you trust in him, the God of hope, not in your circumstances, not in the things that surround you, but the one who is greater. than you, not in headlines, not in policies, not in politicians, not in the influencers who are gonna tell you everything you wanna hear. Nope, we put our hope, we put our trust in Him. Why?

So that you may actually overflow. And I love that, that God fills you with joy and peace so that you overflow with hope. The God of all hope gives you the kind of hope that actually begins to pour out of your life into the lives of others. This is really important. That kind of hope can only come from God, but it's not only for you. Does that make sense? It comes from God, but it's not just for you. It's not just to encourage you. It's not just to give you a better perspective. It's for those around you that it begins to overflow out of your life. And they may get a glimpse of God that they might not otherwise have had, had it not been for the hope that is overflowing out of your life. And then that last little phrase, is by the power of the Holy Spirit. Again, this is not something that you and I can muster up on our own through wishful thinking. This is not hype. We're talking about a deeper kind of hope. This is some deeply spiritual stuff that we're talking about here. And I just wanna make sure we're clear on not only what hope is, but what's in your life right now. And so what I wanna ask you is,

as you think about this idea of being filled so much so with the peace of God, the joy of God, the hope of God, it begins to overflow out of your life. My question to you is, do you know what is currently filling up your life? Because there's things that you're filling your life with. There's things that I'm actually filling my life with. Do you know what it is that you are filling your mind with right now these days? Or what you are filling your heart with these days? Or what you're filling your body with these days? What is it that you are actually filling yourself up on? This is really, really, really important that we know the answer. Is it hope? Is it rooted in God? Or is it just sort of endless TikToks and reels and news updates and numbing out through Netflix and overly thinking about work all the time? What is it that you are filling yourself up with today? How you answer this question really, really, really matters because all of us are being filled with something every day. And the reason why this is such an important question is simply because of this. This is true of me. This is true of you. What fills you, forms you. Let me say that again. What fills you, forms you. Whatever it is that you are filling your life with,

that is what begins to form your perspective, your outlook, how you see yourself and how you see the world. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, the reason maybe that you are feeling so overwhelmed or so hopeless is because you are filling yourself with the things that will always and only leave you feeling that way. What fills you, forms you. You know, there's a reason they call it a social media feed. There's a reason they call it a news feed because that's what I'm feeding myself with. That's what I'm filling myself with. And whatever it is that I'm filling myself with, that is what is actually forming me. And if I were to be really, really honest with you, there are lots of things that I'm not proud that I'm filling myself with. Like to know me is to know that I'm in my like peak white guy, middle-age era right now. And the reason I know that is because if there's a great documentary on, I'm watching it. Specifically, if it's in black and white, I really wanna watch a black and white documentary. A couple of weeks ago, Gina and I were sitting down after getting a bunch of stuff done. We were gonna watch a show together, a movie together. And I noticed that there was a whole documentary on the blizzard of 67 in Chicago. I'm like, babe, let's watch this. We've never seen this.

She's like, what is your problem? Why? I'm just living into this era. So I am also super, super obsessed with American history. I just, I'm so fascinated by this experiment in democracy. And so as sort of a justification for my love of these things, there's nothing wrong with any of those things, but I'll listen to, I'll read, I'll watch a bunch of stuff about politics, about our current circumstances and current situation. And without even realizing it, some days the very first thing I fill myself with is someone else's opinion about the world around me. And it begins to form my perspective. To that point, we had a board retreat, an elder board retreat earlier this week. And I was sitting with one of our elders and we were just talking about some different things. And he mentioned something that was going on in our country right now. And I watched myself like start to vomit all these things that I'd been reading and all these things that I'd been hearing. And I watched his eyes get bigger as I kept talking. And then I realized this person actually has the power to fire me. I should probably shut my mouth at this point because it just began to flow out of me. And that's another important thing for you to actually pay attention to.

Not only what fills you forms you, what fills you flows from you. And it begins to affect every relationship, every conversation, every way you see, everything in the world, your world around you. There is a spouse right now. There is a friend right now. There is a family member right now. There is a coworker right now who is getting the overflow of whatever it is that you are filling yourself with. You cannot help but overflow with whatever it is that you are actually filling yourself with. So again, I ask the question, what are you filling yourself with? What is it that you are filling your mind, your heart, your thoughts, your time, your day? Because whatever that is, it is I guarantee you flowing out of you into the lives of those around you. So if you like me want something better than the most recent podcast or YouTube video that you watch to begin to flow out of you, if you want something that's actually more rooted in the reality of God, something like the hope that Paul talks about in Romans 15, I wanna sort of let you know how you can access one of the best ways for you to access that kind of hope. Just another quick poll. Does anyone here just by raising hands

at any one of our locations, anyone here want that kind of hope for your life? The hope that only comes from God? Yeah, right. The 27 of us here, we want that. We want that. I want that. I know that I want that in my life. So how do we get it? How do we access it? How do you integrate that into your everyday life? Well, there's actually a really profound truth that I believe can become a transformational practice for your life. And it's actually found in Romans 15. You just gotta kind of roll the tape back a couple more verses. Because in Romans 15, verse four, this is also what Paul says about how we can access that kind of hope in our everyday lives. This is what it says in Romans 15, four. Paul says, for everything that was written in the, anyone wanna say it out loud? Everything that was written in the past, thank you, was written to teach us so that through the endurance taught in the scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have what? Hope. This is profound.

What Paul is saying here is, everything that happens in this book, and to his readers, it wasn't as big as this, and it wasn't printed as neatly as this. Everything that they had that they would call the Bible, Paul says, everything that's in it exists to teach you and to encourage you to have hope. That if God brought them through, certainly he can bring you through. If God did it then, certainly he could do it again. If you wanna access that kind of hope that's bigger than anything around you, you root yourself into the reality of the faithfulness of God. We just sang about it over and over and over again. Paul says, everything in this book is written so that you might actually be taught and encouraged with the hope of God. That is how it forms in you. That means that every story that was actually told, every miracle that was performed, every prayer that was said, every promise that was kept, every need that was met is there to encourage you to have a greater sense of hope. Every seed that was split, every ram in the thicket, every promise, every fourth man in the fire, every time God's people were literally down to the wire, those are there to encourage you to have more hope. Every time that God's power was proved,

every time God miraculously moved, every time God came through is to encourage you that you can actually have hope in that God. All of those things actually happened back in the day so that you could have hope today. Isn't that powerful? Isn't that amazing to think about? That is actually what is part of the beauty and the profound mystery and the power of God's word is that it can stir up a deeper level of hope as you look back at God's faithfulness on every page, every line. But you don't even have to have a Bible to see the faithfulness of God that rises up as hope within you because you have stories in your life. You have times where you have seen God come through and you may not even call yourself a Christian yet, but my hunch is you've had some of those moments where you go, I don't know what that was. Maybe it was God. My hunch is there are stories in your life that are there to teach you and to encourage you so that you may actually have hope. See, what Paul is saying here is basically looking back on all that God has done, that is actually what gives me hope for what's to come. So I can look back at all that God has done in this book and it begins to fill me. Fill me up with hope for whatever it is that I'm facing,

whatever it is to come. I can look back at the stories of God's faithfulness, how he has provided for me, how he has healed me, how he has provided for my family, for my friends, for our church, and those actually begin to root me into the reality of the faithfulness of God and hope begins to rise up in me every time I do. If you want that kind of hope, instead of looking around for it, you can look back at the faithfulness of God and watch as that hope begins to rise up in you. Now, I don't know why it is, but at some point when my wife and I got married, someone put the fear of God or the fear of the IRS into us so that every receipt we ever had, we kept. I don't know why that is. We had files of receipts. Back when most receipts were kind of paper, we would keep every receipt for everything in our life because I lived under this constant fear that at any moment the IRS could come knocking on my door and audit me and I wanted to be ready. I wanted to have the receipts. I literally have a very real visceral fear that the IRS is gonna knock on my door in this, the year of our Lord, 2026, and ask me about my purchase from 2003 at Circuit City where I bought, now that's what I call music 14. I want to have the receipt just in case that happens. I don't know why that is,

but we've just kind of locked in on keeping receipts because I wanna be ready just in case they would ever come after me. Thank God we have not been audited and I pray that we will not ever be. But if we were, we're ready. We're ready. And I wonder, I wonder actually, if that's the most important thing you need to do today is to do an audit, to go back. Look at the receipts. Look at how God has been so good to you. So faithful. You have receipt, upon receipt, upon receipt, upon receipt, upon receipt of God's faithfulness in your life, you do. You just haven't done an audit for a while. You think about the time that God provided for you financially when there was no other way. You did not know how God, you did not know how it was gonna end. God came through and provided for you. You got a receipt for that. You think about the time that you prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed for healing and God healed that part of your body or God healed that part of your heart or God healed that person that you love. You got a receipt for that.

You think about the time that God provided you with that job that you so desperately need and you can't believe you have a job that you love this much. You got a receipt for that. You think about the time that God actually brought you to this church and you actually found a spiritual home and you began to find spiritual friends that are helping you become all of who God made you to be. You got receipts for that. You have receipt upon receipt upon receipt upon receipt of God's faithfulness. Some of y'all got some of those Walgreens, 10 pages long receipts of God's faithfulness. And maybe just maybe the reason it feels so hopeless is because you forgot to check the receipts. I got receipts. You got receipts. This book is a book filled with receipts. This room, whatever room you are in right now is filled with receipts. There are people around you that have stories of God's goodness and God's faithfulness. And maybe just maybe if you feel so overwhelmed, if you feel so hopeless in this moment, you need to lean into the receipts of the person next to you so that God might actually stir up some hope in you. And look, this is not just some sort of sermon illustration for me.

I am desperately right now clinging to the receipts of God's goodness and God's faithfulness, specifically for someone that's been in my life for a while now that I love and care about. And I'm seeing them make choices in their life. I just go, I just don't think this is gonna turn out good for you. I just don't think this is the wisest thing for you to do. And no matter how many times I've tried to tell them, like, look, I think you are literally driving your life into a wall. They just continue to do it. And I am, there are days where I just feel I don't think it's ever gonna change for them. I don't know if it'll ever get any better for them. And so I am actively going back on all the receipts of how God brought me through, of how God brought people I love. and care about through. I got names, I got receipts of people who everyone else had written off but God and their lives now belong to him and they are so fully being formed by him. I got receipts and I'm clinging to them as I pray for and as I live in relationship with this person. And I think sometimes rather than looking around to try and find our hope, one of the best things you and I can do is to look back at God's faithfulness and just watch the hope that begins to not only rise up in you but overflow out of you. And so what I thought we could do, I want to take a little bit of a risk in this space, but I feel like I've kind of like earned it over the last 16 years, so I'd like to thank that at least. And what we're going to do is an audit, a live audit in this room in whatever room, wherever you're at right now experiencing this moment, we're going to do a live audit and it's not going to be that weird. It's going to be a little weird but it's not going to be that weird because what we're actually going to do is I'm going to ask you to just start

naming out loud, that's the important part, out loud the goodness and the faithfulness of God. How have you seen it in your life? And it could be as simple as he got me up this morning, I walked, I'm at my body is well. It could be as big as God got us out of that financial ditch that we drove our family into. God, I don't know what it is but I know that you do. And what we're going to do for just a couple like 30-45 seconds is we're just going to start saying those things out loud. Now why out loud? It's because God needs to hear it because he forgot? Nope, it's because you need to hear it and it's because I need to hear it. And you don't know, there may be someone sitting next to you or in front of you or behind you that feels so hopeless right now. And you declaring the goodness, the faithfulness, the dependability, the reliability, the healing, the freedom that only God can bring, you naming that out loud may be exactly what they need so that they can begin to be filled up with hope right now. So that's how we're going to pray and close our time together today. Just whatever it is, top of mind, I want you to just start saying them out loud where you have the receipts of God's goodness and faithfulness and generosity in your life. Does that make sense? So I'm going to ask if you would, we like to take a posture at Soul City where we open our hands up when we pray. So if you would open your hands up and it helps me to close my eyes sometimes so I can really focus in on the moment. And I'm going to invite you just for the next brief moment right now, all over this place, to just start naming out loud the receipts line by line. Remind yourself of how faithful and how good God is. So go ahead, you can start right now, wherever you're at, whatever it is, you can just start naming it out loud. Say it out loud like you actually see it and believe it. God, I thank you for my wife. God, I thank you for her strength. You've been so good. God, I thank you for every way you've provided for our kids. God, thank you for every way you've provided for us financially. God, thank you that you've provided a way for us to cover their college. God, thank you for how you've healed my friend Mark. How you've healed my friend Mark. God, thank you for how you've provided for our church. Thank you, God, for the miracle of our space. And God, we could go on and on and on and on. We could spend the rest of our lives and every word that we have trying to declare your goodness and your faithfulness, and it still would not be enough. And God, I pray specifically for anyone who's feeling overwhelmed. They could barely even make it here today. And they're wondering if you see them, if you know them, if you care

about them. God, I pray even in this moment right now, they would be reminded of how close you actually are, how you've never turned your back on them, how you love them, how you actually have been with them and for them more than they know. I pray right now, God, for all the joy and peace to begin to fill them to the point of overflowing with hope right now. God, I pray that we walk out of these spaces so filled up that it begins to overflow, that we cannot stop telling the stories of your goodness in our lives, in our businesses, in this church. God, thank you, thank you, thank you that we have receipt upon receipt upon receipt upon receipt. And so, God, I pray that we begin to walk out of this So now God, would you form us by filling us space so filled up that it begins to overflow, that we cannot stop telling the stories of your with the hope that only you can give so that it may overflow into every life and every person we encounter. goodness and your faithfulness. God, I pray that we walk out of this space so filled up that it It's in your name that we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for letting me come back one more year. It's good to be with you all. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Y'all are dismissed and I'll see you in about a year or so.