The Waiting Room // Romans 4:13-25

I need to tell you I had a special weekend. On Friday, I drove up to Charlottesville, Virginia and spoke at a men's night. We had about 300 men from center church together and I got to preach God's word to them. That was exciting, but was more exciting was hearing all of the stories 'cause before I went out there, I talked to all the guys and I said, how did you get here and what do you love about this church? And I kept hearing stories of life change. In fact, I heard one story from a guy. He came up to me and he said, "Doesn't Zach Meyer go to your church?" And I said, "Yeah, he said, "He led me to Christ five years ago." And he said, "Now I'm a community group leader. "Please tell him I said hello." And all of that reminds me of this. That one line in that video, and it was like a three and a half minute video, but that one line where he says, "We didn't know what we were missing out on." Do you know that there are so many people, maybe you don't know what you're missing out on, but there are so many people in your life that have no idea what they're missing out on? See, here's one of the truths about churches. Churches do not reach their city. We have a heart for the city,

but churches don't reach their city. Let me tell you who we reach. Two cities reaches. We reach you. We reach you, and we reach the people you know, okay? And so one of the things we're trying to say is how can we better reach you and how can we better help you reach the people you know? And 'cause guys, we're not playing games. We're gonna be centered on God's word and sent into God's world. Okay, that means that we're gonna need to know the Bible's answers to people's questions, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your classmates. So we thought, let's bring somebody in to help us. We brought 'em in about a year and a half ago. We're gonna bring 'em back. Dr. Moller's gonna be with us on April 22nd. I hope you're excited about that. (audience applauding) I affectionately call him the Pope, the intellectual Pope of evangelicalism, okay? He's so smart, AI asks him questions, okay? That's how smart he is. I want you to come, look, any questions that you have, like you have questions about, Iran, Israel, USA, geopolitical, how we need to think about it, bring those questions. If you've got a seeker or a skeptic friend,

you said, I want you to ask anything, I want you to come down to this mic, or that mic, or that mic, and I just want, in fact, he doesn't wanna, we asked him one time. Would you like us to text the questions, have them texted in so that you could kind of see them beforehand or we could curate them. And he said, I want people to come up to the mic and ask me whatever's on the heart. If we are going to be centered in sent, we're gonna need to know God's answers in his words to people's questions in our lives. This event's gonna help, I hope you'll be there. That's right, Lord, we wanna be like Jesus, who was able to answer all of the questions people had. He was a storyteller, but he was also the type of person who had an answer for the questions people had. We wanna be like the Apostle Paul, who when he talked to the Stoics and the philosophers of his day, he knew their culture, he knew their questions. And most importantly, he knew the Bible's answers. Help us to do that, Lord, help, equip us, strengthen us through this event. We ask this in Jesus name, amen. Well, let me tell you something that I know about you and you know about me, even if I don't know you and you don't know me. And here's what it is. We all hate to wait.

Amazon has ruined us, right? Because what happens is, this happens all the time, right? As soon as you go to the checkout page and the pay now page, whatever it is, there's always that if you order in the next 17 minutes and 14 seconds, you can have this tomorrow. What has happened to the human heart in America, in the Western world, really? That if something takes longer than two days, we think something's wrong. I want to take my kids. I got a 14 year old 12 year old almost 10 year old. I so desperately want to take them to a Hollywood video or a blockbuster. They don't exist anymore, but I want to take them there and I want to go, guys, you want to get a certain movie? Ha ha, they don't have it. Somebody else rented it. You can't watch whatever you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it. Well, you wouldn't know that because the Disney Plus and Netflix and Hulu and everything else that we have today, guys, it's very hard to wait. Recently, maybe like some of you, I was waiting too long and it came down to the wire that I needed to get one of those real IDs, okay? So I did what you would probably do. I got on AI, I talked to chat GBT and I said, what is the least crowded DMV in Forsyth County, okay? And I went there.

And I went there early. I had my computer with me, it's like working on my sermon. I'm like, I'm going to be on like an hour or two before anybody else. And I showed up like two hours before it's going to open and there's a ready line. We hate to wait. Now it's silly when we're talking about waiting for little things, like waiting for your food to come 'cause the waiter's taking too long, that's one thing. But when you're waiting for something serious, we have people in our church that are waiting for healing. Today we're gonna talk about what do you do while you have to wait. If you'll turn to Romans chapter four, Paul's done asking questions. He'll ask more questions later, but he's been asking for like two chapters. He's been asking and answering questions, and he's like, I'm just gonna now tell you the story of Abraham. Earlier it was like the type of faith that Abraham had that received the promises of God. Now he's gonna talk about the type of faith that Abraham has to have to continue to believe the promises of God. So if you have to leave early, and I know every once in a while you're grateful for our journals, but I've had a particularly a couple of ladies say there's just not enough space

in these journals for us to take all these notes. Well, let me give you the big idea for this sermon, okay? The promises of God, there's three parts of this, are bigger than you could imagine. But the promises of God will take longer than you want, and there will be a lot of obstacles in your way. The promises of God are bigger than you could even imagine. I'll show you that in a second. They're unfortunately gonna take longer than you want because God's never late, but he's rarely early. And then there's just real life. You're gonna have troubles and trials, problems and pains and pressures. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read you the rest of chapter four, what we have left. And I want you to notice the word promise shows up here five times. The focus of this passage is the promises of God. Starting in verse 13 of chapter four, it says this. For the promise to Abraham and his offspring, by the way, if you're in Christ, this is you, and his offspring that he would be heir of the world. Now, I don't remember God telling Abraham he was gonna be heir of the world. We'll talk about that. They did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith or it is the adherence of the law who are to be heirs.

Faith is null, second time, look at this, and the promise is void. For the law, we don't want the law, I guess. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, there is no transgression. That is why it depends on faith. Up third time, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, not only to the adherent of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. I told you, you're connected to that offspring if you're in Christ. As it is written, I have made you the father of many nations, that's a quote from the Old Testament, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Look at verse 18, in hope, he believed against hope. What does that even mean? How can you hope against hope? We'll talk about that. That he should become the father of many nations as he had been told, so your offspring shall be. That's another quote from the Old Testament. He did not weaken in faith, I guess you can do that. When he considered his own body, so I guess he was realistic, which was as good as dead since he was about 100 years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb,

that's his wife, no unbelief made him waver, so I guess your faith can waver concerning fourth time, the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith and gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what, final time, what he had promised. That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness, but the words it was counted to him were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also it will be counted to us who believe in him, who raise from the dead, Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Okay, if you're new, let me tell you how we do things around here. We are in the book of Romans for a year. That means we started this book in the very beginning of January, you're right, and we're still only in chapter four. By the way, Romans is the deepest book in the entire Bible and the most important letter that's ever been written in human history. So here's what we do, if you're new every week, here's what we do. We open up the next part in this book and we talk about the deepest theological truths possible for like 50 minutes interrupted by the occasional dad joke, okay? It's a system, it's kind of working, don't fight it, okay? I want you to understand, there's God's word and there's God's timing, and if you don't know this,

you're gonna get frustrated. Because this is what every Christian does is they start to read the word, okay? They can begin to be cynical, understandably so, because they start reading all of these unbelievable promises in God's word, and then they watch the news, and then they go on Twitter, and then they interact with their neighbors, and then their marriage is falling apart. Like everything I'm seeing in God's word, or most of what I'm seeing in God's word, unfortunately I'm not seeing in my word, Here's the first thing. I want you to know the promises are bigger than you think, but take longer than you want. I'll show you this, watch this. Just verse 13 will read. The promise, for the promise to Abraham and his offspring, and here's the promise that he would be heir of the world. Now that actually wasn't the promise at the time. I won't take you there, but with your community group, and if you're not in a community group, you're not getting all you could out of this church. You need to get in a community group. Yeah, you need to come to our weekend or all this stuff that Spencer talked about. Okay, in Genesis 12, God shows up to Abraham. He's from the wrong side of town, from the wrong family, from the wrong religion, all that kind of stuff. And God shows up to him and makes a promise to him,

and it's pretty big, but it's basic. It's like, Abraham, leave your house, and I'm gonna bless you, and you're gonna be a blessing to all the nations. And unbelievably, and kind of surprisingly, Abraham listens. Now here's what I wanna let you know. That's the first of eight times God makes a promise to Abraham. But every time God makes a promise to Abraham, it's basically the same promise, just expanded and enhanced. This is important for us to understand. The Bible teaches what theologians call, here's a big phrase for your Sunday morning, prophetic escalation. It means that the promises come to us in seed form, but then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So he says, hey, I'm gonna give you a land, actually let me summarize it this way. His promises to Abraham are this. I'm gonna give you a people in a place. And by the way, that's the big theme of scripture. Don't let some modern person or your professor in college tell you like, the Bible contradicts itself, it's like, no, the Bible's one book by one author, okay, with one message, about one person, Jesus Christ. And the whole thing is with Adam and Eve, it was God's people, in God's place, under God's presence.

God comes to Abraham and says, look, it's gonna be my people and my place, under my presence. Jesus shows up, it's I'm gathering the people of God to ultimately be in my place heaven, under my presence. And then we get to the book of Revelation. So you can summarize the entire promises as people and present or in place. Now, let's talk about the place. What's interesting is this is, you know, isn't it amazing how theology keeps showing up in the news? What are we talking about? What is the headline story for the last three weeks? Israel, we're talking about Canaan again. Now, here's what you need to understand. Um, Canaan was never ultimately about Canaan. Promised land was a preview, okay? It was a preview that one day God was going to make all things new again. He's like, in Abraham, you thought I was giving you the promised land, I was giving you the entire world. Which, by the way, Christian, if you're like this, stop trying to escape the world. Stop having escapism, we're not supposed to try to leave earth and go to heaven, we're supposed to try to bring heaven to earth. The offspring wasn't ultimately Isaac. I mean, it was in a short promise, but the offspring was ultimately Jesus Christ through the seed who would be blessed. So in the nation wasn't ultimately Israel,

it was the entire world. Now, here's how this works. God makes promises and then likes to do even more than he promised. He likes to make, he's a good dad. He likes to surprise us. Let me give you an illustration. So say I come to my kids and I say, and this will work with any kid, okay? My kids are 14, 12, and almost 10, but this works with an eight year old or an 18 year old. And you said, I want to take you to get some ice cream. No kid says no to that ever. They don't say, I need to pray about that dad. They say, that sounds good, okay? They don't even really ask where. It's like, all ice cream is good ice cream, let's go. So, but then say, they're thinking, we're gonna go to downtown, we're gonna go to some ice cream shop or something. And then I say, no, you know what? You just get in the car and you just trust me. And I start driving and I start heading south. Like, dad, this is, we've been in the car for like two hours, dad. The amount of ice cream places. And then I say, guys, just trust me. We drive a couple more hours. They are so frustrated until I pull up to Disney World, okay? And I say, we're getting ice cream,

but we're getting ice cream in Disney World. That's what God does, basically. Some of you go, you know, I had a dad who said, we're going to Disney, but we ended up stopping. Said, we're going to Disney Ice cream, but we ended up stopping at a rest area off I-40 and had a hot dog instead, okay? That's not God. God doesn't make promises and then come back on them. But the reason, it's a silly illustration, but hopefully you'll remember it because basically, it's the same idea. God's taking us somewhere better than we ever thought. To give us way more than he promised, but it's taking longer than we want. We talk about the promises of God, okay? What are the promises of God that you're holding onto? Let me give you just three, okay? 'Cause I wanted to give this three of them today This works for the empty nester, the single mom, the college student, the young family. Let me give you at least three promises you can hold onto. The first is God always finishes what he starts. That's Philippians 1-6 if you're looking for the verse and you need it because what's gonna happen in your life is you're gonna get discouraged 'cause that's Satan's strategy for the Christian. If you're going to heaven and your sins are forgiven and you have the Holy Spirit and you have the church

and you have the Bible, what does Satan have left to do? Just discourage you in your marriage? How's that? Discourage you with the condition of your son. Discourage you with your health issue. Discourage you in your finances, discourage you 'cause one time you tried to show the gospel and it didn't go well. And you gotta go, you know what? God's gonna finish the work he started in me even though sometimes it just feels like I'm not even walking, it feels like I'm crawling. The second is God's gonna work out everything in your life for your good and his glory if you're in Christ. And that's really good to know because who knows what 20, I mean 2026 has been a wild year so far. And who knows what the rest of it holds especially for you, you know? Like I love my life right now, but I told our staff the day like I am so aware that they're like, there's like one phone call that could change everything in my life. There's one doctor's appointment, there's one accident. And my entire life looks completely different. And you need to know now that wait a second, God's gonna use everything in my life for his glory in my good. And ultimately God's taking me home to a place where one day all things will be made right.

We don't ultimately live in an unjust world. And one day we're gonna head somewhere before in Christ where every sad thing becomes untrue. So I wanna encourage you to dream, I wanna give you permission to dream again. Some of you grew up in your parents taught you the American dream, it changes, but at some version of like, you're gonna get the job and the spouse and the house and the kids and you're retired at a good age and whatever else. And it's like, I wanna find, have that if you want. But I want you on top of that and above that to have some God dreams, God based on all of your promises. This is what I want you to do by the grace of God in my life. The first thing he wants you to know is the promises of God are way bigger than you could imagine. The second thing he wants you to know is that the promises of God are the opposite of the law. I'll show you this. Turn to me to the same verse. We'll just read it again. In that same verse, he says this, "For the promise to Abraham in his offspring "that he would be heir of the world "did not come through the law." So Paul is like, guys, you can't get there that way. That's not the right direction. It's not the right system. It did not come through the law,

but through the righteousness of faith for it is the, for if it is the adherence of the law, there's a second time he mentions it, who are to be heirs, faith is null and the promise is void and then he just wants to summarize it. He's like, you wanna try to do this by law? He says, the law brings wrath. So do you wanna inherit the world through faith or experience God's wrath through the law? You can pick. He says, "For the law brings wrath, "but where there is no law, there is no transgressions." So here's what you need to know. Paul's been talking about faith and the promises of God for multiple chapters now. And he's been comparing it to three competing systems. Let me just remind us, okay? He talks about one of them today. He's talked about two of them so far. He basically says what's contrary to living by faith and the promises of God is what he earlier calls works or works righteousness. It's some version of, and everybody has a version of this, I'm a good person because I'm for the current thing or I recycle or one time somebody asked me for directions and I gave them. You know what I mean? It's like, we all wanna, I smile at strangers, I'm a good person, okay? We all kinda wanna say that.

He said the second is circumcision, which sounds silly until I said, it's like, no, I'm gonna be right with God because of my religious activity because I was baptized because my mom's a Christian 'cause my, you know, I can not tell you how many times. As soon as someone finds out I'm a pastor, they always do two things. They apologize for swearing, that's the first thing. And they tell me the nearest person in their relational connection that was a pastor. As if that makes them okay. It's like religious activity. Oh yeah, I'm so sorry about saying that. By the way, my uncle, he's a pastor. The third is the law. Now when Paul says the law here, he's particularly talking about the 10 commandments. Or there's actually a thousand commandments, by the way, in the Bible, roughly a thousand. Old Testament, New Testament, it's a little over a thousand. because there's at least, we'll be conservative. There's at least 7,000 promises, which means there's seven promises for every command of the Bible. And I won't take a lot of time on this, but as soon as you have an honest look at the law, you realize you can't keep it. I mean, just take the 10 commandments, which is the distillation of the thousand commandments. And if you said, okay, well, have you loved God

with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, if you put them above everything in your life all the time, and you're gonna say no, if you're honest, like, yeah. And then I said, okay, well, hold on, have you ever used the Lord's name in vain? And you're gonna be like, ah! When you and see lost last week? Or, but here's what, when you use the Lord's name in vain, it doesn't just mean you say his name after you hit your thumb with the hammer. It means I've used God for my own personal advantage. And then you start to go, maybe I've done that. Have you kept the Sabbath day, holy no, we could ask your parents, you weren't perfectly obeying. Have you ever stolen anything, even if it's somebody else's Netflix password? Yes. We've all lied. We've all coveted. Jesus says to lust after someone in your heart is the same as committed to all three. So it's like, he basically says, guys, you don't, in fact, he says the law brings wrath. You don't even wanna try to go it that way. And this is why he says, instead, let me show you this. Instead of the law, he says, that is why it depends on faith in order, I'm in verse 16, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring,

not only to the adherent of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. So what you notice in the verses, I not just read, but the verses before that, he has three words that he clumps together. You kinda know this words clump together and they bring you an idea. So if I said like, candy, eggs, bunny, those three together give you this idea of Easter. He has three words that clump together that are negative. And he says, okay, let me give you these three words. It would be law, transgrash, that means you break it, you trespass it. You say, okay, there's law, there's transgression, and then there's wrath. And he says, on the other end, there's faith, there's promise and there's grace. Okay, I wanna talk about this. So faith is the, I told you this before, but it's the instrument, okay? It's the instrument that connects us to Christ. Jesus saves us not faith, but he saves us as we put our faith in him. So we put our faith in the promises of God, and then it says, it depends on grace. Even before he gets to grace, let me say one more thing about faith. So the reformers, and that's just like John Calvin and all these guys that you probably should know

at some point, John Calvin, these are guys that lived in the 16th century. John Calvin, Martin Luther, they will forget more Bible than we'll ever know. They just were like Bible, Bible, Bible guys. And they basically looked at all of the teaching on faith, and they said faith has three categories to it. Knowledge, agreement, and trust. And so many people stop at the first two, especially if you grew up in the church. Knowledge is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the Bible says Jesus died for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the Bible says I'm a sin. Yeah, I know the Bible says that, you know, there's a judgment to come or whatever it is. Agreement is going further than knowledge. Agreement is, I believe that. I've gone from renting that to owning that. That's what I know to be true. But then they said the third one, and this is the one that a lot of people who grew up in the church never step into, which is, and I trust that. And I'm leaning all of my weight. I'm trusting God with my eternity. I'm trusting God. I'm trusting Jesus Christ with the only reason that I should ever go to heaven. He said, the promises depend on trust in them. And it says, and they rest on grace. So grace is the foundation of everything.

Grace is that God's good to you, even though you're not just undeserving, but you're ill-deserving. And what Paul says in other places is if you try to work for your salvation, it's an insult to the grace of God. Because the grace of God is there to say, I have done everything necessary to save you. And the only thing you bring to your salvation is the sin that made it necessary. And sometimes we wanna be gracious, or sometimes we say to God, God, I need, I don't need your grace. But more likely we say something like this, God, I just need a little bit of, I can mostly do this on my own. I just need grace to make up the rest. This is why look what he says here. Let me read it one more time. That is why at verse 16, it depends on faith in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring. So here's what he's saying. The law depends on you, the promises depend on God. In fact, the law literally says you must or you will, and the promises say I will. And guys, we struggle to do anything. So recently, I read an article, and it was about trying to figure out when do people actually quit their New Year's resolutions?

And what they did was because of AI, because of apps, because of a couple of different things, the article I was reading was using the Strava app to try to figure it out. If you don't know what the Strava app is, it's a very well-known, very used app that attracts your hiking and your running and your mountain biking, your ski, whatever trails you're on. And when they were running the diagnosis and having AI look at everything, they noticed that there was a day and was a large amount of people quit. January 19th, they're thinking about calling it Quitter's Day. Guys, we can't keep a health commitment for our own good and for our own selfish ambition. We can't keep a health commitment for three weeks. We can't keep God's law. He says, that's why God guarantees it. Now, when we hear the word guarantee, it doesn't mean as much to us, because every time a human says, I guarantee something, there's always an asterisk, which means like, unless I don't want to. I'll pay you back, unless I forget, unless it gets hard. I'll be there at seven, unless I hit traffic. In fact, we had a guy come in, this is a while ago, to help us do some long-term thinking for our organization, long-term visioneering, all that kind of stuff. And one of the-- he gave us four helpful categories. He said, guys, when any time you put together is anything that's long-term, he said,

you have to have these categories. As you communicate it, you have to say, possible. And possible means like, it might happen, but I'm not sure. He said, then there's probable, which is like, it will most-- more likely to happen than not happen. He said, and then there's plan, which is, well, we're trying to make it happen. And then there's promise. He talked to us about how hard it is to actually in light of everything, and being finite, and so many changing factors. It's hard to promise anything, right? Yeah, I promise I'll be there, you know, in six months, unless I die, which I can't control. There's so much that God doesn't-- here's what I'm trying to tell you-- God doesn't do possible. God doesn't do probable. God only does promise. In God, all of his plans are to accomplish his promises. Now, what's interesting is, what is the guarantee? Well, if you read, you don't need to go here now. In Ephesians 3, so the Bible interprets the Bible-- OK, it takes the whole Bible to make the whole Christian-- we're told that God guarantees our salvation in all his future promises by putting the Holy Spirit as a down payment. Looking around this room, I'm guessing at least some of us have bought a house before. And it's one thing to look at Zillow

before you go to bed at night, which I did for a season. I was looking at Zillow every night. All houses I could never afford, but they were so fun to look at. Wow! You know, but it's another thing when you finally talk to your spouse, and you say, well, we're going to a real estate agent, yeah. Well, let's go look at the house. Well, let's make an-- are we sure? Make an offer on the house. And it's a whole nother thing when you're like, we're going to put 20% of the price of the house as a down payment, saying that we're committed to paying the rest. That's what God did. God said, I'm going to not just put skin in the game. I'm going to put myself in the game. And I'm going to give you the person of the Holy Spirit inside of you to guarantee all my future promises. Well, that's important because that's all the good news. But then here's the real-- let's get realistic in verse 17. As it is written, I have made you the father of many nations. So that's a great promise. Oh, man, I can't believe it. Like, you made-- you're going to make me Abraham says, the father of many nations in the presence of the God in whom he believed. Look at this. Who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things

that do not exist. So he said, here's what's going to-- he said, when he made the promise to Abraham, two things were a problem. Number one, Abraham and Sarah were super, super old. And Abraham and Sarah had no kids. And Sarah was barren. And it looked like they would never have kids. And so he said, basically, there were two things that were standing in the way of the promises. there's probably no two things that humans understand less than death and nothing. I'll explain in a second because you may go, what do you mean? Well, think about death. I mean, so it's been said before, I don't know who said this, such a great line, that the dead body in the casket is the beginning of all superstition. So I, you know, I have my master's in theology. I teach the Bible for a living. Okay, I've been studying the Bible for like 25 years. And when my good friend Andy Jump died two and a half years ago, and I did his funeral, but when I went to look at his body, I have so much theology. I looked at the body and I thought, where is he? Like, that's not him anymore. I mean, that's his body. And then you start asking, well, then where, where is he? I know the theological answer. I know that. I know the true answer. He's in the presence of the Lord, but you look at the body go, how do you live without a body? How do you live without limits? I want you to know, our ancestors have not known what to do with death forever. They're like, all right, build a pyramid over it. Okay. The wisest people go ahead and write myths about it, you know, and then like, we couldn't handle all that. So we're like, okay, don't even call it death anymore. Call it going to a better place, call it passing away, call it kicking in the bucket. We can't don't even say the word dead and then embalm them, put as much cosmetics on them. And in a lot of cases, doing, do a closed casket because we just don't know what to do with death. I want to encourage you, some of you, you feel like, let me ask you, what's dead in your life right now? And I don't mean like that's not like, what's hard? That's not like what's kind of difficult and you know, you're a little bit upset about it. I'm like, what feels dead in your life? You might be like, man, my marriage is dead.

I mean, there's nothing there. Well, it's not just death. It's nothing. Now, when I say nothing, people are like, well, I understand nothing. It's like, you've never seen nothing. Nothing they say is what rocks dream about. If you think about it, you're like, yeah, they don't dream. Yes, exactly nothing. Okay. You've never seen nothing. You've never tasted nothing. You've never experienced nothing. You know, you've seen a dark room or something. It's like nothing. Okay. Here's what I want you to know. God loves to work through death and with nothing. For summary, this is the God that we have. Okay. We're about to celebrate Easter in two weeks, okay? And the resurrection isn't just an event in human history. It's the pattern of how God loves to work. For some reason, God said, find death can be my canvas. I mean, think about, you know, the store where Lazarus, he's been dead for multiple days and Jesus goes to the tomb and I don't usually read the King James version, but I love the KJV because when he gets to the tomb, they say, Lord, stay away. He's stinketh. Okay. In other words, sometimes there's something I was like, dude, this Jesus cannot handle the graveyard that is my life. And everything in my life stinks way too much. It's like, actually, God loves to show up and show off with death. How about with nothing? It's like, well, how did God make you and me and everything that we see, the first miracle? Some theologians would argue the greatest miracle is God creating everything out of nothing, which means that's exactly what God loves to work with. And some of you think, I need to have a couple twigs, you know, that he could start the fire with. If I could just get one or two things right in my life, then I could just, we just, in our marriage, we need to read the book on communication. That's what God will use. It's like, I want to let you know that God loves to work with nothing. In fact, look what it says here. It's a, he, he, I told you this phrase is interesting. It says, in hope, he believed against hope, what does that mean? That he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, so shall your offspring be. So how could you hope against hope? Well, must mean there's two different types of hope. We would probably say it today this way. He hoped against optimism. Optimism is like positive thinking based on my circumstances and basically how extroverted I am and how good I think things are going to be. Let me, let me give you a personal example. Let me tell you the difference you'd hope in optimism, okay? So, you know, I like to play golf. You probably know that I've told that you a couple of times. And, um, I'm a 10 handicap. Just stay with me for a second. This is going to be important, okay? Which is not that good, okay? And basically that means that the way you get your

Which means when I'm playing well, like I'm, you know, shoot 82. So let me give you optimism. Optimism is me standing on the first hole going, you know what, today's the day. I'm breaking 80 today, no question, okay? That's optimism. Let me give you hope. I'm 14 over after the 12th hole. And I believe God still has a plan for my golf game, okay? (audience laughing) Hope is hoping against hope. Biblical hope is faith looking forward. It's a confidence in who God is, despite my circumstances. Human hope is human calculation. So, and I have permission to share this story, but when I was thinking about hoping against hope, I was thinking about Pastor Dave and his wife, Leslie. So a couple of, well, a long time ago now actually, but about 15 years ago, we've been friends for a long time, but about 15 years ago, Margie and I, we were, she was expecting, we were expecting our first show. She was pregnant with Addie, and I remember, I actually was thinking about today, I remember being in a Starbucks parking lot, calling Dave and saying, "Hey, we're gonna be that." And he said, "Well, Leslie and I are probably not far behind you.

"We need to come see you guys." So they lived in Knox all the time, they came and saw us, and I remember they're in that trip. They were excited for us, and Leslie was having some pain that she couldn't explain. And he goes home and he calls me, and he's about a month or two later, whatever it was, and he said, "Leslie has cancer." And he said, "The good news is, "it's a very treatable type of cancer, "and we're gonna do this treatment "and it works on 90% of people that have cancer." Like, they go into remission. And I was like, "Well, that's great to hear. "So, you know, let me know how that goes." So he calls me a month or two later and says, "She's in the 10% that it didn't work for." But there's another treatment, and this treatment works for 90% of the people that the first treatment doesn't work for. Well, that's 90% again, that's okay. Yeah, you called me a month or two later. She's in the 10% that it didn't work. And that began a four year long journey where by faith, by the grace of God with prayer, they had to continually hope against all of the medical hope until God performed a miracle to which they would give God all the glory

and thank the church for prayers that God healed. But it was a journey of hope against hope. In fact, look what it says here. It says verse 19, "He did not weaken in faith "when he considered his own body, "which was as good as dead, "since he was about 100 years old. "And when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb, "no unbelief made him waver concerning the promises of God, "but he grew strong in his faith "as he gave glory to God." Okay, and I love this because it's honest. It says that when God said, "You're going to have a kid, "even though you're 100 years old, "and even though your wife's 75 years old, "it doesn't say Abraham looked at himself in the mirror "and said, 'I could do this.'" I looked, he didn't say, "Sarah, you know, "you look 25 to me, you know." He's very, here's the thing I want you to know about faith. Faith, 'cause like we don't like people that just like play the God card and are unrealistic about what's going on in our life or their life. Real faith does this. It looks at your problems in light of God's promises. Could we have a church that does that? Could we have a community group that says, you know what, tell it to me. What's going on with the mental health of your daughter?

Give it to me. I want all of it. And people can just be honest. I won't tell me the truth about how much you hate your job and how you feel like you're underemployed. Tell it to me, I want to know. Name it. I want you to just be so honest about the circus. Tell me about your dad and how he doesn't believe and how he's never believed and how he said it's good for you, but it's not for him. So you need to go, I need to look at all of the problems in my life, but more than that, I need to look at God's promises. And God's promises are bigger than my problem. See, in psychology, they have a phrase and this happens to all of us, they call it tunneling. And tunneling is where you can only see your problems and you can't see God's promises. And it leads to catastrophizing. Have you ever done this before? Let me, here's what happens with catastrophizing. It's Tuesday night, you had an okay day at work and you get an email or a text from your boss that says, I'd like to talk to you first thing in the morning. And if you're given to tunneling and catastrophizing, you're like, I'm putting my new LinkedIn profile together tonight, you're metaphorically cleaning out your office, right? You're walking through the whole conversation, That's catastrophizing, okay?

You're already like, I'm gonna be living in a van down by the river, you know, whatever. You're just like so negative. This is why Paul ends with the gospel. Let me show you this. Here's what Paul says. Verse 21, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness. Now, I want you to focus on this next part because we've been reading something that was written 2,000 years ago about somebody that lived thousands of years before that. And look what it says. But the words it was counted to him was our speaking about Abraham were not written for his sake alone. But for ours also, it will be counted to us who believe who raised from the dead Jesus, our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. So if you ever want to come, why are you taking this word that was written a long time ago and keep applying it to us? 'Cause that's exactly what Paul does. And I want you guys every day of your life to go to the word of God for A word of God for you specifically. Because what he's saying here is guys, everything that we just talked about,

about the promises of God and waiting and trusting on God and the grace of God. Yes, it was about Abraham, but much more it's about you. In other words, stop reading the Bible like it's somebody else's mail. Where you're reading it and you go, you know what, this is so awesome. This is exactly what God would do for someone like Abraham, but this is not what God would do for me. In fact, he roots it in the promises of God. Do you notice that he says that Jesus is the answer to the promises of God. All of our prayers are yes in Amen. All of God's promises are yes in Amen in Jesus Christ. It says that he was delivered for our trespasses, okay? Not just the trespasses of people, but your trespasses. And you might ask who delivered him? Like if we were to grab, you know, the fifth graders right before they get out of kids ministry we would say who delivered Jesus to the cross? They would probably say, "Judas." And they'd be right. 'Cause he did betray Jesus with a kiss. Or they might say someone else with some fifth grader might go, "That's not right." I mean, that's partly right. But it was all, you know, "Pastricot is also the religious leaders." And I would say, "You're also right." 'Cause they conspired with Judas.

Somebody else say, "Actually, I know how this works. It's actually Pilate." 'Cause he washed his hands and I'd say, "You know what, you guys are all right." But, you know, theologians have a phrase called the divine passive. And the divine passive is a phrase theologians use where God is active, but not mentioned in the verse. God ultimately is the one who delivered Jesus up for you and for me. Isaiah 53 says, "It was the will of the Lord to crush him." Which here's what this means. The cross was not an accident. And in the final analysis, the cross was not a tragedy. The cross was part of God's plan to accomplish God's promises, which is why it says he was raised for our justification. What does that mean? It means that if at the cross, God says it is finished, at the empty tomb, God says, "I mean it." If at the cross of Christ, we hear loudly, it is finished. What is the empty tomb about? It's God saying, "I mean it." It's God saying, "I approve it, I accept it." You know what? Psychologists tell us that there is a deep need in the human heart for closure. That's why you have the funeral, by the way. It's like, "Yeah, I gotta say goodbye." I can't live with not knowing if something's not over,

something's not complete, something's not been accepted. And God says, "The empty tomb is my way to say, 'I accept it.'" And so here's what we're gonna do in a minute. We're just gonna dream together. I thought of a couple different ways to close today, but I wanna go back to a phrase I haven't used enough and I got from somebody else, but I just love it so much. It's, here's the phrase, pray, gesco. Comes from a church in Jacksonville, Florida, 1122. I learned a lot from them, and I was down there, and I got to meet with some of their elders, and I said, "How are you guys making all these decisions and doing all these things?" And they said, "In light of everything else that's going on." And they said, "Well, we just have a culture here that we pray, we guess, and we go." And I think that's what Abraham does. You know, go leave your family, pray, gesco, I guess. Go save lot, pray, gesco. Go take your son up on the mountain, pray, gesco. Pray says, "God, I'm all in." Prayer is not God. Here's all my prayers so you can answer my prayers. Prayer is God, I want to stay connected to you while I wait for your promises. That's what prayer is. Prayer is not, can I manipulate you and pray to answer it? It's like, no God, I'd like to stay connected to you in prayer while I wait for your promises. some of you don't like the word guess.

I told one guy this, he said, can we say educated guess? I said, guess just means there's a mystery. You don't know what God, what is God doing? It's like, in your life, you have no idea. In your daughter's life, you don't have a clue. That's why you just guess, you go, okay, God, I'm gonna trust you, I'm gonna guess, and then I'm gonna go, I'm gonna take my next step. I'm gonna forgive my dad, okay? I'm gonna have the conversation I've been avoiding. I'm gonna confess to sin I've been afraid of. See, faith is not, I told you before, you know, the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is fear, but here's another thing, the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is standing still. And so just a minute, we're gonna stand and I'm gonna invite you to come forward. And I'll tell you what, I'm still living off of my men's night that I was at two nights ago. Because just moment of vulnerability, he asked me to make a call to the men at the end, and I did, they weren't the men in my church, I didn't know them that well. And I made a call and Adam come forward for a few things, and some guys came forward, and that was great. And after the first song, there was a couple songs at the end, after the first song, Josh got up, and he gave a call to the men.

And I just sat there and I thought, I don't know that I know how to call people. He got up in front of his church, all the men there, and you know what he said? He said, guys, he said, my dad never showed a lot of emotion when I was young, so I don't know how to show emotion. And he said, you know what, every time we make a call here, not that many people come forward. And he said, you know what the problem is, we need some older people to come forward. I thought, I never had that type of voice. He said, yeah, here's the thing. He said, there's a bunch of young people that go, is it okay to come forward? I don't know, I need to see someone in their fifties do it. Is it okay to come forward and say, I don't know what's going on? Is it okay to come forward if your life's going well? So just a minute, here's what I wanna ask. I wanna ask anybody who's older if you'd come forward. And just say, you know what, I'm gonna pray, I'm gonna guess, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna lead the way and I'm gonna give the next generation permission to go, what it looks like to be strong, it does not mean I have everything together. What it looks like to be strong is I am vulnerable before God, I'm trusting Him and in the deepest part of me, I'm living by faith saying, I will pray,

I will guess, I will go. So in a minute, I'm gonna pray and I'm gonna ask you to stand. And I'm gonna ask the older generation to lead the way in helping us respond to God's word, so we can be centered on His word and sent into His world, let's pray. Lord, would you, across all of our campuses, create a pray, guess, go culture? Lord, I pray as I've asked the older generation to lead the way in this, I particularly pray for the older generation. That they would dream some God dreams again, maybe that's why they need to come forward 'cause they're in their 50s and their 60s and they've stopped dreaming. And they've stopped dreaming on the impact they could have on this church and your kingdom and the world and the promises of God maybe have gotten small in their life, Lord, may their dreams always be bigger than their memories, Lord. Lord, would you create a multi-generational church where the younger generation is learning from the heart posture of the older? We ask this in Jesus' name. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]