Wastelands Into Gardens | Sarah Brooks

I'm telling you, this is the best view in the house, getting to look at the faces of my church family and people that I love. If you're joining us online, live, or at another time, I'm sure you look lovely as well. When I was invited to come this morning and bring a word of encouragement, I knew that I was gonna talk about hope. I can't help it. I knew that we were gonna talk about hope because I knew that we were gonna talk about hope because I knew that we were gonna talk about hope and I knew that we were gonna talk about hope I knew that we were gonna talk about hope because I love hope and we've already alluded to this. Not just when hope is fun, like we're kind of in a fun season right now. This past weekend, we had parties and fireworks. That was a blast. The World Cup is like a giant sleepover with our international friends as they discover ranch dressing and all these wonderful things America has to offer. It seems like there's a lot of hope in the air right now and I love that. What I wanna talk about today is a hope that's a little bit harder to find or hope when it's maybe not as easy to see. I heard someone describe me recently as someone who does not take hope lightly

and that felt like the greatest compliment. I believe that hope is for all people at all times in all seasons and I'm gonna tell you why but first I wanna start with a story about the power of perspective. I'm gonna tell this story from two different geographic angles. That feels tough, just go with me. So several months ago, my family and I were invited to be a part of an outdoor church service in our downtown area of Fort Worth and it was with a local nonprofit that serves our unhoused and underprivileged friends. Well, imagine my surprise when the directors of this send me the pin location and I realize that we are holding outdoor church service in a parking lot of the largest, most popular haunted house in our city. I thought, well, that's an odd venue. Even more odd than the venue was the fact that depending which direction you came to that location from that day, you would have walked away with a very different story. If you had come to that property from the east that day, all you would see is a giant menacing building, abandoned looking, kind of creepy. And even in the off seasons, all you would see is this giant building being guarded by gargoyles and demons and coffins and skulls. And that would be your only perspective

and you would think, oh my goodness, fear and evil and death have this market of Fort Worth cornered, right? That's what you would think. But if you had come at that location from the west that day, before you even got to the property, you would hear live music. You would come to a parking lot full of people of all kinds of walks of life, people shopping for necessities, people eating, people dancing, people laughing, big tables with people eating together, new friends, old friends, homed friends, unhoused friends. That's what you would see. And if you had this perspective, you would realize, oh no, it's actually life and hope that is controlling this whole area. It doesn't mean that the spooky stuff went away. Like just because there was a party going on does not mean that the evil was gone. In fact, it was still off in the distance, but it was no longer a main character to what was going on. It was still lingering there in the background, ready to freak you out, but it was not the main character, it was just a side character that was not part of this story happening in front of us. So perspective is super important. One of my favorite promises and word pictures in scripture

is found in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel is found in what we call the prophetic writings, and like most of the prophetic books, Ezekiel's kind of a tough read, not gonna lie. The majority of the book is Ezekiel the prophet detailing in great detail all of the ways that people, the Israelites, have fallen short, have rebelled, have sinned against God. He describes their violence, how they mistreat the foreigner and the fatherless, how they worship idols, how they desecrate holy things. The list of accusations in Ezekiel is quite long, and so is the list of consequences tied to those actions. Ezekiel is talking to a deeply broken people who are living in exile in enemy territory, and he's telling them, because of your actions, because of your rebellion, not only are you living as refugees, War is coming, plague is coming, famine is coming. Your home city of Jerusalem will be destroyed and the temple will fall. This is the book of Ezekiel. You're like, cool, glad you picked this one, yes. The people of God are in a bad way. Just like at first glance, like our haunted house view, the scene's pretty bleak. It appears that fear and rebellion have completely hijacked God's story for his people. It seems like they are controlling the narrative and everything looks broken beyond repair.

And then comes Ezekiel chapter 36. Look at this promise God drops in the middle of all of this. God, through the prophet Ezekiel, reminds his people there is always more to the story. He never loses control of the plot. Look at what he says. I will cleanse you from all your iniquities. I will cause the cities to be inhabited and the waste places shall be rebuilt and the land that was desolate shall be tilled. Instead of being the desolation that it was in the sight of all who pass by, they will say this land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are now fortified and inhabited. That's a cool promise. The people of Israel were in a wilderness of their own making, both literally and figuratively, yet in this landscape, God says this is bad. This is serious, but so am I. And this is not the end of the story and so I'm gonna need you to keep watching. He promises to bring new life, rehabitation, refortification, and not just a little bit. He's not like I'm gonna clean y'all up a little bit. I'm gonna fix this just a little bit. Like God does not restore things half-heartedly. God says no, I'm going to redeem this story and these people so fully that people

who used to walk by and see devastation are gonna one day walk by and say when did that garden get here? I could have sworn that was a wasteland. That's what God promises. He promises wasteland to Eden, that's the promise. And so here's the truth. Here's why I love this so much. Here's the truth. You can write in permanent marker. Hope can always be found even in the desolate places. Even in exile, even in judgment, God is still speaking, he is still pursuing, he is still offering hope. I love how Jeremiah 29, 28 says the exile will be long. Anyone ever feel like the exile on planet Earth is long? The exile will be long. Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Even when it's hard, flourish. Even when it's hard, grow, secure your roots. This is a hearty kind of hope. You with me? I don't know about y'all, but sometimes it's easy to hear people up here talk about Old Testament stories and promises and you're like, I love that for them. That's so great for those Israelites, right? That's nice. It's a little bit harder to apply this to my own life today. It's a little bit harder when I'm the one in a wasteland. It's a little bit harder when there's desolate places

in my life, it's a little bit harder to hold on to that hope, isn't it? Sometimes it's easier to spot in someone else than when we are the ones in that place. It's a bit harder to hold on and it's easier to focus on what is missing, what is desolate in our lives than what is growing. So there's a patch of dead grass in my backyard, little patch, it serves as a home plate for backyard wiffle ball, which is great, I love that. I also could go for some grass there. And so most mornings I sit out on my patio with my coffee and I just look at that little patch of dead and I'm willing some little blades to come through. I'm just like waiting for this grass to fill in and it hasn't happened. But while I have been hyper-focused on that little patch of dead, what I almost missed was that 10 feet away and 10 feet up, our magnolia trees were in full bloom. Big, beautiful, white blooms, new life everywhere. Well, I wasn't looking there, I was looking here and it didn't seem like anything was happening. This is where we can get hung up, myself included, and sometimes disappointed or disillusioned. with God, it's when that hope, when that new life, when that restoration does not show up when or where or how we are expecting it or when or where or how we are asking for it. I'm guessing you can relate to a desolate place

in your life, right? I'm guessing you can relate to that little patch of your life that you're asking God to restore. I don't know what it is for you. I would imagine we'd have however many people are in here, it's different answers. I don't know if for you it's relational, if that's the patch of grass that you're looking at and you're asking God, would you restore this marriage? Would you heal this fraction with my children? Maybe that's the area that you're studying. Maybe it's financial. You are looking at that bank account just a-waitin' for something to happen. And month to month isn't bad for a month, but month to month to month to month and you're just waiting to take a deep breath again. I don't know if for you, maybe the wasteland that you're looking at is cultural, communal. You're looking around at some stuff in the world and you're like, what? How is anything good gonna come from that? I don't know what your desolate places are where you're looking for God, but when he doesn't show up when we think, how we think, it can be a little bit disappointing, can't it? And so we start to wonder, like, are you not working because I'm not praying right? Is this me? Are you not working because you don't hear me,

because you don't care? Whether it is a desolate place of our own making or simply a very real consequence of living in a broken world with broken people, there are seasons and places and times where God's hand is not easily recognized and it is hard. But I stand by what I said, that hope can always be found. Here's a really important caveat. Hope will come in unexpected places and unexpected ways. The reason I love the imagery in Ezekiel 36 is because it's tangible. We understand the metaphor. Whether you're good at gardening or not, you understand that you don't go from dirt patch to botanical wonderland overnight, right? With scripture that says, the land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden. We understand that probably as an instant. You have to till the ground and then you plant the seeds and then some of the shoots come up at different times and some of them bloom at different times until eventually you do go from barren to full of new life, but it's a process, is it not? Here's where we have to be careful. When we are only looking for God in the patches of dead that are the most glaring in our own eyes, we miss what he might be doing elsewhere. We are a culture that loves success. We want the success story. We want Eden to be completed before we celebrate, right?

We want the garden to be done. The God of restoration and hope invites us to be a people who search for and cherish every bit of growth along the way. A people who scour the landscape for every bit of hope he leaves as evidence that there is more to this story than what you can currently see. I give this illustration often, but when our middle son was younger, he had loads of ear problems. At one point, he was missing most of his eardrum and the doctors just kind of kept saying, I don't know, that doesn't usually happen. Cool. So as a family, we really started becoming intentional about praying for his healing in ways that we never had before. And we prayed as his parents, we prayed with his brothers, we brought him here to trusted voices in this church. Will you help us pray for healing for my boy? Will you pray that God restores his hearing and it wasn't happening. And I remember one day, the day after, the afternoon after a big appointment, I went to pick his older brother up from elementary school and he saw me up at the top of the hill and he came running and he said, Mom, did he do it? Did God heal my brother? And I had to look at him and say, not yet. And I was like, I don't know, I don't know.

Not yet. And I was not happy about it. It was painful. But a few weeks later, in this place, I watched a faith giant continue to faithfully pray over my boy. And he grabbed his hand. head and he got down on his level and he started praying for him. Before he said a thing about his ears, he started pouring into his identity. He said, oh my goodness, you're so loved. The Lord has made you to be a warrior. He is with you. And then we got to the ear part. But as I watched that, I thought, oh my goodness, my son's ears are still super jacked up. But I have been limiting God's healing and his power to the size of a four-year-old's eardrum. That's where I limited God to. And meanwhile, he was fortifying my son's identity. He was growing our family in ways that suddenly I don't really care about the rest. That's what God was doing. I will tell you, he ended up doing both over the years. He did heal my son and I'm so grateful. But long before he did that, long before he restored his healing, he healed our family in ways that we wouldn't have grown had it not been for that.

It doesn't always work that way though, does it? Sometimes that little patch of grass never quite does what you think it's going to. But you can always trust that there will be good growth nearby. Romans 8, 28 tells us, and we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. He has good things for us. There is good growth, but maybe not where we're looking yet. So maybe that relationship that you're praying for, it might never do what you're asking God to do, but maybe through the process, you're learning how to be loved and healed through community who walks alongside you. Maybe that bank account never blooms like you're wanting, but maybe God is healing you of the fear of self-reliance and that's really what you need. Maybe as we're looking at culture, we know it's never gonna get issues right. So maybe God is helping us understand and grow in how to get people right. It is easy to limit God's work to the obvious broken bits, isn't it? It takes courage and a whole different perspective to look for him elsewhere. So I don't really know how to segue into this next story gracefully, so I'm just gonna go for it.

My husband of 18 years, the father of my three awesome boys, my best, best friend is very colorblind. There's not a good way to like, you need to know that information for this story. He's very colorblind. He will try to tell you he's not. It's pretty bad and that's not a judgment. That's not a judgment, it's just kind of fact. And so I used to tell him, I'm like, you are going to perish in heaven when you get to see colors in their fullest form. But then I saw an ad and I realized that for $299, he could see colors in their truest form with some colorblind correcting sunglasses. And so I bought some of these sunglasses. We went on a 10th anniversary trip to the Pacific Northwest. I don't know if you've seen these glasses, if you've watched videos online about these glasses. I am here to tell you it was even better than the videos make it out to be. It was the coolest experience ever watching him see color. He put these glasses on and he got really still and really quiet. And he just kind of looked around and then he started, is that red? Yeah, that's red. Is that green? Yeah, that's green. I lost him.

We went grocery shopping. I lost him to the produce aisle because he had a whole moment with a Clementine orange. He's like, what is this? The most ordinary things in the world, he could not get over. The first time he saw a stop sign, he's like, it's so vibrant, no one told me. He saw a traffic cone. He thought it was incredible, work of art. Grapes. He cut himself one time and he's like, you are not gonna believe what blood looks like. And I'm like, we have three boys, I see it every day. But you're right, it is kind of pretty when you think about it. It's a pretty color, you know? He didn't take those glasses off for a week and it was the coolest thing to watch the world through his eyes. Because the colors didn't suddenly appear. They'd been there all along. He was just given eyes to see them. Slam-dunk analogy, I know, I hear it. This is part of the gift of community. This church body right here, we get to help people see what's right in front of them. Hope grows roots when it is shared. When you are really close to a hard situation, when you are walking a desolate road,

trying to spot new life 10 feet away and 10 feet up is impossibly far. So what a gift to be able to be alongside other believers who can help give us eyes to see what God might be doing. Who can come alongside and help us spot hope and say, hey, hey, hey, I know you're looking here, but don't miss what God is doing over there. Don't you dare miss what God is up to right here. Don't you miss it. There is no shortage of bad news out there. Y'all hear me? We don't need anyone else giving us wasteland perspectives on the state of things, we have enough. Turn on the news, scroll through social media. It is desolate take after desolate take after desolate take, we have enough. Fear is the currency the world operates in and we don't have to buy it. As believers of promise, we get to be the ones who say, no, I know it's rough. Yeah, it's pretty rough out there, but I know God is doing something. So I'm gonna come help you look. There is always more to the story. Rick asked me why this was the thing I wanted to preach on today. He was like, Ezekiel, really? Why? And I think partly it's because the Lord has used this church to help form me

into the hope hunter that I am today. This church is crazy intentional about sending hope bearers all over the world to wild places. We send missionaries to countries we cannot even name publicly. We help plant churches in some of the most unchurched areas in our country. We partner with organizations going head on into wastelands in our own city. And I've not only watched this over the years, I've been honored to be a part of some of these initiatives, specifically working with women coming out of sex trafficking and exploitation, also working with teenagers coming from really hard places, and those wastelands have changed me. I'm not the same person I was. In fact, the person it changed me into is someone who is insufferable about hope because I've seen too much of it. I've seen too much beauty come from places it just should not exist. I've seen God infuse new life straight into the hardest, darkest of places. In my own life, in our city, I have watched God in adult entertainment clubs and street corners full of drugs and prostitution, full of brokenness and bondage. I have watched God send people of peace and of hope to invite freedom.

Into our middle schools and high schools full of anxiety and loneliness, I've watched God send adults who want to call out identity and purpose in these kids. Into some cities that you might see on the news or hear from other people, others deem this city spiritually uninhabitable. It's that far gone. God's like, what a perfect place for a new church. Time and time again, wasteland to Eden, desolate to new life. I wish we had hours to tell stories, but I'm kind of hopeful that's what part of eternity will be, story time. For my skeptic friends in the room, not sure where you stand, on faith, on hope for you, I'm so glad that you're here. I've been you. I want you to know, I want you to hear me say that you can trust God to be at work. This is what faith is. Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see yet. I want to state really clearly so everyone hears me, this is not a sermon about self-help. This is not a sermon about wishful thinking or some like churchy version of toxic positivity. That's not what this is. This is not manifestation. This is not optimism.

This is banking on and trusting the very character of God. You don't have to take my word for it. You can take his word for it. Not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name. Then the nations that are left all around you shall know that I am the Lord. I have rebuilt the ruined places and replanted that which was desolate. I am the Lord. I have spoken and I will do it. It is his character on the line, not ours. You can trust him not because you are faithful, but because he is. And he has a record to prove it. Our scriptures are full of story after story, record after record of God taking nothing and creating everything, of God taking death and bringing forth life. We have the record to prove this. You wanna talk about a gardening plot twist? In the Old Testament, the Israelites fall from what they are described as the Davidic dynasty, the dynasty of David and his family. They fall from that to a stump. That's how they're described. The stump of David. In other versions, the root of Jesse.

This is what they fall to, a stump of what was. And yet, out of the stump of David's family will grow a shoot, a single shoot. Yes, a new branch bearing fruit will come from the old root. The shoot that would grow out of the remains, out of the devastation, the shoot that would grow, this new branch bringing life is Jesus. He was the ultimate hope surprise. You talk about unexpected, that. God doesn't need anything to change everything. And so, this is why we hold unswervingly to the hope we profess. Because he who promised was faithful, is faithful, and will be faithful. Hope is here now. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus solidified a new and better Eden to come. There is no wasteland that you can bear witness to this side of heaven that does not hold whispers of future life. Do you know that? There is no desolate place you can look at that is the end of the story, it's not. So we've got a choice, friends. We've got a choice on the perspective that we take. You can take the one very readily available. You can take the perspective that says

everything is terrible and awful and more terrible. Take that perspective if you want. Or, you can take the perspective of hope that trusts that the God of yesterday is still capable of growing gardens today. Would you pray with me? God, I thank you for this branch of the family tree called the Hills Church. I thank you for all the ways you are growing us into a beautiful garden. God, may we be the kind of place that people look at and see, oh, those lives used to be full of utter devastation. Would you look at what God has done? Would you look at the life he has brought? May we be that kind of place. God, give us courage to keep looking even when it's hard. Give us eyes to help spot the hope in others. God, give us just the utter unflappable confidence in your goodness. You are good and you love us, and we thank you that the story is never over. It's in your name we pray, amen.