When the River Moves On You | Chris Seidman

Hello, Hills Church, do you remember me? My name's Rick, and I'm the preacher here, at least I think I still am. I've been on my study break, and it's been wonderful. I've gotten to visit four church planters and do some work for sermons coming up. I'm so excited about it. In fact, I'm starting my new series next Sunday. It's called Together, and we're gonna talk about how together we are with Jesus, becoming like Jesus, and doing the things that Jesus did. I'm excited about that, and I'm excited next Friday night, Living Fearless with Jamie and Donna Winship. If you haven't signed up, you'll want to be a part of that. I promise, everyone's gonna be talking about it, so be a part of that conversation. It's been a joy to be in different church plants this summer and see what God is doing. But I wanna tell you, I miss home. I can't wait to be back with you. And we started my summer break by hearing from Cooper Seidman. Well, we're gonna close by hearing from Chris Seidman, Cooper's dad, and my very first preaching associate 30 years ago. Chris is the senior pastor of the Branch Church in Dallas. They have a couple of campuses. I'm actually preaching for him today. He's preaching here.

Chris is my best friend. I love him as a preacher. I love him as a peer. And here's what I love most about Chris. Whenever I spend time with Chris, whether I'm walking a short distance or a long one, I realize when I'm through, I'm closer to Jesus. And you're gonna be too. So I want you to put your hands together and give a warm Hills welcome to Chris Seidman. Thank you. Well, thank you. I honestly believe with all of my heart that the Branch gets the better end of the deal this weekend because he gets your preacher, Pastor Rick. And yet I truly am honored to be here because in many respects, this church is very much family to my bride Tara and myself. Of course, Tara was here in her high school years. We were married here at the Hills 34 years ago. I came on staff here 33 years ago. My mother in love, Pam Willingham was on staff here for many years as the single parent family ministry. Her husband, Mike Willingham has served as a shepherd here in the past at the Hills. But a lot has happened over the last 33 or so years. We've lived in places like Pensacola, Florida. We've lived just up the road in Coppell in the same home for the last 26 years.

We've have the blessing of having three incredible adult sons. And now we are rookie grandparents having two freshly baked children, grandsons arriving from heaven here over the last couple of years. And we are just so incredibly blessed. And I wanna say how thankful I am for the way you have received my son Cooper and his bride, Lexi. You have been such an incredible blessing to them already as a young couple. And I want you to know up front, his gift is so much greater than my gift for preaching. His heart is broader than mine. The only thing I have on him is a few more dumpster fires in ministry. And that's really about it. And so I'm so thankful for the way you're loving and receiving them as well. Some things don't change over 33 or 34 years, but a lot of things do. And it's the changes that you don't see coming, particularly the changes that you don't really want, that can be particularly disruptive in your life. And that's what I wanna reflect on with you today. Maybe you're in the midst of a disruptive moment in your life, or maybe you're not. And if that's the case, then you can just tuck this away for a rainy day.

Speaking of a rainy day, the image you're about to see is of the Choluteca Bridge in Honduras. Our church has had significant work in Honduras and Guatemala for many, many years. Some of you support works in that part of Central America as well. This particular bridge was considered to be the state-of-the-art bridge in all of Central America toward the end of the 1990s. It had been built by a Japanese firm. But in October of 1998, a Category 5 hurricane by the name of Mitch blew into Honduras, and it dropped a historic amount of rain in the mountainous region of Honduras. Over the course of 24 hours, six feet of rain fell into the mountains. And that rain came cascading down out of the mountains with such force and such ferocity that it carved entirely new river channels. And this is what you had after the hurricane at the Choluteca Bridge. The entire riverbed had moved. And it looks like somebody didn't know what they were doing. That somebody built this beautiful bridge in the wrong place. The truth is the bridge had been rendered obsolete. It actually had a nickname after this incident. It was called the Bridge to Nowhere. And the problem isn't that somebody built the bridge in the wrong place. The problem is the river had moved. Have you ever had something you thought was immovable move on you? You had a life or a job or a strategy.

You had a niche in the marketplace. You had a person in your life that you thought would never ever move. And it or they moved. I mentioned earlier about a couple of grandsons. This is a picture of them. Our oldest is Ollie. You'll turn two next month. He's holding Kellen who was just recently arrived from heaven. And if you'll look closely enough at Ollie's left foot, you'll notice that it doesn't look real. And that's because it's not. Just before Ollie was one, he endured an amputation just a little above his left ankle. All he'll ever know is life with a prosthetic. Our oldest son Skyler and his wife Allie in the very first year of their very first child had a river move on them. And yet I couldn't be prouder for how they responded. So how do you respond when a river moves on you? I want to take you to a little story in the book of Jeremiah. It's in the shortest chapter of Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 45. I'll give you a second to turn there if you have your Bibles or pull it up on your phone. Jeremiah chapter 45. It's only five verses. And it involves a man named Baruch. But in order to appreciate him, I need to give you just a little bit of context. Baruch was a scribe for Jeremiah. Baruch's one of the reasons why you have the book of Jeremiah in your Bible. He's the one who actually wrote down the words that Jeremiah prophesied that later were translated into our English Bibles. But Baruch had one of the more difficult jobs of his day.

He was serving Jeremiah and nobody liked what Jeremiah had to say. Much of Jeremiah's ministry was a ministry of bad news at one level. He was confronting and warning God's people who were far away from God. He was waving this red flag over and over saying, if you don't return to the Lord, you might find yourself dealing with the Babylonian empire who will overrun you as a form of discipline. And God will use them to get your attention. And sometimes Baruch had to preach this as well. There's this epic scene in Jeremiah where Jeremiah sends Baruch to the temple in Jerusalem to read the words off the scroll that he had written, the words that Jeremiah had been speaking and Baruch didn't want to read them, but he read them. And the king of Jerusalem was Jehoiakim. He was in the temple that day and he listened to the words, the scroll being read. And when Baruch got done, Jehoiakim said, bring those scrolls to me and they bring the scrolls to him and he proceeds to burn them to ashes right in front of Baruch because he didn't like what the scroll had to say. Can you imagine what that was like for Baruch when he came waddling back home to Jeremiah to share with him that basically the first 36 chapters that you have in your Bible are in ashes back in the temple in Jerusalem. And can you imagine what that was like when Baruch was handed a fresh set of scrolls from Jeremiah and Jeremiah said, sit down, Bubba. You're going to write it all out again. And Jeremiah proceeded to prophesy the first 36 chapters of his book. Word for word, and Baruch dutifully wrote those things down. For 23 years, Baruch was caught in the backwash of the rejection of Jeremiah by most of God's people. He's like, just imagine this. He's like, you'll have to imagine it because you can't really relate to it. He's like one of these great football players who plays for a franchise for years and years and years

and never gets to win a playoff game, ever. I know it's hard to imagine, but try. This is Baruch. For 23 years, he's on the losing team. He's there when Jeremiah's thrown into prison. He's there when Jeremiah is left in a well, and he's there when Babylon finally invaded and overran Jerusalem. Baruch's name means blessed, and yet he had a life that wasn't living up to his name. By this point in Jeremiah 45, Baruch and Jeremiah have fleed to Egypt, and they're hanging out in Egypt, and now you're ready for these five verses. Jeremiah 45 and verse one. When Baruch, son of Neriah, wrote on a scroll the words Jeremiah the prophet, dictated in the fourth year of Jeholakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah, Jeremiah said this to Baruch. Okay, just to make sure, here we are. Jeremiah has Baruch sit down, and Jeremiah's got a word from the Lord, so Baruch sits down, and he begins to write. All of a sudden, Jeremiah's word is for Baruch, the guy who's been writing the words for everybody else. Now he gets a word. Can you imagine? Some of you felt this way. Other people around you have these stories

about God speaking to them, and you're like, I want God to speak to me. Buckle your seat belt. Jeremiah says to Baruch, verse two, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to you, Baruch. Can you just imagine? Baruch's just leaning in. You said, woe to me. The Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am worn out with groaning. I am weary. The Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am worn out with groaning, and I find no rests. So here, Baruch finds out that God has been hearing everything he's been thinking about him. God is telling him through Jeremiah, hey, I heard what you've been thinking about me. Woe to me. The Lord has added sorrow to my pain. No rests. Can you imagine? Baruch is having his mail read. Jeremiah continues, but the Lord has told me to say to you, this is what the Lord says. I will overthrow what I've built and uproot what I've planted throughout the earth. Should you then seek great things for yourself, do not seek them,

for I will bring disaster on all people, declares the Lord. But wherever you go, I will let you escape with your life. Well, this isn't very encouraging or empathetic. Perhaps Baruch now understood why everyone else wanted to throw Jeremiah in prison or in a well. What's God saying to Baruch? Please understand, God doesn't have a problem with any of us being tired or grieving. When rivers move, there are things worth grieving. Believe me. And there's plenty that Baruch could have been grieving over. He could be grieving over the people who had died in the invasion. He could be grieving over the masses swept into Babylonian captivity. He could be grieving over the fact that the people of God hadn't listened to the word of the Lord through Jeremiah. That's not what Baruch is grieving about. Here's why. It's verse four. I will overthrow what I have built and uproot what I have planted throughout the earth. Should you then seek great things for yourself, do not seek them. God is addressing something deeply embedded in Baruch's heart.

Turns out he's been seeking great things for himself even as he served Jeremiah. Baruch had it good early on. When Jerusalem was blowing and going and the temple system was rocking and rolling, scribes had it good. They had the best parking spaces for their chariots. They had the places of honor at the king's table because the scribes were one of the few literate people in the culture. They had wealth. They had influence. They had... Power. Truth is, Baruch's career path probably stalled when he started being associated with Jeremiah. And then, when Babylon swept into Jerusalem, it wiped out everything Baruch knew about his world. Baruch had been planning great things for himself. Things were part of a system that God had at one time built and at one time used, but now God was allowing that thing to be uprooted that he had at one time planted. Baruch had a career path envisioned within a system that God had used in the past, and yet the system was shattered. And God gets to the heart of Baruch's groaning and grief, and it turns out he was having a pity party. Should you then seek great things for yourself, do not seek them.

Baruch's grief and exhaustion wasn't tied to any of the things that maybe he should have been grieved about. It was tied to his dreams being thwarted. He was seeking of great things for himself. This happens a lot in most every arena of life. Some pastors and ministers, we answer the call because we want to do great things for God. And then somewhere along the way, we drift to seeking great things for ourselves. Baruch is a scribe. He's a religious leader. I'm familiar with this myself. When I was here on staff at the Hills many years ago in my 20s, I wound up in a conversation with a church that was looking for a new lead minister, and I couldn't decide whether or not I really needed to go. I was really wrestling with it for months on end in dialogue. I entered into a three-day fast for three days. I fasted and prayed, just asking God to speak to me. The third morning of the fast, at 5.30 in the morning, I'll never forget this, at 4950 Cloyce Court, right across from the academy in North Richland Hills, I woke up with a question in my mind, a simple question. Chris, if this church had the same problems it has right now but were 150 people instead of 1500 people, would you even be considering it?

And I went, well, no, Lord. And I had my answer. I realized at that moment, through that question, the whole reason I was wrestling is just because of the size of the church that it was. It was my ego that was driving me, more than a call from God. In my own experience of hearing from God, more often than not, when I hear from him, it's usually because he has a question for me that more often than not smokes out some motives that are cluttering my process of discernment. So, obviously, I said no. But it was my first experience in realizing how easy it is to drift from seeking to do great things for him to just looking for great things for yourself. It happens, not just in the world of vocational ministry. You can start a business saying, I'm gonna glorify God, meaning with all your heart, but in the end, it just becomes a vehicle for somebody else to glorify God. You're seeking great things for yourself. You can start out raising children saying, I wanna do this for the glory of God, and then years later, believe it or not, some people will actually attempt to direct their children or steal their children one way or the other, not for their child's sake, but for their own sake and glory. There's all kinds of ways parents can sacrifice their children for their own sake.

It happens. You can have a plan in life, you can have a business, you can adopt this perspective that I'm gonna glorify God, but then in the end, something cataclysmic happens. Your Jerusalem gets overrun. The whole institution or system gets dismantled. COVID happens, the economic landscape changes. The people you thought were your ride or die people took a ride and didn't take you. And your river runs dry. And your river moved. And while there's definitely stuff worth grieving about when those things happen, sometimes, some of our exhaustion and grief and pain has more to do with our own plan for great things for ourself being thwarted. And it's as though God is saying to Baruch, I'm gonna glorify God, I'm gonna glorify God. I'm gonna overthrow and uproot some things, I'm gonna glorify God, I'm gonna glorify God. things I've established, things I've used, I'm gonna glorify God, I'm gonna glorify God. things I've planted in the past. I'm gonna glorify God, I'm gonna glorify God. So save yourself some grief or exhaustion. Don't seek great things for yourself in these things. And then God, as he so often does in Scripture when he's addressing a place in our heart, does give Baruch a promise. It's the only promise he gets.

It's verse five. For I will bring disaster on all people, declares the Lord. But wherever you go, I will let you escape with your life. That's the promise. In other words, Baruch, you're gonna get out of this thing alive. And that's about it. As I ponder what God is telling Baruch, I think about the words of an old worship song called Majesty, written by the late Jack Hayford years and years ago. He has this epic line. Your grace has found me just as I am, empty-handed but alive in your hands. Some of you have lived this story. God tells Baruch, you're gonna get out of here alive, but you're gonna be empty-handed. And because he's alive, he's gonna get a chance to do it right again. As someone once said, the Lord is the most patient of teachers. If you flunk his test, you get to take him again and again and again. What does it mean to do it right? I think this is what Jesus is getting at when he says later in Matthew 6 and 33, but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. That matches with over and over in Jeremiah. Jeremiah is saying over and over, seek the Lord while he may be found.

Seek the Lord while he may be found. But it's a real challenge to do that still because even if you're a disciple of Jesus, you can still have a tendency to drift into seeking great things for yourself. This is what the disciples are dealing with in the Gospels. This is the drama of the Gospels. All the disciples are following Jesus, but they're following Jesus with their own idea in mind of the destination Jesus is gonna take them to. They all have their agenda for Jesus. That's why they freak out when Jesus starts talking about suffering, being rejected, and being killed. That's not in their job description for their Messiah. They're like, this Messiah has been sent to rule from a throne in Jerusalem and to kick some Roman tail. How in the world are we gonna overthrow Rome when you're planning on suffering, rejecting, and being killed at the hands of your own people, Jesus? And it gets so bad that Peter actually takes Jesus aside, if you remember, in Mark 8, and Peter rebukes Jesus. He's like, Jesus, you got the wrong job description. And Jesus, in turn, says, get thee behind me, Satan, for you have in mind the things of men and not the things of God. Because even the disciples themselves are following Jesus in the hopes that he'll be the vehicle that will take them to their preferred destination in their own hearts.

It happens. As A.W. Tozer said, we often treat Jesus the way Saul treated David. We want him to slay giants and sing evil spirits away, but we don't want him to be king. And the nature of him being king and me being a disciple is learning to die a thousand deaths to where I learn to seek him first. And it's a slow learning curve. Here's what's interesting, though. We have the book of Jeremiah because of Baruch. One of the cool things is that, though his heart was a mixed bag of motives, there's a part of him that was seeking great things for himself, and yet the Lord still used him. Thanks be to God, he still uses us, mixed bag of motives and all, amen? And he made a significant contribution that's lasted through the ages, but his heart was mired in a pity party. We don't know what happened with him. We have the fruit of his ministry. I've learned two things in my life when it comes to seeking great things for myself from experience, but I think they're also revealed in Scripture. When I seek great things for myself, two things I want you to lock in on. Number one, joy is elusive. What I focus on has a lot to do with my capacity for joy.

If our focus is on seeking great things for ourselves, we're putting ourselves in position for a great deal of frustration because the universe doesn't revolve around us getting great things for ourselves. Nobody else is waking up thinking about how can I help you accomplish a great thing for yourself? The will of the Lord doesn't revolve around me achieving great things for myself. God can use you like he did Baruch, but there was still no joy for Baruch because he was focused on the wrong thing. But when I learned to keep my focus on the kingdom of God, the glory of God, the will of the God, I can find the joy in it because the kingdom of God, as Dallas Willard says, is never in trouble. But my will and my agenda often is. Why? Because rivers move. The glory of God is always at work. Jesus said in John 5 and 19, my Father is always at work. And the glory of God is present even when your river has moved. I think of my friend Chris Geigel and his family. They lost their entire house in a fire just down the road from our Farmer's Branch campus years ago. It was a complete loss. A few of you have been through this.

Their river moved. The next day as they were picking through the smoldering ashes just trying to find things that hadn't perished in the fire, valuables and heirlooms and family memories, they're all weeping. Chris asked for his wife Vivian and his son Jake to come with him and they gathered over on the corner of the property in the midst of the ashes and he said, we need to pray that God will do something beautiful with this horrible thing and that God will help us to see where he's at work in it. And they bowed their heads and they wept and they lamented, but they asked for God to bring something beautiful quite literally out of the ashes. It was a long road of rebuilding the house, but that prayer is an expression of seeking his kingdom first and of all things the Lord did use it. It turns out that as the house is being rebuilt over the next couple of years, Chris working closely with the contractors and they noticed his demeanor and his joyful disposition through it all because they knew how they lost the house and yet they saw how he treated them, how he responded to the whole context of the situation, the durability of Chris's joy

got the contractor's attention. It spoke volumes. Listen to me, sometimes it takes you enduring some darkness in your own life in order for others to see your light really shine. For all the times in your life when you've asked, Lord, I pray my light shines, my light emanates from me, that people see the light pointing to you. Often the background have to get darker, has to get darker in order for your light to shine brighter and before it was all said and done, after a couple of years, wouldn't you believe it? Three different people, two of them contractors were baptized in his rebuilt pool that they had built. As Chris himself would say, that's beauty from ashes. But when we seek great things for ourself, that joy becomes much more elusive and secondly, when we seek great things for ourself, chaos and disorder in relationships is so often the fruit. It's interesting that James wrote, Believers in the First Century, this piece of wisdom, James 3, 14 through 16, watch what he says. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, stop right there, if you harbor, if you allow bitter envy or selfish ambition to dock, to find harbor in your heart. He goes on to say, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom, why in the world would anybody consider

that to be wisdom? In Greco-Roman culture, it was. It was thought, you know what? Don't deny selfish ambition, it's a good thing. Let envy motivate you. You'll go far with selfish ambition and envy in our world. It was thought to be wisdom. James takes on the wisdom of the day and says, such wisdom does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. And then he says this, for where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. Most disorder in our relationships is rooted in envy and selfish ambition having docked. In our heart. That's why much of the life of a disciple of Jesus is paying attention to what's docking in your heart. As C.S. Lewis says, the Christian's nostril must be continually attentive. to their inner cesspool, and yet God is in the business of purifying the cesspool. Sometimes, river-moved moments has a way of smoking out the selfish ambition that's been sabotaging my relationships all along. I think about the question that God asked Baruch, should you then seek great things for yourself? I think about Jesus in the wilderness alone with Satan. What is Satan doing? He's trying to get Jesus to be preoccupied

with seeking great things for himself, and the temptations don't stop there. They go all the way through the cross, but aren't you glad Jesus didn't seek great things for himself, but he embodied that text that you just heard read during our worship time out of Philippians chapter two. We're reminded he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross, in a world that's all about making something of yourself. Jesus was secure enough in who he was before the Father to make nothing of himself. Part of the power of the gospel is to give you this profound security that you can be secure enough to make nothing of yourself, that you can be secure enough to go lesser than in a world that's going greater than. Of course, you know the rest of the story. Early that Sunday morning, Jesus got out alive. It's been an eventful year thus far in our country and in our world, and for some of us this year, it's been an eventful year in our personal lives, and maybe every now and then, I feel this way right now when I think about what's happening in our world, maybe every now and then you're wondering what in the world are we in for? What are we in for?

What's about to happen that's going to change the worship assembly plan next Sunday? What's about to happen? What river's gonna move that's gonna render a plan obsolete and send you back to the drawing board in your life? I don't know what we're in for. Today's the day to reaffirm who we're in it for. Who are we in it for? Who are you in it for? As you stand on the threshold of a new school year, who are you in it for? As you enter into the last third of the year, who are you in it for? Regardless of what rivers may move. If you're in it for the glory of God, if you're in it for the kingdom of God, then your pity parties are gonna be few, your joy's gonna be durable, and your relationships are gonna be a lot less chaotic and disordered. I like your chances. Rick and I have got a dear friend by the name of Milton Jones. For more than 50 years, Milton's been preaching the gospel. Last couple decades, he's been working with the Christian Relief Fund. A lot of you are familiar with the Christian Relief Fund. Milton gave his life to Jesus in the 70s on the campus at Texas Tech University. He didn't know what to pray on the day

that he was baptized, but he prayed something like this. Lord, I don't know what I have that you would want. I don't know what I've got that you can use, but whatever it is, you can have it. You can have it, all of it. And maybe those are words for you today. You don't know where to begin. You've had rivers move, but you wanna make a step forward to seeking him like you never have before in your life. Or maybe you wanna step into another river, the waters of baptism, and begin a life anew in Jesus. Or maybe you've been walking with him for a long time, but you've had a river move this summer, and you've been dealing with it in isolation. And today's the day to step out and say, you know what, I need support, I need help, I need prayer so I can get my bearings about me in the wake of this river moving. In just a moment, I'm telling you now, in just a moment, there's gonna be an invitation to step out for prayer, to step out, step in the waters of baptism. I don't know how you need to respond, but I'm here to tell you there is another river that wants to move through you in the midst of all the other rivers that have been moving around you because Jesus once said in John 7 and 37 that his spirit is as a river of living water, sent to flow through those who would believe in him. And for every river that's ever moved on you,

there's another river that wants to move through you. May it be so, Lord. Let's pray. Lord, I ask for grace to be upon our hearts right now. I pray you water your word for those of us who have people in our lives that have had rivers move on them recently, will you grant us a word of strength, encouragement, and comfort according to 1 Corinthians 14 and five, a word that brings strength. and fortification to them. For others of us who've had a river move on them, will you grant us the courage to step out and to allow others to be a source of strength and wisdom and counsel for us, to pray for us? For maybe a few of us right now who are saying, I don't even want my life anymore, I pray you would hear the voice of the Lord tell you, then give me your life and watch what I can do with it. Through Jesus, amen.