You're Brave, You're Strong, You're Loved // 24 May 2026

Dr Brendan Roach

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Presence on this Pentecost Sunday, Lord, as you sent your Holy Spirit to the apostles, so you send your Holy Spirit to us. Lord, we just pray that you be with us, be in our presence as we come together and worship and celebrate you in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Please take seats. So I don't know what stories I can really tell you about, Scott. There's that I can actually say in church. That's the issue, really, isn't it? Um, so no, I Scott and Rachel, very proud of what they've done and followed them from afar when they uh first talked about coming, talked about planting, went to Liverpool, and and just you know, their their tenacity to just follow through on what God has told them to do. Scott, so proud of you, so of what you've done. It's so awesome just to be watching from a distance and now to be seeing what God's doing here. With you in this beautiful city of uh Dover, I've been bragging to Carol and she's saying, Send me pictures, and that's my wife, by the way. Um just in case you're wondering. Uh so uh hopefully we'll be we'll be back even if we're just flying through as uh tourists one day. We'll definitely coming back to this beautiful part of the world. And and yes, I'll take credit for the weather. Uh unless you're feeling too hot. I see someone furiously fanning over there. So uh so the but so a little bit of what I what I did and uh and uh uh what was it, Harvest for several years, Harvest Bible College for a long time, and then we felt God call us to start training uh pastors, uh particularly starting in Africa, but but globally, and we did that eight years ago. And the day I started was April 1. So I think that was fairly apt, uh leaving a very comfortable, secure position to go and be be a missionary in in Africa, and that's where I've just come from. We've been working with our translators in in Mozambique and hoping to get our first Portuguese course up and running uh by the end of the year, which will cover several countries in Africa and also places like Brazil, where they start 17 churches a day, Pentecostal churches a day, with one train pastor, as in one train pastor in those 17 churches. Very, very similar. So we provide free training to now 25,000 pastors who are enrolled doing our training. We've graduated about 4,000 now, and so that's been really exciting. We're working towards um hopefully in the next few months, we'll be working towards uh starting the translation of Swahili, which will cover 200 million African speakers who have virtually no training whatsoever in their languages, in their in their uh native tongue of that part. So there's a couple of different languages there that we're we're working on. So it's very exciting what God's doing through the through the Ministry of Acts. It's all online. I can say, how does that work? Just about every Kenyan has a phone, smartphone that they can, because in in places like Kenya and other places in Africa, they would cut down the phone lines and sell the copper. So they stop putting phone lines up and they put mobile phone towers up everywhere. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of access, there's also a lot of uh poverty, a lot of challenge, but most of our graduates and pastors actually stay in their villages, stay in their towns, and and huge, there's over two and a half million untrained pastors in the world. So we're doing our little bit uh we're a little bit with that. So our ministry is called Axe AXX. Don't type in the third X, otherwise you could end up in a place you don't want to be. Um, so you'll be able to find us or put in Dr. Brennan Roach if you want to find out a little bit more about what we're doing. So I want to talk to you today about your brave, you're strong, and you're loved. So I've been writing this, put up put off writing a book for a long, long time because I always changed my mind on everything. Hopefully that's because I'm learning a little bit more. And so I started writing writing my book, and as I was going through the the process of it, I I started to just do a big dump of all the things I felt that I wanted to write about and that I'd learnt. And then I started to look at and said, Well, is this actually what the Bible says? Is this true? And then I went, well, have I actually lived my life by this? And started to filter it. And then the third the final part was can other people live their life through this? So I'd spent a couple of years every morning in a cafe riding away, and for at least an hour every morning, and some days went well, other days not so much, and for the last three months, I was completely stuck. I'd written everything else, but I couldn't write an introductory chapter. And I was completely stuck, and then my wife was sitting down with our new grandson, and I heard her say, You're brave, you're strong, you're loved. And that's been our family motto that was said to all of our kids, all of our grandkids. And and then we we had a bit of a chat about about that and why she was saying it and all that sort of thing, and I went, I think you've just given me the introductory chapter of the book. So if you like today's sermon, you can thank Carol, my wife, for that. If you don't like it, you can just blame me, because obviously I'm not communicating it really very well at all. So I originally started writing this book for people who were called into ministry, people who saw themselves as pastors, apostles, prophets, or whatever it might be. But then as I started to go through, one of the key characters that I looked at was Hannah, and I call Hannah the mother of the call. And Hannah and Boaz and several other characters, even we look at Pilate and the rich young ruler, all those characters in the Bible who are not the leading lights, and I could see all those principles that I've been writing about applying to what there was. So Boaz with his generous heart, Hannah, who just cried out to God and was willing to sacrifice and give it all. So when I started to look and started to go through that, I started to end up with these three identifying principles. You're brave, you're strong, and you're loved. And I identified that if we can get a hold of those three things, it changes our life. It starts to starts to change the way we think about God, the way we relate to God, the way we we we think about how we relate to Him. So quite often I would get asked in many different circumstances, how do I know if God's calling me? How do I know if God's calling me? But more often than not, the real question is we know what God's asking us to do. We're trying to figure it out as we go through our journey. So at every but we we end up getting stuck on the where and the when and the how. But most of the time, it's actually God's already speaking to us. And that's not a failure, that's the journey of the call. And if I can leave you with one point to think about and one point to focus on in the message today, that the call of God, what I'm calling the call of God, God's main interest in your life is not what you do for him. He's actually interested in transforming you into the person of the call. We get caught up in the activities of God. Yet God is not interested in what activities we do for him. He's interested in what we're being transformed into. So the foundation of the call is you're brave. When your time to step up comes, you will step up. You're strong, strong enough to stand to do what God is asking you to do, and you're loved that you are being you're loved enough to be transformed into the purse of the call, and you're called in that you are uniquely and wonderfully made. And that transformation begins by knowing that we're brave, we're strong, and we're loved. We know the story of David and Goliath, and most of us would think that David is brave when he actually goes to fight Goliath. But David is brave long before he goes to fight Goliath. And we have a look at the next scripture, which is not there in full, just a few summary points from 1 Samuel and the story. So David's father is a little bit above average intelligence. He goes, I'm going to send David off with some really nice cheese to the guy who decides where my sons are in the battlefield. So if I give him a nice little gift, they'll be at the back. And so David goes off, gives the gift, and he's there and he's walking around going, Who's this guy? Why aren't you fighting? What's the reward? And he's just being really, really annoying. He's being really annoying. Do we have any younger brothers here in the audience? I'm a younger brother. It's our role to annoy I've got two older sisters to annoy my older sisters. I remind them that I'm the favorite, that mum loves me more than them. So that that sort of behavior, that sort of annoying thing, it doesn't happen, it doesn't change the older you get. But David was there and he was running around and he was asking a question. And so often, when God starts to speak to you about things that he wants you to do, you become a real annoying pest. You become the one who sees what needs to be done. Everybody could see the problem, right? Everybody could see Goliath every morning. You don't have to be the rocket scientist to go, I see Goliath. He's out there, he's annoying, I can see the problem. But David was the one who came into that circumstance, who came into that situation with the bravery to act. No one else but David was called to fight Goliath. No one else was given the bravery to fight Goliath. So before you're brave, you're often a pest. But David actually went in, and his first act of bravery was to go in before Saul and say, I will fight Goliath. That's what the bravery step that took. It wasn't that he willed himself up with courage to actually stand before Goliath. No, it had been everything that in his life had been building up to that point. He'd been fighting the lion and the bear, he'd been protecting the sheep. He'd been doing all of those things, he'd been building a close relationship with God. So when he stepped into the moment where God was asking him to do something, it was like a reflex. It was a spontaneous action. He didn't have to go away and pray and fast for 30 days. He didn't have to seek the Lord as to what he would do, because when he was confronted with the thing that God was asking him to do, it was a reflex of faith. And so often we get caught up in this idea, what can I do for God? Yet when our moment comes, and every one of us has had this in a smaller or larger way, when the moment comes, we know it's our time to act. We know it's our time to respond. A lot of us have walked away from those moments, uh, maybe a small moment of sharing the gospel or a word of encouragement or something else that we we know when we walked away from that situation, we knew, oh, I should have done this. I should have said this. That is what I call the instinct of bravery. It's where God has woven something in your soul which is unique and special to you. And when your moments come, because it's not just one big moment fighting Goliath, when your moments come, you instinctively want to respond. And so we don't need to have great levels of faith to move mountains or whatever it might be, because when God's asking us to do the things that he's set before us, bravery starts to rise above. So bravery is instinctive. Like Peter at the back of the boat, he hears Jesus calling him. He doesn't think, he doesn't have a discussion with the other apostles. He just says, Jesus, if you want me to come, I'm coming. And he steps out of the boat. It's a reflex, it's instinctive, it's an action that we that we don't even need to think about. We're already there, we're already leaning forward, we're already moving into this place, and sometimes when we're doing it, we don't know why, we don't know how we've got there. It's like blinking your eyes. It's just an absolute reflex. It's when the the Spirit of God whispers and says, Step forward, move forward into what he has for us to do. So the key point is that only David was called to fight Goliath. Only David was called to fight Goliath. I don't like this theology and this idea. If you don't do it, and I've heard many preachers say this, I was God's third choice for this. Everybody else, it was a nice, semi-humble, false humility. If anybody I might be getting into trouble if someone said it from the pulpit here. But it's sort of like that that idea. But what it is that we God has woven something in this, and David was the only one called to fight. So when he gets out there, everybody else is trembling, everybody else is in fear, everybody else is talking about the problem, and David's going, I'm called by God to do something about this. I'm gonna fight the battle, I'm going to do it. So when bravery rises, the strength of God follows. So here's a couple of quick points about the strength of God. Psalm 18, verse 32 says, God arms me with his strength and makes my way perfect. How cool is that? Once we step out and follow the plan and path of God for our lives, then we need the strength of God to stand. To stand in what he's asking us to do, to stand in what he's called us to do. So when bravery rises up within you, so I'm using the word bravery, not courage. Courage is like being on the football field and gritting your teeth when that the impact is about to hit you and you're about to be crushed. That takes courage because you'll know pain is coming. Bravery is this instinct from God that flows naturally through you, and then the strength of God comes upon you. The strength of God is first and foremost wholeness. You are whole, complete, lacking nothing for what God's asked you to do. Whole, complete, lacking nothing for what God's asked you to do. You don't need to do another course, you don't need to pray more, you don't need to wait for the white time, you don't need to, whatever it might be, our myriad of excuses that we have for delaying. You don't need to have any of those things because the strength of God, you are whole and complete in what he's called you to do. Peter, the fisherman, becomes an author and a leader. Moses, the stutter, he becomes a speaker. Paul, the persecutor of the church, becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. He makes you whole for your call. He makes you whole for what he's asking you to do. It's not that you're broken and you need to be fixed. The moment you got saved, you are whole, complete, lacking nothing. If you've been saved for a few years, you're whole, complete, lacking nothing, and hopefully transformed more into the image of Christ, and in ten years' time, you'll be whole, complete, lacking nothing, and more transformed into the image of Christ. There's not a moment that you have to wait and say, you know what, once I get that sorted, once the kids are grown up, once I get my behavior under control, once I get this thing sorted out, once I do a little bit more Bible study, once I can pray in tongues for an hour, then God will use me. Whatever our limitations that we place on ourselves, the Bible tells us that we are whole and complete, lacking nothing. So strength faces the questions, the questions in our head, the questions that other people make of us. Strength declares who the battle belongs to. And strength is in every season of life. I thought when I read the book when I was writing the book, everybody'd say, Who are you writing it for? Who are you writing it for? Who you writing for? And I go, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And there's uh a gentleman in my church who's over the age of 70, and he got the book, and he came back to me, he read it really quickly, came back to me next week. He said, I know what God's asked me to do. I'm taking the book to my friend who's 85 in the nursing home. He's really going to enjoy this. So he takes it and he comes back to me and he says, He's read the book and he knows what he's now going to do for God. So it's not a season. It's not, I'm too young, I'm too old, I'm the wrong gender, I'm the wrong race, I'm in the wrong place, I'm in the wrong stage of life. God knows exactly where we are. We don't need to be waiting for something to be right, something to be complete, something to be in the right place in the right time. It's every one of us. So bravery steps out, strength stands firm, and love transforms. And this is the foundation of everything. You're called because you're loved. You're called because you're loved. We live in a transactional world, and I do my best as a parent and a grandparent, but I know that I'm nowhere near perfect. And I know that the people that I've worked for, the relationships that I have, there's been transactional elements and relationships. And we take a lot of what we've learned and what we've experienced from our parents, from our colleagues, from our family, and we take that transactional relationship on to God and we say, God, if I can just get this right, or God, if I can work this a little bit harder, God, if I can pray a little bit more, God, if I can read my Bible a little bit longer, God, if there's something that I can do to make you happy, then you'll give me what I want. But that's not the way God works. You see, when Jesus met Peter after he denied him three times, he asked him over and over again, Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Do we think that Jesus really didn't know that Peter loved him? But Peter needed to hear that. Because Peter had grown up with a transactional father who was more interested in the fishing fleet and what he was doing. That's why he went back to fishing. Because he disappointed one important man in his life and he didn't want to disappoint another. He entered into that transaction relationship and said, I've let you down, therefore I can't do anything more for you because my transaction has failed. Whereas God says, I love you regardless. Because I love you, you're being transformed. It's not, God is not interested in what we do for him. Sorry for the missions program, sorry for the volunteers and the ushers and the pastors. But you know what I mean by that, right? Because we love God, we serve, but God does not require us to do activity for him so that he will love us. But yet the world has corrupted us in such a way that we think that we have to work hard for God. We need to do this for God, and if we do this for God, then God's gonna do this for me. We understand that God loves us for who we are, and the foundation of everything is love. 1 John 4 16. So we have come to know and believe that. Love that God has for us. We have come to know and believe. Many of us know or believe, but most of us don't know and believe the love that God has for us that just sits with us. Because when I know that God loves me, I can never fail God. I can never let him down. And you know what? If I can never let God down, if I can never fail God, if God's love is never ever retracted from me, then I can try something for God. I can step out bravely for God. I can be strong knowing that there is no way I can let him down. There's no way that you can let God down. There's no way that you can fail God. There's no way that you can remove yourself from the love of God. So we step out in bravery because we're loved. We stand strong because we're loved. But bravery without love is simply pride. Bravery without love is pride. Strength without love is striding. But love equals transformation. You're not loved. Sorry, you're not loved because you're called. You're called because you're loved. We don't need to earn it. It's there. Before David, before the king, he sat in the wilderness with nothing but a harp and a sling. And he worshipped God. And in that place, in that place, he realized that God's love would never abandon him. God's love would never let him down. And he reads, and he writes in Psalm 63, verse 3, Because your unfailing love is better than life itself, my lips will praise you. And we see all of David's life with its ups and downs and his crazy behavior and things going well and things going bad. Something was so deep in his soul that he was able to write, Your unfailing love is better than life itself. So he wouldn't kill Saul, even though Saul was trying to kill him. Because God's unfailing love was better than life itself. So transformation isn't about fixing what's broken in you. Yes, as we're transformed into the image of Christ, things change, things shift. But it's the deepest work of love itself is transformation. So bravery changes your position, strength changes your posture, and love changes you as a person. Give you one example of this from what Jesus did at the Last Supper. Really quickly, then I'll finish. So Jesus takes off his robes, washes the feet of the disciples. And Peter carries on until he figures out what's going on and then goes, I'm all in. But he's there and he kneels down. I've got dodgy knees at the moment, kneels down, and he's there and he's washing the feet of the people that love him and that he loves. He goes out, he's betrayed. Peter decides he's gonna delicately just take a little bit off the corner of the temple guard's ear. They actually had helmets with the ears sticking out, so Peter was trying to chop the guy's head off and could only get the ear. So you've just had your ear cut off. Little bit of the heat of battle going on. What does Jesus do? He does exactly the same thing with the temple guard. He bows down, changes his posture, shows the back of his neck as he reaches out and picks up his ear. You see, Jesus does the same thing for those who believe that they love him, and those that believe are his enemy. His posture changes. His posture changes that he knew that he loved them. He loved Peter when he washed his feet. He loved the temple guard when he reached down and picked up his ear. And it didn't matter what they thought. It didn't matter. And he changed his posture to show that I love you no matter what. I love you no matter whether you're my friend, my disciple, or my enemy, I will love you the same. And my posture never changes. I am here to serve you. I am here to love you. So the deepest truth of the call is this you are loved. And once we get that in our head, once we get that in our mind, everything changes. Like Peter, he denied Jesus, but he didn't fail Jesus. So often we think we've failed him. So often we think we've let him down. But the truth is we can never let him down. We can never let him down because he loves us and he will always restore us. He will always bring us back. If the museo music team could come up. And just to finish up with Romans chapter 12, verse 2, let God transform you into a new work, a new person. The ultimate work of love is not you doing something for God. The ultimate work of love is that He is transforming you into a new person, into a new being. And in that process, I can never fail him, even when I do. I can never let him down, even when I do. In Jesus' name. So here's my final declaration and my prayer for all of us here this morning. You are brave enough to step out. You are strong enough to stand, and you are loved enough to be transformed. Follow the call. Live the call in Jesus' name. Amen. Lord, we praise and we thank you, Father. On this Pentecost Sunday, when you sent your Holy Spirit, you sent your spirit down. You sent it down powerfully on a group of untrained, flawed and failed men and women on the day of Pentecost. Lord, we praise and we thank you, Father. We thank you, Lord. Likewise, you send your Holy Spirit down today on a failed and flawed group of people here. But a failed group of people that are perfectly and wonderfully and completely made in your name. Come, Holy Spirit, fall afresh on us today. In Jesus' mighty name. Amen. Amen.