Holy Ground | Week 3 (6-14-2026)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "The Riverside."

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Transcript

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Uh did I ever tell you about the time a couple years ago where I spent uh $450 on uh sod to fix some patches in our front yard? I guess let me say a little bit when I wasted $450 trying to patch some sod in our front yard. You know, I I I I I watched every YouTube video on like laying sod possible. I mean, I'd laid sod on some mission trips, but I I just did like the carrying of the grass. I didn't prepare the ground. So I watched all these YouTube videos and I read all these things, and I got a tiller from Home Depot, and I did all the preparing and laying it all out, and I put up my squares of sod. And if you laid sod this year, or if you did some patching your grass, you know this is the time of year now where you're supposed to see the fruits of your labor, where the lines are starting to disappear, the grass is growing soon. You can cut it for the first time and starting to look like your grass. I never got that experience. I never got to experience the joy of seeing the grass take. And it turns out that there's a reason that those patches of grass were dead, is because on one side of the yard we had this magnolia tree with all these magnolia leaves that were constantly falling on it. And the other side, there's this other like uh group of trees or pollen falling on it, and no light is getting through. It didn't matter what grass I planted there, it was the wrong place to be planting grass. And I would like to say that that grass failure is the only time that I have killed outdoor plants, but it's not. Uh somebody earlier shouted out, black thumb. I was like, yeah, I hadn't heard that term before, but but when it comes to outdoor plants, um the amount of plants we have put on our front porch that have gotten scorched by the summer sun, because you know, they need like constant water out there. And and I I can't count my I don't have enough fingers to count how many plants we have killed on our front porch. And and we've come a long way, you know. Brianna, uh we're really good at indoor plants now. She's a crazy plant lady, that's what I like to call her. And and her office in our new realm house over here, it looks like a greenhouse. There's this Florida room, and I mean you go in, it's like a jungle. But outdoor plants still aren't our thing. We had this beautiful hydrangea bush right outside our front door nine years ago when we moved in. And it was like as tall as my chest. And now, as we're moving out, it's like below my knees. That's just kind of our I feel like outdoor plants are allergic to me. Like I get around them, they just die. Which is why I get really mad at live oaks. You know live oaks, right? It's one of my favorite things about living in this area. If you're not from here and you move down here, you're just amazed at these beautiful, monster trees. And you you drive down any neighborhood in this area. You go to the Avenue of the Oaks over there on Spring Hill College, you drive down Scenic 98, and you see these gorgeous trees. Some of these trees are older than Alabama is as a state. They have been around some of them for a hundred years or more. And uh one of the things that makes me so mad about these trees, though, is you don't ever see somebody in their yard at 6 a.m. misting a live oak, right? I've never watched somebody tend to the live oaks. They have stood through droughts that killed everything around them. They are still standing after hurricanes came through. You know how if you're from this area, um, you talk about things like before and after Frederick. If you're not from here, Frederick was a really big hurricane that came through. And people talk about there's the before and after Frederick time. Well, guess what? Most of the live oaks made it through Frederick. And it's amazing to me uh that the difference between my porch ferns and those live oaks, it's not effort. It's not that those are better seeds per se. It's not that they work harder than the others. The difference is where their roots are, right? I mean, those ferns, they live off whatever I remember to give them, which is obviously not very much, which is why they all die. But those live oaks, the reason why they've been around for so long is because those roots found water deep underground and they never let go. They happen to be planted in one of the wettest parts of our country. You know, we have sometimes uh a lot less trouble growing things outside than we do keeping them from growing, which is why it's amazing. I can still kill everything outside. The secret of the live oak, it's not some like a life hack or productivity or leadership book. It's not that they have the right personal mission statement and so they just do things better than all the other plants. No, their secret is that they are just planted season after season in the right soul, touching the best water. Uh, three weeks ago, we started a new series called Holy Ground, where we're looking at how the geography in the Bible, how the land in the Bible helps tell the story of God and his people. And how when you look throughout the Bible, you can see the way that the authors bring in kind of the features of the area. Like on our first week, we talked about the mountaintops, Mount Hermon, how the dew that starts at Mount Herman trickles down and provides life to the Jordan River. And we talked last week about how sometimes you come down the mountain, you end up uh with a the ground falling out beneath you. You end up in the shadow valleys, how shadow valleys can be unavoidable. So mountaintops are a nice place to visit. Shadow valleys can be unavoidable. But the riverside, the riverside, that's where everybody wants to live. That's where you want to set up camp. And in fact, uh it's true of almost every civilized civilization in history. Almost every major city and the largest city, some of the most important cities throughout time, were all set up near a river. Because the best soul in Israel was at the riverside. It had these broad, fertile plains that were along the Jordan and its tributaries. And it wasn't only for drinking water, which did provide life, but it was for the irrigation channels that brought water to their crops during the dry seasons. And the closer you lived to the bank, the less work you had to do. And every time the riverbed would overflow, the silt would come and provide more life, more nutrients, more nourishment to the land. And so the moving water kept everything alive. And so you can also see if you keep reading the Bible, what happens when the water stops. When the water stops moving, when it gets to its end, when the Jordan River reaches its end, it becomes the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is so salty that nothing can live there. When the water quits moving, it it stops being that nourishing life for all those olives and dates and figs and becomes a place of desolation. In our readings this morning, uh, both in Jeremiah and Psalm, there's a tree that is planted by water. The psalmist says that the truly happy person, the one who loves the Lord's instructions, is like a tree planted by a stream of water, bearing fruit at just the right time, leaves that don't fade. Whatever they do succeeds. Jeremiah uh says that one of those, the one who trusts in the Lord, is like a tree planted by the streams, whose roots reach down to the water. Now, these scriptures are so similar that you have to assume that one of them might have been reading the other one when writing theirs. And scholars can argue about which one came first, and I'm not too particularly concerned about that. What I'm more interested in is how these two scriptures differ. Because did you notice that the Psalm never mentions the drought that Jeremiah talks about? If you were to read Psalm 1 by itself, it would sound like everything's gonna be perfect no matter what, right? If you just get planted, do you plant yourself by the river, then everything, whatever you do, succeeds, and there's no bad things in life. But Jeremiah, the prophet, whose entire ministry was one long heartbreak, takes that very same tree and he writes that drought directly into the promise. He doesn't say if the drought comes, he says, when the drought comes, they will not fear, they won't be stressed, their leaves will still be green. And so as you're reading these two verses, I kind of wonder which one is it? Like, is it Psalm 1? Everything's gonna be fine, everything's gonna work out for those who plant themselves. Or is it our lives more like Jeremiah? Who know that hey, there are times when things dry out, when seasons are tough, because they don't sound like the same promise. One more thing about these two texts in the common English version of it. Uh, the word uh that I love is how it says it's been replanted, how the tree has been replanted. The Hebrew word is is mostly kin to transplanted, like it could be carried from one place and set down in another. Trees don't end up by the river by accident in these accounts, right? A wild seed might take its chance and land whatever it will. But these transplanted trees, they were chosen, they were carried and they were placed by somebody who knew where the right water was. You know, as much as I love preaching and teaching and spending time with you and talking, um, a lot of my job is also measuring things. Uh during the week, you know, it's funny. Uh uh I went fishing with somebody a couple years ago and they said, Hey, could you go with me on like a Tuesday morning? And I was like, No, I've got stack meeting. And they look at me and they say, What do you mean? I was like, What do you mean by what I mean? I got a staff meeting. And he's got this confused look on his face. And I said, Do you think I only work on Sundays? He's like, Oh, yeah, I just assumed. Most of the a lot of times during my week, it is doing things like uh looking at uh our our our giving and uh our our disbursements, what we're spending money on. It's also looking at how we're using our time, supporting our staff, and measuring things, basically looking at spreadsheets and and doing a lot of the organizational work. And uh I I often live by the line that uh attributed Peter Drucker, might have been somebody else, who says, that which is measured gets managed. And I'm constantly thinking about those things. What can I do to improve? What can I do? What measurements do I need to do to help us make sure we're managing things and treating God's resources He's given us in the best way possible? But I also think that sometimes uh we as a society can take that too far. I know that on the one hand, I am healthiest and I'm at my best shape whenever I am measuring things like calories and and and my miles run or ridden on a bike. Um, and you can tell um when I'm in one of those like measuring things modes, because I'm wearing my Apple Watch more or my garment or something like that, and and I don't look as much like this, you know, and just having a little more freedom uh lets you be able to let go a little bit, right? I I think sometimes in our personal lives, but also in our professional lives, we put so much attention into asking what are the measurable goals and are we exceeding them, are we succeeding that we miss out on the fact that there is more joy to life and that your worth is not in your work. I mean, I I think sometimes we look at our lives and we end up basing our entire self-worth and identity on our vocations. Am I producing enough? Am I keeping up? Am I succeeding in this life season? And if our productivity uh does not uh go up the snuff, if it doesn't seem like it's it's what it should be, then our self-worth plummets. And what happens is that we end up planting ourselves nearing a stream that will never satisfy. We we plant ourselves by whichever stream makes us feel most accomplished or gives us uh the greatest feelings of worthiness. For some, it might be that career, right? Because the career, as it's flowing fast, it goes downstream and everybody's impressed with a good work. Or perhaps uh it is uh the the approval that comes from time on a screen, right? A stream that runs exactly as long as as you keep performing and looking good. For some of us, it's making sure the calendar is so full that all your busyness is worthwhile, and that you can show that your time hasn't been wasted. Israel has a lot of streams like that, and they have a name for these type of streams. The land over there is full of wadis. These are these riverbeds that roar with water for a few weeks during the rainy seasons of the year. From a distance, in February, a waddy looks like a river. You can't tell the difference when the water is up. They even have trees and bushes that grow up along the banks right up until the time of the year when the rain stops. How many of us plant our lives besides beside wadis? Besides rivers that really can't nourish us. A few verses earlier in Jeremiah, uh, the prophet describes how there's this other type of tree. It's a tree that relies on human strength. He says it's like a shrub in the desert, living in parched places, in a salty land where nobody survived, it's on the edge of the Dead Sea where there's no moving water. That shrub didn't get planted in some exotic wasteland. It got planted beside a stream that couldn't provide what it actually needed. I have sat with enough people during dry seasons to know what a drought actually exposes. To know what gets left behind when everything is taken away. When the job goes away, you find out how much of yourself was planted in it. When the applause stops, you find out that that stream of approval was insufficient. The diagnosis comes, uh, the marriage strains, the kids struggle, and the question that surfaces in all those places, it's not uh why is there drought? It's almost always, why am I withering? And those are two different questions. Why is there drought? It's an existential theological question that we can have big pontificating uh discussion about. Why am I withering though? That's a personal question. It's a question about you. And the leaves will tell the truth about the roots. I love how Jeremiah answers this second question. Look at that tree again. It it doesn't avoid the drought, or it doesn't even ask why is the drought happening. The tree stands in the same water as the shrub, the same sky, the same merciless months without rain, but the tree doesn't experience any type of better weather than the shrub. It experiences deeper water. That tree is isn't living on a fake stream that goes away when the sun comes out. The roots have gone down past the topsoil, past everything that the weather can touch, down deep to where the water keeps moving, whether the weather cooperates or not. That's what trust is in this passage. When it uses the word trust, it's not some feeling you manufacture. It's not only there whenever the rainy season is there, whenever the water is lush. Trust is deep at the roots. One of my favorite verses in all the Bible comes from the book of Proverbs, chapter three. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding, acknowledge him in all your ways, and he will direct your paths. Trust is the best word we have for faith. Faith isn't just belief. Oh, I believe because everything is easy, I believe because everything is good. I believe. Trust is what happens when you realize that you have to have deep roots when things get hard. It's what you do when you are planted so deep that those uh rivers still give you nourishment when everything around you is dry. You know what I've come to appreciate about the psalm of this though? That that one line in there, a really hard line, that doesn't make sense. Whatever they do succeeds. Uh I'll admit that line used to bother me. Whatever they do succeeds, it sounds very prosperity gospel, right? Like, well, you just plant yourself and everything, and you're gonna get a Lamborghini. It's not that. I have come to realize that's not what it's talking about. When you uh think about life, I I when I think about the people I've buried, who have been wonderful, faithful people, who've gone through tragedies and hardships and sorrow. And I ask not everything they touched turned out fine. They they were, I believe, planted by rivers, but not everything they produced was perfect. I find encouragement though when I realized how this psalm is actually defining success. If you look at it, it says, a tree bears fruit at just the right time in its season. It never says that every season is always fruitful, or that every season will look on the outside like everything is perfect. A fruit tree isn't covered in fruit in February. There are whole months where that tree looks like it's doing nothing at all, but there's deep things happening beneath. And the psalm calls that tree a success the whole time because success was never about constant output, about looking perfect to everybody else, about being something it was not or not even capable of being. Success for the tree was about staying connected to the water. Heaven measures fruitfulness at the roots, but we keep trying to measure it on the branches. I'm gonna say that again because I think it applies to many of our lives. We're trying to look perfect on the outside, but but heaven measures fruitfulness and faithfulness at the roots, about where we are connected and how we're staying connected, not by how good our branches look. Even trees that are planted by the YD can have some nice branches, but they will not last. And the part of this text that I find most encouraging is that word again replanted, transplanted. The tree is able to thrive and find life when it's by the river, but it's only there because somebody put it there. And the witness of the Bible is that God is planting us by the rivers. In fact, that God is planting himself, bringing the river within us, the living water. Throughout the Bible, we see these covenants of God saying, I'm connecting you to life. So he promises to Noah and to Abraham, he promises this to David, and then when we kept breaking covenant, he sent Jesus to send his roots all the way into humanity, to put his feet on the soul, and then to plant himself within us. He says, you know, Jesus gets baptized in that same Jordan River. And he says, the life I give you is not a wadi, it's not a seasonal stream, it is the living water, the kind that keeps on moving. Here's something you might not know about me, but it's true, and I'm guessing it's true of just about everybody in here. I am really good at believing that there is always something better somewhere where I am not standing. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's just me. I'll maybe it's not you. Maybe y'all don't do that. Maybe you're just content all the time where you are. But but sometimes I think if I could just create a different schedule, then everything would be smooth in life and I would thrive. If I could have the perfect day, right? Or think like, well, all this house things, right? If I get this house stuff settled, then everything is gonna be perfect after that. Or if I could just get ahead at work, then I would never feel like I was behind and I'd always be more patient, right? I just imagine that where I'm not standing is probably better than where I am. I catch myself thinking if I just transplant myself to the right spot, to the place where I think is best, then I can take root and thrive. But did you know that I'm not the first person to think of this, and neither are you? Like 1200 years ago, actually almost 1500 years ago, that there was uh this uh uh monk named Benedict, and he watched all these people pack up and move from different monasteries to different monasteries from one valley to another valley whenever they felt like the spiritual winds were shifting a little bit. And oh, things over there must be a little bit better. And he didn't like that very much. He didn't like how people were not committed to the place where they were. And so when he started his order, he said that uh he made these vows, and one of them was a vow of the faithfulness that all the monks take, but he added additional one. It was one to stability. He said you have to take a vow of stability, a vow to stay. Even when things get hard, even when things get dry, even when it seems like something might be better over there, this is your place. There's a vow of stability that goes far beyond and is much older than even Benedict. And it's the one that God made. Us when God gave us the covenant of baptism. When you were baptized, if you were baptized, God made a covenant with you to stay no matter what, to plant his roots within you. And whether you came on your own as an adult or whether you were brought as a child, those waters of baptism still run underneath your entire life. And God is still nourishing you even when things get dry. And what I love about it is no matter how you got baptized, something led you there. You were transplanted by God. Whether somebody invited you to church for the first time, whether your parents brought you as a baby, the provenient grace of God was going before you, bringing you in, anchoring himself within you so that you would have that living water. The gardener already knows what the tree needs before things get dry. Because the God of all things is already there. In a few minutes, you're going to be invited to reaffirm your baptism. And if you haven't been baptized yet, I would love to have that conversation with you to talk about what that means in your life and what it means to take that step. And some of you are might be wondering: has it been too long? Am I worthy? Do I deserve this? I've strayed so far. I look around this room and it looks like a lot of y'all have been dragging hoses around for months trying to water this grass that is just not growing. You've been laying awake at night wondering whether your leaves are going to give out. I hope you know that this water is for you, just as it always has been, and as a reminder that God has never left you, even when things get tough. God's grace is the activity in your life that brings you to the water of life, no matter what has been said about you, what you think about yourself, what has been done to you, what you've done. When we reaffirm our baptism, we are remembering that God's water, God's life, God's grace is always there. And we're not redoing anything. In our tradition, we don't practice re-baptisms because God made the covenant with us and God don't mess up. So you don't have to do it again. We are remembering, we are reaffirming and claiming once again that we want to be in covenant with God and that we have failed to be perfect in that covenant. And when we have done so, we need God's forgiveness. And we remember that no matter what we do, God is still faithful to us. And so here's the question that we're asking in this season. Where are you planted? Which stream are your roots uh trying to take root in? Are you trying to put yourself into position because it feels like the right thing and it's gonna satisfy or scratch an itch? Or is it actually the waters of life? And here's how you can tell the difference. When you drive down 98, you can see these live oaks, they're all leaning towards the bay. They lean towards the water source, they lean towards where the life is, and that's the case with many of our trees and plants that might lean towards the sun. Which way are you leaning? When you are in a dry season, when things are tough, are you leaning for escape? Are you going to things that are just trying to fill a void? Or are you leaning to God? Are you praying? Are you coming here and being a part of this community? Are you leaning into one another? Because that is the beauty of being a part of our church. When life feels dry, God's waters are rich and they can provide life in the midst of whatever heaviness, whatever darkness, whatever lack of water might be going on around you. You don't have to manage your way into fruitfulness. You don't have to go chasing the next stream because there's already one that runs underneath it all. This where we are is holy ground. This church, this community, this family, because the water keeps flowing, because God put down roots in this place and in our lives and will never pull them up. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.