I want you to know that the last three weeks have been a delight. We have been working very hard. We're in a rhythm, a sacred rhythm. Pastor Paul is as intentional and strategic as anybody that I have met, he has already accomplished a lot in this congregation. And so I was just sitting back there trying to think, Lord, what's the song in my heart today that that you've given me and you'll probably recognize it. I was thinking, rolling, rolling, rolling on the reel.
And you know what I was thinking it's the river of God's Spirit. We can grant our way through life and church ministry as a congregation are we can roll with where the Spirit is leading us. And I'm so grateful. I believe with Pastor Paul at Christ Church, I'm going to live to my next birthday. Amen. How many of you hope he lived two years?
That was so weak, I said, I'm going to live to my next birthday. That's a big deal to me.
When he called, I thought, Lord, I have got a sermon file, I think I'll pull one of those sermons off and blow the dust off of it. Pray over it and ask you to bless it. And it won't take much time. And he said, That's not what I want you to do.
There's nothing worse than stale bread.
So he said, I want you to share the word that I'm speaking in your life right now. Understand this, I am in process, how many of you thank God for that. And you say, we can tell.
I'm in process just like you are. And I'm thankful that God is going to complete the work that he's begun in me. This is not an unusual sermon. For me. It's more thematic or topical than it is expository. So I hope that you will lean in, just write the scriptures down that we're going to be going through. And I pray that today will be a blessing. And I thank Pastor Paul for the opportunity to stand in for him. During this time and season in in the life of his family, please be praying for them as they navigate all the transition that they've had in their lives. I want to begin with Isaiah 4318 and 19.
The Scripture says, Forget the former things, Do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing.
These are the merciful words of the Lord calling his people to trust Him for what is not yet seen. And you have to understand that the people could not see or even imagine a way through all of their sins and wrongdoings against the Lord. Neither could they see a way through all of the oppression that was going on, during the times in which they live.
But God says in the midst of all of that, he says, I will make a way through the desert, and I will provide streams in the wasteland. Now we know ultimately that Isaiah prophesies of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, who is the WAY, the TRUTH and the Life for all time, and eternity. The Message translation of these verses says this, forget about what's happened. Don't keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I'm about to do something brand new. It's bursting out. I'm making a road to the desert, and rivers in the Badlands. Brothers and sisters, God is always doing something new. In fact, the book of Revelation, it tells us that Jesus Christ came to make all things new. He is doing that right now, in our congregation, he is doing that in your life. You don't have to feel that happening in order by faith, to know that that is the purpose for which God exists is to make all things new. How many of you would say I won't enough trust in God to claim that from my life, and for my church, and for my family, and for my city? He's making all things new.
yet to receive it. We must release the old in the spiritual life. Receive always comes before release always comes before receive.
You say what's the definition of release? It's to be set free from confinement in bondage or pain. It's to be able to Let go to give up to relinquish to surrender.
In the book with open hands Arthur Henry now and relates a story that provides a powerful image for us as a people. There's an old woman in a mental health facility, that that has a small coin in her hands that she so tightly grips, because she's afraid that someone might try to take it away from her. And because of that fear, her fists are clenched so tightly around the coin, that the circulation in her fingers is almost completely cut off. In fact, she holds on so tightly to it, that no one could possibly pry her fingers loose, even to see what was in her hand that she was so terrified to let go of she is so controlled by her fear that she hangs on for dear life, as if the coin was the most valuable treasure that had ever been out there.
And that is how we often live our lives.
With clenched fists.
I've got a question for us. A question for you and for me.
What are you hanging on to?
We hang on to all kinds of things.
We hang on to old patterns of sin, to old worries and old, old sources of value and worth old ways of seeing and being. We hold on to old attitudes of possessiveness and demand and entitlement. We hold on to our stuff so tightly. Stuff covers a lot of stuff done it.
I don't know what your stuff is this morning. But Psalm had been holding on very, very tightly, we hang on to our old reputations and afraid that we'll lose them. We hang on even to our old hurts and wounds. Like there's some kind of treasure that we don't know how to let go of.
And in all of that process, without even realizing it, we try to control our lives with our clenched fist, that represent a refusal, a resistance and an unwillingness to trust God. These wadded up fists say no to God.
The problem is that nothing can be received from God until we are willing to release or let go of our clench fisted approach to life and to relationships, particularly our relationship with our Father, and open our hands to whatever he desires to give us to whatever he desires to make us into our open hands. Say yes to God. Amen.
They say yes.
I want you to think about it. Open hands hold absolutely nothing. I just love the freedom. I get tired of carrying stuff. Anybody else like that? In it nice to feel the wind between your fingers? Are y'all alive this morning? Isn't it nice to feel the wind in between your fingers? How many of you glad you got two hands.
Some of your hands had been so full that God says I want you to open your hands up and receive whatever it is that I want to give to you.
Psalm 4610 says, Be still and know that I am God. We've probably all quoted that 1000s of times. In the Hebrew there's different translations, but one of them says, For be still striving to make life work the way you want it to quit trying to be the head of how your life comes out.
One of the translations simply says it like this. Stop it.
Stop it.
Stop trying so hard to grasp for control, and to determine how your life is going to look.
Stop trying so hard to gain security and almost everything else. And trust me with your life, every detail. I've already anticipated everything that could possibly happen in your life, and I have a provision for that.
At I love the Humble Confession of the man who said, I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.
Release is such a huge part of the spiritual journey, because we all have a tendency to hold on to things to people, to our own selves to our own stuff.
And in our heart of hearts, I guess it would be safe to say that we are all hoarders by nature.
And I say this sensitively, because I know that many struggles severely with this form of mental illness.
But even if we don't struggle, externally, most of us can relate to being hoarders internally and having a lot of stuff to deal with. Just this week, our son, Eli, volunteered to help a very good friend who was feeling helpless about the task of cleaning up his room. It had been so long since he had cleaned up his room that he said, Eli, I really need your help to do that. And Eli understood why when he saw this guy's room.
His friend said to me last week, I haven't seen my floor in years. I haven't used my desk in a long time, because they're just mounds and pounds of stuff on top of it. And they even found a big pile of Legos that he had when he was five years old. He's 17. Now, and he hadn't seen it in 12 years.
And here's what happened.
Together, they began to create space. And I want to say this, some of us need help. When it comes to releasing some things in our lives. We need an extra nudge, we need an extra push. We need somebody to know somebody is there with us to encourage us when we are overwhelmed. And Eli and his friend got together and they began to create space. And after three trips to the goodwill with a car loaded completely. And nine hours later, they saw a complete transformation.
Glory to God.
When you love for your heart to look like that, the all that clutter and all that stuff that weighs in upon you that overwhelms you, wouldn't you like for the Holy Spirit to come and just clean it all out and give you some space to be with God and to receive with God exactly the life that he died to give us, folks, our lives and our hearts are so full, and not in a good way all the time.
They're so full of ourselves in our stuff, that there's not much room for God to do a work within us. We are full of regret and shame and guilt. We're full of secrets and lies and sin. We're full of worry and anxiety and frustration and anger and pride. We don't want anybody else to know about our stuff.
We're so full of insecurity, and inadequacy. I know that you think my name is Chris, some of you think my first name is brother.
But for years, I have thought my name was not enough.
Not enough.
A lot of us carry around names that God did not give us names like dirty in failure, and dumb, and disappointment.
And we must learn to release these to let go of them. And let God give us the names that he wants to give us. Names like beloved son, and daughter and delightful and forgiven. Pastor Paul already has been speaking to us and helping to instill in our hearts this sense of spiritual family and identity who we are in Christ. And I love it when he leans in and he calls us dear ones, loved ones, because we need to be reminded of who we are and what Christ calls us. He gives us some names that we need to hear.
My precious grandparents God bless them. I missed them so much. They had every closet every room and every available square foot of their house and 40 acres of property packed full of stuff. And when one space got full, they would build another outbuilding when the outbuilding would get full, sometimes they would go as far as to build an Other barn to put their stuff in stuff that they never used and could never find if they wanted to use it. A freezer stopped working on the breezeway porch, not the kind of little upright freezer or a dormitory freezer. I'm talking a big chest freezer that covered one whole wall. They didn't realize that freezer had stopped working, and they lost pounds in pounds of food. A lot of it was marked World War Two.
They called me and said, Chris, will you come and clean out our freezer, and we'll bear after wheelbarrow of those of that food I had to take into the woods and bury. One day I volunteered to clean out my grandmother's closet and found $3,000 Cash wadded up and stuffed in a pair of old pantyhose and shoved in the end of a pair of high heeled shoes that were in my mom's closet, she took one look at it didn't blink and said praise God, I've been looking for that for 50 years.
And when they died, brothers and sisters, it took so much more than three trips to the goodwill I need to cry right now.
It was so difficult to bring closure to that.
And one of the barns we never got to we told the new owner, you can have it all of it.
We are simply full. And as a result, we stuff our lives over and over again, with things to do more things to do more people and places to go people to see trying desperately to prove our worth and make a name for ourselves. But please don't miss this. This is the most important thing that you could hear this morning. God has a much better plan of fullness for us.
Jesus says, I have come that you may have life and have it to the full sum translate that abundantly. He came to empty of all the stuff that fills us in my our lives are filled. But he came to emptiness of that which doesn't fulfill there's a difference between being filled and being fulfilled in our calendars and our hearts and our minds. And our schedules are full, but our hearts are not fulfilled. And God says I want to empty you of your stuff. And I want to replace it with myself.
I want to replace it with eternal life.
I want to replace it with my perspective. I've been praying lately, God give me your perspective more, I want to see life a bit more from your perspective. Fill me with that. He fills us with the riches of God's righteousness, his peace, His love and His joy. And we have a constant need for release. Because it creates space within us, for God to work. There are two ways I want to show you this morning to practices where we can learn to release ourselves and our stuff. And the first is the practice of Confession.
Confession is recognizing and naming what we need him to empty us of.
Now I know several people mentioned to me last night and today brother Chris, I don't know what it is that I need to be emptied of. But I know that I'm full of stuff.
This is the value of spinning, regular, intentional time, in the presence of God, and in the Word of God. Because the word of God is like a mirror to us. As we read it, it reads us. It gives us a picture of what's going on inside. And we need to have self awareness of our stuff so that we can bring it into the presence of God and say, Lord, You've shown me that this attitude, this behavior, this addiction, this situation, I need to give it to you and I have been carrying it around so I confess it to you. And I ask that you give me the grace to release that. You say brother Chris, I've done that before. Some release comes instantly an automatic the minute you ask God to take it, he'll take it. But there's some burdens of the heart and some wounds of the life and heart that are so deep. It's sometimes it's kind of like giving birth to a baby and I've never done that I kind of look like it. But I've never done that.
You can't give up because God doesn't zap you the first time you go into His presence.
And as God tenderizes our hearts and we are exposed to his grace sometimes Long ingrained habits, behaviors and things that we've held on to in our lives, we will find them just going up into the presence of God. So don't give up. God will empty you in due season, and he will replace that with something of himself that is far better. Through the practice of confession, we are able to let go not only of our sin, but also of the guilt, and the shame and the remorse that we drag along behind us as we journey through life. There's a powerful scene in the movie, the mission, it's an old movie.
Robert De Niro plays one of the main characters, Rodrigo, Mendoza, and Rodrigo due to his enormous guilt and shame over dreadful things that he had done in his past, imposed a penance upon himself, of carrying a heavy bag of armor to the top of a high mountain.
The journey was so grueling as he carried that weight upon his back, it was so treacherous, and it was so painful to watch. I felt it with him, I felt my own weight is I watched him try to deal with his weight.
And as he struggled, he fought his way to the top of the mountain. And it was not until he reached the top that the ropes were cut, and the bag was tossed into the depths of the seas, and at this Rodrigo, dissolved in a pool of tears, tears of relief, tears of freedom, tears of release, and I was crying with him.
And I thought, Lord, thank you, thank you for the gift of tears. We can to live our lives like this, dragging our baggage behind us wherever we go, just like Rodrigo. But brothers and sisters here, the good news, because of the work of Jesus Christ, and what he accomplished for us, and His power that works within us, even right now, through His Holy Spirit, we do not have to live that way. There is no need for us to do that, because we can release it all right now, it may not all go right now. But the process of what God is doing in us always requires a fresh surrender in our lives, to what he's doing.
And all of our guilt and shame and regret, can be cut loose and tossed into the sea, of God's great mercy, and love and grace.
A lot of things excited me about being a child of God.
One of the things that excites me most is when a brother or sister has a burden lifted from their hearts.
One of the things that excites me most, somebody's experiencing freedom.
Somebody getting some clean space in their heart, where they've been so cluttered, and so overwhelmed.
Glory be to God today for his power to give you release in the area that holds you down. Some of you today, you've been living like this. And even today as God reminds you of His Word and His plan of fullness, and his help releasing, you're just going to open up like this. I see it in my heart today. We're going to be a church like that, where we're free to minister to people who God sends to us. How many of you know we're a healing station, we're saving station, we're a filling station. We're a people who lifts up Jesus Christ, and all men are drawn unto him, and he and he alone can set them free by the power of His presence.
Second thing and I'll go quickly.
Second way that God helps us learn to release ourselves is that He tests us.
Now I know that when you think of God testing us, the Bible does say that God does not tempt us. But it's very clear that God tests us. In fact, the Scripture says in Peter that the trial of our faith is as precious as gold refined in the fire, that God test us so that we can know how to be authentic and genuine the real thing, so we never need to minimize the trials that we go through.
Abraham, the father of faith is the greatest example. In chapter 12 of Genesis, God tested him.
Abraham is asked to trust God by letting go of his of his past. That's hard to let go of sometimes, isn't it?
I'm getting into age now where I don't even remember my past. It's kind of wonderful. It's wonderful.
God tests us.
You don't know if what you have is genuine and real. Unless it's tested. It's easy to say you have faith, but genuine faith will be tested. It's easy to say I love but real love will be tested. It's easy to say I'm patient. But how many of you know patients will be tested? Somebody say, Oh, me, yeah.
That's how God makes it real in our lives.
So Abraham, let's go of his past, the Lord said, leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land that I will show you. He was called to leave, he was called to let go. He was called to release his people, his customs and his country. And yet Abraham didn't even know where he was going. So don't miss this. See, again, that release comes before receive.
We want to know what's going to happen next in our lives.
So the second area that Abraham was tested, as shown in Genesis 22, he's asked to trust God by letting go of his future. He and Sarah I had prayed for years for a child for a son. And that didn't look like it was going to happen. And it finally happened. And you can imagine when something is that, when something takes that long, that they loved Isaac with everything within him, he was their only son in such a precious son, that they couldn't imagine ever letting go of him. And yet God says, I want you to sacrifice him, I want you to lay him on the altar, I want you to give him up.
Notice again, that release comes before receive. Unless we offer up the most precious things in our lives, we cannot see the best thing God has prepared for us. Just as Abraham could not see the round God had prepared until he gave up his beloved Isaac, brothers and sisters. Do you know one of their motivations for releasing ourselves into God's hands is that God already has anticipated every need that we have. We need to let go of everything.
We need to let go keep nothing so that God can give us everything right.
Richard Foster said, we often hold on so tightly to the good that we know that we cannot receive the greater good that we do not know.
Some of us some of you are in a place of transition.
And I want us to prepare for a response to God this morning.
For some of you, you're in what one writer calls a liminal space.
It's the time between what was and what's next.
It's a place of transition, a season of waiting in a season of not knowing and it reminds me of the trapeze artist or flyer how scary it must be to have to let go and release our hands or their hands from the trapeze bar to sail high and through mid air. One writer says that there's a special relationship between the flyer and the catcher.
The flyer is the one that lets go in the catcher is the one that catches as the flyer swings high above the crowd on the trapeze. The moment comes when he must let go. So he jumps out into mid air and his only job is to remain as still as possible and wait for the strong hands of the catcher to pluck him from the air.
The flyer must never try to catch the catcher.
But as to always wait in absolute trust.
The catcher will catch him but he must wait.
For some of you that are in that liminal space.
God says release your worries and your concerns. Give yourself to me. I've already made a way Do you believe that God is a way maker?
God will make away where he seems to be no way. He works in ways we cannot see. He will make a way for me. God always makes away.
So I asked you this morning brothers and sisters, is it time to let go?
And I asked you secondly, what is the Lord calling you to let go of do it.
He will catch you.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit