[SERMON] God Isn't Done | HOTLWOOD: Project Hail Mary

In this closing message of the Hollywood series, the sermon uses the film Project Hail Mary to explore the nature of biblical hope — distinguishing it from good odds and optimism. Through the story of an astronaut throwing a Hail Mary across the universe, and the biblical account of Abraham and Sarah, the message challenges listeners to stop quietly giving up and start hoping again. It emphasizes that real hope is rooted not in circumstances changing, but in a God who never changes — and that hope is ultimately a person: Jesus Christ.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Uh this is our last sermon in our Hoddlewood series, we which we believe that God's truth is God's truth no matter where you find in the world. And so we can look at the popular cultural vernacular of movies and we can undersc uncover God's truth because you can find it anywhere that truth is spoken, and God's truth is spoken. So we utilize that to teach basically biblical parables. We take a story that some people have have uh connection with, and we teach the truth within that story. That's why in movies Jesus spoke in parables, he took stories and context from the local cues of the stuff people would have known in his own day and time, and he shared Bible truth through that to people and helped them understand who God is and who he is. And so we do that through the movies, and so this is our last one, sadly. Uh, we are doing a movie called Project Hail Mary. Who has seen Project Hail Mary? Better than he-man. So uh yeah. Um Project Hail Mary, it's a good movie, it's a clean movie. Uh, and so we're doing Project Hail Mary now. Who knows what a Hail Mary is? Okay, Hail Mary. Uh so there's a couple different ones. There's the Catholic Hail Mary, which is a prayer, and then there's the football Hail Mary, which is throwing the pass a long, long way to the end zone and hoping that somebody catches it. And if they do, that's the Hail Mary. You won at the end of the game. So you're throwing the Hail Mary, you're hoping that you know, even though all is lost, you're 50 yards out, you're definitely gonna lose. And less this person catches the football, that's called a Hail Mary play. It's one of my favorite plays in football. I always love rooting for if it's not Michigan, I always root for the underdog, and I always want to see the Hail Mary team get it. And like it's just it's epic. The stands clear, people clear the benches and come down the field. It's a wonderful moment in sports. Um, this week, I haven't seen actual football Hail Marys yet, but they're coming. Football season has started, so I'm excited about that. I did get a ride with Mike this week, and in his car, we were we were going to get some pizza, and he was on the Catholic radio station for whatever reason in Toledo, and it just we just heard constant Hail Marys being prayed over the radio. So uh so I did have my Hail Mary moment this week, but it wasn't Project Hail Mary, it was that Hail Mary. But um so Project Hail Mary is a movie that we're gonna talk about. But in the movie, there's there's two main characters there's Ryland Grace, who is kind of the main character of the movie, and then there's his sidekick, which is an alien named Rocky. And so for the kids in the room, and all of you who are in your 70s and still have a kid at heart and mind mentality, so here's your job this week. We have Rocky, Rocky is kind of right here. There are a certain number of Rockies hidden in this image. I will reveal that at the end. So as you go through and the words change and you can see more of the picture, we'll see what you who gets it right. Somebody got it right last service, and it was kind of impressive. So see if you can find Rocky. But Rocky is one of the other characters, he's the alien in the movie. We'll kind of get into that. But this movie is really all about um the sun is dying, and they're doing they're throwing a Hail Mary, which isn't a football, it's a giant spaceship across the universe to try to save Earth. That's the movie. And that seems like a pretty hopeless thing to try to take a spaceship, send it to another galaxy, and hope you can send the information back to save Earth. And that's kind of hopeless. And sometimes life feels hopeless. That's the reality of life. Sometimes life feels pretty hopeless. Uh maybe it's uh from a diagnosis, a health diagnosis, maybe it's from struggles in a marriage, maybe it's because finances are tight. Right now, it's not easy to go get groceries and gas, right? Finances are tight, it feels pretty hopeless. I went to Walmart last night, $87 later, I didn't even have three full bags of stuff. So uh it's pretty hopeless, right? Or, you know, maybe it's an addiction that you're you're struggling with. Addiction to drugs, alcohol, addiction of stuff. Maybe it is uh because you've got a child who's walked away from the Lord. Maybe you've been hoping all your kids would grow up to know, love and follow Jesus, but they're not. So it feels pretty hopeless that there's you know, there's no hope left for your kid. Maybe it's because this prayer you've been praying still hasn't been answered. You've been praying and you've been praying and you've been praying. But you don't have the answer that you want, that can feel pretty hopeless. Or maybe it's the future that thought you thought you were gonna have, you don't have. Maybe you thought one day your retirement was gonna look a certain way, your life would look a certain way, your future would look a certain way, and here's what I'm finding out. Uh I have two kids that are now 18 plus, I have one left of 14. I keep thinking, four years. They're all out. I'll have more money, more time, and then all of you depressing people who are 10 years older than me say, No. They take more money and more time, and then they make more kids who take more money and time. So uh, yeah. So you guys are depressing. So uh the future I thought I was gonna have doesn't seem likely. Um yeah, but so it can feel pretty hopeless, right? But in the movie Project Hail Mary, humanity is facing an extinction level crisis. And it gets explained by a middle school teacher, which is a kind of uh he's gonna doctorate and I don't know, what some big uh scientific degree, but he's kind of a disgraced uh doctor. He uh Ryland Grace, the main character, he had some opinions, some beliefs about science that were rejected by the the kind of the community of scientists. Ends up, he was correct, you find out the course of the movie. So he ends he lands in uh middle school as a middle schools teacher and he explains the crisis that's going on in this clip.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

What is the Petrova line? You can't pass.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

Two years ago, a radio telescope enthusiast named Irina Petrova, she noticed that there was a streak of infrared light from the sun to Venus, and that is now known as the Petrova line. That's it.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

That's the dot.

SPEAKER_02 6:17

They think so.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

What dot?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

They sent a probe up to the Petrova line, and this is what they found.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

Are they eating the sun?

SPEAKER_02 6:34

They seem to be dimming the sun. A tiny teeny little bit.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

So no big one.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

It's a small work. It's a small to medium woof. Over the next 30 years, the earth could cool, maybe 10 to 15 degrees.

SPEAKER_03 6:56

So it is a big war. I heard that all the cops will die, the economy will free fall, and half the earth will die of starvation. Well, we're all gonna die! Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

You're forgetting something, guys, guys. That's if that were to happen, right? They're gonna figure this out. Right now, the best minds in the entire world are on it.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

It ends up that he's the best mind that's on it, so uh, which is a middle school teacher. And so if you see the movie, it is a great uh view of like hopelessness. I mean, if you know what's gonna happen with 15 degrees of uh getting colder as our as our world, that means everything will be frozen. So it'll just be like winter all the time for us. So uh that's not necessarily a good thing, like what the kids were saying, true. This is hopeless. The crops are all gonna die, and we're all gonna die. And so there's this moment of kind of existential crisis that they're going through when everything seems like it's lost and they're all gonna die and everything's falling apart. And guess what? We kind of go through that too, right? We're all hope is lost. And when everything says it's over, hope says God isn't done. That's the difference. When you think like, oh, it's all is lost, it's all over. Hope, real hope, says in that moment, God is still in control and God isn't done. And sometimes you look at a situation and when you can't see a way out, that's depression. That's desperate. For me, like when I go to the gas station right now to get gas, that's not that's doesn't, I don't have like these bubbly warm feelings in my in my chest. It's like, oh yay, I love going to the gas station, right? Like I love going filling up at 8167 a tank, right? Anyone like when I go to Walmart and leave with groceries and I realize I just spent $87 and I I have like four things. That that is, I you don't feel like this was fun. This was we should do it again. Uh and yeah, I don't know if you know this, there's an election coming. There's an election coming. We just had primaries, and guess what? We all get a vote in November again. Isn't that exciting? Nobody's like warm and fuzzies right now. Oh, great. Yeah, you're right. Thank you for ruining today. Like there's a lot of depression and frustration and hopelessness because our world is broken and it's lost. And hope is the opposite of that. And sometimes when you look at a situation and you can't see a way out, that's depression, that's despair. That's the opposite of hope. Hope is that God is bigger than all those things. And sometimes we confuse hope with odds. Now, I love games. And a lot of my games, we could play board games, we could play card games, and I love, I love knowing what the odds are, and I love using the odds in my favor. So I like to invite you over to play a game you've never played, and then to beat you at that game and to send you home and invite you back to play it again. That's typically how it happens. So um, yeah. I don't like games that are just pure odds because that means I have an equal chance to lose that you do, and I don't like that. I like games I can stack in my favor. So uh when I know the rules. And so even I tell you guys this, I go play a trading card game every Friday night. I went through this Friday night, and so they just revealed statistics on which champions, there's like, I don't know, 40 champions now, which champion has better odds. And so, guess which ones I'm not playing? The ones with bad odds. I'm gonna go to the next competition and play one that's got 60% odds. So it means 60% of the time, that one's gonna win. I'm not playing something with 27% odds. That's just insane. People do it. I don't know why, but they do, and they uh maybe they think that's fun, but that doesn't sound fun because we don't want odds. We want them stacked in our favor. And there's a famous movie that has a phrase about odds, it's Hunger Games. And what is the phrase? Anyone know?

unknown 11:01

I hate hungry favor.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Sinners. You're not supposed to watch that movie, so uh I'm just kidding. You guys sold yourself up. We're gonna do an altar call for those people. No, no, I'm just kidding. I mean, the Hunger Games is famous for, it's a movie about odds. Essentially, they're gonna draw lots to see which children they're gonna send to their death. I mean, that's really what the movie is all about. It's a may the odds be ever in your favor. You don't want the bad odds in that situation. And so we confuse good odds with hope. If I've got good odds, if I can roll a dice and I can win, then that is hope. That's not hope. That is odds. And there are odds. You roll a dice, you're gonna get. I don't know. Anyone know if you roll two dice, what number out of twelve has the best odds? Does anyone know?

unknown 11:50

Seven.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Seven. Thank you. Yeah, my other gamers over here, of course, they know. Yeah, right. So um, so there's different odds. If you don't pick two, if you're playing Settlers of Catan, people, that's gonna make you loose. So that's the worst odds that come up. Two and twelve. Like if you ever want to play with me, do not pick those. Pick six and eight. They have the next best odds. So um, but sometimes we get confused. The the biblical hope, our biblical hope, it doesn't come from just rolling and having good odds, it comes from a good God. That's the difference. We often confuse my situation in life where the odds are stacked in my favor as having hope. That's not the case. Hope only comes from a good God. And we have hope because this word, his word, it is true. I'm gonna go to Romans 15.13. Uh, and I lost my place, so we're gonna pull it up real quick. Um, so Romans 15, 13 tells us, and you can read it on the screen, you're gonna the yellow part is yours to read out loud and proud. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God's word makes it clear that we have hope. We don't have good odds. We have hope because our God is good and his plan is good. And the Bible makes it clear, we've talked about this throughout this series, that God works everything together for good according to his purposes. That's why we can have hope, because God has a plan. We have the God of hope. That's what we have. We don't have the God of odds, we don't have the God of odds. We don't pray to God's, well, just God stack these odds in my favor. No, no. We have a God of hope. And hope flows from who God is. It actually comes from his character, who he is, and how, why he created us and how much he loves us. That's where our hope flows from. And hope is not optimism. We get it confused. It's just good odds. Some of us will think hope is optimism. Optimism is I see the glass half full, not half empty. Means when I look at that situation, I think it's gonna work out for, it's gonna be okay, right? That's optimism. Things are gonna work out for the good. Some of you in here, you are some pessimistic people, right? Some of you, right? When you see the glass, that glass is half empty. Like, woe is me, the world's gonna be over, the election's coming, it's gonna be all, it's just gonna get worse. We're gonna go more trillions and trillions of dollars in debt as a country. Like you just see the world through a pessimistic viewpoint. Others see it through an optimistic viewpoint. But optimism is not hope. Optimism says things like, I think things will get better, I think our marriage will improve, I think the country is gonna get out of debt, right? Well, someone didn't he really doesn't understand it and laughing at that one. So that's a good joke. Uh, biblical hope says, whatever happens, God is still God. And God is still good. That's the difference between hope and optimism. When we look at situations, whether it's good or bad, and we recognize that God is still God and God is still good, even when things are good and even when things are bad, that's hope. Optimism will flip on its head if things don't turn out so good. Right? It can become pessimism really quick for people. Optimism depends on circumstances changing. Like it's gonna turn out for the better, it's gonna turn out good. Hope depends on that God never changes. We have hope because God's word is true and it's unchanging truth. That is from the beginning, we'll go through the end, and that's why we can have hope, because God doesn't change. That's what hope is. Now, some people, I had someone tell me this recently, because I was getting, I was really positive about something. And they're like, Are we gonna die? Because I've told you, when when when I get super positive, we're about to die. Because like I get more positive when things get worse, and I because I believe we can always get through it. Like, I am an optimistic person who has a lot of hope also. And so that can be annoying for people. I get that. So it can be annoying for my kids, uh, it can be annoying for my wife, it can be annoying for some of you. I I get that being too optimistic can be pretty annoying. I I get it. I'm still gonna do it because I my optimism is rooted in hope. Like, I am not gonna believe that it's all gonna work out for bad because truthfully, if I die today, I'm going to heaven. That's what I'm living for. I win. This life is what we're living through, it's not what we're living for. And so when we recognize that anything that's gonna happen, good or bad in our life, we're just living through it for something greater. That's where our hope comes from. Because the promise of God's word is we're living for something. We're just living through it to get to that thing we're living for. And so we see a story in the Old Testament about Abraham. Now, Abraham is kind of like the father of all nations. Uh, but Abraham's married to Sarah, and he had terrible odds at having children. He did not have children. And so I know some of us have struggled with having children or taking longer to have children than we wanted, but he he wanted to have children for decades and decades and decades. And he became a very old man. Um, and still in his 80s, he was praying. He gets to be 100, he's praying. And ultimately, at that point, we know biologically, those of us who've been through science class, that once you hit 40, your biological clock is pretty much all the way off, right? Like, you're not likely to have kids. Sometimes you can, but most likely you're not gonna have children. Abraham and Sarah, they're way, way, way, way past this. They're not likely gonna have kids. And so God comes to them and says, Hey, by the way, because of your faithfulness, I'm gonna make you the father of all nations. Yet they had no children. And so they laughed and they're like, God, we can't have kids, we're old. He's like, Oh, don't worry about this. I got this. You're gonna you're gonna be the father of all nations, you're gonna have kids, and you're gonna be over all the nations, every offspring for all time will be because and come through you and your line. That is power. And so, because they trusted God, they could have hope that that is true, but it the odds weren't in their favor. And we see in Romans 4.18, and I'll I'll start over here. Uh, we're gonna start on this together. I tricked you, it's at the beginning. So, Romans 4.18, this is Paul, and Paul is writing about Abraham and Sarah, and what he says about them is this ready? In hope he believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told. So shall your offspring be. So Paul is telling the church, he's saying, by the way, Abraham. He in hope he believed against hope. He was old. He hadn't, there's no chance. The odds weren't in his favor. He he could look at that with a pessimistic view that he wasn't gonna have kids. And instead, God says, My plan's bigger. You can trust me and believe in me. My plan is good, and you can have hope in it. Because it's mine, my plan. And so faith, faith doesn't ignore reality. What faith does is it looks reality in the face and still trusts God. If you have real faith, you understand the situation before you, but you look that situation in face, in the face. I can't say faith and face in the same sentence. Faith, faith looks reality in the face and still trusts God. You may be in a bad situation, you may be in a struggle of marriage, you may be going through addiction, you may be struggling with finances, you may have gotten a bad health diagnosis. All those things may be true. That may be your reality. But if you have hope and you have faith, you look at that situation in the face and you still trust God in the midst of it. Whether it's good, whether it's bad, you still trust God. That's hope. That's God's plan, his promised plan for me and for the world and for eternity is bigger than anything that we face. Because we're living through those situations for something bigger. And in the movie, Ryland Grace, he survives by continually confronting impossible problems. Now, I won't, I don't want to ruin the movie for you because it is it's probably one of the best movies I've seen in the last five years. It's phenomenal. Uh so I don't want to ruin it for you. But he goes from solving impossible problem to impossible problem to impossible problem. He's a high school, I mean he's a middle school teacher who basically is saving the world by coming up with crazy um solutions to problems all these other scientists can't figure out. And when something goes wrong, which it does, he learns, he adapts, and he tries again. That's how we are supposed to live our lives. When you're faced with a problem, you confront it, you understand the reality, and you have hope that God is bigger than the problem, and then you learn, you adapt, and you try again. That's what you do. See, we often get confused with the difficulty and we think things are done. Don't confuse difficult with done. When things get too difficult, we just give up and then we're done. Ah, it's just too hard. I just give up. I don't want to deal with that anymore. That is how a lot of us live life. When things get too difficult, we stop. When the going gets tough, the tough get. But also when the going gets tough, some of us just give up. Oh, it's just not worth it. Oh, we're never gonna this marriage is broken. We're never gonna figure it out fix this marriage. Let's just throw in the towel. Let's give up. Oh, my neighbor's never gonna change. They're still gonna be a jerk neighbor, so let's just never talk to them again. Let's just be extra mean to them, too. Let's get revenge on them, how mean they're like we just do it with everything in life. Oh, my co-workers are always gonna talk about me. I can't have a relationship with them. Let's just like we we do it to people, we do it to things, and we give up. How many of us would actually watch football or any sports if when when it came time for the Hail Mary, you know, you're your your favorite team's on the 50-yard line, they gotta score seven points to win the game, they're six points down, they're playing against Michigan, the greatest team of all time. And uh it's not likely that they're gonna win. And the quarterback, instead of just throwing, you know, five seconds left, he could throw the touchdown pass, he could try. But he just says, you know what? It looks too tough. I don't really, I don't want to try that. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go in the locker room. We're gonna be done. Like, what if we just gave up? That would end the sports world. We'd be done. The best part of sports is those epic, crazy comebacks at the end of the games. If they just gave up and walked off the field, that would be the end. You'd never pay for that, you'd never watch it. It would destroy sports. Yet, some of us, that's how we live our lives. The moment something gets tough, we just give it. We're just done. I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore. But the reality is, we all deal with difficulty. Your marriage is difficult. Well, know that God isn't done. Your child is struggling. God isn't done. Your health situation is difficult. God isn't done. Your future looks uncertain. God isn't done. How about you failed at something, whatever it is, God isn't done. Now I just see failure, failure to me as just success. It's just one successful way of not doing something. That's just, you have to change your mindset. Like, I don't care, I tell our staff all the time, I don't care, try it. Fail. If we fail, we fail. If people come to me and say that was awful, don't do it again, we won't do it again. Right? There are songs we've done one time, we've never done them again. Because like people like, we didn't like that. Okay, okay, we failed. So it's successfully figured out. We don't sing that song or do that thing or do it this way. I don't know if you know this. All summer long, we have not done a song after the sermon to see how it's we're we're trying something to see what you guys think. And if people say we hate that, we'll probably go back to it. Nobody has said that yet. So now you probably will today. So like we just want to, I don't want to tell you Kyle, I hate that. So like but we regularly change things up here and try different things because we don't want to get stuck in a rut. Because when I go visit our churches, they are carbon copies of each other every time I go and visit our church. It's the same exact three songs, it's a sermon, it's announcements, and we're like, we want to change things up. So things are different from different seasons. So this series we're doing something different. Last series we did something different because we want people to come here and engage and not get stuck in a rut. And sometimes that creates failure. Like the first time we did the MGR thing, barely anybody clapped. And we just stuck at it for six weeks. So um and now we've stuck at it for like four years, so we've been doing it until they shut us down. But uh from doing it. But for some of us, when those difficult things happen, you give up. You're done. And see, the tomb, here's the great thing about Jesus. The tomb changes how Christians see hope. Because our God sent his son to die and to be buried in a tomb, and then he walked out of that tomb. We can have hope. That's the difference. Jesus entered the tomb, he entered death, and he walked back out. That's why it's not odds, it's not optimism, it's hope. Our God is bigger than life and death. 1 Peter 1:3 says this Blessed be the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Our hope is a living hope. Our hope isn't good odds, our hope's not optimism, it's Jesus Christ. The reason I can hope that in no matter what situation, it's going to turn out for good, according to God's good purposes, is because his word is unchanging and it's true. And his son is a living, breathing hope. That's why. We don't have a temporary hope, we don't have a circumstantial hope, we don't have a theoretical hope. We have a living hope. A living hope. And it's Jesus. That's why Christians can go through life different. And we can have hope no matter how bad situations are, no matter how bad the struggle is, no matter if you're caregiving for somebody and you just feel like everything is against me, we still have a God who is for us, and God has a plan for us. And see, sometimes in life, God sends hope through people. In the movie, Ryland Grace is careening against across the universe alone. And that that creates some stress and struggle for him. Until he comes across another solitary traveler on the way. This happens to be an alien named Rocky. And so I want to introduce you to Rocky here as he sees Rocky the first time in this clip.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Okay. Okay. I'll talk to you later. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

So that's Rocky. Now I can't show you all of it because you haven't seen the movie. So you guys see, he's the cutest little Rock alien you've ever seen. Um I just realized I was saying over there. We've actually shown three alien movies in a row. He-Man, uh, he's an alien from a different world, and then uh Mandalorian Grogu, and now this one, so Project Hill Mary. So uh we must like alien movies around here. But when it comes down to it, Rocky and he's not actually his actual real name is not Rocky, he gets named Rocky. You'll kind of see that if you watch the movie. But they become friends, and ultimately they're there for the same purpose. Uh Rocky's planet's star is dying. There's the one star in the universe by all these other stars that's not dying. They're trying to figure out why that one is not dying, so they actually help each other figure that out. Obviously, it's, you know, most movies end happily. So um, but they become friends. And so in Ecclesiastes 4 9, it says this two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. We need people. People need people. That's why we're singing this song. God, God didn't say in the Bible, hey, you can just go through life and never have any friends, never do life together. You don't need people. He actually says in the Bible, you need to be part of a body of believers. You're all different parts that make up a body. You come together corporately and do life together. Now, I don't know if you know this. I do not get a bonus if you guys go to groups. So when I stand up here, I this is not this is not Kohl's, and I'm not trying to give you a credit card at the end of the checkout. Like, hey, if you sign up for credit cards, say 5%. They get bonuses when they do that, if they sell a certain number of credit cards. I do not get from our board a bonus if you go to life group, if you go to Bible study, if you go to dinner with friends. I don't get paid any extra. I just literally believe those things are important from you because God's word says that those kind of things are. I do those personally because that's how I get through and navigate my own life. I encourage my own kids to do the same. Nobody's telling me I have to. Nobody says it, Kyle. You need to get you to get your quota up on groups around here. We we create groups because we believe it's that important for you. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. When I have struggled in life, the people that helped me get through it were the people I was in groups with. Go get in groups, do life together. I know some of you sit there and say, Well, I'm not gonna do that. I want to be in a group. I don't need people. People do need people. That's what this says. It says we actually need each other. And sometimes the first step towards hope is letting someone into your story. The Bible tells us over and over again in the New Testament: encourage each other, build each other up, carry each other's burdens, confess your sins to each other. Over and over and over again, we're gonna live in a context of community. Go be in community with each other. Go do life together. Get in a group and see what happens. Because sometimes the group that you get into, that's what you need. Like for me, I would I would not be standing here if there wasn't a group of people who I was doing life together with when our daughter died 21 years ago. I wouldn't be. I promise you. Those people loved us and loved us and loved us through it. We needed them. And they gave us hope that we would be okay because God is good and it would all work out for the good according to his purposes, even though it was the worst moment of our lives. And they were right. Those people loved us and they were right. And we had hope. And you don't have to fight whatever your battle is alone, whatever difficult situation you're going through, you don't have to go through it alone. Because hope doesn't always show you the entire solution. I know it would be great if God would just resolve everything for us all the time. It'd also be pretty boring, right? If just we never had problems and God just took care of everything for us. And like, God is not your spiritual butler who fixes everything for you. Sometimes God simply gives you enough strength for one more prayer, one more conversation, one more day, one more attempt, and one more step. That's the reality. Sometimes God gives you just what you need for that next day, that next moment, that next prayer. And it's okay. He's building your character and he's leading you to something. If you wake up today, it's a good day. Hopefully, you wake up tomorrow, it's another good day. Like I think every day is a good day. You don't know how many days are left. Enjoy them. Don't struggle through them. Go. One more day, one more attempt, one more prayer. Through his word, through his promises, through what's true. You don't see the need, you don't need to see the whole road to take the next step. That's faith. We just need to trust that what God's saying, go and take that step, you take it, you move forward. I think in the last three weeks, I have, probably in the last three weeks, I've told more people to go to AA than at any time that I've been the pastor here. I just don't know why, it's just kind of been the last three weeks, and it's okay. Because here's the thing about AA, we have a ton of people in our church that go to AA who have had their lives transformed by AA. And guess what? That is a group of people. I don't get bonuses from AA to tell you to go. They don't send me a quarterly check. Like, I just know the purpose of it is you go with people with the same struggle who encourage each other, who build each other up, and who support each other through life. Now, maybe your struggle is not that kind of addiction, but maybe you're struggling with something else. And what you need to do is go to Bible study, a life group, some kind of connection point, and you need to walk through and just say, This is my struggle, and find someone else who's struggling who can help you through that, who maybe says has success to get through that. Because the thing I've learned about A, and I've been learning a lot as I kind of talk to people, you don't you don't get it until you give it away, right? Or that's what I hear. So, and so I think for us, it's the same thing in our faith in our life. If you're not in a group of people who you can't hear and hear what they're getting and getting from it, you're never gonna get through it. You need to actually get through it and then give it away to someone else. That's what we're doing. I had people love me 21 years ago that gave me an understanding of hope in the midst of my brokenness when my daughter passed, and now I try to give that away to people. That's why I do it. And so the question I have is where have you started losing hope? Maybe you've stopped praying about it. Maybe you've stopped believing your situation could change. Maybe you've stopped expecting God to move. Maybe you've just stopped trying. Maybe you've just stopped dreaming. Maybe you've stopped fighting. And for some of you, here's the thing I believe about a lot of Christians all over the world right now. They haven't officially quit at whatever the struggle is, they just quietly stopped hoping. Because we don't want to be quitters. Nobody likes a quitter, right? If I say you're just a quitter, man, you'd be so mad at me. Uh if I said if we're doing counseling, I say, oh, you just you just quit. You gave up on this marriage, you'd be mad at me, right? Like, I didn't quit, she quit, right? So nobody wants to be a quitter, but the truth is a lot of people haven't quit. They just quit hoping. So they stay stuck in the muck and just they want the other person to give up first or the other situation to collapse first. What we've got to do is start hoping again. One more prayer, one more conversation, one more step forward in hope and in faith. Some of you, you're guilty. You're you're sitting here and you're guilty. In a church our size, there's plenty of people who are sitting here who just have quietly stopped hoping that things are gonna improve in their situation, in their finances, and their life, and the world, and their relationship, and with their family, with their friends, with their kids. Whatever it may be. And so, what does this mean for you? Yeah, we're we're using movie clips to talk about truth, but it's deep truth. We gotta stop letting our circumstances define our God. That's the reality. The problem before you does not define your God. And some of you, you're facing some big problems. You are. But you're looking at the problem, and then you're looking at God with that perspective. What we need to do is look at the size of our God, and then again look at our problems. Our God created everything: the universe, everything in it, all life. He sent his son to come into the world who would then die and conquer death and go create an eternity for us. That God is bigger than any problem. Yeah. That God is bigger than if your neighbor is mowing on your side of the line. It's true. That God is bigger than 467 a gallon gas. That God is bigger than all your problems. But if you look at it with the wrong perspective, your problem gets in the way of your view of God. Put God in your perspective and then look at the problem. And guess what? Nothing's that big of a deal. Because we're living through this life for the next one. This life does not really matter. The one that come does. Matthew 5, 14 says this you are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. We need to show our hope. We need to show our faith to the world. We need to understand the perspective of who God is, and we need to live it. And we need to let our people see it. Because we need to not only just understand hope for ourselves, we need to become hope for somebody else. That's the truth. We need to bring hope to each other, not take it from each other. That's the goal. And our hope is the person. Our hope is the person of Jesus Christ. That's the hope. We can have hope because Jesus lived, he died, and he conquered death. And truthfully, I'll just say this. If Jesus didn't conquer death, this doesn't matter. This is just Homer's Odyssey. That's all this is. It's just historical literature. But the fact that Jesus conquered death gives us hope. It also proves this to be true. That's the power. And so when we look at our lives, we have to look at him with that perspective. We have a God that's bigger than any problem. Guess what? If we were to have a petrol line and our son would be demon, yeah, we'd all be depressed. Right? But our God is still bigger than all of that. Our God conquers, our God created the Son. He's bigger than that. The eternity to come doesn't need that to exist. So He's bigger than every problem. He's bigger than your marriage problem. He's bigger than your problem with your kids. He's bigger than the problem with your neighbors. He's bigger than your finance problems. He's bigger than the problems in the world. God does not care about how much debt we have as a country. He's bigger than all that. And so if you have a struggle, if you're sitting here today and you know, like, oh no, God, you're talking to me. If the Holy Spirit's telling you that, you got a hope problem. You need to have more hope. And the way to do that is to get in community with people, get into the word, and focus on Jesus first, and then your problems, not the other way around. Let's pray. Help me, Father, Lord, we just pray we can be a church of hope. We can be a church that acknowledges you and follows you and loves you. Lord, we know that what we're most guilty of is not quitting, Lord. It's just that we're quietly stopped hoping and trusting in you and having faith. That everything will work out for good according to your purposes. Lord, we ask collectively forgiveness as a church that and as individuals of just being people who just stop hoping. And Lord, we pray that we can be a congregation of hope, united by your word and invited by your son and the power of who he is. That we just pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.