You’re going to have to have a supernatural boldness in this day and age to be unashamed about the good news of Jesus Christ.
You’re gonna have to have some fortitude and some spiritual meat on your bones.
This is not a time for spiritual mps. Y’all.
We’re gonna have to rise up with some actual muscle spiritual show, but it’s not a your Bible study.
Oh, it’s great. But it’s if you want God’s presence on you, mark you distinct and different from the people around you, then you’ve got to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
Hey, man, hey, you, you may take your seats.
How you doing family? It is a privilege.
I mean, it’s a privilege for real, for real to be here.
Because let me tell you, you know how sometimes you don’t even know until you’re in an environment that you needed to be in that environment for maybe reasons that you didn’t come for initially, you came for other reasons.
But then you get somewhere and you really that the Lord has a whole another plant up his sleeve.
There’s encouragement. You didn’t even know you need comfort.
You didn’t even know he was gonna extend a, a word of faith that was gonna be given to you to bolster you into the next level.
That’s how I feel today. I feel like I came for one thing which I’m privileged to do to minister to you.
But I walked up in this room and sat down and that worship team was worshiping God in spirit and in truth.
And the Holy Spirit said to me, I did not bring you here for them.
I brought you here for you. My life has already, I’m telling you for real.
For real. Pastor Connor, thank you. My life has already for real. For real.
Been blessed because I’ve been in this room today with all of you. I’m so grateful.
I’m so grateful. And can I also tell you that I’m so glad we’re not virtual.
Like I’m so glad y’all for real in this room.
It’s something about gathering together with other sisters in Christ, right?
And a few brave brothers that are in the room that is a blessing.
We are so grateful that you um were patient with us while we tried to figure out get our schedules all together so that we could have an opportunity to be here, Jerry and I are grateful to be here, especially because you know, this is, this is our home, born and raised in Dallas Texas and we’ve raised our kids here.
Um So we’ve been married 23 years now. And we have three boys.
And so I just feel like I get to be with my sisters, my family for real today.
You know, we all shop at the same Super Targets.
We all be at the Mansfield Field house watching our kids play and do their thing at the Uncle Julio’s on I 20 and Matlock.
So it just feels like I’m with family and I’m privileged to, I’ve looked around and seen um new faces but also people that I’ve known for a very long time, I looked up and saw Joel playing the keyboard up here.
He’s been my son’s piano teacher for many years.
He was their piano teacher and um family that’s in the room.
And so it’s just, it just feels like a breath of fresh air this morning to be amongst friends.
So thank you for having us.
I’m excited to share us a simple thought with you from the scriptures that I hope will be an encouragement to you.
Uh But also a challenge I believe that tucked within every verse of scripture chapter of scripture book of the Bible, every time we come to the pages of scripture, yes, he encourages, but tucked with it, every encouragement is a challenge that there is a requirement for us to respond.
And the great thing about God though is that he does not call us to respond without simultaneously empowering us to respond in the way he’s requiring he by the power of the Holy Spirit is going to guard you up to do whatever it is that he’s gonna impress upon your heart to do.
Oh, I’m so grateful for the grace of God that he speaks to us and challenges us and convicts us and redirects us and recalibrate us and points us maybe in an entirely different direction as a result of something that he speaks to us through his word.
But then he says, I got you back.
I love that and I’m grateful for it.
Lord, I thank you for your word.
I thank you father that it is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword.
I thank you that father in these next few minutes, what you’re about to do is open up the windows of heaven and come down here and speak to us.
Father. We have worshiped you in spirit and in truth the best we know how Lord.
So we are praying, asking that that worship has been acceptable to you.
We have wanted to roll out the red carpet for your spirit to come in here into this room and change our lives.
Lord, we are so grateful that each other is here, but we didn’t come to see each other.
We came to see you, Lord. We need a word from you.
Our lives need to be touched by your presence.
So at Lord I’m asking that you would read the heavens and come into the space and speak.
Father. We are on the edge of our seats with our chin in our hands and full expectation that you have a word for us this morning.
So father, I pray you take this one little simple portion of scripture that you would divide it up about 700 different ways so that every single person that’s under the sound of my voice today will know beyond a shadow of a doubt.
They heard you speak to them today. Do it more in Jesus name. I pray. Amen.
I know. Amen.
Many of uh you know that as I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Dallas Fort Worth area.
But many of you know who my daddy is and my mom, the late Lois Evans, my father is Doctor Tony Evans.
I greet you on behalf of he and my late mom, Lois and our church, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship Church just down the street a little ways from you all.
Um We live, we lived grew up and my parents, my father now still lives in the exact same house where he raised the four of us.
I have an older sister named Crystal then it’s me and two younger brothers and they’ve been in that house since I was six years old.
So the exact same little house very near the church down on Camp Wisdom Road and dad and mom have been in a house, I guess so.
Now it’s been, you know, 40 years or so.
So, you know, when you’ve been in a house that long stuff starts to collect.
So I remember very clearly when I was in my twenties.
At one point, mom called and she said, listen, none of y’all live here no more.
She said I love y’all, but I’m gonna need y’all to come get y’all stuff and mommy was real clear.
She said, now, listen, I want you to know that on this particular date, which was about a month later on this particular date.
I’ve already called the people that are coming with a truck for whatever is left for whatever stuff y’all don’t come get.
So any point over these next 30 days, you have an opportunity to come and look through your old things and all that.
So I remember the day that I made a point to go to the house and I went up into the attic, you know, the old school attics where there’s a pulley that comes down from the top of the roof there, pull it down and a little ladder folds out.
And I walked up into the attic and sat down in the little attic space that’s up there in the little house and there were boxes there, some of them had my name on it.
I started opening up these boxes, one of the boxes that I opened up had several journals in it.
So man, I I just had forgotten all about these journals.
So you know, I kind of sat down Indian style because now I’m getting into all the nostalgia of looking through these boxes and I started looking through these little journals.
Now, I have kept a journal.
I didn’t even realize it until I opened up this box that it had really been my entire life that I have kept some version of a journal.
I’m not one of those serious journaling people. You know, those people, we admire them so much, don’t we?
Those people who get new colored pencils at the top of the year and a brand new journal and she writes every day and she’s so consistent and sweet.
That precious. That’s not me.
I write every now and then, you know, when something happens that I don’t wanna forget I’ve done that for my sons as well.
When there’s something that has happened in their life through the years, I have a little journal for each of my boys and, and I’m just, I plan to give it to them or maybe better yet.
I’m gonna give it to their wives when they get married and say this is what you’re getting yourself into right now.
So every now and then I’ll write down things that are happening throughout the course of a year.
But I didn’t realize that I had this first journal when I was nine.
So I sat down and I was looking to see what the world was.
I thinking when I was nine.
Then there was one from when I was 13 and then 18 and then 22.
And man, I was looking through just the things that were on my mind and that were happening in my life during those seasons.
Here’s what I noticed, I noticed that of all the different little details or stories that I had written down, there was a common thread that was running through these years of my life that at nine years old man, I could not wait till I grew up a few more years, like my older sister, so that I could get out of the, the Sunday school, elementary part of church life.
And I could finally be in the youth group.
I wanted to be a whole for real life teenager so that maybe then my parents would give me a little bit more freedom and, and I could enjoy my life a little bit more.
Then I looked at my teenage years and then I could not wait till these teenage years were over where I was living in the strict house of my parents who actually had the nerve to have rules and regulations.
I could not wait to bust up out of here and go to college so that I could have some freedom and live on my own.
Then I read these entries from when I was in college.
Oh, I cannot wait until these college years begin to dovetail into something more meaningful.
In my life. I can’t wait until I find the guy of my dreams until I get into married life.
I mean, single life has been good, but I’m so ready to go ahead and be married.
Then I read a journal entry from the first years of our marriage.
There are many things that I wrote down there, but one of them sounded like this.
Oh Lord, this is so exciting that I’ve finally gotten married, but I cannot wait until we finally can have kids and move on to that season of our life.
Then I had a bunch of small kids.
Oh Lord, I’m tired.
I love having these babies.
But man, I cannot wait until they grow up a little bit and they can take themselves to the bathroom and strap themselves in their own car seat.
I’m ready for them to grow up and now I’m watching my sons go off to college one after the other.
And I realize looking back over the course of decades now that there have been so many seasons of my life that while I was in the season, I was too busy.
Looking forward to recognize the blessing of the season that I was standing in and what a tragedy it is when the winds of change blow and they blow you into the next season of your life.
And it’s only then that you look back and realize that you were in the good stuff and missed it while you were there because oftentimes when the winds of change blow, they blow you into a season and you may never again return to the one that you just came from.
I wonder if you like I have in previous seasons of my life.
I wonder if you’ve been sleepwalking through certain seasons of your life just waiting for this particular season to be over as you’re dreaming about the future and what, what is next and what God has laid on your heart, whether in business or in family or in ministry or in entrepreneurial endeavors or whatever it is that he is fostering for you to do.
I wonder if you’re so busy like I have been looking forward that you’re missing out on all the good stuff he’s got for you.
Now, in fact, there’s foundational material that unless you grab hold of it right now, you won’t even be steady enough to stand firm in the next season.
That’s on the way. There’s character you need for tomorrow sis, there’s fortification that’s going to be required of you.
There are relationships you’re supposed to be making now and investing in.
Now, there are things that are supposed to be built into our lives that if we’re sleepwalking through this season, we won’t be ready for the next.
This is a message for sleepwalkers.
Anybody who’s not quite awake in your life right now, anybody who’s been a little bit disengaged just trying to wait for this thing to be over so you can get to the good stuff.
I just drove over a few miles from my house to tell you this is the good stuff.
I’m telling you.
High school student be fully present on your high school campus.
I’m telling you university student be fully present as you’re in this season of your life.
I’m telling you, single woman, don’t wait on the next thing you’re in it right now.
I’m telling you, married woman. I’m telling you, entrepreneur. I’m telling you woman in ministry.
Even as you wait for what my God, what God might have next.
Don’t sleep on what it is he has for you right now. This is the good stuff.
Have y’all, I’m gonna get to the text but listen, have y’all been watching? This is us.
It’s too much, it’s too much.
Listen, I’m not gonna spoil it for you because they just had the last show of this is us the very last one in the entire season.
But the whole show as you follow six years, basically, six seasons.
These people’s life, basically from the inception of this family all the way through to the end of their lives.
You watch it. You see these people now in their older years and the whole lesson of this entire series for all these years, all these ups and downs and grief and celebrations and losses and, and triumphs in life.
You get to the end of the series and it all boils down to.
We were in the good stuff and didn’t know it.
Oh Y’all, we gotta wake up, we got to wake up and fully engage even with the trouble and frustration and struggle and heartache that we have going on collectively in our world right now.
And that I’m sure in some degree is happening underneath the roof of your own house just like it is in mind as we deal with the relationships, as we deal with the decisions that we have to make the forward movement that we’re trying to see happen in our life.
And in our journey, there’s one step forward and sometimes two steps back, even with that discouragement, keep your eyes open because the enemy would have us sleepwalk through this part.
There was someone in scripture who knows exactly how this feels.
In fact, y’all, there are several people in scripture who had a moment with Jesus and they were too sleepy, too disengaged to actually realize it.
You, you remember there were two men walking on the road to amaze to Aus.
They were so discouraged by the crucifixion that they had just witnessed that this guy, they were hanging their hopes on.
Now, he had been hung on a cross and they’re so busy discussing the details of their disappointment as they’re walking along that the Gospels tell us a third party joins them on the walk and they so busy telling him about the disappointment that they don’t even know the person they’re walking with and talking with is Jesus the Christ.
Or then there’s Mary Magdalene.
She comes to an empty tomb and she’s so bored by the tears that she’s crying because her savior is not where she supposed he would be that she doesn’t even recognize that the man standing behind her is not the gardener as she supposes.
That’s the Jesus that she’s been looking for all throughout the scriptures.
There are people who are with him in the season that they’re in, in the discouragement and disappointment, even as the tears fall from their eyes, they don’t even recognize he’s standing right there.
And then in the book of Genesis chapter 28 let me tell you something.
If you highlight stuff in your Bible, this is one that deserves to be underlined, highlighted whatever you need to do to never forget these words that Jacob speaks in Genesis chapter 28 verse 16.
Then Jacob woke up from his sleep and he said, surely the Lord is in this place and I didn’t know it.
He, he woke up and was alerted to the fact.
Wait a minute, God was here the whole time and I was unaware of it.
And I just wonder if today the Lord has brought us here together for an alarm clock, an agitation to your soul to wake you up out of your spiritual slumber and me so that our eyes can be open like Jacob, not at the end of the story, but at the beginning of our story, our eyes can go ahead and be open so that we’ll know certainly the Lord is in this place and we’ll have a testimony that we can tell our grandchildren.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, girl, he was there. Let me tell you how I know.
Let me tell you the fingerprints of how I saw him. Move.
Let me show you his footprints that were in my life and in my story and in my history, let me tell you how I heard his voice whispering in my ear.
Let me tell you how the Holy Spirit warmed my heart with the comfort of his presence.
Yeah, I went through some hard stuff, grand baby.
But let me just tell you how good God is not because I heard it from somebody else but because I have a testimony of my for myself that surely the Lord was in this place.
So come sit down on my knee and let me tell you the good news about Jesus Christ.
There are tucked within these few verses that come before verse 16.
In Genesis chapter 28 there are what I call some secrets for sleepwalkers, ok? Some secrets for sleepwalkers.
They start in verse 10. Then Jacob departed from Beersheba and he went toward Harran and he came to a certain place.
Somebody say certain place he came to a certain place and he spent the night there because the sun had set.
Let’s just start right here. We meet Jacob on a journey, Toya.
He’s on a journey from Beersheba headed towards Harran.
And I want you to know a little bit about Jacob’s journey and why he is making this transition.
This is not a transition he would have chosen.
This is not what he would have preferred, this would not have been comfortable or convenient for him or easy for him.
The reason why he is leaving is because he has duped his brother out of the birthright and the blessing that should have belonged to him.
When Esau found out what his brother has done had done, he decided that he was going to come after him to take his life.
So Jacob’s mother loving him the way she did.
She said you got to get out of dodge, you got to get out of town in order to spare your life.
They had said Sadden goodbyes as he left his mother who loved him, his father who loved him and the comfortable home environment that Isaac had created for them.
Jacob is leaving that which is comfortable.
He is leaving that which is familiar, he is leaving that which he loves, he is leaving that which has as stewarded him and brought him to this particular season of his life.
This is not a transition that he’s choosing just like the transition you’re in right now.
Maybe it is not the one you’re choosing.
It’s because of choices they made and things they did and circumstances that lined up in that particular way that is now making you walk this particular journey in this season of your life with that child or with that spouse or with that coworker or with that boss, or in that particular financial journey that you’re in, you’re finding yourself on this journey and it’s not the journey that you prefer.
Jacob knows how it feels to be lonely and isolated and frustrated and disappointment.
Be disappointed because this is not what you signed up for.
And as Jacob is on that journey, he comes to a certain place.
There is nothing that denotes the details of what this place would have been.
We know it would have been mountainous terrain, rocky stony ground that’s going to be important in just a minute, rocky stony ground because the terrain between Beersheba and Harran where he was headed was filled with mountains, not a plush soil and grasses, but more desert and rocks and stones and barrenness is what he would have been traversing through.
Oh, if that ain’t a word right there because sometimes that is the journey, isn’t it?
There’s not soft soil, there’s not green grass, there’s not anything plush that we feel like we can relax into.
It’s just stones and rocks and desolation and barrenness and dryness.
And the Lord has allowed Jacob to take this journey and the only reason why he comes to a stop in verse 11 at this certain place is because the text says the sun begins to set.
He can’t see the lights of Horan clearly anymore. In the distance, darkness is descending.
We’ve been in that place where darkness descends, where your hope about that dream kind of begins to fade where the vision that you had, you could see it so clearly at the beginning.
But all of a sudden the lights are a little fuzzy in the distance.
Now, as you’ve literally been trying to take one ft in front of the other to head towards that particular destination, life happens and you come to a certain place where you feel a sense of despair or apathy or lethargy about that, that destination that you have in mind, you can’t see it clearly anymore.
He comes to this particular certain place and because the darkness begins to descend, he just lays down, taps out and goes to sleep.
What Jacob couldn’t have known then is what you and I can see now clearly in the text of in the context of scripture because we have all the jewels and the gems and the treasures written that they could not have known in real time.
And what Jacob couldn’t have known in real time is that that English term, a certain place actually comes from an original Hebrew term that means listen, a sacred place.
He couldn’t have known that this regular run of the mill mundane isolated frustrated patch of rocky ground between one place and the other.
Not quite there but not quite here.
This frustrating middle ground that made him want to do nothing else except tap out and just sort of disengage from this entire experience.
He had no idea that the ground he was standing on was holy ground.
What we know from the entire story is that this particular patch of ground is where his grandfather would have been, where Abraham would have built an altar to the Lord would have had communion with Yahweh, the one true and living God.
Jacob wasn’t just in any old place. This was a sacred place. This was a sanctuary. God.
He doesn’t know it is coming in the, in the next verses, God’s getting ready to show up here.
He’s getting ready to see a whole ladder with angels descending and ascending and God is gonna be standing above the ladder.
Speaking to him, this experience is getting ready to mark Jacob’s life for the rest of his life.
And it doesn’t happen in a palace. It doesn’t happen on a platform. It doesn’t happen in a spotlight.
It doesn’t happen in Beersheva. It doesn’t happen in, it happens in the nasty middle ground, the place where we just want to disengage and go to sleep because life is a little bit raggedy right here.
This is the place that is sacred.
It’s a sanctuary And if our eyes are open, if we’re just connected enough, if we keep ourselves prayerful and connected with God, asking the Holy Spirit to open up our eyes so that we can see him moving clearly before we know it.
Even with the run of the mill, middle ground stuff that we’re going through, we’ll start taking off our shoes because we’ll realize this is holy graham.
This is sacred stuff right here raising these toddlers. This is sacred stuff right here, raising these teenagers.
This is sacred stuff right here, washing these dishes. This is sacred stuff right here. Building this business.
This is sacred stuff right here, mapping out this business plan.
This is sacred stuff right here doing the marriage counseling. This is sacred stuff right here.
Participating in the regular rhythms of life. That’s the sacred stuff right there, y’all.
He’s not just in a certain place. He’s in a sacred space.
That’s the first secret for sleepwalkers that certain places are sacred spaces who just ask Moses because Moses is wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years between the ages of 40 and 80.
He is just tending sheep in a desert, desolate place in the desert of or and this would have been a job that would have been beneath his pay grade and beneath his educational level, he’d been raised as the Prince of Egypt.
He’d been raised in the lap of luxury, but because of consequences of his own choices.
He finds himself right smack dab in the middle of the desert doing this tedious mundane, lonely isolating job.
But one day while he’s in that safe, that, that certain place, one day he’s just walking along, being faithful to the task at hand and a bush starts burning and all of a sudden a certain place is a sacred space or maybe like haggar, you know how it feels to be misused and abused and mistreated and cast out by the people you were supposed to be able to trust and you find yourself sitting in a desolate place, not because of something you did like Moses, but because of choices they made.
It was your parents or your spouse or that environment that kind of set you in this place that you’re trying to figure out how you got here and you wonder if God will ever be able to find you and utilize you and make your dreams come to fruition.
Now that you find yourself in the position that Hagar is in, ask haggar, she’ll tell you that the angel of the Lord will show up in wilderness places.
Oh, just ask Gideon.
Gideon will tell you that you can be sitting under the shade of an enormous oak tree of thrushing out wine, not in a wine press, but or threshing out wheat in a wine press.
Not the place where you’re actually supposed to be doing this job.
It’s not a convenient place for this kind of job.
But you’re there because you’re timid and afraid because the MidNite external circumstances keep pressing in on you so much so that now like Gideon, you’re walking in timidity and fear and insecurity and that fear has relegated you to a place that you know, is not where you’re supposed to be.
Ask Gideon that even when you’re hiding, the angel of the Lord will come and find you.
Oh, I wonder if there is any Moses in the house that you’re in that desert and you did it to yourself.
Honestly, you can look back and you can see how it was the choice you made that put you there.
You knew upfront before you participated in that relationship or in that task or walked down that road or chose that direction or participated in that activity you knew upfront what you were getting yourself into.
And so now like Moses, you find yourself sitting in a desolate circumstance that is of your own making.
Oh, I got good news for you, Moses.
The arm of God is not so short that He cannot save and there is no pit that you’ve dug for yourself that the mercy of God is not deeper still.
He will reach down in that pit and snap you up out of it. Bushes burn in deserts like that.
Moses bushes don’t burn in palaces, they burn in deserts or maybe you’re a haggar and you’re in the house and you’re sitting in a pool of disappointment because of someone else’s choices and you wonder if God will find you there haggar, the angel of the Lord is on the way.
He will never leave you. Somebody listen to me. Somebody needs to hear this today.
His eyes are on you. He knows where you are. He knows what you’ve been through.
He knows the abuses that you suffered. He knows the way you’ve been ignored or circumvented or disregarded.
And even though it seems like nobody else has their eyes on you, you need to know you serve a God who’s got his eyes on you.
And Gideon if you’re afraid, if you’re timid, if you’ve been insecure, if you’ve been hiding, where can you flee from this presence?
He will come and find you where you are and just like Gideon, he’ll take you by the hand and lead you out to a brand new assignment where you change the, if you’ll go with Him, you’ll change not only the trajectory of your own life and your family’s life, Gideon changed the trajectory of an entire nation.
One timid afraid man who God showed up for, who realize that a certain place actually is a sacred place.
I gotta tell you that the only reason why I think the Lord would allow us on this Saturday morning for our path to intersect like this.
Not just yours with mine but mine with yours at this point in your life with what’s going on in your details.
I don’t know all your specific details and you don’t know mine. I know what’s happening with us collectively.
Is some chaos going on out here in this, this here world.
We’re in the chaos that is happening in the world.
The escalated inflammatory nature of what it is that we’re experiencing collectively.
But also the details of what’s happening in your life and mind.
I’ve got to tell you the only reason why I think the Holy Spirit would line us up today is so he could tell you this space is a sacred place that he is still sitting on the throne that he has not been knocked off the throne because of all of the chaos that’s happening and swirling around us.
He’s still in charge. His sovereignty is still sure his love and kindness still endures forever.
He’s still got your back rest, trust, take your shoes off. This is holy ground.
Verse 11, y’all still with me.
He took Jacob took one of the stones of that place and he put it under his head and he lay down to sleep.
The King James version says he took one of the pillows and he or he took one of the stones and used it for a pillow.
That’s what the King James version says right now, remember I told you this is stony ground.
OK? Uh There would have been all manner of rocks and stones around him on his journey.
Meaning there would have been tiny stones more like gravel that you could just kick as you walked.
There would have been medium sized stones that would have taken maybe two hands to pick up.
There would have been boulders, uh rocks that were even more gargantuan than, than this monitor sitting up here just 234, 10 times as large that, that 10 men wouldn’t have been able to live everywhere he looked, there were hard things.
There were ones that were small and seemed insignificant.
There were medium sized ones that would take a little bit more effort to get out of the way and there were big ones that no matter what he did, he wouldn’t be able to move them.
So Jacob is being allowed by the one true and living God, yahweh is allowing him to walk a path that’s got all this hard stuff.
And I just wonder if there’s anybody in the room and everywhere you look is hard stuff.
It’s small size, hard stuff, medium size, hard stuff, real big, hard stuff.
And just when you get this stone out of the way, you turn around and find out there’s another one right there and there’s one to the east and one to the way, it just don’t matter what you do.
And some of the stuff you’ve been able to take care of on your own with your own little effort.
Some of it is taken a little bit longer, but you’ve been able to move it.
Maybe with a friend of yours or two, been able to get through that stuff.
But there’s some stuff that it don’t matter how hard you’ve tried, it doesn’t matter how, how long you’ve tried.
It doesn’t matter how much you’ve prayed or how much you’ve paid.
It doesn’t seem like that big boulder is ever going to move out of the way.
Jacob knows how it feels to be surrounded by stones everywhere.
You look, there’s hard stuff and I don’t know about you, but when there’s hard stuff in my path, um I wanna do one or two things with those stones, I either want to kick it out of frustration that is in my way or I wanna pick it up and throw it at the person that’s caused this stone to be in my path in the first place.
Come on. Can I get a witness?
But Jacob actually teaches us that there is a secret for to, because he looks around at all the hard things and he finds one that looks like it actually might be useful and he puts it under his head and he uses it for a pillow, wouldn’t have been as comfortable as the one he would have had back at home.
But he looks at what he has access to today, given these circumstances and this reality and he assumes that there’s something useful that can be done with all this hard stuff.
He teaches us that the secret of stones is that there’s good stuff.
It’s just hidden in the hard stuff.
There’s good stuff, it’s just hidden in the hard stuff.
Here’s what we do as Christ followers, church goers, Christians, we pray and say, oh lord, we want to see your power.
Lord, we want to see your glory.
Lord, we want to see your presence and then in the next breath, we pray.
Lord, would you please keep me out of any situation in which seeing your power and presence would be required?
We say, Lord, I wanna see a miracle but but lord, please keep me out of any situation in which I would need a miracle.
Everybody wants to see the red sea divided, but nobody wants to come face to face with the red sea.
Everybody wants to see the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.
But nobody wants to be the one who has to walk around those walls in obedience to God.
Trusting that his divine supernatural strategy is better than your own.
Everybody wants to see God, but nobody wants to be at me too.
We don’t want to be in positions where we actually have to see Him.
But I’m gonna tell you right now that when you and I have the courage to pray, Lord, we want to see you.
He answers with stones and he says, I’m gonna show you how to live life knowing that there’s good stuff hidden in this hard stuff.
I’m gonna fit you with my vision, spiritual vision with the perspective that will angle you to be able to detect that that even in the difficulties of life y’all, this is what the abundant life is.
John 10 10, I came that you might have life and life more abundantly abundant.
Life is not, is is not you waiting on or me waiting on life to be more like skipping through a grassy knoll with no heartache and no trouble and no disappointment.
No abundant life is when you are surrounded by hard stuff, you’re on the journey from point A to point B and you’re on the patch of ground where really you want to give up.
But right there in the middle of all of that, God gives you peace like a river.
God gives you joy that is unspeakable. God gives you a sense of emotional stability.
When Lord knows you shouldn’t be emotionally or mentally stable and yet God continues to stabilize you giving a peace that is literally beyond your understanding.
You, you’ve met people like that, you know, your friend that you know what’s going on in her life.
She’s the, she’s the one that tells you all the things you listen to all the things she has a lot going on and yet she has peace and you don’t get how this girl can still sleep a full seven hours, eight hours at night going through what she going through.
You, you don’t get that kind of peace on your own, but God can give it.
Uh Jerry and I took the boys. This is several years ago, y’all.
We took the boys to Babes chicken over in Cedar Hill.
So we were at Babe, this is when it first opened. So this is a long time ago.
The boys were little and at the time, my second son was probably six years old.
So we sit there and if you’ve ever been to babes, you know, it’s all family style.
You order the, the meat that you want and then they bring out all the um the sides to go with it.
So J C is looking at the, the list to see what it is that he’d like.
There are about five options for the meat selections. One of them is catfish, fried catfish.
So my son is looking at the menu all studios trying to be all adult like.
And the waitress comes over and she says, young man, what can I get for you to eat?
And he said, well, ma’am, can I ask you a question first? And she says, yes, sir.
And he says, I’m thinking about the catfish, but is this made out of real cat?
Of course, our response was just like yours, Jerry.
And I, the waitress, we all fell out laughing hysterically at this boy’s question.
Could not believe that he asked that And as we’re laughing hysterically, he’s looking around getting all frustrated that we’re laughing at him.
He said, why is everybody laughing at my question?
And I said, babe, it’s actually because you’ve asked the wrong question.
We can’t even give you an answer based on the fact that you’ve asked the wrong question.
Oh Lord, would you move this hard stuff?
Lord, get this hard stuff out of my way. Lord take this stone.
Lord change this difficulty, get me out of this season of life. Move this hardship.
We pray and ask God to get the hard stuff out of the way.
And then we are mad because he’s not answering.
But I wonder if he’s not answering because we’re asking the wrong question.
What if the question is, Lord, would you fit me with spiritual vision so that I can see any good stuff that’s hidden in this hard stuff?
Is there anything useful that I’m supposed to use in this to support me, to give courage to me, to build character and fortification in me?
Lord don’t take none of this hard stuff out of my life until I mine it for every single treasure that you’ve touched with it because what a tragedy it would be to get to the next season and realized there was good stuff hidden in that hard stuff.
So Jacob finds something useful out of the hard stuff.
He lays his head down on the pillow and he has a dream.
He sees the latter of verse 12 set up on earth and reaching up into the heavens.
The angels of God are ascending and descending and the Lord stands above it.
And he says, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac, the land on which you’re lying right now.
Jacob, I’m going to give it to your descendants.
Your descendants shall also be verse 14 like the dust of the earth and you shall spread out to the west and the east and the north and the south and in you and in your descendants, shall all the families of the earth be blessed and behold, verse 15, I am with you.
The secret of certain places is that certain places are sacred spaces.
The secret of stones is that there’s good stuff in the hard stuff and there is a secret of confirmation.
Everything that God just said to Jacob. He’s standing above the ladder.
He is speaking to Jacob. He sees the angels descending and ascending on the ladder which speaks to the connection between heaven and earth that God is closer than we think and God stands above it all and he speaks to Jacob, everything he says to him.
Jacob has heard before. OK.
Do you remember that blessing and that birthright that he stole from Isaac, he stole his brother’s blessing and birthright, two separate things.
But they are all embedded within these words when He when Isaac gave Jacob the blessing and the birthright, these were almost identically the words that he spoke over his son.
And now when Jacob is removed from comfort, and he’s in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar, lonely patch of ground, an in between place that feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
God speaks to him. And when he does, he does not tell him anything new.
He says, all I’m gonna do is confirm for you that I am who I said I am and that I’m still going to accomplish exactly what I declare to you that I am going to accomplish even the life right now with all this hard stuff does not affirm my promises.
I have come to confirm them to you.
This is the secret of confirmation that when life does not affirm God will go out of his way to confirm that if you’ll keep your eyes open, if I’ll keep my eyes open, if we will not become prayer less, if we will not disconnect from God, if we will not allow the hard stuff of our life to push us away to where we stop attending church and we stop keeping ourselves in the word of God, we disconnect from our friends who are encouraging and challenging us to stay connected.
If we stop being prayerful and being on our knees about that situation that honestly we’ve been praying about so long that we honestly are just tired of praying about that one thing.
If we’ll keep ourselves from disconnecting.
This will be the season when God will go out of his way to confirm his promises for you.
He’ll go out of his way.
You’ll come to church on a Sunday or you’ll come to the, the gathering.
I heard that you guys are having tomorrow night or Sunday night at six PM.
That, that you’ll come to a gathering like that and God will go out of his way to make sure, you know, he still is who he said he is.
You’ll come to church on a Sunday morning and pastor will be preaching and he’ll open up the Bible and the one verse that he reads, you will feel like a spotlight is on you as the holy spirit seals his presence in your life.
You’ll have your, you’ll have your devotions, your quiet time.
You’ll just be just reading something.
But what it is that you read, it will be like the Holy Spirit takes out a divine highlighter and causes it to leap up off the page and grip you in your soul as God goes out of his way to just confirm for you that he still got your back when life doesn’t affirm, just get ready.
God’s getting ready to go out of his way to confirm. He’s gonna confirm it.
He’s gonna confirm it through the word of a stranger.
He’s going to confirm it through a worship song. He’s gonna confirm it through a scripture verse.
He’s going to confirm it as you just go throughout your life and he just gives you little winks from heaven that lets you know he got you the gift that comes in the mail.
The surprise email that shows up the little nuances that God does to just remind you that everything he said then is still happening now.
And this also is a challenge to us y’all.
You don’t need nothing new. Listen, how many of y’all been in church? Your whole life?
You just been in, in and around church, your whole life.
Many of us, probably 70% of us just raised our hand.
You’ve been in and around you, you kind of know the scriptures, you know what the red Sea and Jacob’s ladder and you, you heard the stuff you don’t need nothing new.
We don’t need new information. We need revelation concerning the information we already got.
And in these seasons, God goes out of his way.
So pray, Lord open up my spiritual ears, open up my spiritual eyes, father, because if you’re moving, I don’t wanna miss it.
And if you’re speaking, I want to hear everything that you have come to say.
And so God will use his own word to just speak back to you. Bits of confirmation.
He’ll use circumstances to light up your path to be a lamp unto your feet, to help you to know He’s still there.
He’s still got you. It’s the secret of confirmation.
And finally God says to Jacob verse 15 and behold, I am with you, I will keep you wherever you go.
Here it is and I will bring you back to this land for.
I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised to you.
Thank you Lord.
Right after that, Jacob wakes up, it’s on the heels of that statement, I will bring you back to this land.
I will not leave you until I’ve done what I promised you.
On the heels of that, Jacob is startled awake and he says, God was here.
God was here. I didn’t know it. I was asleep. I was sleepwalking through that whole thing.
I missed it. But, but now I realize in hindsight that God was here, it was right after God said to Jacob, I will bring you back to this land.
There is a secret of returning. Oh, y’all listen to me.
You listening, you are coming back to this land.
Listen, the place you’re in right now that I’m in right now that we actually some of us are praying hard to get out of so we can move on to the next thing.
The Holy Spirit of God whispers to you today and says, yeah, but you are coming back.
The circumstance might not look exactly the way it does right now.
But listen, there are seeds we’re sowing today.
The harvest of which is coming back to us tomorrow there are relationships we’re either ignoring or fostering today and the harvest of that is coming back to us tomorrow, Jacob could have never known that.
One day, years later, he was gonna be back on this same patch of ground sitting in the promises of God with his sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters and nieces and nephews.
His descendants spreading out to the east and the west and the north and the south.
He’d be sitting right here in this place.
He was coming back to this place and his posterity was reaping the harvest of what Jacob sowed.
I’m trying to tell you there’s a whole generation that is waiting on us to get serious about this land that we’re on right now.
There’s a whole, listen, your daughters, y’all, our daughters and granddaughters, our sons and grandsons that maybe we haven’t even met yet.
They are dependent upon us waking up and realizing God is here because when you recognize that God is here, when you realize this is an important place, this is a sacred place that there’s good stuff in the hard stuff that God’s confirming His word to me, that I’m coming back here that there are seeds, I’m sowing the harvest of which my people are gonna reap in the future.
When you recognize that it makes you treat this place different differently instead of disdaining it and being disappointed by it and completely frustrated by it.
And trying to get out of it.
You also realize I better take time to cultivate it, to foster it, to nurture it, to love it because we are coming back here and my people are gonna reap the benefits or the lack of benefits that I sow or do not sow here.
I’m telling you don’t burn the bridges of the land you’re on right now because there is a secret of returning that you’re coming back here.
I’m gonna tell you this.
Uh in closing y’all, uh in the past 2.5 years, our family has lost eight family members.
It has been devastating one after the other. Some of them for it.
It was just one day they were here and one day they were not like just every 3 to 4 months, another close family members, family member of ours passed away within six months of each other.
I lost my mother and then Jerry lost his mother back to back my mother.
We knew she was sick and we knew that unless God chose to supernaturally heal her, there was no earthly answer to the cancer that she was dealing with.
So in those last couple of months, in particular, the entire year of that.
But the last couple of months in particular, we were all up on her, me and Crystal, my sister, we kind of moved into the house really to take care of her and daddy and just be all up you know, all up in their business and all up on them laying in the bed, hanging out, spending time with her.
And there was this moment when me, Crystal Anthony Jonathan, we were all there in our pajamas.
Our spouses were there at that particular time. They were all in there, all of our Children.
There’s about 14 grandchildren and then the oldest grandchild, she now has Children. So there are great grandchildren.
We were all in the room together with my mom.
And at that point, sometimes she was with us, sometimes she wasn’t conscious as much.
But there was this moment when we were all there and she opened up her eyes and saw all our people and basically blessed us in Jesus name, basically handed us a baton of faith and said to us, don’t nobody.
It doesn’t matter what happens with me. Y’all better not drop this baton.
And in that moment watching a woman who knew pretty soon she might be leaving earth and entering into heaven.
I watched this woman have peace like a river and hope about the future.
What manner of peace is this?
That even in the face of death, it stabilizes you even when you’re on desolate ground like that, even when you’re in a circumstance like that, that none of us would have preferred.
What is it that keeps you so anchored?
You know what does Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces, nephews, those that you disciple the young women that are looking at you, the people whose eyes are on you to see how we’re gonna handle this ground that we’re on.
Do not back down in fear and insecurity and quietness and silence. The enemy would love for you.
And I so much to close our eyes and sleep through this whole thing. God would say to you today.
Ephesians chapter four verse 14, awake, oh sleeper and a rise the ground on which you are standing.
It’s holy ground. I want you to bow your heads with me.
And I wanna ask that any of you who are in this room and right now you re you recognize that you see that you have been sleeping through this whole season.
You’ve been just trying to race through this one to get on to the next one and you have devalued the significance of what God might be trying to do in this particular season of your life.
And you want to ask the Holy Spirit to wake you up out of that spiritual slumber so that you don’t miss anything he has for you.
If that is a particular prayer that you need today, please stand to your feet so that I can pray with you.
Thank you, father. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.
Yeah, Lord. Here we are your daughters.
We’re standing, we’re kneeling, we’re sitting, we are in your presence, Lord, because we need you.
We need a touch from you.
We need an electric shock to our spiritual hearts, to wake us up, out of our spiritual slumber.
We need our spiritual eyes to be open our spiritual ears, to be open father so that we don’t miss anything that you have for us.
So father, I ask in the name of Jesus Christ, that your holy spirit would shake us awake out of our spiritual plumber and would help us father to fully engage in this season of our life.
Do not let us miss anything.
Lord, every blessing you’ve come to give every promise you’ve come to make every bit of yourself.
You have come to dispense upon us.
I pray for grace, upon grace and mercy upon more mercy and glory to glory to be experienced by every woman and man who is standing under the sight and sound of my voice.
I thank you father that today the alarm cos of heaven are waking us up.
Thank you for agitating our souls. Father.
I pray that any scheme of the enemy to distract us, to disable us, to discourage us.
I pray that that scheme would be canceled right now in jesus’ name and by his blood that has been shed on Calvary, we yield ourselves and this season of our lives to you in Jesus name.
Everybody agreed when they said amen.
Come on, let’s give a hand, let’s give a hand to Priscilla Shire.
Now