Well, good morning, Forward. Happy 91st birthday Forward
Church. You're looking pretty good for
91 years old. I got to say, if you're new here
today, I want to welcome you. We're thrilled that you've
joined us here today. This is a little family party
that we're having and we hope that you feel welcome and
joining the party with us. A couple things I want to just
say before we get into the message today.
First of all, the other day my wife said, Kirk, I know
Celebration Sunday is a big day, so I bought you a brand new
shirt and I want you to wear it on Celebration Sunday.
Don't get excited yet, Andrew. It gets better.
So I get here, I put on the
shirt like a good husband should do when his wife tells him to.
And then I'm up here at before the service starts helping to
get things ready for the baptisms that are happening a
little bit later on. And I look over and I see
another guy who has the exact same shirt on.
And then I see another guy who has the exact same shirt on.
Then I discovered that the women in my discipleship group lobbied
together. Guys, stand up all the guys in
my discipleship group. So you can thank Katie Gibbons
for that. 2nd, we have a new member to welcome to the Forward
Church Family. Would you just join me in
welcoming Sandra Gouda as member of our church?
And last, we have a ministry here in the church called the
Forward Leadership School. And this year we have several
people who have completed a three-year journey of walking
through our leadership school program, our second group to
graduate. Now not all of them are able to
be here today, but those of you who are here, if you would just
come on up. We have a few of them who are
here, and I just want to give them a gift and recognize them
for their three years here. So we have Jared and Lisa, and
there's Nick back there. No, you can go back down, Jared.
I know you don't want to. Congratulations, Lisa.
Hey, Nick. Thanks, man.
All right. Yeah, take your Bibles open up
to Psalm 138. That's page 547.
If you're using one of the Bibles in the seat around you,
Psalm 138. And just as you're opening
there, I want to ask you this question.
What are the best celebrations that you've ever been part of?
Maybe you think about a cultural celebration.
I, I live in Paris, and in Paris we have different cultural
celebrations that happened. The Paris Fair is the biggest
waste of money that you will ever have.
We also have the Maple Syrup Festival and I know some of our
people I ran into at the Maple Syrup Festival in Paris.
It is like such a bizarre small town thing.
The Maple Syrup festival in Paris had all these display
booths out and all these food trucks and two tables that
actually had Maple syrup. And so, yeah, we've got these
cultural celebrations that that we have.
Maybe it's an individual achievement in your life, maybe
a graduation after finishing school.
I think that the best celebrations are the
celebrations where you share a common passion with the other
people who are in the room, whether it's your family, when
you celebrate Christmas or birthdays together, whether it's
some type of a group achievement.
There's just something about winning together as a group that
feels really special. Well, over the last number of
years here at Forward, we have marked the end of June as
Celebration Sunday, a time for us to celebrate together as a
church family. But I I want to make something
really clear right up front. We are not here today to
celebrate our achievements. This is not a day for us to pat
ourselves on the back and say look how great Forward churches
because everything that we are seeking to celebrate today is
simply because of the goodness of God.
The Bible tells us in James chapter one that every good and
perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of
lights who's who does not change like shifting shadows.
Everything that is good about this church family is because of
the goodness of God. Every good gift we have received
is because of Him. Now when you have a name like
Forward Church, it's really easy to keep looking to the future
and to say what's the next thing?
What's the next mountain to climb?
What's the next vision to accomplish?
What's the next ministry? How can we meet the needs of
more people and reach more people with the good news of the
gospel? But one of the most critical
things that we can do as a church is to have a habit of
pausing and looking back and enjoying what God has done
amongst us. Now, when someone's been good to
you, there's a lot of different responses that you can have.
You can sit there and go, well, I did a lot of the work already.
They just kind of helped out a bit.
That would not be the right response.
With God, you, you can take it for granted and you can just go,
well, of course, God's supposed to be good.
Of course he's going to be good and show his goodness to us.
And so you just learn to take it for granted.
It's a little bit like when you were a kid at Christmas and,
and, and in the first early years of Christmas, you get
super excited at all the things that you got at Christmas time.
But then as time went on, you started to go, it's Christmas
and there's more presents at Christmas And you just assume
you're going to get more presents at Christmas time and
you start taking it for granted that it's always going to be
there. Or maybe your response to
someone's goodness to you is just a polite thank you.
It's like sitting at the dinner table and and saying thank you
for supper because your mom or your dad told you, you need to
say thank you for supper, right? You just, it's the polite thing
to do. Well, Psalm 138 gives us a
really specific way to respond to God's goodness.
And it's this. The goodness of God should
compel us to thank Him with our whole heart.
Look at verse one of Psalm 138. He says, I will give you thanks
with all my heart. I will sing your praise before
the heavenly beings. There is no polite nice thank
you going on. There's just this deep sense of
gratitude and being thankful it comes from the depths of his
being to express his gratitude to God.
And I love this description because it doesn't leave room
for half hearted thank yous. Like, I wonder how many of us
have gotten so used to good gifts from God, we've just
started to take them for granted.
I wonder how many of us settle for a polite thank you instead
of a wholehearted God. I can't believe you've been so,
so good to us. When you understand that what
makes a gift a gift is you don't deserve it, you can't help but
be thankful from the bottom of your heart.
You know, I, I got to tell you, I've grown up in church my
entire life. I've had the privilege of
traveling across Canada and I've seen other churches up close.
I've been in ministry for 30 years, over 30 years.
Let me tell you, we should never take for granted the good gifts
that God has given to this church.
We, we are a church family who lives every single day in the
goodness of God. What?
What God has blessed us with is not always the story of other
churches. Now, are we a perfect church?
Absolutely not. No, we're not a perfect church.
But our perfection isn't what determines the goodness of God.
The goodness of God just comes from the character in the heart
of who God is. It's not about how well we've
performed for God. Have we made mistakes?
Sure, we've made mistakes. It's not about that.
It's about His goodness, His kindness towards us and for
David, he just needs to he's compelled to express in praise
how thankful he is. And it's not just his words.
His actions also say it. He he's so thankful.
He says, I can't just stop praising God.
Verse one, I will sing your praise before the heavenly
beings. So I have to sing about your
goodness. I got to tell you, like sitting
up here at the front listening to you worship and sing praises
to God this morning was amazing to listen to you.
Some of us, we live in a state of, hey, it's enough for me just
to be thankful on the inside. I don't need to kind of say it
too loudly and proudly. That's not where David lands.
He's like he lands in the space of if you're wholeheartedly
thankful, you cannot contain it on the inside.
You have to praise God. But last Sunday I was in Brant,
and man, it was just so cool listening to the group of people
in that little room lifting up their praises and worship to
God. And when we come together, we
praise the one who's been so good to us.
But it's not limited to praising God when we're together as a
church. Notice the words.
I will sing your praise before the heavenly beings.
Some Bible translations use the word God's there.
David praises the goodness of God in the face of false gods.
What David is saying is I don't just praise God on Sunday when
we're together as a church family.
I praise God all the time when I'm out in the community, when
I'm at work, when I'm with my family, wherever I'm interacting
because there are false gods everywhere and I'm just going to
go everywhere I can go and proclaim how good God is in the
face of the false gods. To tell them you guys are
useless compared to the one true almighty God.
That's the kind of affection that is stirred up inside of
David. He has to proclaim his praise of
God. And it's not just how loud he
sings and how loud he proclaims it.
He also says he has to bow down and quietly give thanks to God.
Verse 2 says I will bow down towards your holy temple.
Neither of these expressions of praise are very Baptist.
Now, for those of you who don't know, Forward is a Baptist
Church. That might shock some of you.
We're a Baptist Church, but neither of these expressions of
praise kind of land naturally for us as Baptists.
A lot of us are like, I don't know about that whole praising
God out loud thing. And a whole bunch of us are
like, you want me to bow down, get on my knees and worship
before God? That, that feels like an
expression that I don't feel real comfortable with.
They're not very Baptist, but they are very biblical.
See, I, I want to not only give you permission to praise and
worship God in this way, but I want you to consider this.
We're nothing without God. We don't exist as a church
community apart from Jesus. Our salvation is in him alone.
He's the one that has brought us together.
He's the one that has rescued us from sins.
He's the one that has saved us. He's the one who says you're a
church. None of this exists apart from
Jesus. So gaze on the goodness of God
and allow the depth of your thankfulness to come out in your
actions. Praise Him, be vocal about your
praise, but also bow down before Him in humility because you
don't deserve any of the goodness that we've received.
Now, I know we live in a fairly individualistic society.
We, we more easily see things that are good for me before we
see the things that are good for we.
We, in other words, we more easily celebrate when something
good happens to ourselves or within our immediate circle of
friends. But because we get caught up in
our own world so often, sometimes we miss the goodness
of God in the collective group. And so from this Psalm, I want
to give you 4 reasons that we as a church family have to
celebrate and to be thankful with all of our hearts.
First reason is we celebrate God's faithful and constant love
in verse 2 that that's what David says.
I'll bow down towards your holy temple and give thanks to your
name for your constant love and truth.
You've exalted your name and your promise above everything
else. David recognizes that God has
shown his faithful love over and over again.
And and I know that we talk a lot about God's love here
forward, but I think sometimes we talk and even as church
family we talk. Yeah, God loves us.
God loves us, but we talk at high at such a high level we
don't know how to pay attention to where's God showing up and
showing his love for us in the everyday of life.
I got I'll be honest with you and tell you that not everything
about this past year has felt good or simple.
There's been a lot of tough things, a lot of tough things in
our church, a lot of tough things and many of your own
personal lives over this past year.
I'll say that for me personally, this was probably one of the
most challenging years that I've had in ministry for all kinds of
reasons. And I won't go into all the
details, but I can tell you this over and over again, the
goodness and faithfulness of God has shown up to protect this
church and carry us through. God's faithful love has shown up
time and time again. I see the compassion of the Lord
so often in the course of a year in this church.
We had 10 people who passed away part as part of our church
family this year. And as I went to each funeral,
you know what I saw and I heard over and over again from family
members? They kept talking about how God
was their comfort, how they were at peace and at rest because
they were experiencing the closeness of God in their grief
and their sorrow. I've heard so many stories of
people who have told me about encountering God's love in our
worship services or as they study the Bible in discipleship
groups or in sermons on Sunday. A lot of times, God's faithful
love is expressed through you as you serve.
You are the hands and feet of Jesus.
Every person who's ever served at a funeral in our church or
brought help to a family in crisis, as you've experienced
the goodness of God in your own life and you've served other
people, you're helping them to experience the goodness of God.
I see it in our seniors care team who visit and care so well
for so many people, some of whom may never be able to come to
church again because of their health.
It shows up as you invest in families in need through
organizations like say Families. It's shown up in our ESL program
that we have here in Cambridge. You know, when ESL first
launched, it had really large numbers.
And over the last year, the numbers have really kind of
slowly dwindled and gotten smaller.
But there's been a more consistent group of people that
have been coming to ESL. And as that group of people
came, relationships, deeper relationships were being formed
with the people who are serving and leading in ESL, and we began
to see God working in ways that we could have never expected.
Most of the attendees in ESL came to Canada with a faith
already, but basically nothing else.
They had nowhere to turn for practical needs to get settled
in Canada. But this team stepped up and
served these families in need in the most practical ways and
showed the goodness and kindness of God to them.
This team has used their knowledge and their circles of
influence to provide practical assistance and to see lives
change for the better. They've lived out the command in
the book of Deuteronomy to love the resident alien amongst us.
It's beautiful you as you serve. You are expressing the goodness
and the constant and faithful love of God to others.
We experience God's faithful love in our church as He
consistently kept His promises towards us this year.
God has provided for all of our needs as a church family.
You know there is a sense of God math that doesn't always make
sense. As you know this year we started
2 brand new church sites. We sent out about 100 people
from Cambridge to help start the Branton Arabic sites.
And you would think that would result in a drop in giving in
Cambridge, but actually the opposite happened.
Somehow God gave an increase in giving in Cambridge.
See, God keeps providing for our needs as a church family,
showing his faithful love over and over again.
God has been so good to us, but it doesn't end there.
We also celebrate what he's done in answering our prayers.
Look at verse 3. David says, on the day I called,
you answered me. You increased strength within
me. He's recognizing that God is the
God who answers prayer. God has done the same for many
of you over this year. I I know so many of you have
experienced God's answer to prayers in your own personal
life. And it's so important when you
experience God answering prayers that you don't just move on.
It's important you stop and say thank you to God.
If you're going to ask Him to show His goodness and His power
in a situation, it's essential that you stop and say thank you
God, for showing up and for answering this prayer.
Andrew Murray described answered prayers this way.
He said answered prayer is the interchange of love between the
Father and his child. You know, I think about all the
ways that we pray together as a church family.
I think about our prayer and worship nights that we have
together, this powerful moment when we come together to pray
for each other and for the needs of our church community.
I think about the prayers that happen in discipleship groups or
when your ministry teams that you're serving and come together
and you pray within friendships, watching people after church
services, just standing around in circles and praying for each
other as you've experienced different things.
Every Sunday morning, our elders meet at 8:00 AM to pray for you
as a church family. Over 400 people receive our
weekly prayer e-mail and pray for different requests in our
family. And every year there are
hundreds and hundreds of prayer requests that get brought to us
as a church. And over and over again we see
God answering those prayers. Just this week, a family who had
asked us to pray that God would sustain their business through
the spring reported back how God has answered that prayer and
then some. So many of you, I look out in
this room and as a pastor, I know so many of your stories of
things that you were desperately asking God to show up in
situations. I know so many of your stories
where there were health concerns, financial concerns,
and relationship concerns. I know that some of you, if we
would have had this conversation three months and six months ago,
you might have said, I don't even know if I'm going to make
it to be alive on Celebration Sunday.
And here you are. I look out and I just see the
goodness of God in answering prayers over and over and over
again. When you prayed for our Brant
and Arabic congregations to start, God has answered those
prayers and we're seeing people coming together and forming
congregations and it's beautiful and it's powerful to see what
God's doing. You know, one of the things that
we pray for as pastors all the time is that we would be a
church who keeps growing to be more and more like Jesus.
And we can see the ways that God's answering those prayers.
Over 1800 people are connected somewhere in our discipleship
ministries in the life of this church.
There's a hunger and a desire for people who want to become
more like Jesus. We have almost 500 people who
serve on a team somewhere in the life of our church.
Like the fact that you are willing to give of your time to
serve Jesus and to serve others and love others in that way is a
beautiful picture. One of the things that our
elders pray for all the time is unity.
And I am so deeply grateful to be part of a church family where
we can agree to disagree on some things, but we can still be in
unity with each other. Like there is a difference
between unity and uniformity. We'll never be in uniformity
because we're all different. We all different ideas and
thoughts and backgrounds and expertise and everything else.
We'll never be in uniformity, but we can always be in unity
because we have one thing in common and it's Jesus.
It's his love for us and it's His mission that He's called us
to. When I think about all the ways
that God has answered prayers for our church family over this
past year, I cannot help but look to the Lord and just say
thank you, God, Thank you for your faithfulness to us.
Thank you for showing your power over and over and over again.
Thank you for hearing our prayers and answering when we've
called out to you. But His goodness doesn't end
there. We also celebrate His grace.
The verse 4. All the kings on earth will give
you thanks, Lord. When they hear what you've
promised, they will sing the Lord's ways, for the Lord's
glory is great. Though the Lord is exalted, He
takes note of the humble, but he knows the haughty from a
distance. In these verses, David talks
about how even the mighty are going to recognize their limits
when they encounter the glory of God.
The the eternal God, the all powerful, all knowing Creator of
everything. The one who put the oceans and
the mountains in place. The one who is capable of just
simply saying a word and speaking something into
existence. The one who judges anything that
falls short of his standard. Who is wholly imperfect in every
way. The one who is greater than your
mind can possibly fathom, whose ways and thoughts are so far
beyond what you can imagine. And frankly, his ways and
thoughts are so far beyond what AI will ever be able to come up
with that God loves you that that God sees the brokenness of
the world, the brokenness in your life, in my life, the sin
and the shame that we carry. And instead of running away,
that God comes to rescue you. And not only does he come to
rescue you, he comes to keep walking with you and to be with
you every moment of every day for the rest of your life.
He's a God who does not need you in any way.
But the evidence says he does want you to know him and to know
his love for you. That's grace.
That's the unmerited favor of God.
And Psalm 138 tells us in the verses we just read that the
Lord is exalted. He takes note of the humble.
Over this past year, we've seen people encounter God's grace
over and over and over again. We have seen people of all ages,
kids and youth and adults in all of our sites who've come to know
and believe in the goodness of God and have come to faith in
Jesus. That's God's grace showing up
over and over again. We've seen 49 people baptized in
the past year between all of our sites, and today that number is
going higher. We have a bunch of people who
are going to get baptized today in the service.
We got at least 8 and there are some of you who are going to get
baptized today and you didn't even know you were going to get
baptized today. Because what we're going to do
is we're going to open up the baptism to anyone who is a
believer and follower of Jesus to be able to say today is the
day where I'm going to go public and I'm going to say Jesus is my
Lord. I'm going to live in obedience
to him. Today is your opportunity for
you to be baptized, even if you weren't planning to be baptized.
We do this because we've encountered God's grace in our
lives. You see, baptism is just an act
of obedience. It's what Jesus has commanded us
to do as an outward sign to show what is already true in our
hearts, that we have experienced His grace and put our faith in
Him for the forgiveness of our sins and the salvation of our
lives. And if you're a believer and
follower of Jesus today and you've never been baptized, I
want to say today is your day. And you're thinking, well, but
do I just wear the clothes I got?
We got you. We got clothes for you.
We got towels for you. We are taking away all your
reasons so you get back to not get baptized today.
All right. But grace is not something that
just ends when we come to faith. Aren't you so glad that grace
doesn't just end when we come to faith?
We need the grace of God every single day in our lives.
You know, a few months ago, I had two different people come up
to me and say this about forward within like a week of each
other. It was really crazy.
They said, I cannot believe how open and transparent people are
in this church about the challenges that they're facing
in life and about the sins that they have.
And they said this, it's like this church lives like we know
we all have problems and need a Savior.
Man, if you're going to be known for one thing, isn't that a good
thing to be known for? Like we live like we know we all
have problems and need a Savior. That's our story.
And can I just tell you that when I heard that, that's an
answer to prayer too. If you were to walk down the
hallway where our staff offices are, you would actually see a
prayer request on the wall that says this.
Pray that. Shame and secrecy would lose
their power in Christians, and we are seeing the Holy Spirit do
that work in our church family, and I praise God for that.
In the video you saw earlier this morning, you saw stories of
people who walked through Freedom Session, and every story
of freedom is a story of God's grace amongst us.
But I'm so glad that we're not a church that just keeps this good
news of grace to ourselves, that that we're a church that is
committed to seeing the people in our community and all around
the world discover this same kind of grace in every Alpha
program, every youth Alpha in Kitchener, community outreach
events that we've done, community programs that we run
camp forward through our global engagement partners.
And as you interact with people in your everyday life, God is
using this church to help so many other people know that he's
a God of grace. And that's our story we have to
keep telling over and over and over again.
The goodness of God over this past year is everywhere.
But there's still one more thing for us to celebrate, and it's
this. We celebrate the future
victories that He's already won. Look at verse seven and eight.
If I walk into the thick of danger, you will preserve my
life from the anger of my enemies.
You will extend your hand. Your right hand will save me.
The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me.
Lord, your faithful love endures forever.
Do not abandon the work of your hands.
David has this absolute confidence that because God has
been good, he's going to keep being good in the future, no
matter what might come. He says if I walk into the thick
of danger, you will preserve my life.
He says the Lord has a purpose for me, even when it feels like
life is uncertain. And if there's one thing that I
know to be true over the next 12 months, it's this.
I have no idea what's going to happen in the next 12 months,
but here's what I do know. The God who has been good for
the past 12 months is not going to stop being good for the next
12 months. No matter what comes, God is
still good. There are so many more victories
and moments of experiencing His goodness that are waiting for
us. We just need to pay attention
for them. And if you haven't heard one
thing I said today, I want you to hear this.
No matter which site you are a part of.
The best days of Forward Church can still be ahead of us.
Not because we're great, but because His faithful love
endures forever. That's why and that promise and
that hope should never lead us to any sense of arrogance or
entitlement. It actually should move us in
the opposite direction to complete dependence.
It should move us to a place of how David ends this Psalm.
He says he praises the God who is faithful and good, but then
he says, God, please don't abandoned the work.
You've already started a complete dependence on God.
I am confident in the goodness of God, but I also know we are
nothing unless He continues to show His goodness to us as a
church. And So what do we do with that?
Well, for David, there's only one thing you do with the
goodness of God. You praise him and you worship
him. That's what you do.
We fix our eyes on the one who has rescued us from our sins,
who has saved us, and we celebrate his goodness amongst
us. We're going to sing a couple of
songs, one to praise God, one to really reflect and worship God.
And as we're singing these songs today, if you are here today and
you've never been baptized before, but you are a believer
in Jesus, then I want to challenge you as we're singing
these songs, here's what you need to do.
You need to just get up and go out the doors on this side.
If you're up in the balcony, go out the door on this side as
well. And we have some people from our
team who are going to meet with you and help you get ready for
your baptism. Today is your day.
Don't let fear get in the way of you saying yes to Jesus.
If you're here today and you've never put your faith in Jesus
before, man, I can't think of the better moment for you than
right now. He's a God who loves you, who
sent his Son Jesus to die on a cross for your sins in your
place so that you could have the gift of eternal life, that you
could have the gift of calling this godfather.
And what you just need to do is turn to him in faith and say,
Jesus, would you come and forgive me of my sins?
And I place my faith on you. And when you place your faith in
Jesus, God says he gives you the gift of eternal life, not
because of anything you've done, but because of how good he is.
And guess what? If you pray that prayer right
now and say, I want to come to faith in Jesus, you can get
baptized right now too. We'd love to be able to do that.
So as we sing these songs, just get up and leave to the back
doors over on the side, and our team will meet with you if you
want to get baptized today. Church, let's stand together.
We have so much to praise the Lord for.
We have so much to worship our God for.
Let's do that over these next couple of songs.