Good morning. My name is Daniel.
I'm the lead pastor here at Res Church.
Welcome if you're new here. Welcome if you're coming back
from Easter excited. You joined us today.
You braved that torrential downpour of a storm, 110th of an
inch of rain. Welcome to Res Church.
We are continuing a series we started last week.
Hey, have you ever, have you ever had a plan?
Maybe a good point, you know, maybe, maybe a perfect plan that
fell apart in in college, I got invited to play quarterback for
a flag football team, for a fraternity flag football team.
And I wasn't in a fraternity, but the, the Delta Chi invited
me because they hadn't won a game in two years.
So at that point, they're just inviting anyone with a pulse.
And we ended up making it all the way to the championship game
down by 5. Last play of the game, and I was
supposed to call the play. And so I was thinking like I had
like a razzle dazzle, you ain't nobody seen this coming sort of
play. And I drew it out in the huddle.
The wide receiver is going to head out and then get behind the
defence in the back of the end zone.
I was going to throw it over their heads.
Everyone was going to cheer. I was going to be hero.
And then we hiked the ball and the receiver fell down and they
blitzed. And that's about the time that
it dawned on me that the other team was all like 6 foot, 4 frag
guys. And we were short and
unathletic. And I couldn't see anything
other than all of the defense. And so I just closed my eyes and
threw the ball. Listen, it was a good plan in
the huddle. You ever have plans to fall
apart? Me too.
Here's one of the things that I've learned about myself in the
Christian life is that I have a lot of ideas and every once in a
while I decide I should check in with God about his plans.
You see, the one of the problems that we have as humans is we
have this tendency to trust our own plan more than we seek and
trust the Lord. And so today, as we start in
Acts chapter 1, Jesus is going to make a point that most of us
will probably feel pretty uncomfortable with.
He's going to hand his disciples the mission of their lives and
he's going to deliberately withhold the plan.
And the reason that he does is, I believe, one of the most
important lessons that you're going to learn about living the
Christian life. And if you you leave today and
you get nothing else out of it, I want you to leave with this
concept. You actually don't need the
plan, You need the power. You don't need the plan, you
need the power. Let's read together starting in
Acts chapter one. Verse one says this in the first
book. O Theophilus, I have dealt with
all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken
up. After he had given commands
through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many
proofs appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the
Kingdom of God. The apostle Luke, who also wrote
the book of Luke, opens the book of Acts by connecting this story
all the way back to the end of his gospel.
He's saying Jesus is still active.
His ministry doesn't end when he died.
It doesn't end at the resurrection.
It doesn't end at the ascension, which we're about to see in just
a moment. It continues through the people
that he empowers, and those people are actually called the
church. That that's what Jesus had
originally promised all the way back in Matthew 18.
The church. The church is not a building.
It's not a program. The church is the continuation
of Christ's mission to the world that makes the church
indispensable. The church is Christ's plan for
the world. It is the hope of the world
until he returns. And that means we don't get to
just dismiss it or ignore it and listen.
There are a lot of problems with the church, mainly because you
and I are in it. That makes it really messy.
What's the, what's the phrase? You don't ever want to show up
at a perfect church because the moment you show up, it's not
perfect anymore. It's really messy.
But even in that mess, the church is called the bride of
Christ. It is the continuation of his
work here on earth. Do you know there are no
Christians in the New Testament who are disconnected from the
local church and are still living on mission?
Doesn't even exist. I just I want you to think about
that the next time someone tells you that they that you don't
need the church. Let's keep reading verse 4 And
while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from
Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he
said you heard from me for John baptized with water, but you
will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.
Just consider for a minute that the disciples that he's telling
wait. The disciples have spent about 3
1/2 years with Jesus and in that time they've they they've eaten
their meals together, they've traveled together, they saw
slept in the same spots that the disciples have watched all of
these miracles happen about 40 miracles.
They've heard every teaching and all these lessons that Jesus
taught. I calculated it.
We were, as we were running the numbers somewhere between 14,000
and 16,000 hours of intense mentorship.
Malcolm Gladwell writes a book where he says that it takes
roughly 10,000 hours to master any subject.
They had 14 to 16,000 hours with Jesus.
They didn't just study under him.
They they had mastered the subject of Jesus.
And Jesus says, hey, this thing that's coming, you're not ready,
Wait, wait, don't move. Why?
Because everything that he is about to ask them to do cannot
be done by human means. No matter how much training
they've had, knowledge is not enough.
They're going to need something supernatural.
What is about to happen is something that had never
happened before. So if you're familiar the the
first part of the Bible the the pre Jesus part of the Bible is
called the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament the
Spirit of God rested on specific people, usually prophets,
priests or kings and it was temporary.
It would rest on a person for a specific task for a specific
time. And so when the task was done,
the Spirit could leave. There's a man named King Saul in
the Old Testament, and he lost the Spirit of God.
There's a man named King David in the Old Testament.
He prays to God. Don't take your spirit from me.
Because it was selective and it was temporary.
What Jesus is about to give the disciples and us had never
existed before the Holy Spirit permanently indwelling and
living with every single believer, not resting on a few
living inside of us all. So Jesus says, wait, they're on
the edge of something that would have been unimaginable to any of
the Old Testament Saints. Now you would think after
hearing what he just said, there would be some profound
questions, something like really impactful.
Let's read verse 6. So when they had come together,
they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the Kingdom
to Israel? He said to them, it is not for
you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his
own authority three years with Jesus.
They've witnessed the resurrection.
Jesus is physically standing in front of them, risen from the
dead. And their first question is, is
Israel going to be in charge? They want to know about the
Romans. Are you going to conquer the
Romans? National politics?
How would you imagine for a second that tomorrow night?
So Monday night, Jesus shows up at your house and you can ask
him anything you want and you're like, who's going to win the
next election? What?
What of all the questions, bro? Now notice Jesus doesn't even
answer the question. He redirects it entirely.
And I just want to say something for maybe a couple of you.
This This is a word for when you've been asking the wrong
question. Often times you don't get an
answer, you get a redirect. And so maybe in this season of
your life, you've been frustrated by what you feel like
is God's silence. And I just want you to sit in
this for a moment. You, you might be asking the
wrong question. You see, the wrong question is
always some version of when are you going to fix my situation on
my terms? As if, as if Jesus is some kind
of genie in a lamp and you have wishes left.
The right question is what are you already doing Lord and how
do I get in on it? And so look again at what Jesus
says verse 7. He says It is not for you to
know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own
authority. But you will receive power when
the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my
witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the
ends of the earth. He gives them, He promises them
power. You will receive power when the
Holy Spirit comes, and He promises them purpose.
You will be my witnesses, but He intentionally withholds some
things and I don't want you to miss the fact that he withholds
the plan and the particulars and most of the procedure of how
this is going to work. Like you realize he is about to
launch them on the greatest mission in human history and he
gives them zero timeline. You may have realized that for
the last 2000 years, people have not actually listened to that
and have decided that they can come up with the time that Jesus
is going to come back. It's going to be November 11th,
1982. It is not for you to know the
times or the season. It's not for you.
And he doesn't give them the particulars.
There's no step by step strategy.
There's no details of what's coming next.
You know what? There's not even a playbook.
I don't. Some of you are planners.
Got a couple planners in here. Oh, yeah, they get nothing.
So do we need Sunday school or Bible study?
Do we need Wednesday night prayer meeting or Sunday night
prayer meeting? Do we need small groups or do we
need, should we we meet in parks or should we meet in buildings?
Should have a big church or small church.
You don't get any of that and get any of that detail.
Why does he withhold all the details?
Why doesn't it give him any of the plan?
This is this is about to be the greatest movement in all of
human history. Objectively, if you track back
what what will happen with Christianity, nothing in history
will impact the world like the movement of Christianity.
It is the biggest move sociologically and culturally
that will ever happen in human history.
And they get no plan, no tips, no organization.
I was at a wedding yesterday and man, if you've ever any of you
want to use a planner and like your spouse is not or vice
versa. I was at a wedding and I kid you
not, I open, I open the, the the the bulletin and the bride has
organized all of the photographs of all of the people in the
wedding by three minute increments.
It's like 443-440-6440. I was like, this is a I like
this person, this is a planner. Her husband texted me the day
before want to be in the wedding.
I'm like, really? Why would God hold back all the
planning and all the details and all the how TOS?
If you're familiar with the story of the Bible, kind of how
it starts, there's a book called Genesis in the beginning and in
and in chapter 3 of the very first book is the story of the
Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. And in that story we get the
story of the first rebellion against God.
All everything's perfect until we rebel against God.
We call that sin. And the first sin is the first
man and woman sinning against God.
And Eve takes a fruit she's not supposed to take, and she does
it because she's tempted by this serpent.
And here's the here's the promise.
Here's the trick that he gives her to get her to do this.
He says you can be like God. You can be like God.
You see, at the at the root of our sinful nature, because we
have all come from Adam and Eve, is a desire to be God, not to
serve God as we were created to do, but to replace him, to be
him, to not need him. And see what happens for me, and
often times what happens for you is that when I get the plan and
when I get the details and when I get the strategy, I begin to
think that I don't need God. I got this, I can handle it, I
don't need you. The desire to have all the
details and have all the plan and to map it all out and to
control it and to execute it all on our own is as old as the
Garden of Eden. We haven't changed.
If you give me the plan and give me the procedure and give me the
details, then I won't need to depend on you, God, because I'll
be in control this way. You turn to the Lord's Prayer
and he says, what? Give us this day Our Daily
Bread. You don't even get to know if
you got tomorrow's bread because I want to be in control.
And Jesus says it is not for you to know these things that should
make you uncomfortable. Sure makes me uncomfortable.
That's my flesh fighting against the Holy Spirit because I hate
this. I hate this in every area of my
life. But you're in school.
You want to, you want to plan out the classes you're going to
take every single semester and how long is it going to take and
what internship are going to be at what was my first job going
to be and how much is that going to pay and where I'm going to
live when I'm going to come here?
I want to plan it all out. I want to know what those
details are. I want to I want to, I want to
climb the the corporate ladder. I want a career path.
I want it all laid out for me and Jesus says no, you don't
need to have all the details of the things that I'm going to do
in your life. Here's what you need.
What you need is is a helper that you learn to follow.
Oh, negative. No, do not like that at all.
Zero out of five stars. Would not recommend unsubscribe.
I don't like that I depend on other people.
Oh no, depend on the Holy Spirit.
You see in our church. If they're up to me, I would
like whiteboard out the next 10 years.
I would have every wall filled in the office and it would look
like the conspiracy theory guy with the threads and the strings
and I. And yet all of the greatest
things that have happened in this church have not come
because we came up with a plan. They happened because we got on
our knees and we saw the face of God.
And then when he prompted us, we obeyed.
Wrest Mania, this big thing that we're talking about today, our
big kids camp. Y'all really think we were
sitting around one day and we thought to ourselves, you know
what? What if the church worked
themselves half to death, took vacation time from work, dressed
up in horribly silly costumes and danced like no one was
watching for Jesus? We did not know.
That is not how that happened. We were praying and seeking the
face of God, and then when he responded, we obeyed radically.
You see, this is what we're actually supposed to do.
Is the purpose of the Holy Spirit the recipe that Jesus is
going to leave them with His Wait, seek and obey.
Now we're not waiting for a
feeling. We're not waiting for a vibe.
We're waiting for a person. The Holy Spirit, the disciples,
had been living with God in the flesh.
That's Jesus and he's transitioning so they will be
ready to live with God in the Spirit.
That's the Holy Spirit, and that's us too.
The recipe for us is to wait, to seek and to obey.
What does it look like to wait? You all realize we're a culture
that hates waiting, right? I mean, we've got drive through
so you don't have to get out of your car to get food you didn't
prepare. And if the line is too long, you
drive past it. We are turning in patients into
an art form. What does it look like to wait?
It is active positioning. It is not passive sitting.
It is getting ourselves, our minds and our hearts in a
position to hear from the Lord. And so so Monday morning when
you wake up, before you open your phone and you start doom
scrolling, before you start the To Do List of all the things
that are on your plan, we stop and we wait and we talk to the
Lord. We read our word in the
stillness of the moment. Been reading through Proverbs a
lot lately in the daily reading plan.
And it's weird because it's almost like a biography because
it keeps talking about this guy named a fool.
Man do I relate. But, but you're reading through
it and, and, and, and, and this has maybe happened to you
before. You're reading, you're reading
through some verses and you're speaking to the Lord and all of
a sudden someone comes to mind. It has nothing to do with even
what you're reading. You're like, why did that person
come to mind? And in that moment you go, man,
I should start praying for that person.
You've got to pray for them. And you go, I need to reach out
to them just to check on them. And you text them or you call
them. And then as you do, you realize
that God's working in their life and there's an opportunity that
you have maybe to, to, to respond to a need that they
have. And, and that's God working
through his word, through prayer, through time to lead
you. And that comes while waiting.
I'm, I'm, I'm struggling with some things that are going on in
this church right now. I want to just run out and fix
all of them right now. And God is just pressing on me.
Wait, slow down, be present with me.
Psalm 4610 Be still and know that I am God.
Wait, but in the waiting seek Him.
What does it look like to seek God?
It is to pursue His presence, to pursue His face, not just His
answers. We have to learn to stop asking
God to bless our plan and start asking God to show us where He's
already moving. Practically, you wake up and you
ask God, Father, what are you doing today and where do you
want me? And then pay attention, God,
where are you at work? Father, what does it look like
to do your will today? If you're, if you're brand new
to this and you're like, man, I've never even heard of this
idea of seeking the Lord. I'd start here.
Just talk to him even out loud. God, if you're real, show me
where you're moving. What a great start.
And when you realize where He's leading, obey.
When you see it, you move. Even when it's costly,
especially when it costs something.
The moment that you begin to realize real conviction, we act
on it before we talk ourselves out of it.
Because I'm really good at talking myself out of it.
I have a lot of excuses about why not to obey God.
Don't do that. That could be taking a risk,
making a phone call, having an awkward conversation, signing up
somewhere to volunteer. This past week, I was sitting in
a meeting for this secular business, non Christians just
kind of sitting in the room and talking about some stuff.
And they begin to talk about some employees that that had
done some really evil stuff in their company and that they'd
gotten rid of. And as they're talking about
like, finally we got rid of these bad people.
And I and I heard the Holy Spirit just go like, there
aren't bad people, you're all bad people.
And I was just like, well, well, I'm, I'm a bad person too, but
but for the grace of God that they're no different than me.
And just, you know, people that are Christians are looking at
you like what? Those awkward moments where
you're like, no, it's true. They're going to be moments
where the Holy Spirit calls you to do something in a moment that
is very awkward, that is going to require a risk that might
even seem radical. And if you're paying attention,
you will obey. And it was awesome.
And it was also scary. See, The thing is that wait,
seek, obey sounds really simple, but it's actually pretty hard
because in order to be good at it, you have to practice it.
And most of us, most of us have this tendency to, to, to lean
away from that in one of two ways.
I would, I would describe them like like ditches on the side of
the path or the side of the road that we often find ourselves
falling into and on and on one side is this ditch that is
religious formalism. It's when I replace wait, seek
and obey, I replace dependency on God with a checklist.
Went to church today, check. Read my Bible, check.
Give some money to God, check guess I'm good.
It's when I'm managing God instead of following him.
It's when I'm managing him. The Holy Spirit, though present
in my life, I completely ignore. I've stopped noticing I built
such a religious performance instead of a relationship that I
I can't tell when he's moving. There's no formula, guys.
It's a person, it's a relationship.
God is at work all around you did like we always.
I wish I wish I knew what God was doing.
God is at work all the time. God is at work in your life.
He's at work in your family, he's at work with your
neighbors. He's at work in your workplace,
he's at work in your gym and that the restaurant in the
supermarket. God is at work.
We're generally just too busy to notice, and we're missing it.
We're too busy with religion to notice God at work.
Think of the irony of that. The Holy Spirit doesn't start
working when you walk in those doors and stop working when you
get to the parking lot. You all know that, right?
This is the building. The Holy Spirit lives in you.
He's at work all week long through you.
Or he's trying to be and so we have to start paying attention
and then responding when we recognize it here.
Hey, lean in real quick. I got something for you.
I'm going to give you a money back guarantee.
You ready for this one? Come on, everybody likes a money
back guarantee. Money back guarantee.
If you will start really earnestly seeking God and then
just obeying when you realize He's moving, your Christian life
will go from boring to sizzling money back guarantee.
If that doesn't happen, I will give you every dollar back that
you paid to get saved. Pastor jokes If one ditch if one
extreme is religious formalism, then the other ditch on the
other side of the road is emotional decision making.
This is when I can't tell the difference between something the
Holy Spirit is doing and my own emotions.
Anytime you feel something intensely, you call it God.
And this is where we get dangerous.
When we act out of hurt and call it conviction.
We act out of fear, shame, excitement or even a wound and
we call it God. Hebrews 4514 is the author is
talking to a group that lacks spiritual maturity and he's
explaining the concept to them and he says this he says solid
food is for the mature for those who have their powers of
discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good
from evil. Now, the Greek word that is used
in this verse for trained is the word gagumnasmanah.
That's a tongue twister, but it means athletic training, like
you're training a muscle. You build it by using it
repeatedly over time. Spiritual maturity is not
referring to how long you follow Jesus.
It's referring to how well you've developed the ability to
tell the difference between right and wrong, to tell the
difference between what the Holy Spirit is doing and what your
emotions or your wounds are doing.
You know, most of the decisions that you're going to make in
life are morally neutral decisions there.
There's not going to be no Bible verse for a lot of the things
that you do in life. You're going to have to have
exercised your powers of this sermon, your recognition of
where God is moving and leading in order to get those things
right by design. And when you get saved, that
muscle is completely undeveloped.
You have no idea it's going to take work and both of the
extremes on either side of the road, whether it's religious
formalism or emotional decision making, miss the whole point.
They don't even use a power of discernment.
And you can actually have built this muscle up and then stopped
using it for a while and it actually it gets weak again.
It atrophies when you neglect it and either side neglects this
training. Being religious does not use
this muscle. Following emotions doesn't
either. About about 4 1/2 years ago I
just had an absolute emotional meltdown over some stuff and I
was ready to quit. And I had a really good friend
who called me and he said so Daniel, are you emotional right
now? And I was like, yes, clearly.
And he said, well, do we make good decisions when we're
emotional? No, it's like, OK, let's not
make any decisions then I'll call you in a week.
I've been, I've been dealing with some of this even in this
last season, in this year, I've, I've had some just significant
relational wounds over the last couple months, like really deep
ones. And I've been working with my
accountability partner and with my mentor and, and with my wife,
just talking through, trying to process through those things
and, and, and I, and in the process, I realized, man, I'm in
a really dangerous place right now, Not not because I'm broken,
but because wounds speak loudly and they feel like conviction.
They feel like righteous anger. And I've been walking with the
Lord long enough to understand what that combination can
produce when you're not careful. And so I started to see a
therapist about 3 weeks ago, particularly one that
specializes in pastoral counselling.
And then at the end of the first session, the therapist said to
me, hey, what's what's your goal with counselling?
And I said, I want to have emotions.
I don't want them to have me as a leader.
I don't have the luxury of not dealing with my wounds because
they will hurt someone, and so I need to work through those.
I don't believe that time heals all wounds.
I think working on those wounds actually heals them.
You leave them, they just get infected.
That is the work of building discernment.
That is the work of Hebrews 514 in real life, working through
those things that you can recognize where God is leading
and then obey. And every one of us has to work
on that. You see, there's a difference
between a religious routine and being spirit led and there's a
difference between being emotionally driven and being
spirit led and the difference matters and learning to tell the
difference is not optional. It is the marker of spiritual
maturity. And if that's where you find
yourself right now in, in the fog of a, of a wound or a hurt
or an emotion, not sure what's the Holy Spirit and what's your
own pain, Jesus doesn't actually ask you to sort it out all out
on your own. He asks you to come to him.
The disciples in this moment of the ascension, we're going to
read it in a second. They're up on a hillside and
they're going to, they're going to walk off that hillside.
Not with a plan. They're going to walk off with a
promise of power from the Holy Spirit and with a brand new
purpose. Jesus doesn't hand him a
whiteboard. He actually hands them himself
in the form of the Holy Spirit who was about to come and live
inside them permanently in a way that no human being in history
had ever experienced before. And then he leaves.
That's what the next verses say. Verse 9 says this.
And when he had said these things and they were looking on,
he was lifted up, and the cloud took him out of their sight.
And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, 2 men
stood by them in white robes. And he said and said, Men of
Galilee, why do you stand looking at heaven?
This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the
same way as you saw him go into heaven.
What are the angels saying? They're like, Hey guys, what are
you waiting for? It's time to go.
You have what you need. Go work.
So you don't need the plan, you need the power.
So for any of you here or online, even listening to this
and realizing in this moment you have just been grinding out
religion, You've been grinding out a checklist, checking those
boxes, managing God, going through the motions.
I want you to know that is not what God is offering you and for
any of you the likewise that are on the other side of you, you're
thinking about, you know what? I've been running on emotions,
making decisions out of my wounds, confusing how you feel
with what God is doing. He is offering you something far
more stable than feelings. What He's offering is a person,
the Holy Spirit living in you, guiding you, empowering you to
do things that frankly have no business working by human
standards. And so if you have been
minimizing the Holy Spirit and trying to control your life and
God, in fact, if you realize today that you are in one of
these ditches, I want you to take a moment.
I just want you to write that down on your insert because you
can make a choice today to wait, seek and obey in a moment.
As we respond to the sermon, I want you to tell someone about
that commitment. Don't keep it a secret.
For some of you in the room perhaps, or watching online, you
don't have access to the Holy Spirit because you haven't met
Jesus and surrendered to Him. And if that's you, today could
be your day One. Jesus died on a cross to pay the
penalty for our sin. Three days later, He walked out
of the tomb. He is alive and He is offering
you salvation, forgiveness of our sin, and eternal life with
the Father. So here's the invitation that He
extends. Repent and believe.
So I want to offer you that
invitation that Christ offers you today.
Will you all bow your heads for just a moment as we close?
If you would like to surrender your life to Christ and follow
Him as King, I just want you to repeat this prayer after me.
Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner who can't save myself.
I want you to save me, so I surrender everything to you and
I receive your promise of forgiveness, of adoption into
your family, of the Holy Spirit, and of eternal life.
Be my Lord. Please Jesus, if you said that
prayer for the very first time, would you be brave and raise
your hand for me to see? Thank you.
You put your hands down in Jesus name, Amen.
Real quick as we close, if you just committed your life to
Christ for the very first time. Welcome to the family in just a
moment as we respond to the sermon.
There are tables in the back that say I raised my hand,
there'll be people back there. We would love to talk to you.
And so if you've made a decision today or recently to follow
Christ and you haven't told anyone about that yet.
I want you to go to the back. We have a gift for you.
We would love to celebrate with you.
Will you stand? We're going to sing a song.
If today you made a decision to wait, seek and obey, or if today
you would just like prayer for an area in your life, our prayer
team is going to be up here. We love praying for you.
You can come up here and receive prayer for any reason.
You move as the Lord leads you. We love you, Church.