Please be seated. Happy fall, y'all.
How many of you are excited? That fall's almost here?
Technically it's not here until September 21st or something, but
the pumpkin spice lattes say otherwise.
But you cannot tell me that it could have happened any other
way. I will not believe you, no
matter what you might say. And there is no argument that
you can make that will budget me from this conviction.
Chick-fil-A is the Lord's chicken, the chicken that comes
out of the clouds, chicken that makes every other representation
of the bird on earth look like dog food.
Popeyes should know better. Then they try to stand against
chicken that the Lord has ordained to be the best.
The Colonel knows when he's been beat.
Zaxby's is just one among a million others that tries but
cannot compete. But my dear Bojangles, if there
was ever another chicken that the Lord might have blessed, it
might be you. Yet you remain the Esau of
chicken. So my chicken recognition is
strong. My vision for it is straight and
true, like that of an arrow shot from a bow.
Because I, I, I've you see, Chick-fil-A has figured
something out. It's not just the perfectly
crafted Polynesian sauce or hearing the words my pleasure
that actually causes you to be pleased.
Watch. You'll smile when they say it.
No, no, it's bigger than that. They know what priority they
need when it comes to having effort and faith.
And here's how I know I have never seen a disgruntled
Chick-fil-A worker, one that cannot operate the cash register
or take your change. And everywhere you turn, when 1
disappears, 2 more magically show up.
It's like they're a colony of ants, and they have this
structure and they work so beautifully together.
And you know what? They do this all in six days,
not 7. That was for you.
See, friends, this is the Lord's chicken, and Truitt has built
his house upon the rock. But do we have this figured out?
Do we have our priorities in line when it comes to effort and
faith? Do we do the things we know we
should do with excellence and pride, yet with the humility
necessary to cause those who come in contact with us to see
Jesus through us? And I would like to explore this
this morning, this difference between effort and faith, so
that when we are done here today, we will know that we have
been in His word and dwelt in it richly.
Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your
chicken and the example that it can be for us, that there's a
big difference between doing things your way or the highway.
Help us to take away from this text this morning something that
will move us towards action. That's your name, we pray.
Amen. Go ahead and lift up your right
hand. Stretch it out forward.
Draw a circle. How many of you drew a small
circle like one of these? How many of you went Elvis?
Everyone was kind of like right here, right because you your arm
was out stretched. So there was you kind of did
what you could do. I want you to keep an idea of a
circle in your mind today is we're going to talk about two of
them. There's a circle of effort and a
circle of faith. But first.
Let's talk about the circle of effort.
Whether you know it or not, a lot of things in life happen in
circle cycles. The calendar moves in cycles.
The Pirates give me hope every January through April, only to
dash it come May. Charlie Brown always thinks he's
going to kick that football, good, bad or indifferent.
We know there are cycles, and I want to walk you through the
cycle of effort. And we're going to be traveling
clockwise, which is this way, which looks counterclockwise to
you. I get it.
But it's clockwise for me, for those of you who are very
concerned about that. But in this cycle of effort,
we're going to go this way. And so usually at the beginning
of the cycle of effort, you have something that happens, whether
it's an inspiration, whether it's a conviction, whether it's
a movement of some sort, maybe it's even guilt.
But you, you come to this resolution that hey, I have to
do something. And so here's what happens.
You have this inspiration slash guilt slash resolution and you
immediately start to act on it, right?
I would call this the launch. So you have inspiration and then
you launch. A lot of people plan out what
they're going to do and they have this elaborate plan.
And then some people just jump right in.
How many of you are jump right in people?
Nobody. If you don't raise your hand,
I'm assuming you're you're not, I jump right in kind of a
person. So you all planners.
And so if you plan, what have you learned in life about plans?
They don't always go according to plan, yet we still put a lot
of effort into them. But there was something that
stirred you, something that propelled you, something that
moved you. And thus you are activated.
You are on the go now. One of the most common examples
of this is in January, when gyms are all of a sudden full for the
first two weeks. And then what happens?
Slowly but surely, the resolve wanes.
Or you don't get those immediate gains, like you're not bench
pressing 400 like you hoped after two weeks of running on
the treadmill. But you have these expectations
of success. And what ultimately almost
always happens is that you experience a set back.
It doesn't go how you think it's going to go, or you flat out
fail. So you have the inspiration, you
have the launch, and then you have adversity.
Now there is there's a lot of fireworks that happens in this
first quarter of the circle and you may go.
You know what I missed? I missed that workout today.
I'm, I'm going to get there tomorrow.
Oh, I got a doctor's appointment.
I'm have to go Wednesday. I got to go to the grocery
store. Kids need picked up, got a lot,
got a lot of laundry to do. All of a sudden it's Friday and
you haven't been to the gym all week, and if you know where this
is going, you stack up that adversity and you come to a
place of discouragement. Now, in this place of
discouragement, you will be visited by three voices, the
voice of doubt, the voice of cynicism and the voice of fear.
It's like the three gross that visited Ebenezer Scrooge.
Doubt, Cynicism and fear. Doubt says, well, did you really
think that was going to work? Cynicism says, you know, doubts,
right? He's always right.
Yeah. How could you pull that off?
And ultimately, fear goes, maybe I don't have what it takes to
pull this off. And you know, if you have that
conversation enough times, guess where you end up?
You quit. And then if you're lucky,
another thing of inspiration comes, another thing of guilt
moves you or a bad blood test or something like that that propels
you back into that cycle again. And we just go through it over
and over and over again. This is also called living
Sunday to Sunday. What I'm about to say is going
to poke you a little bit. Sunday you make it to church,
you're inspired on Sunday you leave here ready to go, you go
tearing off into the world. Sunday afternoon you go.
Monday is coming. And then you get to Monday and
Monday goes gives you a swift kick to the to the shins.
And then Tuesday goes little elbow to the back hits you like
a ton of bricks. And then Wednesday goes, hey,
remember what happened on Monday and Tuesday?
Just going to be the same today. And then Thursday hits and you
go, well, that was a nice try. I'll get them next Sunday.
But it doesn't stop there. You get into Friday and maybe
you make some decisions that cause you to reflect even
further and further why you need Sunday.
And that's you come back to Sunday hoping that this Sunday
will be different than the last one.
But yet there's 52 of them. And sometimes we can find
ourselves in the wilderness because Sunday to Sunday can
sometimes become Sunday to someday.
And you do it enough times. You live through these cycles.
That's when bitterness can find its way in.
You start carrying this baggage that you've accumulated week
over week over week over week. Can you see that it is not hard
if people are just living Sunday to Sunday that it can very
quickly turn into Sunday to someday.
And if you haven't caught on, we just literally did this the
cycle in that explanation. And I bet at this point there
might be some of you who have in your head and go, well, what's
all this for then? Then how did we get here?
You ever zone out on the highway and you come to and you like,
you do not remember the last 100 miles?
Yeah, it happens. That's called living Sunday to
Sunday. That's called burnout, and it's
real. The Bible has 2 kings named Joe
Ash. We're not talking about the good
one today. We're talking about the one who
is not so good. We also have a character in this
particular story named Elisha. Now, Elisha was one of the the
best prophets in my opinion. Listen to some of the things
that he did. He healed a woman who was sick.
He healed a man with leprosy. He raised a boy from the dead.
He calls out a curse and a bear eats some teens after they make
fun of him for being bald. It's one of the best Christian
T-shirts I've ever seen. He actually at one point calls
down fire on a on an army and then he also, without fighting,
stops another army from attacking with a band of angels
who blind them. And they bring that army into
the middle of the camp. And then they become unblinded
and they realize they're surrounded and they give up.
Elisha is incredible, so incredible that even when he's
dead, incredible stuff happens. Verse 20 So Elisha died and they
buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to
invade the land in the spring of the year, and as a man was being
buried, behold, A marauding band was seen and the man was thrown
into the grave of Elisha. So Elisha's dead bones at this
point, and they so this so they don't get robbed, they throw
their friend into his grave. And as soon as that man touched
Elisha's bones, he came back to life.
Even when he's dead, he's on point, right?
Elisha is incredible. Verse 20, or sorry, I already
said that, verse 14. Let's go back a couple verses.
Now when Elijah had fallen sick with the illness of which he he
was to die, Joash king of Israel went down to him and wept before
him, crying, My father, my father, the Chariots of Israel,
and it's horsemen. And Elisha said to him, Take a
bow and arrows. So he took a bow and arrows.
And then he said to the king of Israel, draw the bow and he drew
it. And Elisha laid his hands on the
King's hands. And he said, Open the window
eastward and he opened it. Then Elisha said shoot, and he
shot. And then he said the Lord's
arrow of victory, the arrow of victory over Syria.
For you shall fight the Syrians in AFEC until you have made an
end of them. So Elisha was in dire straits,
sick unto death. And what happens here is like
the King's coming to pay his respects.
And when he says my father and my father, it's not his actual
dad, but when he's essentially get, he's paying his respects to
him. He's saying like, hey, you are
an important person to me. And then he talks about the
Chariots of Israel and its horsemen.
As you heard Jerry read a little bit earlier, there really
weren't that many of them. So he's super concerned that
Elijah, who had been a part of a lot of the victories up to that
point, was going to be gone. So how are they going to win?
And he goes the Chariots and the horsemen of Israel.
It's like saying, how are we going to do this without you?
And then it gets weird, this bow and arrow thing and and but as
we know, when Elijah says you're going to win, you're going to
win verse 18. He said, take the arrows and he
took them and he said to the king of Israel, strike the
ground with them. I need Chip.
Chip, run up here real fast. Come on, Chip, Chip, got to run.
Grab these arrows, Chip, I want you to take those arrows and I
want you to strike the ground. Just strike the ground a couple
times. Are you striking the ground?
Are you tapping the ground? Make the ground.
Feel it, Chip. All right, round of applause for
Chip. Now Chip is a fierce warrior,
but I can imagine that he took the arrows like this and went.
He only did it three times. There was no instruction about
how many times, but Joash said 123.
Here's what happens Then the man of God Elisha was angry at him
and said you should have struck 5 or 6 times.
Then you would have struck down Syria until you made an end of
it. But now you will strike down
Syria only three times. So there's victory, but it's not
a complete victory. Now, could this king have done
better? Could he?
Could Chip have gone crazy up here and slammed things?
Of course he could have. But I don't necessarily think
that this instance is a matter of effort.
I think this has way more to do with faith now.
Elisha had not given him a reason up to this point to doubt
him for any reason. And when he tells him to take
the bow and shoot the arrows, that's a clear instruction.
He shoots 11 and done. But when he tells him to strike
the ground, he doesn't do it more than three times.
And I often wonder, because I I've, I've studied this passage
for a long time, why 3 And I still don't know.
But perhaps if he had believed something different about it,
might he have done something different?
What he what if he had been operating in a different circle?
So go ahead and reach out your hand and make your circle again.
OK, Thanks, Brendan. That was a nice big Elvis
circle. So you had the circle of effort.
And now let's chat a little bit about the circle of faith.
It is very different. It is very different.
And here's where it's different. The big difference is where we
begin. It has everything to do with
your posture. The faith circle cycle begins
with listening as opposed to hearing.
Parents, you say this to your kids all the time.
There's a difference between listening and hearing.
And I bet all of you can hear me this morning.
Statistically, less than 10% of you are actually listening to
me. When we hear from God, usually
those things go through the gymnastics of our mind.
What is He? What is He trying to say?
What are you trying to tell me? Well, I, I don't know if I want
to do that. Lord, we tried that before and
it didn't work. Or wow, that person's not going
to be on board with that or, or finally, like, so you're
actually actually, you're actually asking me to give up
something to, to do this. There's a huge difference
between listening and hearing. So you have this space in the
circle of effort. You have the hearing.
You heard something that made you convicted over here in the
circle of faith, though, however, you have a posture of
listening. Like, what are you trying to
actually tell me? I'm open to what you have to
say. And from there we hear like, you
know, you ever get excited about hearing something or like you
learn something, you want to share it with somebody else?
That's literally what happens next.
You go from listening to sharing.
If I hear a brand new song and I really like it, odds are even if
it's 10:30, I texted to Brendan whether he's awake or not,
right? I hear something and I
immediately want to share it. Because when you, when you
actually listen, you want to transfer value.
Now with sharing, how many of you feel uneasy about sharing
something unless you verified it?
I mean, I, I hope so, right? How many of you like to spread
around falsehoods like nobody should raise their hands for
that? But yet, but yet, we move rumors
like nobody's business. But when you go from listening
to sharing, ultimately the next place that you're moving into is
a place of trust. Like this is actually something
that you believe that you've heard.
And here's the hard part. You've got up the courage to
listen and share and to trust in something, but the reality is
you're still going to struggle. Success is not always
guaranteed, and even though there will be a struggle,
anything worth doing comes at a cost.
Your time, your energy and God often calls you into things and
they are immediately training grounds like Jesus had to go
into the wilderness. But is.
In those times of struggle, some magical things happen.
Usually it's in our struggle that we come face to face, as
close as we possibly ever will be to experiencing what God's
grace really feels like. There's something beautifully
brutal about struggle. We often learn more there than
we do on an easy road. And not only that, you learn who
your friends are. And you most certainly need
friends who are down for the struggle.
When it comes to struggle, it's not a place that we want to be.
But you know what it does? It tests your trust.
It's as if God goes, let's see if you actually trust me.
And I think one of the reasons that is, is because if we are
able to get there on our own effort, it's very easy to write
God out of it. However, if God has to carry us
across the finish line, who gets the glory God does?
I've also noticed that it's an incredibly interesting place.
Rock bottom, it's a place that people avoid.
It's a place that nobody wants to go.
But when you're at rock bottom, that's an incredible foundation
to build from. There's nowhere to go but up and
God does this time and time and time again.
Do you guys remember the story of Joseph?
Where did Joseph end up? Imprisoned?
He was a slave. What did he become?
2nd in command? Right?
So there. So you have this listening, this
sharing, this trusting and this struggle.
And you know what comes out of struggle?
Weirdly enough? Confidence.
And this is a way better circle to hang out in rather than
hearing, going, failing, discouragement and quitting.
That's where effort leads. Faith is equally as hard, but
the outcome is most certainly different.
Imagine if Joash, this king, approached this situation
through the lens of faith as opposed to the lens of effort.
He may have hit those arrows off the ground so many times that
they snapped. And this hits home for us
because we make choices like this every day.
God prompts you, and like I said, you know there's a big
difference between hearing Him and listening to Him.
There's one word that undergirds that.
It's called obedience. And this might be uncomfortable
for you to think about. You might not be sure in a given
situation that you are actually able to hear God at all.
I mean, what does God's voice sound like?
Does it sound like this? Does it sound like this?
What does it sound like and when is the last time that you can
say that you thought He spoke to you?
Which cycle do you currently find yourself in 'cause you're
in one? You see, Chick-fil-A doesn't get
to be the Lord's chicken for any other reason than they listen.
They listen to their customers, they listen to their critics,
they listen ultimately, to a biblically based business model,
and it seems to be going pretty well for them.
That's why you're waiting to wait 1/2 an hour in a line and
still smile when they say my pleasure.
There might be something there, this art of listening.
So as you have conversations this week, I want to challenge
you to actually listen. People know when you just hear
them. My kids say I hear you, Dad.
And I'm like, no, you don't, because if you did, I wouldn't
have to say it three times. Actually try to listen to the
person you're talking with with no agenda other than to listen.
And I am convinced that if we do that enough times and we apply
that same kind of energy and effort, this is a good kind of
effort. That kind of effort to listening
to what God has to say through his word and through his people
that things might just happen to turn around for you.
Not saying you won't struggle, but that's one of the reasons
why we gathered together is because everybody here struggles
with things visible and things invisible.
And that is why it's so important, especially as growth
groups kick off this week, that you find yourself one and become
a part of it. It's why it's important to show
up and be here with the people of God week in and week out.
That's why it's important to check in on one another.
It's not the pastor's job to do that.
It's your job. You are the community.
You are the body. And I'm convinced that this is
one of the key components, this listening to living a life and
living it to the full. Let's pray.
Lord, give us ears not only to hear, but to listen.
Give us courage to strike out again, this time in a different
posture, in a posture of faith as opposed to a posture of
effort. Give us wisdom to remember that
you have brought us through before, and you will continue to
do so again, so that when struggle comes, we understand
that it's temporary, so that we may then be able to, with
boldness and confidence, approach you and be your hands
and feet, the working of your will in the world.
And it's your name we pray. Amen.