I'm excited about this morning. We've been starting off our even greater things campaign, these conversations about our future, about what we believe God has for us as a church. We've been carrying loose a lot of really fun, cool stuff. And as I think back, last week we talked about the stories, and you mentioned the video on Facebook, people sharing their favorite memory with Foundry.
I love a good story. We all love good stories. I love hearing stories because stories, they help us understand where we've been, they help us take our memories and speaks it to what's happened to us, and it keeps it in front. It keeps it in the present, it keeps the way for us to be telling the stories of what has happened.
And I love the way the television and the movie tell stories. I love how we can grab ourselves onto something, and we can connect with it, and we can identify inside of it, and we can be inspired by it as well. Good stories are good stories for a reason, because we've learned what good stories look like. And if you've ever just done a little bit of research, or you can find out there's kind of ways that good stories are told.
I was talking to somebody this week, and I kind of, there's another pastor, and he was asking me about, what preachers do you listen to? I'm like, well, I don't wanna listen to you. I said, well, I'll tell you who I listen to, I've learned a lot from. It's Jerry Clower.
It's just like, oh, stories are great. And there's a reason stories are great. But there's some kind of typical, like we can think through it, like heroes and villains. It's a story type, or there's another classic storytelling device that's been around for thousands of years, and the storytelling device is called Overcoming the Monster.
But my favorite story path that goes on is it's called the Heroes Journey. And every single great movie about a single person is following this thousands of years old pattern of a great story. Star Wars is a fantastic example of the heroes journey. I'm not that big of a Star Wars fan.
You can throw something at me if you want to. But from a story time device, it's fantastic. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that I had never seen any of the Harry Potter movies. And they're all available streaming right now on HBO Go.
And so I took a week and a half, two weeks, and I watched every single one of them in order. And I get it now. I'm like, yeah, but it's the heroes journey. It's the story of a person realizing that there is a much bigger world around them.
And that they have the ability to tell a specific story inside of that, to understand and to realize greatness and to change things. I mean, you can not run through all of your favorite stories. And you see it's been going on for thousands of years. And what's funny is that you see these same patterns in the scripture.
And I think the reason you see these same patterns in the scripture is not because someone's trying to tell a great story, but it's because life works this way. And that we've realized that to tell great stories, that sometimes we simply just have to mirror the greatness that happens inside of our life. And what does it mean for something bigger than us to take control and to help us do something altogether bigger than what we think we initially might be capable of? And so today we're going to talk about one of those stories.
It's a man named Abram. And I have been fascinated with this story and with what the story means and does for this the last months. Honestly, I've been fascinated with all the passages that we're going to talk about over the next three weeks for the last five or six months. And I've spent just time just digging deep and deep into them because I'm finding myself in them.
And I think we can all find ourselves in them. And their stories that initially might seem to be bigger than each of us are. But what we actually can do is we find ourselves inside of them very easily. And so this is the story of Abram.
He's a man. But it's the story that's about surrender. Because when we look at all of the great stories of people overcoming and doing amazing things, surrender is a key emotion inside of them. Surrender is part of the process.
Surrender is that moment of realization of, OK, I need to reframe the way I think and look at that things because the world is no longer the same. So I'm going to surrender to this new reality and choose to live into it. So let's open our Bible's up. We'll start in Genesis at chapter 12 today in the story of Abram.
And this is what we read. And the Lord said to Abram, leave your native country, your relatives and your father's family, and go to the land that I will show you. And I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous.
And you will be a blessing to others. So Abram, this man, and we meet him. And we see this person being asked to move. I know for some of us, moving is not a big deal.
We've moved kind of all of our lives. We look at our culture and our community right now. And in some ways, we live in a transient community. We live in a community where people are moving in here for work and are moving away from here for work.
As a community where sometimes people have to move away for a while to find a firm footing and move back to it. Moving is not a big deal. Like I can think if there's been three times in my life, I've had to make big, huge moves and to begin things again. There's also some of us in this room.
I was talking about this earlier. Somebody, one of the unique things I love about Monroe is that this is a community that people will do everything they can to get back to. People genuinely love this place so much that they want to get back here. I'm from Alexandria.
You don't try that hard to get back to Alexandria. Like my sister, her and her husband, ended up because of work, because of good jobs coming to them, moving back home. And he got promoted to work inside the corporate office of Clico, my sister's a physical therapist. And they got a chance to move back home.
And my sister was terrified. He's good as this is for us. I don't want to move back home because think we're going to fail in everything we did. We had to come back to Alexandria.
You don't move home to rapids parish. So like, it's Bible times. I feel so silly to say, Bible times. People didn't move back then.
Like, you really did not move. Because it meant completely starting over, having no safety network, no security. Like, your community was your insurance. So to move is a gigantic thing.
So you had this man named Abram in scripture. There's layers of interesting things. From Adam to Noah was 10 generations. And then from Noah to Abraham.
To Abraham, God changed his name later on down the road. Was another 10 generations. It's telling us these things about recreation and new starts and new beginnings. And people having the ability to be change agency.
So Abram lived. He came out of a place. And essentially there's a map behind us. OK, so he came from, it didn't tell us where Ur of the Chaudians, Persian Gulf, that Kuwait area.
To Heran, where God asked him in a whole family to pick up and move. And then God asked him to move again. And you find him here in Israel. I did the math on this.
So imagine, I like to drive. Like, in order for me to fly somewhere, that has to be more than like a 14 hour drive. So I don't mind driving. But imagine if moving in Abram's family was wealthy.
So it wasn't just like him and his parents kind of pick up and get a moving truck and bring their stuff. This is like hundreds of people. And the flocks. And it's like moving a small village.
And this is essentially the distance between, from Ur of the Chaudians to Heran. This is like New Orleans to Fayetteville by foot. I mean, all that. And so you get there.
And all of a sudden you find out, guys asking you specifically to do it again. And this is like picking up your hundreds of people. I mean, later in Genesis, Abram had a small army at his disposal. This is a lot of people.
A lot of resources. A lot of animals. A lot of tents. I mean, all that kind of stuff.
This is like moving from Fayetteville to Austin. This is some serious movement that's going on. He's asking to move. This is a story of faithfulness because Abram's always willing to surrender to what God's asking to do.
The stuff that's unbelievable makes no sense to him whatsoever at all. But yeah, I'll go do it. We pick the story back up in Genesis chapter 13. And this will be read in scripture.
After a lot had gone, this was Abram's nephew. After a lot had gone, the Lord said to Abram, look as far as you can see in every direction, north and south, east and west, I'm giving this land as far as you can see to you and to your descendants as a permanent possession. Now, it would give you so many descendants, like the dust of the earth, they cannot be counted. So go and walk through the land in every direction because I am giving it to you.
Now, the interesting thing is, Abram is already old. Abram has no children. So this whole business of descendants is almost an impossibility this moment. But finally, though, Abram doesn't ask any questions about that just yet.
That seems like the easy thing. By now, he's seen this stuff happen and happen and happen. So he's not worried about the hard stuff anymore. But a couple of things that God asks Abram that have a tremendous amount of bearing on us and our life so we can look into this extremely ancient story and find amazing truth.
This first thing is to go into this idea of the land, to look as far as you can see in every direction. In scripture, especially in the Old Testament, land is almost a character to itself. We see it function as we Adam, first man, is the same word for dirt. Not as like man's worth dirt, but we are formed in essence out of the place where God has placed us and called us to be.
This land serves as a character. But the land is symbolic of the relationship that we have with God because the relationship is worked out in specific places. At the places where we find God, at the places where God has placed us, at the places where we practice either faithfulness or do we practice struggle. The land is part of the relationship because it's where we work out our relationship.
It's where we meet with God's presence. That place is the proving ground of faithfulness. It's where it's worked out. That land at place is entrusted to his people to make manifest their relationship with God.
It goes back to the very beginning. Where we are is where we define and practice our relationship with God. And it's this place that God ascending is giving Abram is holy and it's not holy because God says, well, this specific place is more holy than that specific place. It's holy because it's where their relationship is worked out.
It's where Abram and his people and his descendants will work out their life with God and their responsibility. It's where they will work out their faithfulness. It's holy because of the holy work that has happened there between them and God. And God is defining these boundaries.
He's saying look as far as you came to the north, the east, south, and the west. As far as you can, you can see I'm giving this to you. And God's not putting boundaries on this because he's saying well, this place is holy only as far as I'm here, but it's to set apart, especially in Old Testament. God's where his people live is set apart is different.
There's different standards, there's different practices. There's different, the way they relate to each other is different. And this is not just in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, we talked about John 1 14 and the Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.
We've seen his glory, the glory of Father's One. And we've said this verse so many times. We also read in Revelation 21. And in the first couple verses, John says, I saw a new heaven and a new earth coming from the sky.
And God says, I'm making my home here with my people. This place matters what we see. It's when Jesus comes on the scene that these boundaries are redefined. These boundaries are then not just in one place, but they're in every place because Jesus is in every place with his people and because of his people.
And at the very end, we see that the boundaries that God sets are so wide that humans that we can't even conceive what this looks like because God will be there with his people. Where we are matters to God because where we are with him, but it's also where we do his work. So when God comes to Abraham and says these things, what he's telling him is I need you to go somewhere that you aren't aware of yet. And he's talking about that physically in this place I need you to pick up all your stuff and move.
But he's also talking about a spiritual life. He's talking about the relationship. He's like I need you to go somewhere that you aren't aware of yet. I need you to be willing to surrender to a new reality of things.
He tells Abraham to look. He says, open your eyes. And it's interesting, he says, please here. He says, please look, I want you to understand that the present is going to be your viewing of the future, that where you are right now, I'm going to give you the ability to see into your future, to see the boundaries of what your future will be.
It's not that I need you to enlarge what you think is possible. So look as far as you can see. The next thing he tells Abraham is in verse 17, he says, free to walk upon this land. So go and walk through the land in every direction where I'm giving them to you.
This idea of walking is not just like, okay, you're going to have to like go do a cattle round up. Or don't go to go find out where the stuff is. To walk and scripture, I think back to the garden, back to the very beginning. God's walking among the garden without any.
It's an everyday type of thing. But God's not Abraham, I need you to put your feet on every single thing I'm giving you. By you walking on this, you were claiming this. It's not something you say, oh yeah, I've got that over there.
I don't know what it looks like. But saying, you're going to claim this for our relationship and for our purpose that we have together. To walk upon it, it says, this is your place and make a difference. I'm giving this to you.
So you need to be fully aware of where it is right now. So you can be fully aware of how I'm going to ask you to transform this in the future. So at Founder, we've talked about this before. We have four assumptions of Jesus.
From the very beginning, we've had this conversation. But our four assumptions are part of our core values. It's part we talk about when new folks come in. It's pretty integral to who we are as a church.
But our four assumptions are that Jesus is here. That Jesus is doing things. That Jesus invites us to do those things with him. And the last one is our greatest fulfillment is found as we participate alongside of Jesus in his mission.
So these assumptions, they sound familiar with the story of Abraham, don't they? We see this call that God has given us to this life, this place and this world. And when Jesus becomes involved, that he's come to our world, that he's made his home among us. He's moved into the neighborhood.
He brings us alongside of what he is doing. This is not something new. This has been God's mission since the very beginning. Because of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, we are now drawn into the same story that has been going on for so long.
Each one of us has our place in this story. Each one of us has this place of realization, of new life, of new love, of new living inside of this grand story that God has tell him. So can you understand how this story of surrender to Abraham is crucial to how we as a church understand our mission and our neighborhoods? What does it mean for us in our age, for God to ask each one of us as individuals to look up and to see the places that he has given us, and to walk upon them?
What does it mean to be a person of influence? You know, you're in places that I'm not in during the week. I'm in places that you're not in during the week. I would love to see like what it would look like to see where every single person in this room is during the week.
And we see the sphere of influence that each of us have. People that we can touch, the people that we have relationships with. This is just us as individuals, also us as a church. It also then begins making us think, well, now where do I have influence?
This is much bigger than just my house and my work. Where am I during the week? Where do people know my name? This might be more important.
Where do I know people's names? Where is it my kids play? Where's that spot that I eat at like three times a week? It's just these places of influence.
Like what if these are the spots where God is asking us to look up and to walk upon them? We know that Jesus is there already. Just to take to claim that. And the re-wise God might be giving you these spaces to tell His story.
And if we think about that and we realize there's expectations involved. What am I expected of? Personally, what's expected of us as a church in the places that we go? To fully re-wise what it means for God to give us places is a pretty heavy thing if you think about it.
For the story we bring all these thoughts about our own mission, our day and age now, and we take Abraham's story, which really truly is the story of scripture, the story of the Old Testament keeps unfolding, and unfolding, and unfolding, and unfolding. If places are promised to us, what does it mean for us to name our neighborhoods? To call it, Jesus has given me this place, and I have a responsibility for it. Our places, the where we are, is the greatest gift that God gave us.
And our greatest task is to be people of peace, to be people of the kingdom, and to be people of healing, to be people that bring out salvation, and it's full of sins in these places. When we read the Old Testament, the greatest failure, is repeated time and time and time again. And the Old Testament is for God's people to squander their places. And so for us to see our neighborhoods as places of holy mission, for us to fail and not see that, is for us to squander these spaces where our relationship is to be worked out.
So the way that we live and interact with where we are, it has a pretty big bearing, but it also has a beautiful story and a beautiful mission for God to tell us in every little space that we inhabit, to look as far as you can see. I'm giving you this, not to take advantage of, not to mind for our own personal benefit, not to try to squeeze out what we can at the expense of others, but to say, I'm giving you these spaces to be alongside of me and what I'm doing, and that you will find yourself better, then you will find yourself. And anything else you come up with or you try to do in these spaces is you work alongside of me with what's going on. That's a different way to drive down the road, isn't it?
I'll tell you, I was thinking about all that this week, and I realized if you've ever seen me driving, I'm sorry. Y'all, that makes morning commute on 165 very differently. It's a lot harder to tailgate somebody when they're not going fast enough for you when you realize that every footstep we take is alongside Jesus in what he is doing. As far as you can see, I'm asking you to be with me.
Now I was having some conversations last night with somebody, and we were talking about us as a church. We've been in here in this space for almost three years, and what we were laughing about was, what is everyday normal to us now seemed like an impossible dream three years ago. I remember the anxiety, the very first time we came in here to set up what you see now. Some of y'all were there for that first day.
Y'all remember when it took us three hours to put this together? I think our set up team, I think our record now is like 35 minutes, is that right, Jamie? Like, this was impossible a few years ago. And what's interesting is we were talking about that.
What was the past's impossibility is now our presence, reality, that what seemed insurmountable a few years ago is now ordinary. That's different right there. And so over the last nine months as a church, we've been having a conversation about a new normal. Realizing what are we being asked to do?
Where are we going, these new spaces? These new places God is asking us to move look like. And I thought back to man, our normal now is yesterday as impossible. And today as impossible can possibly be tomorrow as normal.
God's saying look up as far as you can see. I'm giving you this place. I'm asking you to live outside of what you need and know right now to find a new reality. There's a lot of exciting things about new places.
There's also terrifying things about new places. Who here does change make very nervous? Change is scary. If you've been around for any length of time, you've heard me say that I really believe these next few weeks are going to possibly be some of the spiritual formative in our life as a church.
And I got to tell you right now, the last 48 hours of me, have possibly been some of the most anxious moments I've had in our life as a church. And not because of anything I can put my hand on. It's just been emotional. It's changed.
It's different. There's a story in scripture, a story of Joshua, hundreds of years after what we read about now. That talks almost about in some ways the fulfillment of this promise. Joshua chapter 1, verse 6.
It says we're going to jump a little bit ahead. This is what God tells Joshua. It says be strong and courageous. For you are the one who will lead these people to possess all the land, I swear to the ancestors, I would give them.
Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey the instructions most gave you. Do not deviate from them turning to the right or the left. Then you'll be successful in everything you do.
So study this book of instruction continually. Meditate on it day and night. So you'll be sure to obey everything written. And then only then will you prosper and succeed in all you do.
And this is my command. Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord of God is with you wherever you go.
And we call this campaign, even greater things. From some of the words of Jesus in the gospel of John. But greater things are only greater when they seem impossible. These words of Joshua be strong and courageous.
These are not words for three weeks. These are words for a lifetime. God tells Joshua and his people, his leaders, be strong and courageous. Be strong.
How much are you willing? This is a different kind of strength here. Essentially, how much are you willing to bank on faithfulness and how God says who he is? You know to be strong in this manner.
It makes us questions. Do we have a weak constitution for the gospel? Is it tough for us to actually think about what God can do? Does that seem impossible?
Does that seem impossible? Hey God, I can trust you for about four hours. I can be four hours ahead. This is the type of strength that has to be worked on.
This type of strength that has to be gained. This is the type of strength that we have to grow into. Faithfulness is the best exercise in building biblical strength. But we only understand faithfulness when we have to have new places in our life who experience God's faithfulness.
Asking ourselves questions, where has God been faithful before? For us to answer honest questions of where his faithfulness has gotten us to do. But also for us to begin the tough work of realizing that faithfulness is very different from the times that we've maybe tried to manipulate God into something. I've told you all my story before about a big moment of surrender in my own life when I realize I almost fail out of college because I neglected to pay a $5 bowling fee.
In my prayer life, I really reel at 3 o'clock when I'm running when I realize that. I did some bargaining that night. We've all had these bargaining nights. Like, I will never do this again.
I mean, I think most of us are willing to tell our bargaining moments. Not bargaining, not manipulating. Not like, well, I'll always do this. If you just make this happen for me, those are like, those are foxhole moments.
Those aren't like standing out, look up to the left, the right, forward, and backward moments. It's about surrendering faithfulness. Saying, I'm willing to give up everything so I can gain this. Faithfulness is a process.
A process begins with surrender, though. And it's a surrender to new things that we know will be better. To be courageous, this is just standing firm. This is about resilience.
No resilience is a really tough thing right now. To be courageous is to take all our anxieties about things, our inadequacies about things, our fears, our despair, and to allow them to be overcome by the courage and the confidence that we find in the realization of the presence of God in our lives. And the friend of mine's old country preacher, and sometimes this, he's always like, how long's God been faithful? You see what time it is.
And I go, once, it's 10, 44, Jeff, we've been faithful till now. It's about us being, we're going to plant our feet in the ground here, because we know God is behind us, making sure we're standing up. And this just isn't about our church, this is about our life. To be strong and courageous is something that goes much bigger than the next three weeks, or the next nine months, or the next year, or the next 30 months.
To be strong and courageous is to live a lifestyle of continued faithfulness, but also being courageous when that faithfulness is just not right in front of you at times. The higher the call to surrender is, the more we realize that we actually need it. That place where we begin getting uncomfortable, typically is the best starting point for us. So God, show us these spaces that we can give you.
Go where we are. We pray to realize where you're already at work. And God, to see that as a new thing. But God also, to see that as old things.
To see these old spaces of faithfulness, of where you've been, and of where you've led us. God, I know that for some of my friends in the room that faithfulness is the last thing they want to think about. God, I've been there too. I know what that's like.
It's tough. But Jesus help us to come honestly to you, to just be willing to surrender things, honestly and truthfully. Lord, thank you for being a God who does not leave us on our knees, but who stands us up alongside of him. And you're telling us to look up.
Look at these places I've given you. Look at these people I've given you. I've given you the ability to influence this world, not for myself, but for the big picture, for the kingdom. For the greatest story that's ever been told, and this is the word of redemption, and this is the story of healing.
It's the story of fulfillment. Thank you so much, Jesus. And we pray. Amen.