Love God

As I was thinking about it and getting ready for this series, which is a new series, we’ve moved on from our summer series. So, you know, as we’re thinking about a summer, moving beyond the summer series, the weather helps us, so it gets us more in a fall frame of mind. The kids are going back to school soon.

This week, a lot of them. And so, I was thinking a couple of years ago, well, it was in 2021, in the midst of the shutdown and everything, we were trying to figure out what to do for a family vacation. So, we decided we needed to do something outside because everything seemed to be closed.

So, we drove up to Iowa, to Lake Obidoji. Obidoji. Now, some of you are going, you just made that up.

Did I make that up? No. It’s a real lake there. And you see, I have an interesting experience with boats because I’ve only owned, my brother had a canoe when we were in high school and we used to canoe down the Republican River that we’d put in at Clifton, Kansas, which probably means nothing to you, wind our way down around Clay Center and near Wakefield.

And my dad would come and pick us up. We’d go about four hours or eight hours, however long we could go on that Saturday. And we would ride in the boat and it taught us to be fearless.

Like the time we were riding the boat with my dad and my brother and I was in the back. It was my first time, you know, I was young, my first time. Who’s ever ridden a canoe or a kayak or anything like that? Whose job is it to steer the boat? The person in the front or the person in the back? In the back.

I was in charge. I was steering the boat, you know? And it’s not like we were on rapids. This is a river where you gotta find, you gotta look ahead and see where the current is and get over to the current so you don’t get stuck on the sandbar.

And we’re going down the road and all of a sudden there is a great big spider, which might even have been a granddaddy longlegs. But there was a great big spider coming at me with fangs this big hanging out of its mouth. And I stood up in that canoe and I started banging the spider with the oar.

And my brother and my dad were hanging on for dear life as the canoe was tilting back and forth. I eventually did learn how to steer a canoe. So then while we were at Ake Obidoji with my great boat driving skills, we rented a boat with a tube on the back and we were gonna go tubing.

And we are on a dock and the dock is, you have to back it into a narrow place. And it had two docks on each side and the guy renting the boat was there with us. And I pulled out and I was pretty good at pinball when I was a kid.

And that’s kinda how the boat came out of the dock. And as I was bouncing off the sides, I was like, man, I better get going or he’s not gonna let me do this. So I gunned it and we got out there.

But once we got out there in the open lake, we had a lot of fun. So you would think with my history, my rocky history with boats, that God would not have anything, me to have anything to do with a boat. But you know how God works.

Today we’re gonna talk about, the next four weeks about our calling and purpose. We have a very strategic calling and purpose that came from God himself. Today we’re gonna talk about, when we live into loving God, how that connects to our calling and purpose.

Next week, we’re gonna look at Hebrews and see how we can have faith that saves. And then in Matthew, we’re gonna look at the outside perspective and we’re gonna look at our work. All of this comes from New Testament verses except today’s, that specifically focus on Noah.

Now it’s kind of odd and it’s another one of those God things that it seems like a weird story for me to tell. So sometimes I’m like, okay, I’m gonna tell this story, but it feels weird to tell it. And so when I tell it, you know it’s gotta be true because it’s one of those things where people embarrass themselves in the Bible and they wouldn’t do this unless it was God.

And it happened a couple of years ago, I was in my car pulling into the garage and there was a song on that was just a fun song to sing by Colton Dixon called Build a Boat. And those who have been here from the beginning have heard that several times, that song now. And I was just in the garage singing along with this song, probably pretty loud, but it was just me, so it didn’t matter.

Then all of a sudden, God, it was a song about I will build a boat in the desert when there is no rain and the rain building it there and the faith of Noah to build that. And I was just singing along saying it is, you know, to me it was just a fun song. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of that, I hear a voice in my head say, will you build me a boat? And I was like, what? I’m just having fun singing this cheesy song, help me out here, what are you talking about? And then I just heard it again, will you build me a boat? And it just, I prayed about it, I looked into it and I realized God was calling me to build a boat.

And it was a metaphor for a church, but the church was like that of the ark, like that of what Noah went through. When Noah built the boat and no one else around him understood that boat or even tried to hinder the progress or whatever they might have done and didn’t wanna have anything to do with it, Noah still built the boat because the floods were coming. Now part two of that is we know that God promised, did you know the rainbow means God promised there is no flood? I just thought I’d ask if you knew that.

There was gonna be no other flood, but with Jesus we know there is a time where Jesus is coming again. So the boat is an ark, a boat where people can come, can get to know God, can grow in their faith and can know Jesus better. Now 3 1⁄4 of you probably know this story, but I’m gonna tell it anyway because it’s still part of God making this bigger.

I’m working with the Global Methodist Church saying hey, what do you have for church starts? And when I started talking to them, they said yeah, we can’t help financially, we can’t help with training, we can’t help with anything and I’m going all right, thanks for your help. And eventually the secretary called me back and she said hey, we’re doing a training in Dallas, you wanna go to this training? And I was like okay, I’m gonna try to make time, it was too hard. And then she calls me back another month later and says okay, now we have a training in Lamar, Missouri.

So what’s your excuse? No, she didn’t say that. That’s what was happening in my mind. So I got in the car and went to Lamar, Missouri for the first time and just over the border, not that far from Joplin.

And I walk into the Sanctuary Fellowship Hall area where we were having the conference and I’m talking to a guy and he says, you know guys, the first thing they say is so where are you from? And I started talking about Overland Park and he said, oh, the guy standing next to me is from Shawnee. And so he turned and he introduced me to Dana and we talked the rest of the whole weekend about what was gonna happen. And he said, so what are you doing here? And I said, well I came because I felt like God was calling me to start a church and I said, what are you doing here? He said, I came because I’m a deacon and I wanted to find a pastor who would start a church in Kansas City.

And I was like, okay, I hear you God. And we came back, we went out to eat with Dana and his wife Michelle and we started talking about this more and more and Dana got together a group of people from a Sunday school class and we met with them at the Gouge’s house and I told them this story, we did a devotional on Noah and he called me later and said, we wanna be builders and that’s kind of the ground floor. We started meeting in homes, we started meeting via Zoom, we just started to just come together as builders.

And so that is what we’re gonna talk about the next four weeks. How can we be builders? If you don’t wanna build, I’m not saying you have to have great construction skills. Not saying you have to be an excellent driver of a boat.

We’re gonna talk about building a boat and why that is so foundational to our church. Our scripture to start off this series on calling and purpose is in Romans 8 where these terms come together and we see what God has in store. Will you stand as you are able? Likewise, the spirit helps us in our weaknesses.

For we do not know what to pray for as we ought but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the spirit because the spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.

The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God, amen. You may be seated. In Genesis, we see the calling of Noah.

We hear a lot about Noah’s family and legacy and then in Noah 6 verse nine it says, Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. Now, it seems like such a simple thing.

You know, when we think of Noah, what do you think of when you think of two with Noah? Two of every kind of animal except a couple extra of the ones they needed to eat. So we think of the flood and the flood coming and here was Noah in the early stages where he was righteous so he listened to God and he built a boat to God’s specifications. So when the flood comes, there was only, thinking of numbers, there were only eight saved is what the New Testament tells us because it was Noah, his wife, his three sons and his three daughters-in-law.

And so those eight were saved because they were righteous and it made me think when I started exploring Noah again, I mean, a couple of years ago, we were watching a video and it was a children’s, it was on Wednesday night, it was the children’s ministry on Wednesday night in my previous church and in the video, all of a sudden, this cartoon started showing all the people outside the boat drowning in the water, screaming and I was like, that is not the VeggieTales version of this. And what does that mean? And thinking of that, that’s a lot of what this is about. That we are in a world that doesn’t believe, even in the church where there are so many who don’t believe or who forget that Jesus is coming again.

And do we have a boat that is built that is ready to house people, to bring them into a relationship with Jesus Christ so that when he comes, people have a hope. And in fact, the reality is we have hope. Do we have two hopes? One hope, we have one hope.

Does that sound familiar? We have one hope to survive when Jesus comes again and to be taken to paradise. Note 1 John 4, 9 says, in this, the love of God was manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. The arc of the 21st century, the arc of the whole new age, is an arc built so people can walk with Jesus.

I mean, that’s about it. That’s our main thing, is to give people an opportunity to walk with Jesus. If you don’t want that, you might not want one hope because that is our main thing.

Now, it comes with, we would help, we want to help anybody, anywhere, any generation to know Jesus. Verse, the next slide is our calling. Our calling is to build a boat.

Let’s read this together. So, thinking of things to be on your heart. Our calling is to build a boat where people of every generation can experience God’s grace like Noah’s family and trust in Jesus who is our one hope from the overwhelming floods of life.

You know, one other thing that happened to me when I was in, when we took the canoe and then when my buddies and I, we were seniors in high school, I believe. You know, kind of that age where you think you can do anything. And we took our canoe to Milford Lake and we’re on the lake and I believe this lake is still the deepest lake in Kansas.

Is that true? Maybe. And we took the canoe out and it was getting later in the day and it started getting choppy out there and it was a little different, did you know it’s a little different riding a canoe in a lake than it is on a river? On an easy river, lazy river. The waves started getting choppy and the whole boat was about this far from the top and waves were kind of splashing over in the boat.

And we are thinking, you know, we may be 18 and we think we know everything but we think we might need a better boat for this. Now, we are taught to be on our own, independent, to be strong, to pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But for every one of us, there are things that come up in life that are difficult, that are challenging, that are painful, that are hard to do on our own where we not only need a community of faith around us to lift us up and to show us the love of Jesus Christ but we need God himself to give us the strength to make it through things.

And even bigger than that, we need that one hope to help us when the floods of the second coming come. And we want everybody in every generation with every, anybody at any point in their life, whether they’re close to God, whether they’re not close to God, whether they’re young, whether they’re not so young, whether they’re very churched, whether they’re not very churched, and whether they’ve been hurt by church. And that’s one thing that helps us see how the purpose fits into us is, I mean, help me out with this.

How many of you have ever been hurt or disappointed or just felt lost in a church? I mean, that’s most of us, okay? Part of building a boat is the grief share, helping people through the grief process, knowing that God still has something amazing in store. Our purpose is to build together, love, spiritual holiness, having the holiness of God in our heart that we gain through walking with people who love us, and to be bold witnesses about life with Jesus. Okay, the picture here and the next slide pulls back and shows that this is who we are.

I’m gonna be straight up honest with you. This more describes us than the cool picture of the boat facing the wind and the waves and being strong. A lot of the work we do when this is our purpose is to build, to build disciples, to strengthen, to reinforce, to put that seal on, that seal of the Holy Spirit, as Noah put the seal on the boat to keep it from leaking.

So the Holy Spirit, when it builds in us and grows, it keeps us from leaking. And a lot of our work is not so exciting. It’s the building, it’s the preparing, it’s making us ready for the whelming floods that may come with the difficulties of life or may come when Christ comes again, but we build so that we know that even though people say, I’m fine right now, that if they wanna be a part of this, they are ready for the flood.

So you see this next slide shows our logo. This is our one hope. This is who we are.

The cross before us, the waves against us. We have one hope in Jesus Christ. We have a boat that God gives us because Christ gave so much for us.

Romans 8, 28 says that, you know, we love to quote part of verses. We love to say, and we know that God works all things together for the good. But what am I missing when I just say God works all things together for the good? For those who love God.

And for those who love God are called according to his purpose. That every one of us is called, every one of us is a part of something bigger that God has in store for us. What is that specifically? We find out as we go along.

I saw a great quote by Shane Bishop today. He’s the guy who wrote the good news that we did in our Hope Builders groups last year. It’s an evangelism book.

And his quote was, one of the greatest tragedies in life is people just sit around and wait for God to say, give them something big to do. I’m gonna do something big as soon as God tells me. But until that happens, I’m gonna wait.

And he said, the Bible, Jesus actually tells us that if we’re faithful in the small things, he will give us more. He will keep building on that and give us bigger things. So part of building is to just look and see how we can help, how we can love, and see God do amazing things to use our gifts so we can live into that calling and that purpose.

And we can build together so that the world could know about Jesus Christ and walk with Jesus every day and be kept safe from rising waters, from waves, and from pain and hurt that will still experience them. But if we’re in the boat, which means if we’re walking with Jesus, God’s gonna do amazing things through us. Let’s pray.

Almighty God, give us the gifts to build what you have called us to build. Help us to endure the trials of this world. Help us to build even though it is so hard to see when or how or if all those things on Jesus coming back.

Help us to trust in you to know that it’s true. Help us to use this boat to draw people in, to make it so there’s a lot more than eight who are saved. But so Christ, who loved the world, gave up himself.

His father who loved you, Father, gave him up for us. And with that kind of love, teach us to love you more. When we love you, you give us a calling, a purpose.

You work things towards the good. Help us to have that kind of faith and be the church who loves you because you are so good. You are so awesome.

You are so amazing. Thank you, Father, for being so good in Jesus’ name. Amen.