1. Dream Big
2. Have Hope that God is FOR YOU!
3. Stand in the face of Opposition
4. Reality of following/trusting God
5. Needing God beyond heaven and hell
6. Denying yourself and your will
7. Exchanging Your Desires for His Desires
8. Getting Excited to Live
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SECTION ONE: DREAM BIG
“Look at the nations, and watch –
And be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe, even if you were told.”
Habakkuk 1:5 (NIV)
Be EXCITED! You cannot even imagine what God is doing or
His Master Plan! You can’t even piece
together what heaven is going to look like or even what is going to happen in
the future of your marriage, kids, career, church, or the world around you. So much of Scripture talks about an
omnipresent God. It talks about a God
who is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. Yet, we limit ourselves.
When we pray we ask for little
things like, “Lord, give comfort to Billy Joe.
It’s just a really hard time for him.
Be with him, Lord.” DUH! God is already going to be with poor Billy
Joe and God could do SOOOO much more if we widened our view of God. Now, I am not saying this is a “Name It,
Claim It” philosophy which is often looked upon in a negative light. But I am saying we limit God by believing he
can do so little for us. Think about it,
when did you actually ask and believe that God was going to do something huge
and impossible? In reality, we treat God
as if He is small and honestly – BORING!
If we truly want to learn how to create a vision for ourselves and our
church, then we need to attempt to visualize how big our God is! We cannot get into a rut of little prayers
accomplishing little things with little belief that our God can do more.
Job got a nice long speech about how
big our God is. He hit a rough patch in
life. It was tragic really. He lost everything. He lost his crops and livestock, his
belongings, his career, and his family to the very last relative. All of it was dead because God allowed Satan
to test him to see if God was right about Job being righteous before God. Not only did he lose his family and
belongings, he also lost his health. He
got these sores that oozed out puss and yet he didn’t curse God as tempted, but
rather Job sat in ashes, scrapping his wounds with a piece of broken
pottery.
I admire Job at this point in the
story. When I got sick, I was not so
quick to just sit around and wait for God’s work to finish. Instead, I got angry. I got so angry that I stopped going to church
and believing that God really cared about us humans. I was a perfectly healthy 19-year old college
student who was headed for greatness, or so I thought! I was going to get my bachelor’s degree in
less than four years and head to graduate school for my dream career! Well, I was going to do all of that until I
was in a fender bender that traumatized my body into full-time, constant,
chronic pain. Day and night, 24 hours a
day, 7 days a wee, my body writhed in pain.
Doctors thought I had gone mentally crazy. Doctor after doctor, medical bill after
medical bill, I strived for an answer.
But I longed for an answer far more than a diagnosis could bring. I wanted to know why. Why me?
Why was I cursed to live with this pain as long as my body had
life? With the pain came far more than
an achy body. Friends left quickly. Many didn’t believe me as it was not a
disease of the outside, but rather an inner aching pain that begins attacking a
body where no infection lies. Lupus SLE
was the diagnosis, but it didn’t answer why I was being forced to live in
constant pain. The people who stuck
around me gave all sorts of advice as to why it might be happening to me.
Job faced the same thing. As he sat in ashes, friends came and sat by
him. I imagine he liked when they sat
merely in silence, mourning his loss with him, until finally, they spoke. They told him the age-old stories of why he
had to go through all of this pain. But,
as you can imagine, not many words can calm someone when you are dealing with
that kind of pain. Eventually, after
many days, Job is pushed to the breaking point.
In Job 29, he merely reflects on the way things were before disaster
came, but by chapter 30, Job is brewing up a storm. He complains and considers himself a
righteous man, undeserving of what has come to him. In Job 38, after another long speech from a
friend, God answers Job. I assure you, I
would not have wanted this rebuke from God which went on four chapters
thereafter.
What you need to know, and I
encourage you to read it for yourself, is that God is truly all-powerful! He takes care of the rising and setting of
the sun and the tides and where the moon sits in the sky. He controls the weather and the animals. He is the ONLY righteous being! He is BIG!
He is “large and in charge!” Yet, we deny that He could do more for us
than bring a little peace and comfort.
We give in to the idea that it bothers God or that it is wrong to ask
for more than what could be considered “politically correct” to have. In fact, I think it bothers God when we ask
for so little. How can we truly trust
and follow a God whom we allow to do so little in our lives?
Jesus
tells this parable in Luke 7:41-43, 47 (NIV).
“Two
men owed money to a certain moneylender.
One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him
back, so he canceled the debts of both.
Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one
who had the bigger debt canceled.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus
said…
“Therefore,
I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven – for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves
little.”
I love this parable. It falls just
in the middle of Jesus being anointed by a sinful woman. Imagine Jesus eating dinner with the
Pharisees and a woman who was known by the entire town as a sinful woman
entered the house with an alabaster jar of perfume. Imagine the woman coming and sitting at Jesus’
feet allowing her tears to cover Jesus’ feet so much that she was able to wipe
them clean. This woman’s hair was long
and probably tied back, but she sat at Jesus’ feet, undoing her hair, and
wiping his feet with her hair. She bent
down kissing them and pouring perfume on them.
Now, imagine you are the Pharisee who allowed Jesus into your home
believing He was a great prophet. The
thoughts that roamed in the Pharisee’s mind were probably along the lines of
disgust. He felt disgusted that Jesus, a
great prophet, would allow such a sinful woman to touch him. Jesus subtly addresses these thoughts in this
conversation with Simon Peter.
“He who has been forgiven loves
little,” verse 47. We forget that we
ourselves are sinners and are in need of that forgiveness. But more than that, I believe we forget that
those who have been pulled out of a life of such turmoil love Jesus much more
than we can imagine. Why? Because they came expecting that healing,
that forgiveness, that anointing, knowing that nothing else on this earth can
give it to them. They knew that no one
would be so forgiving and so powerful that they could allow such mercy EXCEPT
for Jesus. They knew His power. They were able to dream that there was life
beyond “that” sin or “that” mistake.
I am sure you can remember back when
you were a kid when it was “that” thing that was so bad that you were gonna get
a good whoopin’ for that one. Or you can
remember that time when you did something so bad that no one could ever forgive
you. Or early on in school when you did
something so wrong that now your best friend was never ever going to trust you
ever again! I think we’ve forgotten that
we still do this today.
When I got my driver’s license at
age 16, I thought I was pretty cool. I
was a year behind all of my classmates because I was almost a year younger than
everyone, but I was awesome. Two weeks
after I got it, the first week of my junior year of high school, I totaled my
mom’s van. After I got back behind the
wheel, in January, less than 5 months after getting my license, I slid on a
patch of black ice, rolled down a hill, and by the grace of God a tree line
stopped us. Both accidents no one was
hurt, but I totaled another van. That
January morning, the cell phone tower was out.
My brother, who is 18 months younger than I am, ran to a nearby house
and called my parents. I was
TERRIFIED! I didn’t think my parents
were ever going to forgive me because I screwed up not only once but
twice. I had my siblings with me both
times as well as a friend. Of course, my
parents forgave me but let’s just say, it took a long time for me to get behind
the wheel again! This story may seem
silly to you, but it completely adjusted my way of thinking about the parable
on forgiveness.
The great thing about God is that if
we confess and truly seek to change our ways, He will forgive us. Over and over again, He will forgive. When I think about my parents’ forgiveness
toward me and how I thought I was never going to be forgiven, I am amazed at
how God works in our lives. It took a
long time for God to help me release that burden that I carried. I wasn’t sure God was going to forgive me
even if my earthly parents already had.
But God’s love is far more than what we can even imagine.
If God’s love is that large, imagine
what He wants to be able to do for us as long as we are willing to ask and
believe that He can achieve such impossibility!
Ephesians 3:20 (NIV) says, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably
more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within
us...” That’s right! He can do more than
all we could ask or imagine, so why do we limit Him by limiting our prayers? Why do we plan out our entire life knowing
that God could do so much more if we allowed Him? If we truly place our lives in His hands, we
can have a vision of the future like no one else! We can rely on His promises. We can count on His faithfulness. We can attempt to imagine how awesome our
lives can be!
Those who have been forgiven much
know His Power! They know they can dream
BIG because they have a big God! A God
of the impossible who can do more than we can imagine!
Dream BIG! It’s worth it!
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