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Hey.
Welcome to Willow Ridge.
If this is your first time being here, mine too, so that makes it real fun, no?
My name is Adam Venters, and so I am new to the Columbia area.
I actually didn't know this probably illegally, we dropped off some trash over in your Dumpster, so we stayed in the mission house.
It's like right across the street here for about nine months.
And in that time, we had unloaded a lot of boxes.
And so there's a couple of nights I came over there and dropped trash off, and I text Bo the next day like, hey, I put some trash in your Dumpster.
He's like that's fine man.
Don't worry about so.
But it's really nice to be here.
Your church is just a wonderful partner with us down on the campus.
And so in the local area, our ministry partners with, there's about 160 Baptist churches here in the local area, between the Columbia side of things and, like, the Lexington and Richland side of things.
And so your church is one of those.
Bo and another guy, I can't remember his name, came out and grilled hot dogs and hamburgers in the spring and had that whole thing smoking up.
I think he raised our attendance that night by ten or 15 just because they were smoking out the whole campus there.
So our building is actually right across like a block over from the Horseshoe.
But I just want to say that from our ministry that we're so grateful for this church, but also and this will kind of lead in a little bit to some of what will happen in the sermon, some of what just kind of is going on.
So this semester in our ministry and I'm not like I count people because people count, but keeping track of numbers, I'm like any minister where that's not my forte.
I took college algebra, and that was as high as I got in the math classes.
And so I don't claim to be a math whiz, but in the spring of last year, in our average services, so we do a Tuesday night worship service, and churches like yours provide meals.
And actually Bo came and spoke that night.
And so that's one of the ways that we connect with churches, is doing that kind of stuff.
In doing that, our average was 62 students was kind of average.
We'd have high nights, lower nights, but that was kind of the average.
Well, this semester our average has been around 100 and 3124.
Hundred and 30.
And I say that because, yeah, that's really awesome.
We've been really pumped about that.
But the thing that's been most incredible and part of what I'm going to lead in with the service today and kind of go ahead and share with how this is going to close.
This semester, we've had 13 students surrender their life to Christ, didn't have a relationship with Jesus and started following Jesus.
And then we've had around it's 19 students recommit their life to the Lord.
And some of those recommitments, there are people that are kind of like at some point in time they had a religious experience in their life, but a lot of those recommitments, they hadn't gone to church, haven't done anything for five or six years, and then came to a service.
We're invited by a friend and just kind of decided that they needed to redirect their life towards Christ.
And so we've had, over the course of this semester, over 100 gospel commitments that we've had through our ministry either students salvation, recommitments, students that are outside of Christian community and don't have that, getting plugged in for the first time ever.
And so it's just been phenomenal.
We've been really excited.
Yeah, thank you.
You can clap for that.
But I'll say this, and just to be real clear, because I'm not super mystical as a speaker, I'm pretty direct and plain, some of that.
I'll share a little bit of my testimony this morning.
I think that believing in a resurrected dead guy is about as extreme of a view of life that I can get in terms of, like, I don't feel like I need to add much on to that.
That's pretty intense genesis in and of itself.
But I want you to know this.
In my personal life in ministry, I haven't been in ministry a long time, but I've been in it for 13 years, vocationally.
I've never experienced the move of God the way that I'm experiencing the move of God in our ministry right now.
And I don't know why.
Once you're in ministry for so long, you kind of have an understanding of what you should and shouldn't be doing.
And the rest of that is just praying to God that he would just do up and beyond and more than you can ever imagine.
And so nothing that I'm doing functionally, practically pragmatically, is new to how I operate in ministry, yet the numbers are radically different.
And so I just want you to know this is where we're headed towards the end of this sermon.
What I want to do is I'm going to offer something called an invitation.
And there's going to be two parts to this invitation.
One, if you've never experienced a move of God in your life in terms of following Jesus, I'm going to give you an opportunity to do that.
But one of the stories I'm going to share with you at the very end is about going beyond yourself and sharing the gospel.
And I'm going to share with you just a very practical story of myself sharing the gospel actually this week and how God moved in my life in such a way to make a very frustrating situation very real in a moment.
And it made a lot of sense afterwards, but in that moment, I really didn't understand what was going on.
And so we're going to be in Matthew, chapter four.
If you have your Bible actually, if you have your Bible with me, or if you have your phone Bible, if you would pull up whatever your app is and flip it to the table of contents.
So I don't know if you've ever heard a sermon start from the table of contents before.
This might be the first one, it also might be the last one, depending on how this goes after this point.
Bo might be watching on the live stream right now, like, who is this crackpot that I've got up here to speak?
And that might be true, you just never know.
But I've understood that y'all have been in the Book of Genesis, which is the origin or the foundational understanding of the world, anthropology, just a lot of different things like that.
And so one of the things I want you to know this so I wasn't raised in church.
I gave my life radically to Christ at 16 years old.
And it was like, really, I had no concept of God before that, really, even though I was raised in the south.
Like, there was churches around me, but yet I'm not kidding, Pastor Tim.
I was literally a mile from a church and I had no clue who Jesus was.
Nobody had ever shared with me who Jesus was, why people follow Him, why they build churches and do worship services and stuff like that.
I just didn't know.
And so I gave my life radically to Christ at 16, and I've been on this journey of following Christ ever since then.
I just turned 34, actually, earlier this week.
And so Bo's birthday present for me was for me to work on Sunday this week.
And so that's what I decided to do.
I've just gotten to a point in my life where I've been a Christian longer than I wasn't, just in the last couple of years.
But there's this thing that if you grew up in church or if you're trying to wrap your mind around what it means to know God and love Him and understand his word, is that we believe that this book right here is God's word.
And I'm telling you, it is so hard to describe this, and I'm not super smart, that kind of deal.
So the only way I really know how to do this is like a visual demonstration.
But the idea that this would be God's word in our life should be this like, kind of moment.
And I know it's like, what in the world is going on this morning?
It is just such an incredible thing that we have what we have right here.
And I know some people like to talk through different translations and stuff like that.
I just want you to know, I think if you got a translation, that's about as good as it gets.
The fact that we even have a translation is just a modern miracle.
And if we had another couple of hours, it'd be so easy to talk to you about all the radically crazy things that happen in order for us to get this right here.
So we have this word, and one of the things we believe about God, we believe that there's three divine attributes that make up a God or a deity.
And those three attributes are that God is all powerful, he's all knowing, and that he's everywhere.
And I don't want to talk about all three of those, but I do want to talk about one because it impacts radically how we read the Bible.
And that it's.
God is all powerful.
So in this understanding of God, that God's all powerful.
I don't know if you've ever done the philosophical argument, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it himself?
I don't even know the answer to that question.
Tim can tell you later.
If you know Tim, he's real philosophical.
And whatnot I think the question is, like, it's illogical because it doesn't make sense.
But the idea behind this I'd like to illustrate with a story of my friend Andrew.
When I was in high school, I had a friend named Andrew.
Andrew in high school was six, 4330 pounds.
He was a massive man.
So Andrew, he was one of my friends.
I played football in high school and went to college to play football.
I love telling people that because one of my favorite things is to tell them that I was really good in high school and I was absolutely garbage.
When I was in college, I got in one game.
I played at a school called Carson Emmanuel University, which is a division two school.
So it's not like I was like in the upper echelon or anything like that.
I got in one game.
We played Brevard College.
When I went into the game, we were up 77 to seven when I went into the game.
So at that point, up 77 to seven, I was a defensive player.
The coach felt like, you know what?
Adam can't even screw this up right now.
So he put me in the game.
I have one stat in my whole two years of playing college football.
It was in that game I went to tackle somebody.
It was a toss, sweep to the outside.
I was a safety, rolled downhill, grabbed the guy up by his ankles.
He kind of stood up a little bit, steal, and so he was about to fall over.
But there was another guy named Rylan Herbert who played defensive end.
If you know a Rylan Herbert, don't trust him because all they do is steal from you.
So he hit the guy the rest of the way over.
So I have half a tackle on my college stat sheet and Rylan had the other half of a tackle.
And so Rylan Herbert's just thief you, is all they do.
My friend Andrew, he was just so big.
And when I was in high school, I already shared with you.
I was mostly not saved when I was in high school.
And I did probably a lot of the things that every football playing, jock living football player kind of attitude would have.
Like I was very full of myself.
I kind of ran at the mouth, a lot of that kind of thing.
Well, part of what emboldened me to do that was Andrew.
Well, why?
Well, it's like if you're rolling around with a dude that's six, 4330 pounds, there's really not much somebody else is going to say to you.
Well, why?
Because Andrew's right there.
His forearms as big as my thighs.
Now.
He works for Washington County Sheriff's Department in the east part of Tennessee.
He was always destined for law enforcement.
I think he's just such an intimidating dude.
He's so big.
And I tell you that story and man, I hope I'm not making the front of the sermon too silly or simple, but this is what I want you to know, is that when we read the Bible and we believe that God's all powerful and when we read God's words, this is what I want you to know.
That God in your life, through the reading and understanding of His Word, regardless of the obstacle, situation or problem that you find yourself in.
It's possible this morning that as we read God's Word that he enlightens you on how to move that problem out of your way.
Why?
Because he's all powerful and he extends his power out to his people on their behalf all the time.
Why?
It says this all throughout the scriptures if you didn't know this.
God describes us as his sons and as his daughters.
And I don't know some of you all like our high school, middle school, that kind of thing.
I just want you to know most parents would do whatever it took in order to help their child make through whatever obstacles in their life.
And especially if people who are broken sinful aren't always great all the time would do that.
How much more so would a perfect Heavenly Father do that this morning?
So I want you to know this.
This morning as we get enter into God's Word, whatever problem you may be facing, however it is that God brings you into this room this morning, I want you to know this that he has the power in this particular moment to radically change your life if you'll let Him.
He extends it and does it all the time.
So in the table of contents this morning, I don't want to talk too much, but I want to just highlight a few different breaks that are here in the very front.
So you've been in the Book of Genesis, which is the very first book.
There's five books at the beginning of the Bible.
So the Bible's broken up into two Testament.
Old Testament, new Testament.
There's 39 in the old, 27 in the new the Old Testament.
The first book that you've been looking at, the date that's on that book that's been given to us is around 2500 BC.
And there's some discrepancy.
It could be a little bit older, it could be a little bit younger than that, but it's at least that time period ish.
So in Genesis of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, those five books are what are established as the Torah or just literally means the law.
And so Jewish people historically, especially in Jesus's day, when they talked about the law, what they were talking about were those first five books that were written about 2500 BC.
And they were pinned, at least historically, by somebody that we believe to be Moses.
So if you've ever heard the story of Exodus before, we believe that Moses was the one, after he exited the wilderness or while he was in the wilderness, he started writing those things down.
And so I don't want to share with you too much more about the breaks that are in the Old Testament, but I do want to share with you two other points.
So there's a last book in the Old Testament, and it's called Malachi.
It rhymes with Srirachi, which is a sauce that you can put on food.
And so it's an irregular kind of name.
Like if you break open your Bible right to the center, you're in a book called Peace Alms, which is a fishing book because all it talks about mostly is lamenting.
And I don't know if you've ever been fishing before, but you never catch anything.
And so there's Malachi, and then there's this space that's there.
It doesn't say that in your Bible.
Hopefully, it just has a white space that there.
But from Malachi to Matthew, those two books, we understand that there's some 400 years.
It's called the intertestal mineral period.
And I'd like to highlight this particular idea before we get into the Scripture today.
And hopefully all this will make sense here in about five minutes.
But in this period of blank space, so you have all these names, all these authors, all these words that exist in the Old Testament leading up to that, during that time, what was understood is that God was very active with the people in terms of speaking his words to them.
One of the books, the most significant miracle that happens in the Old Testament is the Exodus.
And in the Exodus, when God was leading his people out of Egypt, there's a lot of movies and stuff that are made about the Exodus is that it was said that God led the people at that particular time with a cloud by day and a fire by night.
That's how intimate the relationship was between God and his people is there was literally a regular physical manifestation of God and his presence was known.
Well, why?
Because you could see it.
It was there.
It was leading them.
Does that make sense?
But what happens in the intertestamental period, the reason why there's no words or descriptions or names or books or anything that we have in our particular Bibles between that period is because it's not that people weren't doing stuff.
It wasn't there wasn't people that were trying to write and popularize some of the things that maybe God was making sense to them.
But what we understand as Protestants or people that are living post the resurrection of Jesus Christ is that none of the words that were written during that time were influential in such a way that they ended up making it into the Bible.
Let me say this in a little bit different way.
One, it's so powerful that we have God's Word, but also you just got to know that the way that we interact with God now because Jesus died on the cross and we have access straight to Him, has not always been the case for the people of God.
There is a blank space that's here, for 400 years, the people were living however they wanted to live.
They were doing stuff however they wanted to do it.
They were even doing stuff.
Pastor Joel.
In the name of God.
But our reflection just simply out of the table of contents from that time period is there was no significant work of the Lord during that time that we would like to repeat in history.
Which leads us to Matthew, chapter one.
And I'm not going to read any part of Matthew chapter one.
I'm just going to simply point to you something, because it's really just a bunch of names is all that it is.
But it's a genealogy says this is genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham.
And that genealogy gets traced all the way through the Old Testament to Jesus of Nazareth.
So the story that I believe that you're about to hear in the next couple weeks is the story of Abraham and the story of Isaac.
So this is how this connects, at least remotely, is what you're learning about right now in the Book of Genesis is a direct tie to the person that we see in Matthew, chapter four.
And it's so important that Matthew, the Gospel writer, literally writes a whole imagine this.
Imagine God saying, hey, I want you to write down some significant things.
You're going to have 20 something chapters to do it.
And whatever it is that you write in those chapters, I'm going to sustain it, enable it, empower it to be copied, printed, and sent out to millions of people all across the world.
You got 27 chapters to do it.
If you were going to write a book, how many of us would say, you know what?
I think it's time to tell everybody who's everybody's dad was?
Does that make sense?
Like I'm just telling you, not my first play.
You know what I mean?
Out of all the things I could do, I don't think that's the first one.
But for whatever reason, Matthew, that's his first play.
So in Matthew chapter four, this is what we're going to see and this is what we're going to talk about today.
It's called the testing in the wilderness is the passage.
So this is what it says.
Matthew, chapter four and verse one, it says, then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
Everybody say devil.
And after fasting for 40 days and for 40 nights, he was hungry.
Everybody say, hungry.
Oh, we love it.
The Tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God, please tell these stones to become loaves of bread.
And verse four, it says, and Jesus answered, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Verse five, it says this then the devil circle that word.
Then the devil took him up to the holy city and had him stand at the highest point of the temple and said, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.
For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up on their hands so that you will not strike foot against the stone.
And Jesus answered him in verse seven and says, it is also written, do not put the Lord your God to the test.
Everybody say test again.
Circle that word again.
The devil took him up to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of all the world and all their splendor.
Everybody say, all this I will give to you.
He said, if you will bow down and if you will worship me.
And Jesus said to him, away from me, Satan.
For it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only.
Then the devil left him and angels came to attend him.
So this morning there's three particular things that come out of this passage that I'd like to kind of share with you about in Genesis, hopefully one of the things you just learned in Genesis, chapter three, there's something that's called sin is introduced to humanity.
And I don't know, when we say the word sin, I get real disconnected from this because I just think sin.
When you say that word, it just makes you sound like you want to go take a bath.
You know what I mean?
You're like, oh, that just doesn't sound good.
You know what I mean?
And so when I think of sin, I just always think of the craziest things in the world.
You know what I mean?
It's like, what did you do to sin?
I robbed a bank, you know.
What else did you what else does a sinner do?
They murder people in cold blood.
I just always think, Pastor Tim, of these crazy examples and analogies and this is I just want you to know this the most basic definition that we understand of sin.
Are you ready for it?
It's an archery term and all that it means is to draw back and let loose an arrow.
And if that arrow hits anywhere other than the dead center, it misses the mark.
And that's all that sin is like.
Whether you miss it by an inch, whether you miss it don't even get it on the map.
All sin is is missing the mark.
So how does a person not sin?
Well, that's a loaded question and I don't have all the answers to you for you this morning.
But in this particular passage there's three things that shape our trajectory.
I think as much as part of the conversation of sin is as much a part of the conversation of what's your trajectory in life like in order for you not to miss the mark.
Right?
And it's an arrow type of term.
Then there's the flight pattern of the arrow and there's the launch point of the arrow.
So how do we not miss the mark?
There are three things that come out of this particular passage in Matthew chapter four that help us to understand what it is and how it is we can know as our arrow, our life is taking place, that we are going to land where God wants our life to land.
And I want you to know this, this morning towards the end, I'm going to give you an opportunity, an invitation.
Sometimes it's not a matter of flight pattern in your life, it's a matter of where you stand.
And some of you all this morning, what may become very real to you is the flight pattern of your arrow can't be headed towards God because literally where you stand is not pointed towards Him.
And what you're going to have to figure out this morning for yourself, if you've never made a decision for Christ to follow Him is to follow Him.
And that's the ultimate place of understanding exactly where you stand.
This is what it says says, then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
There is a lot to say about this particular passage.
We understand later on in James that God does not put us in situations where he tempts us with sin, but God sends us through and hopefully this will make sense to you.
God puts us through all kinds of trials.
Romans, chapter five tells us this, that actually God is going to introduce to us in our life suffering.
And suffering is going to produce perseverance, perseverance is where we find our character at.
And where our character is, is ultimately where our hope lies.
So a couple promises here.
I can promise you that you're going to suffer in your life.
There's going to be trials that you are undoubtedly going to face.
Some of those trials are going to the end result.
So this is kind of the way this works is the end result of a temptation is to get you to sin which draws you away from the Lord.
That's the biggest part of what happens in Genesis chapter three is after Adam and Eve sin, god has to remove them from his presence in the garden, if that makes sense.
But I want you to know this temptation end result is sin.
God does not desire that of our life of a trial, though the end result is Godliness.
I know this hasn't quite sunk in all the way, but I actually want you to know this, that God promises there's going to be trials in our life because God is going to continue to mold us and make us into more like his son Jesus.
If you didn't know this, Proverbs 20 717 in the Old Testament it says this just as iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another, I want you to know this.
This is how God describes spiritual growth in your life.
It's a forging term.
So in your life, in order for you to grow closer to God, god's going to heat you up to a particular temperature so that you can be beat into submission into what he's trying to create in you and then cooled off.
And if you're married like me, my wife does this daily.
And so you just get kind of used to that kind of forging in your life where you just are constantly beat into submission by your wife.
But I just want you to know this.
Part of it is that part of what God has to do in you is hard, but it's never not good to use the double negative.
It's always good.
Romans chapter twelve tells us that everything works out for the good, the perfect and the acceptable will of the Lord.
So this is what it says.
Says in verse three says the tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.
Point number one of three.
Point number one is in your life.
What shapes this pattern, trajectory of where it is that you're going, where it is that you're heading is the temptation that you will want to be known by what it is that you do.
You will want to be known for what it is that you do.
Look at what it says there.
The tempter came to him, said, if you are the Son of God, he pulls out his job title.
Does that make sense?
He pulls out the very title that's been given to him.
In order for him to understand himself in terms of what his functionality is in life.
If you're the Son of God, he calls on that.
He says, then tell these stones to become loaves of bread.
This is what I see.
I see you've been fasting for 40 days and for 40 nights.
It doesn't take a very smart person to figure out that he would then be hungry.
And this is what he says.
If this is the condition that you're in and you're the Son of God, meaning that you have all the power in the world behind you, then just take these stones, change them to bread, and control your own condition.
Like, just change it.
Like, if you're this particular kind of person and this is the stuff that you kind of do and this is the state that you're in, well, just do this.
And what do we see?
Jesus says verse four.
It says, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of Jesus, I want you to know this.
One of the most significant temptations that you're going to have in your life is for you to be known by what it is that you do, that the mark of your existence is going to be wrapped up in what it is that you accomplish Monday through Sunday from seven to three, three, seven and eleven to seven.
And that that would be the defining characteristic of all that you accomplish in your life.
I just want you to know that if that is the path, the trajectory, the aero flight that you're on right now, you aren't going to land where it is that you hope to land.
Why?
Listen, my dad, who's not a Christian, instilled in me and my eight brothers and sisters hard work and honorability and working for an honest age wage.
He just did that.
He wasn't a Christian.
That was just a part of it.
But if you've lived long enough, I think everybody resonates with this sentiment that sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you work, how hard you try, how much you learn, how much you've known, how many experiences that you have, you just can't flat out change people.
You can't flat out encourage them to do what it is that they should be doing.
And sometimes you get put in situations where you can't even change the reality of the state that you're in by trying any harder than what you're trying.
You just kind of get stuck in existence of, like, this is just what is happening.
I want you to know this.
I'm not saying that you need to give up.
You absolutely don't.
I'm not saying that you don't need to try harder.
You may, should, depending on what's going on.
But to live, orchestrate and organize your life, like, the more that you can maximize the efficiency of your time through minutes, hours and days, is going to be ultimately what changes you and your life for the rest of your life.
I just want you to know it ain't true.
It's absolutely not true.
God and Jesus are the ultimate underwriter of all of our stories.
God's at work and sometimes his power work in this world, usurps and overrides anything that we particularly can do.
So I want you to know this.
In your life, your life is not about what you do.
Here's the next one that we see.
Then the devil took him up to a holy city and had him set at the highest point of the temple.
Says, if you are the Son of God, he said, throw yourself down, for it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up on their hands so that you will not strike foot against a stone.
I'm not sure how much you all have studied ancient Near Eastern city planning.
I don't know that it's a great topic of discovery or intellectual organization for your life.
One of the things that was always a part of these ancient cities is that the temples and cathedrals and synagogues were in the dead center of the city.
And it was their way, as they organized themselves, of saying it's center to our community.
Central to our communities is religious life.
Like, I don't know if you know this or not, but in most towns, banks, the courthouse and those kind of things are central to our type of city council geographic planning.
So I've always kind of thought of it like this, like central to you being an American is I can sue you for whatever.
That's kind of the way that I think about it a little bit.
I guess that wasn't too funny.
Nobody really laughed, but that's okay.
But here's a simple analogy of how to kind of understand this.
So the devil takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the temple.
So this would be the highest point of the highest point.
Let me say it again like this.
I used to live in the city of New Orleans, and I worked in the downtown in Starbucks as a barista while I was going through seminary.
And while I was there, I was working one day.
We were the largest grossing store at one particular time because we were just a freestanding store in the downtown of New Orleans.
And as it was going on, all of a sudden, everybody that was in the store just rushed outside.
And at Starbucks, at least at that particular time, they had like the fair wage type of stuff where at any point in time you could request a ten minute break and they had to give it to you.
And so I was very sharp like that, and I was really good at getting out of work, and so I was like, hey, can I have a ten minute break?
So I walked outside with everybody else and up.
So one of the largest buildings in the downtown of New Orleans is the Intergy building.
And I thought this was fake when I saw this.
So they have windows and the windows have to be cleaned on the outside.
And I saw this on movies but never seen this anywhere else.
The only way that we have figured out how to wash those windows is to have scaffolding that is lowered from the top of the building, down the building and wash the windows out of all the modern advancements that we have had in our particular life.
Like you can put nitrous oxide in your car engine and make it go faster.
You know what I mean?
We are still washing windows by lowering scaffolding.
So I looked up and what had happened, one of the pulley systems for the wire had come unttached.
The two guys that were on the scaffolding have like emergency harnesses and stuff like that.
Both of them on this extremely large and tall building were dangling off of the scaffolding by their emergency harnesses.
And I'm telling you, New Orleans is always really busy.
There's always a ton of people in the downtown.
I have never heard the downtown of New Orleans just be silent as we all just stared up and watched this take place.
And what happened was somebody from the inside of the building had taken one of the emergency axes that was in there for fire and rescue and had taken it and smashed out the window from the inside, which is the way I understand it, is an incredible feat in and of itself just to do that.
And they rescued these two guys by pulling them in and everybody was cheering.
We were hugging each other and just like it was just a great moment for humanity.
And I tell you that story and that's 100% true.
To tell you this is this scene with Jesus is up at the highest point of the highest point of the cultural city.
This is exactly what is unfolding below him.
If Jesus jumps, angels bear him up.
You know what's going to happen, man.
Everybody's talking about this.
Everybody is going to be telling the story of how the devil or Jesus was up and he threw himself off and these angels wore him.
Surely he must be the Lord.
But for whatever reason, and Jesus does this multiple times.
Jesus is not super concerned with people seeing miraculous stunts and then believing that he is God.
It's not that he doesn't do them.
He does plenty of miracles via food, healing and other things.
But there are so many times in the scriptures that he actually tells the disciples to kind of tone it down when it comes to them understanding.
So I'm going to tell you the second thing that I think is super crucial.
Your life is not about what you do.
And the second thing is, it's not about what people say about you.
I think that's a good application for this verse.
And the moment that I think that I say that, I think it resonates with most people in the room.
Like, listen, you can't spend enough time going around making sure that everybody that's around you has positive things to say about you.
You can't put out every single fire that exists where somebody has an offhanded comment to make.
And I want you to know this.
What will take your life radically off course for the place that God wants it to go is by worrying obsessively about what people are saying about you.
It's not about what you do.
It's not about what people say about you.
And here's the last one, verse eight.
It says again, the Devil took him up to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of all the world and all their splendor at all the verses that are in the Bible that calls me a great deal of caution.
It's this verse and not caution because the Bible says it cautioned because of the implications it has on my life.
And I still don't know this 100%, but I'm going to kind of work you through my own thoughts to this.
So we know because Jesus resurrected not at this particular point in the Gospels, but we know it's coming.
And we know if we keep reading on, especially in Revelation, especially chapter 21, when we have the clearest picture of what's going to come from this life, is that in the end Jesus comes back in triumphal.
Glory.
That's what it says at the very end.
If you didn't know that.
So in this passage, how does the devil have the ability to give Jesus all the kingdoms of all the world and all their glory?
So the only thing that I can really think of is that it's one of two things, maybe both, but it's either a very short term gain or it's a mirage.
Smokeshow so let me explain what I think.
And this is not in the Scriptures, but this is just a little bit of my own interpretation.
We know at the end that Jesus wins.
So if Jesus bows down to the devil and he says he has the ability to give him all the kingdoms of all the and all the kingdoms of all the world and all their splendor if he will bow down and worship him.
We know at the end that God is bringing about the world that he created in Genesis One and Genesis Two.
And I don't know if you know this or not, but if you can understand something they call this the foundation for ethics.
If you can understand something in Genesis One and in Genesis Two, when the world was perfect, what it also probably means is that when Jesus comes back, if you can understand it in Genesis One and Genesis two before sin, it's probably going to come back as remotely true.
Again, not that there's a ton that's there that we can actually understand and learn and know, but if it says it there, it's probably going to be like that again one day.
And so we know this that God's going to bring like God made in the incredibleness of God, he made a good world.
Actually, in Genesis, chapter one, this is what we see if you didn't know this through the seven days of creation.
Day one, God makes the he makes light and darkness.
Day four, he feels the light and darkness with sun, moon and stars.
Day two, God makes the waters above and the waters below.
Day five, he makes birds of the air, fish of the sea.
Day three, he makes the land.
Day six, he makes creepy crawly things, hooves, calves, animals, all the fun stuff.
And then he makes people at the end of every single one of those days and twice on the 6th day, he says that all those things are good.
If you don't know this, good is a functional term meaning that if I took a gun, went out, shot a deer with it, fed a bunch of people with it, you would say the function of the gun was good or bad.
Good or at least it's not bad.
If I took a gun and went out and shot somebody with it, you would say the function of that good is good or bad.
Bad.
Yeah.
You're tracking with me here, listen to this.
Watch it.
God did not make your days to be bad.
He actually made your days to be good.
Not that you're not going to have a bad day, but God did not functionally made your days to be bad.
So if you find yourself having tons of bad days, I think what you need to do is get right with the Lord in such a way that you can understand God.
I'm not having a lot of good days right now and I need to have some more.
And I know you created my days to be good.
So how do I get there?
How do I surrender each and every day that I have in such a way that I understand and live and walk in the glory and the goodness of God each and every day that I exist?
I want you to know this out of day one, day four, day two, day five, day three, day six, it's symmetrical in design, it's aesthetic in nature.
And what God always intended for us to understand out of the creation account is that in all of his creation, there's only one day that actually has two goods to it.
And that's the 6th day when God makes animals and then he makes people.
So I want you to know this.
When you live and when you walk in the goodness and in the glory of God, it's not just when you reject Jesus, when you follow whatever way that you want to go, whenever you do whatever it is that you just think that you should do, I want you to know this.
It's not just bad in the sense that it doesn't align your life with the Lord, but you are never going to find the promises and the goodness of God, because the opposite of good.
Good is bad bad.
And I know that might seem super simple, super basic, super rudimentary, but I just want you to know this.
God has made your life in such an incredible way that he wants you to have not just a normal, mediocre, run of the mill kind of life, but a great life that is in a great God who gives all good things to his sons and daughters.
So this offering that the devil gives Jesus is as about a short term of an offering as we will possibly ever see.
Why?
Because at best, it's never really going to be good.
But it's a trick to offer Him something that in a short term, because we know it's not at the end that it would be satisfying to his eyes.
And I want you to know the same temptation in your life exists in mine.
What the devil has the ability to do is offer you something that in the short term seems so satisfying to you.
And I promise you, there's no ROI on that thing.
There's going to be no return on investment.
And I want you to know, like, I work with college students, and this is the biggest.
If you're 25 and under this morning, I want you to lean in real quick, because what I want you to know is in all of our lives, we put forth a particular kind of investment, and that investment ultimately, over the trajectory of our life, will yield certain returns.
And I want you to know this.
It's very possible that you invest in things that never return the way that you want them to.
It's possible you chase money, fame and fortune the rest of your life, only, even if you accomplish any of that, to never really desire what it is that you want to desire.
Why?
Because God, that's not necessarily aligned with the purposes of God.
It's possible 25 is an under that you can spend a whole lot of energy pursuing things that are never going to satisfy or fulfill your soul.
But I want you to know this.
It's the same temptation.
It's possible for you to invest in those things for a significantly long time, even to the point that you don't understand God whatsoever.
And the second point that's out of this, and I think both of these may be true, but it's just to kind of emphasize the point it's either a short term gain or it's just straight a mirage.
And I'd like to share a story with you, and the story is intense.
So growing up in East Tennessee, a particular part of my relatives.
I don't really care to throw them under the bus, but the story is real.
And a lot of their life has been spent in things that are illegal in nature is what I would say, from drugs, guns, all kinds of stuff.
And they've been in and out of jail multiple times in repetitive cycles.
And so one of my cousins, he's literally only a year younger than I am.
He's done three particular rounds in jail.
And I'm only 34, so he's 33.
So he spent most of his life at this point in jail.
And I went to visit him at Christmas a couple of years ago, because I just tell you this, I was just so confused.
I don't know that anybody, when they're five years old, dreams of being in jail at some point in time in their life.
And I'll just say this, if you do dream that, I want you to know that God has better plans for you.
He has a better route for your life than that, but not that, if you ever have been in jail, that you need to feel the guilt and shame of that because God gives us release and glory from that, and you can live a full existence life in the goodness of God after that.
But I want you to know this.
I was talking to Him, and we were talking across the window or whatever, and I don't know.
So I don't mean this in a weird way, but I was just kind of over the conversation.
The situation is not great.
I went in there to visit him, and I feel like what I was getting was just like, air.
Like, we were saying stuff, but none of it mattered.
And I was just like, I don't mean this in a mean way.
I was just sick of having that conversation.
We've been having it for 15 years, man.
So I just told him, I was like, Man, I just want to know I'm not perfect.
And I don't think my life is always as great as I want it to be.
But how in the world do you continue to sit there while I sit here?
We had the same upbringing, man.
We went to the same stuff growing up as kids.
We grew up less than 30 minutes from each other.
We were at each other's houses.
All I don't understand.
And I think maybe for the first time that I've ever heard, like, an honest thing that made sense to me, that it was honest.
He said, Man, Adam, I just want you to know is I got headed down a particular path thinking that what it was going to do was going to satisfy some of the desires that I have, only to find out that once I got in, I don't know that I'm ever going to get out.
And I don't think that's true.
And in that moment, I tried to communicate that as best as I could.
And I want you to know that regardless of what's going on in your life, god has the power to lift you out of it.
I want to tell you one last story, and I will use this to kind of close kind of where we wanted to go this past week.
There's actually been something that's extremely frustrating that's been going on, and it's been going on for a couple of months now.
And I've been the sole one that's been trying to work through it.
So the BCM at Carolina is over 100 years old.
We actually turned 101 a couple of days ago, which is really incredible to think that Southern Baptists have been investing in the college campus at Carolina for over 100 years.
But one of the things that is and if you're a banker in here, feel free to educate me after the service because I really don't understand any of this.
But we have an old account, like it is very, very old.
The bank actually, that we've used has been bought out multiple times.
And so there's been all these changes and stuff like that.
The most recent was in 2017.
But because of that, the Carolina Baptist Collegiate Ministry on its earliest documents of being a 501 is called Columbia Baptist Campus Ministry.
That's the Secretary of State of South Carolina, ein numbered name that's on there and what our CPA that handles our books and all that kind of stuff.
And I've asked him this multiple times.
I was like, is that name and the name that we use on our building on Google and stuff like that, does it matter that they're not the same?
And he, no, no.
As long as it's registered at that businesses brand themselves different ways all the, like, it's really not a huge thing.
And I was like, okay, that's fine, whatever you say.
So that was a cool answer a couple of months ago when we got this letter saying like, hey, that we need to adjust this or whatever.
And then we got another letter a little bit later saying like, hey, this is still not resolved after we took in some documents.
And then it got up to where like a week ago, the account got frozen right before we went to Ridgecrest, North Carolina on a student retreat, which you can only imagine how wonderful that was as the director that the account was now frozen.
So luckily there's a lot of help from a lot of churches in terms of just accomplishing the retreat and having all the funds that we needed, that kind of stuff.
But the conversation that I was having with the branch manager, the person that's over him and the person that's over him or her wasn't negative, but it was very direct because like not pumped situation kind of thing.
And the thing that the branch manager kept telling me as we were sending in just massive amounts of documents to try to clarify, like an address verification error, which seems like pretty rudimentary in the banking world in clearing all this up was he just kept saying, he goes, this is from the banker.
I just don't understand why this isn't satisfying our upper level office people.
And we just kept going through this and this climax to our bank account being officially closed on Tuesday morning, which is not great as like a director of anything particularly.
So I rolled into the bank that morning and there was a guy, I'm not going to say his name because some of you all may know him, and he was extremely helpful.
All the people that I worked with at our bank were extremely helpful.
None of them could just do anything about the particular situation.
And so I walked in and I told him, I was like, hey man, I just want you to know that I think all this is going to be fine.
I just think it's going to be pretty uncomfortable for a little bit because I'm not leaving until this gets resolved because I do not understand what's going on.
And you keep communicating back to me that this also doesn't make sense.
So Tuesday morning down at our bank in the downtown, me and this guy are just working through all this kind of stuff and trying to figure some of this stuff out.
He's sending tickets up the chain and all this other kind of thing.
We're just talking.
And as we're talking, I get to know him a little bit.
He's dating the girl they've been dating for a couple of years.
He moved from Virginia down here, just all this particular stuff.
And he just keeps telling me, he's like, man, I think this will satisfy.
Well, 30 minutes later they would come back.
Wasn't satisfying all this.
It was just super frustrating.
So really at the end of it, the only thing that he could do for us was close the account, which in the banking world is not great.
That's your job is to keep these accounts open, to keep the money flowing through.
So hindsight, this guy's somewhat failed at his job.
I don't really know that personally.
Like I'm not a banker.
I don't understand the intensities.
I just know as he was picking up the phone to call people that were above him, I could hear them verbally chewing him out for this situation.
Like, not nice things said on the other end of this.
And this guy, he just starts he's like, sweating, he's frustrated.
He doesn't understand what's going on.
The people he's trying to communicate with aren't really communicating back with him, all this kind of stuff.
And after sitting in his office for about four and a half hours, it just hit me.
I said, man, I don't really understand why I'm in here.
You don't really understand why I'm in here.
I have one question for you.
How's your relationship with Jesus?
And he, like, froze, and I froze a little bit, and he was like, It's not very good.
I was like, what makes you say that?
He's like, Man, I've actually been thinking about this, and he told me his whole story right there, and I just kind of like I just paused for a minute, and it all made sense.
The reason why I was supposed to walk through that whole frustrating scenario, it didn't have anything to do with any of that.
It had everything to do with me meeting him and having a conversation with him about his heart for the Lord.
I got to pray with him.
He was literally crying.
He was embarrassed.
Like, he was, like, turning his back to the open window behind him because he was just like, man, I appreciate you so much for coming.
I was like, I don't know why I'm here, but I appreciate it too.
So this morning, as the band comes up, I want you to know this.
This morning, I have two invitations for you this morning, and it's one.
If you've never given your heart and life to Christ this morning, I'd like to offer an invitation for you to be able to do that.
And I'll say this.
We're going to pray, and I'm going to ask that every head would be bowed, every eye would be closed.
It's really just a respect thing.
This is like a public setting, and following Jesus is a private decision that becomes public later on.
And so as much as you can, just out of respect, if you would just bow your head and close your eyes with me, and I'm not going to make you do anything weird or try to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
What I do want to do in this moment, like I told you that I wasn't raised in church, so a lot of things church people did didn't make any sense to me is as best I can and as clear as I can give you an opportunity to make that decision of your life.
If you have realized this morning that you are not following Jesus in your heart and in your mind, would you just pray this simple prayer right after me?
And this is the prayer.
God, I realize this morning that the trajectory and the path of my life is not headed towards you because I'm standing in the wrong spot.
And this morning, what I want to do is commit my life to following you.
If that's you this morning, every head bowed, every eye closed, nobody looking around, if that's you this morning and you just prayed that prayer, you've never prayed that prayer before, would you just raise your hand real quick and you can put it right back down so that I can pray for you?
You can just poke it up and then put it right back down.
Yeah.
Amen.
You can put it.
Right back down.
Amen.
You can put it right back down.
Thank you.
Amen.
If that's you this morning and you were one of the ones that raised your hand and you realize this morning that you need to restore your relationship with the Lord, what I would encourage you with right after this service is over with.
Is, go get with one of the staff and tell them hey, I decided this morning to follow Jesus and I need to know what to do next.
The other thing that I want to pray this morning and ask you to respond in a particular kind of way and this is the idea of this is that it is an altar cry.
So there's an altar up here, and it is a knees bowed, head bowed, praying, crying out to God moment.
But it is very possible, like the banker that sat in Wells Fargo on Tuesday morning, that there is somebody in your life that God is orchestrating and moving situations and scenarios that are outside of your understanding, control, and power, because what he wants you to do is to speak the good news of Jesus to them.
And so this morning, what I would like to do is up here at the altar, as the band plays just silently for about a minute, is to come up here and just pray for about 20 to 30 seconds over people in our lives that God needs us to share the goodness of God with them.
So if you know somebody this morning that you know needs to know the Lord and you'd like to pray over this morning and just offer their name up to the altar up here, I'll give us about a minute.
Of doing that.
And then we'll kind of conclude out, come on down to the altar and just lift up names of people that, you know, need to know the Lord.
They don't know Jesus.
And God may be working specific scenarios and situations out right now for you to do it.
Amen, Father.
God, what we know is that you change hearts and lives and that there are people in our lives right now, God, that need to know you.
And there are a whole host of people in our lives right now.
God, when it comes to sharing the goodness of God and how he works in a transformed life, of making somebody that is deeply broken on the process of healing to where their lives can hit the mark for Jesus, God is us.
You've put us in some people's life for no other reason than just to share of the wonderful news of Jesus with them.
So, God, this morning, God, we lift up people to you specifically by name, because we know that before we knew them, you knew them.
And just like you're hopefully working in all of our lives this morning in a particular kind of way, specifically, maybe even for those that have decided this morning to follow you maybe for the first time.
God.
What we pray is that when we share your good news with others, God, that you would help us be bold enough to do it, to understand enough of the situation, to know that there are no coincidences inside the kingdom of God, but God also that we would rely on your power more than anything else, more than what we do, more than what people say about us, and more than the things that we have in this world.
God, it's in your name we pray.
Thanks again for listening and be sure to check back next week week for another episode.
In the meantime, you can visit us@willowridgechurch.org or by searching for Willowridge Church on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.