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Promo: Making Time
You have the same 24 hours in your day as the most accomplished people in the world. So why doesn't it feel that way? Follow along on this special 6 episode series as we take a look at how to make more time. By following biblical principles and taking a look at what you really want, Making Time shares the secret to having all the time you need... with a little help from some friends.
Learn more and download group guides at https://lumivoz.com/making-time/
For questions, comments, or sharing your tips on how to make more time, reach out to makingtime@lumivoz.com
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You have the same 24 hours in your day as the most accomplished people in the world. So why doesn't it feel that way? Follow along on this special 6 episode series as we take a look at how to make more time. By following biblical principles and taking a look at what you really want, Making Time shares the secret to having all the time you need... with a little help from some friends.
Learn more and download group guides at https://lumivoz.com/making-time/
For questions, comments, or sharing your tips on how to make more time, reach out to makingtime@lumivoz.com
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Host Shelley Leith interviews her pastor, Rick Warren. They discuss the difference between our dreams and our purpose, the fulfillment of the specific and God-sized dreams God gave Rick for Saddleback Church 40 years ago, and whether it’s too late, too early, or too unnecessary to have a dream from God.
Study Gateway is a streaming video Bible study service that gives instant access to video studies taught by hundreds of the world's most influential Christian authors, teachers and pastors, published HarperChristian Resources. Subscriptions plans are available for personal use, for small groups, and for whole churches. Learn more at StudyGateway.com.
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Creators & Guests
What is Study Gateway First Listens?
Study Gateway's First Listens: Find your next Bible study! Join host Shelley Leith as she curates first sessions of Bible studies on various themes each season, taught by some of the world’s most influential Christian authors, teachers, and pastors. To learn more, visit https://StudyGateway.com.
First Listens Season 6: Episode 7
Created to Dream, by Rick Warren
Plus interview with Rick Warren
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: Welcome to Study Gateway's First Listens, where you get the first listens to the first sessions on Study Gateway so that you can find your next video Bible Study. Hi there, I'm your host, Shelley Leith, and today I get to spend a few minutes with my favorite pastor, Rick Warren. Welcome, Rick!
RICK WARREN: Hi Shelley and you're my favorite person. I love you and I love your husband Greg. He's such a dear, dear friend. You guys have, of course you served on my staff for a long time and you've always been friends before and after and I'm thrilled that you're doing this new role of ministry.
SHELLEY: Thank you. So getting to do this interview with you is a thrill for me because you were my pastor for 23 years. You were my boss for eight years. I was hired by Purpose Driven back in 2002, right while you were still writing Purpose Driven Life.
RICK: And that was the pivotal year that everything just broke wide open.
SHELLEY: everything broke wide open. I got to put together the training kit for churches to be able to do the 40 Days of Purpose campaign along with us, but we had no idea at the time that we were about to take a ride on a tsunami because the Purpose Driven Life went on to become the best-selling non-fiction book of all time right after the Bible. And now, 20 years later, you're coming out with this book and curriculum, Created to Dream. Why this message and why now?
RICK: Shelley, the reason I wrote this book, Created to Dream, is because I've noticed there's been a post-COVID letdown, and that so many people have been sluggish about their faith and kind of in a miasma of What do I do? And it really took the wind out of the sails of a lot of people. It's time to dream again. Um, I could give you a dozen reasons why it's important to dream. I can't cover them all obviously in something this short, but the bottom line is this, God gave you the capacity to dream and whatever he gives you the capacity to do, he expects you to use. We are most like God when we're being creative. We're most like our creator when we are creating.
Now the Bible says without a vision the people perish. So that means without a dream I'm dying. I am literally dying. You're not really living. You're just existing if you don't have a dream. Now the Bible and life just tells us that everything in life starts with a dream. It was Napoleon who said, imagination rules the world. And it was Einstein who said, imagination is more important than knowledge, where there is no dream that people perish. There's no vision. So everything starts with a dream. And God says, I want you to see something of the future that God has called you to share in Ephesians 1.18. Dreams are how God shows us what he wants to do through us.
But more important than that, dreams are essential for your health. Your dream actually defines you. Jesus said it like this. He said, your eye is the light of your body. And if your vision is good, then your whole body will be full of light. But if your vision is bad, then your whole life will be filled with darkness. Tell me your dream and I'll tell you the direction you're headed. Tell me your dream and I'll tell you whether you're depressed or not. There's so many benefits to having a dream, which is why I wrote this book and actually we put this curriculum together. A dream not only defines me, it keeps me growing. Okay? It keeps me growing. Paul says in Philippians, I know I'm not yet what I ought to be, okay? But I keep moving toward the goal, toward the dream. I know I haven't reached it yet, but I keep my eyes focused on the goal, on the dream. that God has called me to receive through Christ. And he says, if you're spiritually mature, you should think this way.
Another benefit of dreaming is it focuses your energy. As Paul says, I run straight toward the dream, straight toward the goal, straight toward the mark with purpose in every step. I'm purpose driven. A dream stretches your faith like nothing else will. And you know, having been a member of Saddleback, we were constantly a dreaming church, which kept stretching us. You've never really believed God until you've attempted something you can't do in the power of the flesh. And so many times we would get a big dream, uh, and people say, who do you think you are? And I would say, that's the wrong question. The question is not, who do we think we are? The question is, who do we think God is? And whoever is listening right now, I would say to you, Let the size of your God determine the size of your dream. Don't make your dream based on what I think I can do or what you think you can do, but what do we think God can do. Dreams stretch your faith. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is where Jesus says, according to your faith, it will be done unto you. This curriculum will stretch people's faith, okay?
But it will not only stretch their faith in dreaming, it's gonna talk about the phases that come after dreaming too. There's problems, but a dream keeps me going in tough times. I can't tell you in the 43 years that I was pastor, how many times I wanted to resign on Monday morning. I used to say I got PMS, post-message syndrome, and it was like, God, somebody could have done a better job than that. Surely, this church is too big for me. Get somebody else to do it. But the dream kept me going. The dream kept me moving. The dream helped me be diligent, determined. And once you lose your dream, you lose your hope. And once you lose your hope, you give up. On the other hand, having a great dream actually inspires other people to dream. I know that the dreams that God gave me inspired a lot of other people to dream great dreams for their lives. and dream for their churches and for their ministries and for their small group. And one of the things I want to accomplish in this curriculum is create a church, a community, a nation of dreamers who are dreaming again post COVID. It'll all be rewarded in heaven.
And the Bible tells us that dreams are actually a gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, it was Peter who says in the very first sermon at Pentecost, the first day of the church, he said, in the last days, your sons and your daughters, sons and daughters, male, female, will prophesy. They will preach. He says, in the last days, your young will have visions and your old will dream dreams. In other words, you're never too young. You're never too old. He said on all flesh, both men and women, I'll pour out my spirit and they will prophesy. And when you look at that verse, it says sons and daughters, old and young, men and women, who gets left out? Nobody. We all get to play in this great thing called the church where we all get the dream and plan and pray and serve and work together. So I just didn't think there was anything more important coming out of COVID that we should actually be studying than stop looking at the past, stop looking at all the stuff that went wrong, stop looking at all the stuff that's wrong right now in America and in the world and start dreaming again.
SHELLEY: You know, when we think about where this came from, about you coming from 20 years ago, writing Purpose Driven Life, is there any difference between a dream and our purpose?
RICK: Well, yes, there are. The purposes of God are actually universal. God has the same five purposes for every life. He does not have the same dream for every life. Okay, let me explain that. We're put on this earth to do five things, to know Christ and love Christ, to learn to love his family and belong to his family, to grow in Christ, to serve Christ, and to share Christ. That's called worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism. These are five things that every single person on earth is called to do. They're common purposes. So our purposes we share in common. We're all to know Christ and love Christ. We're all to love his family and belong to his family. We're all to grow in Christ. We're all to serve Christ. We're all to share Christ. But the dream is custom made. And God's dream for Shelley Leith is different than God's dream for Greg Leith. And God's dream for Greg Leith is different than it is for Kay Warren. And God's dream for Kay Warren is different than it is for Rick Warren. And so this is the unique thumbprint that makes you that expresses how am I gonna fulfill the same purposes that everybody else is called to fulfill, but in my unique way.
SHELLEY: Okay, how do we know that a dream is from God? What are the elements that we're looking for in this dream?
RICK: Good point. Well, one, it will be so big. You can't do it on your own. God will give you a dream that is so big. You're going to have to trust him. Uh, in Ephesians, it tells us for God is able to do far more than you would ever think or ask or even imagine. And it says in the living Bible, beyond your wildest dreams. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty big dreamer. But God says, Rick, think about the biggest thing you think I could do in your life, and I could top that. Okay, I could top that. So, make no small dreams, okay? Because then you know they're not gonna force you to have faith, and the Bible says without faith it is impossible to please God. So it's gonna stretch you, that's first thing.
Second thing, the dream will benefit other people, okay? If your dream is, for instance, just to to get rich, that's not a dream God's gonna bless because that's a selfish dream, it's a personal dream. Now, all of the things that you really wanted in life are the benefits of helping other people, okay? We feel good about ourselves, you can make a living, you make a difference, you contribute, your life has meaning and significance and... and you see the value of your life. All these things are the side benefits of a dream that is built on helping others in some way. Everybody who's built a great business, built the business by first figuring out how to serve other people with a service or a need or a product. And if you help other people, then God helps you. He wired the universe that we only really get the most out of life when we give our lives away.
So the dream somehow will be taking how God shaped you, your spiritual gifts, your heart, that's your passion, your abilities, your personality, your experiences in life, all those things we talk about, your shape in purpose-driven life. God shaped you uniquely to serve him. And if I serve myself, it's not God's dream. How do I serve God? I can't even see God. here on earth. How do we serve an invisible God? We serve God by serving others. And Mother Teresa was the greatest example of this, that in giving her life away for the poorest of the poor, she had moral clarity and clout to walk before congresses and the United Nations and have extreme moral authority, because the more you give yourself away, the more God gives to you. You cannot outgive God. Give it and it will be given to you. So the dream will make a difference and it will make the world a better place in some little way. Now it may be through art, it may be through music, it may be through parenting, it may be through your career, but your career doesn't have to be your dream. A career might be something that you do that puts food on the table and your dream is far bigger than simply a job. You'll change jobs many, many times in life, and God will give you many different dreams in life. In a minute, maybe we can talk about my most recent dreams that have been post-Saddleback. As long as you're alive, God wants you to keep dreaming. But the whole purpose of the whole knowing what a dream is, is somehow it's going to help other people. It serves God by serving others.
SHELLEY: I love that. Okay, so let's get to that. When you started Saddleback Church, you made this prophetic declaration of your dream for our church that was probably the boldest thing I've ever heard out of the mouth of a young pastor in his very first sermon at his brand new church plant. And God fulfilled every one of those crazy dreams that he gave you. So tell us about a few of those.
RICK: Well, you know, I did, I wrote out a dream and read it to the 60 people who came to the trial run service. Those people were total strangers. Not only did they not know me, they didn't know each other. They had just shown up from an advertisement said, Hey, we're starting a new church at the Laguna Hills High School. And 60 people showed up and here's this 25-year-old kid who doesn't know them. And they don't know me. And I said, this is what our dream is for this church. And God has given me this dream, and I'm here for life, for a lifetime. If you stick with me, I'm not gonna bail out on you. I was at Saddleback 43 years. And it was very, very specific, because the more specific your dream is, the more faith it requires. If you just have a dream, God, I want you to do a lot of cool things in my life. That's not a dream, okay? A dream is, what do you want God to do in your life? Very, very specific. What do you want God to do in your family, in your marriage, in your church? And so I literally listed about 25 or 30 very specific things.
For instance, one of the things was, uh, someday this church will have 50 acres of land. Well, that was unheard of. Everybody goes out and buys a half-acre of land. There was no church in California with 50 acres of land. Now here's the problem: sometimes with a dream, my dream was too small because we actually ended up with 120 acres at our main campus and later got Rancho Capistrano, which is 170 acres. Again, God says, I can outdo whatever you've got.
Another one of the dreams was we're going to send people in our church to every nation as short-term missionaries to go on mission trips. We're going to be the first church to literally go to every nation. And as you know, over a decade between the year 2000 and 2010. That's exactly what we did. We ended up sending out 25,869 of our members on the Peace Plan, P.E.A.C.E., to Plant churches, Equip leaders, A, Assist the poor, C, Care for the sick, and E, Educate the next generation. And on November 18th, 2010, right about a month before the end of the decade we said we're gonna do it by the end of the decade we went to nation 197—sent a team to Saint Kitts, a little island in the Caribbean, only 35,000 people, but we went planted a church there. We’re the only church in Christian history that has literally sent members to every single nation in the world, 197 nations. That’s two more than are in the U.N. because there are two nations, Serbia and Taiwan, that aren't in the U.N. That was a very specific goal, very specific goal. And, uh, you know, there are many, many others. We put a number to a lot of those things about how many people we had baptized and how many members would be in the church and things like that.
SHELLEY: Well, you said you'll have 20,000 members. That was unheard of.
RICK: Yeah. I, at the very first service, I said, we're going to have 20,000 members. Now, people say, where did you get that number? It's just the biggest number I could think of at the time. It's what my faith was the big enough. It's not like God said that would be the number, but today, 74,000 people have taken Class 101, our membership class. Okay, so it went way past 20,000. 54,000 people, new believers, were baptized in our church in 43 years. So, God went way past the goals.
Here's the thing, it doesn't really matter whether you reach the goal or not. What matters is that you do it in love and you do it in faith because whatever you do in love, the Bible says love never fails and the Bible says according to your faith it will be done unto you and without faith it's impossible please God. So when you're setting a dream and you make a big dream, even if you don't reach that dream in every area, you're already a success because if you're doing it in love, and out of love for God and love for others, and you're doing it in faith, God is already pleased.
SHELLEY: I want to finish up with you today, Rick, by talking to the dream skeptics out there, all right? There are those who might say, in fact, you addressed this earlier when you were talking about that verse in Scripture. There are people that might say, it's too late for me to have a dream. Or we might have people on the other end who say, I'm so young, I'm not ready for a dream. Or someone in the middle who says, I'm not the dreaming type, I don't need a dream. What would you say to people who are resisting this notion that God has a dream for them.
RICK: Yeah. Well, this is really good question, Shelley. And let me take each of those three examples you just gave. Somebody who's new in the faith, somebody who is older in the faith, or maybe just older in life, and somebody who's had some, maybe some failures and setbacks and some bad decisions, poor decisions in life. I don't care what group you're in. It's never too late to dream. And it's never too early to dream. I go back to what Peter says on the launching of the church in Acts 2:17-18. He says, your sons and your daughters, your young and your old, men and women will do these things. And he says, the young will see visions and the old will dream dreams. Old men and old women will dream new dreams. A good example of this is in the book of Joshua, the story of Caleb. Caleb was 80 years old when they went into the Promised Land. He was not thinking about retirement and hanging it up. I don't actually believe in retirement. I believe in refirement. And so when I stepped aside from Saddleback, I didn't say, well, I'm going to sit around and play golf the rest of my life. I hate golf. Okay. As long as you're alive, God has a dream for you. Okay. It may be in a rest home and the way you minister to people in an assisted living. But everybody can have a dream. You can have a dream to pray for those people that we were talking about.
But Caleb was 80 years old and he was not too old to dream. And he did four things. First, he visualized what God had in store for him. Okay. He saw a mountain and he goes, I want that mountain and that's going to be my homestead. And he saw the mountain and he carried the middle picture in his mind for 45 years. Second thing, he announced his intention and he said, I'm going after this. He made a public statement and he progressed from a secret desire to, to owning that mountain to a public declaration. So here's the first two steps in dreaming. You see it and then you say it. You see it and then you say it. You see it and you go, this is what I think God wants me to do. Okay. And you see it. I think God wants me to do this. And you pray about it and you get a confirmation in your heart. You get a confirmation from other people, godly people. And then you say it. You say, I'm going to do this. Like that announcement I did at the very first service at Saddleback Church. And like I just did right here. I announced enormous goals, you know, and I'm telling people where we're going in the next 10 years. You see it and you say it.
But then the third thing is you expect God to help you. And that's believing your dream will come true. You have to believe it before you see it. People say, well, I'll believe it when I see it. Well, actually, you'll see it when you believe it. Okay. And so you see it in your mind and then you believe it and then you see it in reality. And so Caleb could sense in his bones, he was confident of what God has promised. I want to challenge everybody and I hope this series will cause people to become what I call promise people. There are over 6,000 promises in the Bible and they're like blank checks waiting to be claimed. And when you go through the six phases of faith, which we discuss in this Created to Dream curriculum, I'm going to challenge everybody to get a life promise and hang on to that promise.
My promise was based on a statement about David in Acts 13:36. It's my life verse and in that verse says “David served God's purpose in his generation then he died.” I can't think of a better epitaph. I hope that when I die, people will say, Rick served God's purpose in his generation. Then he died. Who wants to stay around here anyway? When God's finished with you, I want to go on to heaven, but serving God's purpose, that which never changes in our generation in a world that's constantly changing. You do the timeless in a timely way. You do the eternal in a contemporary way. You do that which never changes in a world that's constantly changing. Get a life promise that's gonna be your promise that will hold you to your dream. And then you'll refuse to give up on it. Even though, for instance, in Caleb's life, it took him 45 years to get that dream, and he had to wander around in the desert with a bunch of unbelieving, negative thinkers. He refused to let his dream die. When he was sent in as a spy, he saw a mountain. He said, that's gonna be my mountain. 45 years later, it became his mountain.
SHELLEY: Well, Rick, thank you so much for squeezing this in between all your work on your dream to reach the entire planet for Christ.
RICK: Hahaha
SHELLEY: And now I am so excited to present session one of Created to Dream called How Faith and Dreaming Are Connected.
[MUSIC PLAYING] RICK: Hi, everybody. I'm Rick Warren, pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California. And I've got a question for you. How is your faith? Is it strong, or is it weak? Is it steady, or is it stretched? It's a very important question to be able to answer because Jesus said, "Everything is possible for the person who has faith." He also said, "According to your faith, it will be done to you." In other words, you get to choose how much God blesses your life. God says, if you'll trust me, if you believe in me, if you'll have faith in me, I will bless you. In fact, the Bible says, "Without faith, it's impossible to please God." So, there's a lot riding on your faith.
Now, let me ask you that question again. How is your faith? Would you like your faith to be stronger? Well, I hope so, because that's why we're going to do this study together. You see, faith is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised. It needs to be developed. And God uses a predictable pattern and process to build your faith. I call it the Six Phases of Faith. Now, once you understand these six phases, you're going to be able to cooperate with God in the process of strengthening your faith, building your character, and experiencing the great adventure of life in Jesus's Christ.
As a pastor, the question I'm asked probably more than any other question is this. Pastor, why is this happening to me? I just don't understand it. I don't get it. I'm ready to give up. Why?
You see, when you don't understand God's Six Phases of Faith, you get discouraged in tough times. In fact, you may even become resentful or even depressed. You're certainly going to worry. You may become fearful about the future. But most of all, you won't be able to cooperate with what God is doing in your life.
On the other hand, when you understand what we're going to look at, these Six Phases of Faith that God takes every one of us through—and he takes you through them over and over and over, by the way—then you're going to say, oh, OK, I understand now. I'm in stage 4, or I'm in stage 5, or I'm in stage 6 or stage 2. And you can relax, and you can understand what's going on, and you're not going to get discouraged when the times are tough.
Now, in this session, I want to just introduce you to all six phases. We're going to give you a little overview. And then in succeeding sessions, we're going to go to a deeper process. We're going to look at each phase of faith in the coming sessions.
Now, how does God build my faith? Well, the first phase of faith is what I call Dream. Now, God always starts with a dream. Nothing happens until somebody starts dreaming. You've got to have a dream. You've got to have an idea, a vision, a goal, a target. God wants to work in your life, but he does it starting with a dream. He gives you a dream about what he wants to do and the impact he wants to make through your life in the world.
Now, there are a lot of examples of this in the Bible. God gave Noah the dream of building an Ark. God gave Abraham the dream of being the father of a great nation. He gave Joseph the dream of being a leader who would save his people. And all through Scripture, we find that God always starts with this dream. He gave David the dream of building the temple of God. And he gave Nehemiah the dream of building the wall around Jerusalem. And he gave Paul the dream of going to Rome.
As I said, nothing happens until first you start dreaming. How do when a dream is from God, or you just made it up? I mean, how do if it's God speaking or it's the lasagna you had last night? Well, here's how you can know God's dream. It will always require faith. You see, the Bible says, "God is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of-- infinitely beyond our highest prayers, our desires, our thoughts, or hopes." That's Ephesians 3:20.
You see, if a dream comes from God, it's going to be so big, you cannot do it on your own. Did you hear that? If a dream comes from God, it is so big, you can't do it on your own. You can only do it by faith. Because if you can do it on your own, you wouldn't need faith. And if you don't need faith, you can't please God. Because as I said, the Bible says, Hebrews 11:6, "Without faith it is impossible to please God."
Now, the second way to know that a dream is from God is that God's dream never contradicts his word. In other words, he's not going to give you a dream of leaving your family and kids and moving to Hollywood to be a star because that's not a dream from God. God's dream never contradicts what he has already said in his written word. But he does start with a dream.
However, a dream is just the first phase along the line of faith. Once God has given you the dream, then you move to phase 2. And phase 2 in the Six Phases of Faith is a decision.
Now, the decision phase is when you begin to actually do something about your dream. Nothing's going to happen in your dream until you wake up and begin to put it into action. You've got to make a decision. You've got to say, I'm going to go for it. For every ten dreamers in the world, there's one decision-maker. A lot of people have dreams, but they never do anything about those dreams. A lot of people have dreams, but they never get to the second phase, to make the decision to go for it. We'll talk about that in this series, how to make that decision.
During the decision phase, you have to do a couple of things. First, you have to invest. You have to make the decision to invest your time, your money, your reputation, your energy. This is where you decide to lay it on the line, take the plunge, and go for it. It's where you say, OK, God, you told me to do this, and in faith, I'm stepping out. I'm walking on the water. I'm going to go for it. You've got to invest.
The second thing you have to do in the decision phase is you have to let go of security. And that's even harder. You see, you can't move forward in faith and hold on to the past at the same time. When God told Abraham, I'm going to make you the father of a great nation, in order for Abraham to do that, Abraham had to leave his home for an unknown destination. He didn't know where he was going. Moses, to follow God's dream, had to let go of his quiet life as a shepherd in order to lead God's people into freedom. Peter had to get out of the boat in order to walk on water. If you want to walk on water, you got to get out of the boat.
A great example of this is a trapeze artist at a circus. You've seen this. They swing out on one bar, and then they grab a hold of the other bar and swing to the other side. But the bars are far enough away from each other that you can't hang on to the first and grab the other one at the same time. At some point, you have to let go of the first trapeze bar in order to move over to grab to the next one. And for that split second, you're not holding onto anything. You're flying in mid-air. Your feet are firmly planted in mid-air holding on to nothing.
Have you ever been there in your career? Yeah, I'm sure you have, when you're leaving one job and you're waiting for another, nothing in between, and you're 100 feet up in the air with no net below and nothing to hold on to. But if you don't let go and you grab on to the vision that God wants you to have, you're just going to swing back in the old direction. And only-- you won't just swing all the way back. Have you noticed that? You swing back with lower and lower velocity until, finally, you're just hanging there with only one way out-- down. [CHUCKLES] God gives you a dream. But you have to make the decision to let go of the dream and to pursue it.
Now, once you move through phase 2, you come to the third phase. And this one is one that's a little bit more difficult. It is delay. Delay is stage 3 in the Six Phases of Faith. God will not fulfill your dream immediately. Why? Because it wouldn't take any faith. You see, there is always a delay. Listen to this. There is always a waiting period between dream and fulfillment.
God says in the Old Testament book of Habakkuk, "These things that I plan for you won't happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair, for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient!" This is God talking to some of you directly. "They will not be overdue a single day." That's Habakkuk 2:3 in The Living Bible. You see, in this phase 3, you start asking the When question. When, Lord? When are you going to answer my prayer? When are you going to remove that barrier? When is the dream going to be fulfilled? When is everything going to fall into place?
It's the waiting stage. Have you ever been in a hurry when God wasn't? Yes. That's the hardest thing in the world to do. God can really be irritating sometimes, can't he? Because you're ready, but God isn't. Or you think you're ready, but God knows you're not. You see, God often takes a delay. In fact, he always takes a delay. Why? Because he wants you to work on you. And he wants to work on you before he works on the project. God has to make some changes in you before he can bring the fulfillment of that dream.
Now, this is a principle taught all through Scripture. Noah waited 120 years from the time that he started building the ark until it began to rain. That's a long time to wait. Abraham was told he'd be the father of a great nation, but he didn't even have a child until he was 99 years old. That's a long time to wait. Jesus waited 30 years in a carpenter's shop before he started his ministry.
Now, if Abraham and Jesus and Moses and everybody else had to go through the waiting period, why shouldn't we? You'll go through phase 3, too—delay. You see, waiting teaches us to trust God. It teaches us that his timing is perfect. Did you hear that? God's timing is perfect. And we have to learn that there's a difference. And this is really a mark of maturity. There's a difference between no and not yet. Your children have to learn that. You have to learn that.
Many times, God says to you, not yet, and you're thinking he's saying no. He's not saying no. You see, that's why the most common reaction in the delay phase is doubt. We start doubting, and we think, well, maybe I missed God's vision. Maybe I did something wrong. But a delay is not a denial. Get that. A delay never destroys God's purpose for your life, never, never, never. The purpose of the delay phase is actually a part of the plan. It's to teach you that you can trust God, and that you can be patient with his timing, and that his timing is perfect. So how do you handle the waiting rooms of life? Some of you are in the waiting rooms right now. Well, it reveals your faith. Once you start moving through the delay period, you're going to come to phase 4.
And now you come to fourth phase, and it's difficulty. And you say, oh, no, we moved from dream to decision to delay, and now difficulty? Yes. You see, not only do you get to wait, but you're going you're going to have problems while you wait. [LAUGHS] It's part of God's plan.
Now, there are two primary kinds of problems—circumstances and critics. And both of these will delay and add difficulty to your dream. When God gives you a dream, there are going to be circumstances that hold you back and critics that put you down to make things difficult.
Imagine the difficulty Noah had. How would you like to have to build a floating zoo? People said he was nuts. Imagine being Noah's kids. What's your dad doing out there in the front yard? He's building an ark. How about Joseph? Joseph had a dream of becoming a ruler. Then he's sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, falsely accused of rape, thrown into prison, and forgotten by everybody. You talk about difficulties on top of delay. After Moses died, Joshua led the people to the promised land. But when they got there, they discovered it was full of giants, big people much stronger than they were. And even in the promised land, there are problems.
Because God is working on your faith, and he's working on you. Why does God allow this? Well, the Bible says this. "At present time, you may be temporarily harassed by all kinds of trials. It's no accident. It happens to prove your faith, which is infinitely more valuable than gold." That's 1 Peter 1:7.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY: Before Rick starts on the fifth phase of faith, I wanted to jump in here and remind us that we’re listening to the first session of Created to Dream by Rick Warren. And I need to mention something I didn’t get to do at the outset of our interview, and that is by just listening to this podcast you can get a 15% discount on any subscription plan at Study Gateway, the streaming Bible study service where you can watch Created to Dream and thousands of other Bible studies. To get your 15% discount on a plan for yourself, your small group, or your church, use the code PODCAST15 at checkout.
And, for a complete experience with Created to Dream, take advantage of our publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide, published by HarperChristian Resources. This study guide gives you the discussion questions for your group and the personal exercises to dig deeper into the scriptures on your own between sessions. Get all the details at Studygateway.com.
And now, let’s return to Rick Warren and find out what the next phase of faith is.
[MUSIC PLAYING] RICK: Now finally, when you get through the delay and you get through the difficulties, you come to the next phase. The difficulties become so bad you've come to your limit. You tried everything. You've exhausted all your options. And now you've reached the fifth phase of faith, which is dead end. [LAUGHS] You say, oh, thanks, Rick, thanks a lot. Well, dead ends are part of God's plan for your life. The situation deteriorates from difficult to impossible. And now it looks hopeless. It looks like there's no way out. It looks like there's no alternative. And I want to just say right now, if you're watching this and you're at this stage, congratulations, because you're in good company.
Even Paul, probably the greatest Christian who ever lived next to Jesus himself, went through dead ends. In fact, one time he wrote, "At that time, we were completely overwhelmed, the burden was more than we could bear." Have you ever felt like that? He said, "In fact, we told ourselves that this was the end. Yet we believe now that we had this sense of impending disaster so that we might learn to trust, not in ourselves, but in God who can raise the dead." That's 1 Corinthians 1:8-9.
Now, if God can raise people from the dead physically, he can raise people from the dead emotionally. He can raise a dead marriage. He can resurrect a dead career. He can resurrect a dead health problem. He can make things better. And if God can raise the dead, he can do anything. Now, at the dead end stage, you start asking, what's going on, Lord? Did I miss your will? Have I missed your vision? Did I just make up this dream? Is it just something I thought up?
Now, the best example of this is when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. They had had 10 plagues in Egypt. And Pharaoh finally says, OK, you guys, get out of here, good riddance. Take off. Leave. And the children of Israel leave. But one day later, Pharaoh changes his mind. And he starts coming after them with the power and velocity of the Egyptian army. Now, the children of Israel are at the Red Sea, and there are mountains on either side. And the Red Sea is in front of them. And the enemy army is in hot pursuit behind them ready to kill them. This is what you call Gods cul-de-sac. You've been in it many times, and you're going to be in it many more times in the future, where it seems like there's no way out. Now, the Bible says that the people were terrified. And they started complaining. And they said, we should have just stayed as slaves in Egypt rather than die at the Red Sea. Now, think about that. We should have stayed as slaves? Some people actually prefer living in bondage that they know rather than taking the risk of something they don't know. And they don't want to take a risk of faith. They'll put up with a bad situation, in a marriage, in a career, in a church, in a job or whatever, that is certainly not God's will, rather than step out in faith, take the risk, and trust God for a miracle.
Now, it's interesting, in the Book of Exodus, that the place where the children of Israel were hemmed in between these mountains and the Red Sea in front of them was called Baal-zephon. Baal-zephon-- do you know what that means? It means God's hidden treasure. They're in a cul-de-sac, and it looks like no way out. But they're exactly where God wanted them to be. Now, if you're in a dead end right now in any area of your life, you're exactly where God wants you to be. God knows where you are. He's got your number. He knows every hair on your head. He put you in that dead end for a purpose. You need to learn to say, dead ends are part of God's plan for my life. Why? Because you're going to have a lot of them. You're just in phase 5.
Now, what is the best response to a dead end? Well, the answer is faith, expectation and faith. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:10, "He has rescued us. And so he'll rescue us in the future. And we're confident that he will continue to rescue us." Over in Psalms 27 verse 13 it says, "I'm expecting the Lord to rescue me again." So once again, I'm going to see his goodness to me. You need to expect the Lord to rescue you when you're in the dead end.
A positive confident expectation that God will rescue you is the key to moving out of phase 5, dead end, into the sixth phase of faith, which is deliverance. Now we get to the good stuff. In the end, God comes in, and he delivers us. He does a miracle. He provides a solution. He gives us the answer. He fulfills the dream. And in Moses' case, God splits the Red Sea. In Abraham's case, he and Sarah miraculously conceive a child. In Joseph's case, all of a sudden, the dream comes true, and in a single day, he's released from the dungeon, and he's made second in command of Egypt.
Now, of course, the greatest miracle from dead end to deliverance is when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. God loves to bring crucifixions and turn them into resurrections. He loves to turn hopeless situations into deliverance. Why? Because he gets the credit. He gets the glory. He specializes in turning hopeless situations into miracles. So the best response to a dead end is to simply keep on expecting God to act. Keep on believing, keep on praying, keep on trusting.
Now, let me ask you a very pointed question. Knowing what you're going through right now, what are you expecting God to do in your life? What are you expecting God to do in your life? Without even knowing you, I can tell you what he's doing. God is doing exactly what you expect him to do.
Because the Bible tells us that every time God moves out of heaven and moves on Earth and does a miracle, it's because somebody believed. The Bible says, "According to your faith, it will be done to you." This is why this series, the Six Phases of Faith, may be the most important series you've ever gone through.
Now, let's just do a little review. We're going you an overview of where we're going in these six sessions. First, what is the dream God has given you? That's phase 1. Now, if you don't have a dream, you need to start praying. Because God has a dream for your life, you just need to key into it. You can say, God give me your dream. You don't make up your own dream. You pray to say, God, what is your dream for my life? If you don't have God's dream for your life, friend, you're not really living. You're just existing. God didn't plan that for your life. He wants you to live the full life of abundance that he intended for you. And that means fulfilling the purpose that you were created for. When you discover that purpose, that dream that God wants you to have, then you go for it, and you make the decision.
Now, some of you are there right now. You're in phase 2. You have the dream from God, but you haven't stepped across the line yet. You haven't made the decision to go for it. And I hope, in this series, you're going to stop sitting on the fence because God's word for you at phase 2 is real simple. Go for it. Take it on. Move out. You've got to move it, move it. [LAUGHS]
Some of you have made that decision, and now you're at phase 3. You got the dream, you made the decision, and what happened? Big delay. You've made that decision, but it is being delayed. And you're asking God, when, Lord? When is it going to happen? Why haven't my prayers been answered? Why haven't I seen any progress? That's OK. You didn't miss God's will. You're in God's waiting room. Don't take a detour. Don't take a shortcut. Don't get ahead of God. Wait for him to open the right door, or you'll go through the wrong one.
Some of you have gone through the delay, and you're now in phase 4. And you've got difficulties. So let me ask you, what difficulties are you facing right now while you're waiting for God's dream to be fulfilled in your life? This is a test. God says, I know exactly what you're going through. I see it. I'm watching. Don't think I've forgotten you. I haven't forgotten you. This is just part of the plan. You're in the difficulty stage.
Some of you have actually made it to phase 5. And right now, you're thinking, I've hit the wall. I'm at the dead end. I'm ready to give up. Well, you're right where God wants you to be. And you're right where this series is going to take you on to deliverance. So keep on believing. Don't give up. You're on the verge of phase 6, and phase 6 is deliverance. You see, you've got to expect and trust God to deliver you. He will. Remember, I've said it now—this is the third time. "According to your faith, it will be done unto you."
God is faithful. And what he promises to do he will do. Where God guides, God provides. But it doesn't happen overnight. You've got to go through all six phases-- dream, decision, delay, difficulty, and finally, dead end, the death of a vision. And then it comes to deliverance.
Now, I've given you a lot to talk about in your small group. But I want to pray with you before you get started with your discussion time, as we start what may be the most important series you've ever been through. Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
Let's pray together. Father, I thank you that you don't just put us on Earth to wander around, to just drift, but that you actually have a dream for our lives. Lord, many of us haven't had that dream because we've been afraid to believe, to risk, to take faith. And others of us have gotten sidelined or detoured by our dream for our lives instead of trusting your dream. Help us in this series to hear clearly from you what is your plan and purpose and dream for our lives. And then, God, give us the courage to make the decision to go for it, to be willing to invest time, money, energy, effort in all that's going on. Help us to be ready to let go of security, like that trapeze artist who hangs in mid-air for that split second. Help us to grab on to the other side, but in that moment of delay that we come to next, that we'll not get discouraged.
Father, for those who are facing difficulties and those who are facing even a dead end right now, may they hang on and get to deliverance. May they not give up and die in the desert, but may they enter the promised land. I pray, Father, that you'll strengthen all of our lives with faith in this series. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.
[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY: At times like this, I am SO PROUD to be able to say, “that’s my pastor.” I love how his message today rings so true to what we experience. Yes, we have a dream, but yes, we have all been frustrated by delay, challenged by difficulties, and we all come up against that dead end! Somehow it’s reassuring to know that those phases are just a part of the journey.
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