Hello and welcome to the Grove Church podcast. I'm Charlie Lofton, the lead pastor
there. And we are so glad that you are joining us. Whether you are
a member and you're just catching up on a sermon that you missed or you're
someone who's brand new, we are really glad that you are joining us. And if
you are new in some way, and I know that a lot of people will
do that, will listen to sermons first before they visit. I want you to
know that we would love to meet you at any point. You can join us
live in our services on Sunday nine and 1030 or our
streaming service at 1030. Either way, we would love to be able
to get to know you. And regardless of why you are here
listening to this sermon today, thank you so much for joining us.
All right, well, hey, good morning. I'm Mark.
I think my body, my mind's almost caught up with my body. So
the place that we were just a few days ago, it's
09:00 p.m. Right now. So I was up at about three this
morning. So I'm finishing my day, so I'm doing
all right. Yeah. This trip that I got to
take here last week, last couple of weeks,
I took my nine year old Jack with me,
and that was a really awesome experience,
if you've been tracking with me at all. We went and
supported this group in Thailand
there at the end of the year, last year, November 1 December.
And his twin sister Darcy went with
us, and she loves watching kiddos. And so she went
and she did childcare during these meetings. And
when we did that, I was like, all right, jack, man, I've got this trip
coming up in March, and I want you to go with me. And
your superpower, her superpower is watching the kiddos. Your superpower is making
people laugh. So just get ready, and if you've been around him, you know,
he will at least attempt to make you laugh.
And it was really interesting, for one, just
because it's worth sharing. And he's not in here. Sometimes he's in here and he's
not today. For the longest, twins are
just interesting to me. So for the longest, he didn't really
talk. He just didn't really want
to walk. None of the things. He just let his sister
tie his shoes. Like, all the things, she just fills all the space and he
just is kind of there and you remove her from the equation and,
boy, he was out of control. I just didn't know he had that much
personality. He was big as life and seemed to manage
all the things pretty well. It's interesting because for
them, our family, their two older brothers, who are now
21 and 18, we lived in this
place in South Asia for three years, from 2007 to 2010.
And so we've got all these experiences, and we've got these
pictures, and I go often, and so they hear me talking
about it, but they haven't personally experienced it. And so
it was pretty cool because this trip in particular, we went back and did some
of the things, and we're around some of the areas that he's heard stories
about. And one of those things, there's this place
way up in the mountains, really beautiful place
where we would go, and there's a school there where we would learn language, do
a little bit more language intensive. And it
is. It's a five hour passenger train ride up
in the mountains. And then you get in a taxi, and there's these little
windy little roads that you get up there to where the school is, and then
up there, it's basically, you're walking everywhere, and it's just real steep little trails
and things. And at the top of that hill, there's this place
where there are four stores, and in a local language that's
called Char Ducan. And the four stores basically
sell the same thing, which is something that I always think is kind of funny.
How do you compete when there's. Anyway, it's an interesting
little setup, and one of them
has chocolate pancakes. Now,
I know that's probably not what you expected me to say. There's a lot of
really good food that's very. But this place does a
pancake, like, I can't even explain to you. I'm not even sure if
it's like, if you would call it a pancake. It's like, folding
over the side of your plate, and it's about that thick. I'm sure they
use, like, maybe some cake batter or something, because it's not just your normal
pancake. It's chocolate, and it's got chocolate syrup, and it's got
chocolate chips. And one of the things I was really excited about was
to get back to this place. I knew we were going to be nearby and
have this chocolate pancake. The people there are so welcoming and
so nice, and this pancake's incredible. The one sad thing about it,
Jack doesn't eat chocolate. So I was trying to introduce
him to this beautiful thing, and because he doesn't like chocolate, he just kind of
didn't really appreciate it. We got him a banana pancake, and now, I found out
all he wants is banana pancake. So he did at least get to experience it
a little bit. But I promise you
that I'm not just pulling your leg like that place actually
exists. Sometimes I wonder when I tell stories, like, I'll talk to somebody later. Are
you just making that story up? I promise you I could take you
there right now. Now, I've got other witnesses. You could
ask Jack. He's experienced it. We even got some pictures while we're up there. So
I could say, hey, this is what this place looks like. And I could introduce
you to this place and tell you that it's there, that it exists, and
that the people there are pleasant and would invite you in and take care of
you. Well, but it's still going to be my experience.
And at some point, for you to experience it, you would have to have
the belief that it's there. And that it's so incredible that it is
worth the two hour flight to the two hour flight to the 16 hours flight
to the five hour train ride to get to that place and
enjoy that pancake. Now, I'm not saying you should do that because it's not
that good, but it's pretty close. But in the
same way, this question that we're going to be dealing with this morning is,
is God even real? Does he exist
and does he care? Does he want to be known and want to be
involved in what's going on and in your life? And
I feel as I've prepared for this morning and thought about this for several weeks
now that a bit like that. I can tell you how incredible it
is. I can tell you the experiences that I've had, the reasons
why, man, I love him
so much and want to know him so badly. But that would be my
experience. And I think a critical part of this is
just the invitation. So I'll kind of start with the end in mind here. The
invitation for you to believe
it. And then what does it mean if you
actually believe that? What
actions, what perspective
is an automatic knee jerk to the
belief that there is a real God and that
he wants to be in relationship with you? Because those implications
are pretty massive. And
if I go back in my journey a little bit. It was
fall of 1997. Terry and I had just gotten married that
summer. The next semester of my
junior year had started. We were in a full swing of
football practice and games. In a kind
of a strange, peculiar set of events. This guy gets my name
and calls me up and asks me to go grab some chinese food.
And in this town that we were in, there was no good chinese
food, but he was buying, and I was a college
student that was just married. And so I was going to let him buy my
lunch especially. He was talking about some Jesus stuff and some Bible
studies, and I had been to church enough that I was willing to
go let him buy my chinese food and talk about Jesus for a little bit.
And so we get there and I'll just say,
God has really used this guy. Now he lives in
northwest Arkansas, and we still meet together. He has continually
used him. And as I try to process what is
it that was different in this encounter and the
way that this guy had approached truths about God than
anybody before that? Because I had grown up around church, my parents
faith is vibrant. And so when I meet this
guy, it's not that I didn't know things, and it's not that he
necessarily taught me any new information that I didn't know. Maybe little bits,
but I had pretty much gotten the big picture. But what
I found out was much of that was a hand me down
kind of faith. I had it, but I
hadn't really thought that deeply about it, been that thoughtful
about it. And most of these interactions with
this guy, as we were looking at passages or we were talking about different things,
passages of scripture or talking about different things, he brought me
to a decision point. If
this is true, then this is the automatic reaction to that
truth. If there is a God that exists
and he created everything, he created you,
then the reaction to that is to worship
him. Big right, and to give him the worship that
he deserves. It affects my things that I
do, the things that I don't do. I mean, if that is true, what
pursuit could be greater than to
pursue to know that living God, if eternity is
real, if it really isn't just we live and we die and we go back
into the ground. And if there is this everlasting life
that also had massive impacts on my moments,
my days, my minutes right now,
if this Bible really does contain
answers and truth, then my
pursuit of knowing it, of memorizing it, of
meditating on it, it becomes not
just a kind of side hobby, it becomes a
core pursuit for me. It just felt like
every time I get around this guy, even today, it's like these decision
points. Instead of being on the
roundabout and just continuing to drive in a circle. This is something
I've noticed that's happened a lot in northwest Arkansas. Now we're
getting these roundabouts everywhere. In fact, somebody the other day showed me a picture of
a car that was trying to take it and was going too fast and slipped
and ended up in the ditch. And I don't know if you've noticed
this, but people don't know how to do roundabouts. They
don't. I think we're getting better at it, as if I'm judging us as a
whole. Now that they're everywhere, people tend to do better at
we. When we were living overseas, roundabouts were a commonplace.
And big, huge roundabouts, too. I'm talking. There would be,
like eight or nine different offshoots from this big
roundabout. And Terry and I were laughing about this last night on this
trip. I was with this younger person who was living there, and he just
finally, it's like, it hit him. He's like, man, because we're driving and we're using
Google maps, and he says, man, when you
guys lived here, you didn't have a smartphone, did
you? And I said, man, actually we
didn't. And he's like, well, how did you navigate driving around
this megacity with all the roads and all the things? I was like,
man, we had a paper map.
And let me explain what it looked like. It was called an iker, and it
was about this thick, and it was the whole city. But then there would be
a page that was know zoomed in on one part of
the city, these few streets right here. And Terry would sit
in the passenger seat, and she would try to work the book and
figure out where we were going, and I would drive. And
it became commonplace that the boys in the backseat would say, oh,
daddy, another uturn, dad. Because we would make so many
uturns. And I love roundabouts because
we could just get on a roundabout and just keep on
circling, and we could look at the book and try to figure out which one
of these offshoots we were going to take, and we could be on that roundabout,
y'all. No joke. I mean, there were some times we wrote a roundabout a long
time, but that was okay because we weren't making a mistake.
We weren't going the wrong way. We're just hitting pause
while we tried to make the right decision. And I feel
like on some of these things that are just true and people of
faith, me, sometimes we get in this place that we're just
on the roundabout. We don't want to
commit too much and make some sort of wrong decision.
We don't want to think that deeply about the difference
between what is true and what is false. And so sometimes
we can just kind of get on the roundabout and write it. And when I
met this guy, I think that's exactly where I was on most of the
things of faith. I was just on the roundabout kind of
holding my ticket to heaven and waiting it out, and then really
making most of my decisions just based on what felt good to me or what
made sense to me. And he just wasn't going to put up with
it. He brought me to these decisive moments
where I had to decide whether I believe this stuff reals or
not. And proverbs says this, it
says verse 20, I mean, chapter 23, verse
23, buy
truth and don't sell it. Buy
wisdom, instruction and understanding.
Buy truth and don't sell it. When you
find truth, you hold on to it with
everything that you've got. You look for it,
you search for it. And when you find that something is true,
you respond to that with a death
grip. And one of the things, just as
an example, one of the things that I found true is
that if this good news that we have the
gospel, if there really is a creator God and
he really does want to know us, and this thing that we're celebrating
in a few weeks, that man, he sent his son
God in the flesh, the image of the invisible God,
he displayed the character and the nature of God before us,
and he gave up his life and then he was
resurrected from the dead. And my faith in that,
your faith in that is possible to make me clean of my sin and
righteous before God. And in that faith I can know him
and be in relationship with him. If that's true,
that good news demands to be told,
it demands to be proclaimed. It can't be something that
I just say, oh, I believe this, but I don't really ever talk
about it. I kind of keep it hid that I believe it. If I believe
that that's true and it's the answer and hope for me for life
and peace, and it's the answer and hope for you, and it's the answer and
hope for the whole planet,
then I can't keep that quiet.
In Romans, chapter one. I love the way that Paul says
this. I am not ashamed of this good
news. I'm not ashamed of this
truth. For it is the power of God for
salvation to everyone who believes. For in it
the righteousness of God is revealed, beginning and ending
from faith to faith, as it is written from
Habakkuk, the righteous shall live by
faith, that this righteousness is possible from God
by faith, and that this good news is the very power of
God. And I'm not ashamed of it. In fact, I can't stop
talking about it, and I believe that it's powerful,
that it can't be stopped. There's this
poet that I listened to a few years ago, and
he talks about this and know the gospel is like a
lion. You don't have to really help it out.
You just have to unlock the cage and unleash it.
That's what I believe about truth. And I think that's what
Paul's talking about here with the gospel. It is the very power of
God. It leaves no doubt. It just needs
to be let out. And so I don't have to do any great
sales job, or I don't have to beat anybody over the head
with something. I can simply let the truth reveal
itself and ask the questions
that demand to be asked.
The truth doesn't have to be argued or defended,
just experienced. And
this truth about who God is, I love the
fact that I can be in a conversation. And I
watched this guy that was helping me
the first time. He took me to a college campus, and he
started to talk to somebody about Jesus. I got real
scared, and I thought, man, this is making me uncomfortable, and I don't want to
be at this table, and I don't want to be around this guy. And then
I started to figure out that what he did was very different than what I
had experienced in the past. Basically, he
had this conversation where both people were offering up their
questions about God and offering up the way
that they understood things worked. And both sides, both he
and the person that he was talking to, were offering up questions to
one another to try on these different beliefs and to
see is there truth there. Because, again, truth reveals
itself. The power of God doesn't need any help.
And so I kind of have always just taken that
there is a lot of incredible truth. In fact, I was thinking about this this
morning. I've got this bracelet I've been wearing for a while now, and on it,
you can't even hardly read it, but it says asatoma
Sadgamaya. And that's
in the dialect of India. And what it's saying is,
pursue truth or
God, please take me to truth and away from untruth.
And it's a part of a chant that's been said in India for a long,
long time. And that statement, that
prayer, wouldn't you say that prayer as
well? Oh, God, please lead me to
truth and away from
falsehood. And so in my personal devotion, this
has just become a part of my prayer, my day in and day out.
It's something that I want to ask for, that I would know the difference between
truth and untruth, and that he would lead me to
truth. And so
I challenge you with that. If truth is
something you buy and you don't sell,
then you go looking for it and you ask all the questions.
And so when it comes to this question of is God real?
In Romans chapter one, a little bit further on, it says, for the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men, who, by their
unrighteousness, suppress the truth.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God
has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely
his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly
perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things
that have been made so that they are without
excuse. So God
has revealed himself.
This intricate design of the universe points to
a creator God. And the deeper you get into
science, the deeper you get into whatever study you want to go after,
the deeper you get, the more it reveals that there is this
crazy, intricate design and this insane amount
of very detailed nature of
creation, and it points to a creator.
And he says he's revealed himself. It's interesting, all the things that it calls out,
his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power, his divine nature.
And it has been clear. It is
there. It is plain,
not complicated, to the point that he says, there's no
excuse, and you could travel the world over,
and people have noticed this. That's the
reason why there's a natural tendency to worship
something, because you look at creation and you go,
man, this didn't just happen.
One of the things that happened with Jack, we're driving through this crazy
hustle and bustle of a city, and there's a cow right in the middle of
the road. And he's not used to seeing cows in the middle of the road
anywhere, much less in the middle of a big city.
And so we had to talk about, why is this cow in the middle of
the road? And it's been a big, huge
learning thing for me to get that these ancient cultures, a
native american culture, you go where you want to. This
cow, for an ancient civilization, this
cow provides milk. This cow
provides dung that's used for heat,
both to warm yourself, but also to cook your food.
This cow is a provider of the things that the culture
needs. The river is also worshipped, and the
river, it provides water to the land to grow the
crops that provide the food. And if you look at it, you go, yeah, it
would be very easy to look to these things and to go, oh, these things
are providing for me. These things are my
God. And to miss the fact that there is a God
that created those things, right? And so that's what he
says here. This is the natural tendency that people move
from man. It's clear it's there,
but they begin to suppress the truth
and push it down. It goes on to say in verse 21, for although
they knew God, they did not honor him as
God or give thanks to him. That would be the natural reaction.
He's revealed himself. The reaction would be man to,
yes, I want to worship this God. I want to honor him. I want to
give thanks to him for all that he's done. But instead, they
became futile in their thinking, again, suppressing
truth. And their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to
be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of their mortal
God for images that look like mortal man
and birds and animals and creeping things. This is another
thing. Probably the first time that Jack has ever seen an idol, a
statue that is there to
represent something that I give my worship to. And this is what we
do. Mia, maybe you don't have a wooden statue or a
metal statue in your house that you're giving worship to or
that you're focusing your attention towards, but
we give our attention to the things that we think provide for us.
Maybe it's the worship of a job or a relationship
or something beautiful that God, creator
God, has given to you. But instead of giving
him the honor, instead of giving him the thanks, you've begun to worship
the thing that you can see, that you can touch, that you can feel,
that you begin to forget that he's
the one that provided it. Truth is
this incredible God has revealed himself and wants to be
known. But we're real quick to just reduce it to
idols and not to worship him in all that he
is. I don't know what that is about us. I don't know if it's just
too big to get our mind around this element of faith
that we can't fully get in. So there's this distance between what we
know and what's plain to us and what is unknown. And so
that distance, that faith that it requires is really
difficult sometimes, I think when the tough things
of life come, I know this has been true for us. I mean, the
tough things make me stop and go, is he really
involved? Is he really even there?
When is he going to show up? Or where did he go? Which is
interesting, really, because from the perspective of now, being a
parent, I know that I have
a tendency and a desire to protect my children from every
possible bad thing that could happen to them in every hardship and
everything. I don't want to have any scrapes or bruises. I don't want them to
have to get their feelings hurt. I don't want any of the tough stuff. I
want all the easy stuff. And at the same time, you and I both
know that a life with no bumps and bruises, a life with
no tough stuff, results in a very weak person.
That it is the tough stuff that grows them. It is the
difficult things that make them strong. And when it comes to
faith and believing in this big God, it is the hardest
times. I bet we could share stories. This morning I look back
at the hardest times and coming through those, those are the moments that that faith
muscle for us. For me, that's when it grew.
If you look at Hebrews, the chapter about faith, chapter
eleven, it says this, and without
Faith it is impossible to please him.
For whoever would draw near to God must believe that
he exists and that he rewards
those who seek him.
Right? He loves faith.
Our faith in him is the thing that God, it makes him happy,
it pleases him. The thing that we can't necessarily see,
the thing that we can't put together on a spreadsheet
for. Whoever would do that though, would draw near to him. Must believe
that he's real. And not only that he's real, but that
he's actively involved and he rewards those who seek
him. He's not know this
chapter. It's interesting talking about the tough stuff because it gives
a list of all these different people, Noah and Abraham
and Sarah and Enoch and all these different people
of faith. And it has this statement in there where it says
they died not having seen the end of their
faith. It's hard circumstance after hard
circumstance. Tough decisions that they made, believing that God was
real in the face. I mean, I can't even imagine what it would be like
to be Noah. Anytime I try to put my mind, I'm supposed to build this
know, and everybody thinks I'm crazy. I'm not so sure I'm
not crazy. I mean, how many days do you wake up and go, man, I'm
going to do this again today. This crazy thing that doesn't make any
sense because I believe and then get to the end of it and not really
ever see the end of that. And
yet these are the moments that these
people made God really happy in the way that they
believed and took action to their faith.
And so I guess that's the question this morning. When you look at
your life, does your life reveal a
person that believes that God exists
and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him? You
know,
I told this story to Jack many times before,
and I don't think he really knew how big the monkeys
are up in this hill place that we went, but they're not little monkeys.
They're like, up this tall,
big monkeys. There's
this story that he's heard me tell about going up to this charducon from
the place that we were staying with his older brothers. And at
Chardukon, I got some mango
juice boxes and some crackers, gave him some snacks,
and we were making our way back down the trail from the
stores. And on the trail, a monkey met us. And I'm
talking about this big, ugly monkey, and he
looked at me and he made his teeth, which
is, let me know I'm coming after you. Be scared of
me. But I was looking at him like, all right, we're fine. They're
behind me. I'm between them and the monkey. He's going to end up going away.
I just need to stare him back down. But then I saw him go like
this and kind of glance over to the side. Oh, no. I
looked over, and there was another monkey over here. And so the two of them
had a plan. I don't know if they were just hanging out, waiting for somebody
to come down the trail. I don't know how thought out their plan was, but
they were definitely about to get my attention and then get the boxes from
the boys. And I had to make a decision
which one of those monkeys I was going to go after.
I couldn't go after both of them.
My point is, I promise there's a point,
is that instead of just being on the
roundabout of faith,
not willing to really make a decision
and go for it, to follow him with your
whole heart, to make known his gospel
with everybody that, you know, an all in kind of thing,
instead of just being on the roundabout and not really choosing and
just standing there in decision.
I'm going to challenge this as we walk through this Easter,
to choose the monkey of faith and to charge it.
Go all in. And that's what happened. I charged this one monkey, and the other
one ran away. But I had to make a decision.
And I think that truth is found in those
moments that we do. We don't just continue to
pretend like two things can coexist.
There is a God. He is real.
He wants to know us. And even went through all the trouble to send his
son to live and to die, to be raised again so that we could be
made clean. He loves us that much, that kind of love. God so
loved the world that big
that y'all demands a response, and not just a half
hearted one, an all in kind of response.
I had a friend one time that I was
sharing these things with that looked
at me and said, man, I think you actually believe this stuff,
which I thought, you know what? You could have talked to me a few
years ago and maybe said the opposite. I'm not so sure you really believe
it. If I spent some time with you,
would I walk away? Say, man, I think this person actually believes
this stuff is real. Not just a Sunday
activity, but that it's real.
It earlier, in Hebrews, chapter eleven
says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.
It's going to require some faith,
even though we can't put all the pieces together.
But man, in that moment of
believing big and following wholeheartedly, our
God meets us there. We have to believe that he
exists, that he wants to and
loves to reward those who earnestly seek
him. Let me pray that we would father, I am
just convicted that
it is easy to get distracted or to
suppress the truth, because
some of these truths require things from me
that may be uncomfortable.
And so it's easy for me to suppress it, to dumb
it down to something that's very manageable for me,
instead of letting the truth
that you exist, that you reward those that earnestly seek you,
letting that be huge in my life,
honoring you, giving thanks to you, not bringing
you down, but in truth, worshipping you and following
you as you really deserve,
proclaiming you as you would with something
that's this good of news.
So, father, I pray that these days, these weeks, building up to Easter, that this
would be a special time where we pull
back all the fog and all the clutter, and we
look at you in truth and we respond appropriately
to your glory.
Thanks again for joining us on our sermon podcast, and you can learn more about
us@thegrovechurch.org. And if you go to thegrovechurch.org
connect, there's a form you could fill out. Just let us know that you've been
listening. And if you want to dig deeper on some of these topics that we
cover in our sermon podcast or just in other issues of
dealing with culture or theology, those kinds of things, you can check out our
cultivate podcast, which is on the same feed. However
you found this particular podcast so, again, this is Charlie,
the lead pastor at the grove, and thank you so much for joining us.