Where does the strength come from to finish the race?

A warrior gets hyped into frenzy with the trumpet and battle drum to start the fight. And we can get worked up to an emotional high. You go to a marriage conference and come out ready to tackle every small sin and lay down your life sacrificially. But two weeks later you are back in the same muddy ruts, squabbling and too lazy to go a mile, much less the extra mile. 

How many of you have laid out a plan for a project, staying up half the night because you are so excited about the details that you can’t wait to get started. And 2 years later, there the project sits, half done and untouched in months.

So where does the strength come from to finish strong?

When the music stops playing, when you are dead tired, when no one else can see you, when no one else cares anymore. How do you continue?

Our elder brother finished strong, for the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now set down at the right hand of the Father in glory. 

The Joy of the Lord was his strength, and the Joy of the Lord is your strength. Strength not for a day, not for a year, strength till the end.

It is not an emotional kick. 

There is no option to leave the battle against sin or against the attacks of the world half done. You can’t pause and take a time out. If you are relying on your own motivation and own strength you will inevitably burn out. The answer is not grit your teeth and try harder. The answer is rest in the joy of the Lord and then double down. 

The current times require steadiness, steadfastness. Some of you are new in this community and maybe riding the excitement of getting plugged in. That is not a bad thing. But remember excitement will ebb and flow, and your calling is to be constant day in and day out and that can only come with eyes fixed on the only one that cannot be moved. 

Zach Browning – July 28, 2024

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In 2 Chronicles 34, we read that King Josiah began his reign in Judah at a mere eight years old. He was a good king, as the Chronicler summarizes, “And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the ways of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” (v. 2). 

We are told that when he was still young, at the age of 16, he began to seek the Lord. And then when he turned 20 – an adult in Israel for at this age a man could serve in war and in the temple – he began his work of reform, purging the land of pagan high places, images, and altars. He tore them down, smashed them into pieces, and scattered them on the graves of the pagan priests. 

Now one lesson that we can take from the life of King Josiah is this – that early piety is possible and acceptable to God. By this I mean that our children may seek after the God of their fathers, as the text says of Josiah, while they are still young (v. 3). 

They do this at first in step with you, their parents. They learn by your instruction and by imitation. But as they grow up, you must be preparing them to seek the Lord on their own two feet, you must be readying them to serve the Lord as adults.  

When Josiah became an adult and came into the fullness of his kingship, his immediate action of cleansing the land was the fruit of seeking after God in his childhood. It was the result of his growing and sincere devotion to the God of his fathers. 

And so the exhortation this morning is for our children, especially our many young adults in their teen years here in this room. You are becoming your own person. You are now responsible for many things, and yet still look to your parents for many others. One thing that you must begin to take on as your own is your faith. You must begin to cultivate an earnest relationship with Christ that is not merely mediated through your parents. 

This is so that, when you come of age and leave home, you are equipped and eager to follow Christ wherever He takes you in this world. And hopefully, like Josiah, you can smash some idols along the way.

Shawn Paterson – July 28, 2024

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If you are a Christian, then God has performed a miracle of resurrection.
There was a time when you were dead, room temperature, face down in the gutter with yesterday’s sins congealing around you.

We all were. It was a mass grave. We’d followed the lusts of our flesh and our spiteful ambitions, and it hadn’t helped a bit. We were all born with the cursed birthmark that signified our doom, and nothing in man’s power could remove it.

But in defiance of all expectation, the King of Heaven looked on his wayward creation with pity, for His love is an everlasting love, higher than the firmament and deeper than the sea, older than time, fiercer than death.

And compelled by nothing other than his own good pleasure, he stooped down to that gutter, lifted your head out of it, and breathed in your nostrils the breath of life.

And in raising you up out of that gutter, he bound you in covenant to Jesus Christ, the God-man, such that where He is, you may also be. Just as He is seated in glory, so are you with him seated in glory.
This work of resurrection, this raising up and enthroning, is a flaming example of the kindness of God that shines from age to age like the golden dome of a cathedral.

It is the free and uncompelled gift of God that gave you faith to rest in Christ’s work. You were in the gutter, but God showed you mercy.

So the fact that you may come into the presence of God now, unashamed and clothed in your Sunday best, is gift. If you had had your way, you would still be a decaying corpse. Not much room for high-mindedness there.

But thanks be to God that He did what you could not. You are a resurrected saint, a new creation, and you are to get busy. This is more grace: you are an actual member of the team, you are an ingredient in the recipe, a part of the body with a job to do. So whatever you have been given to do, work at it with all your heart, working as to the Lord and not for men.

And when you stray back to the gutter, when you splash in the slime of your old sins, come to your Father for cleansing, again and again. You are His workmanship, He stands ready to forgive.

Joshua Edgren – June 16, 2024

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