Do It God’s Way

Welcome back to Ignite. I want to talk about the term it's so easy. And what I mean by that life is so easy when we do it. God's way. Why don't we do that? In my own life, I've served God all my life. I grew up in church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday nights. I know the word. I had these podcasts. I talk about how to do it right. I don't talk about all the times I did it wrong. I've had, you know, 60 years of adult life of doing both. I did wrong a lot. Boy, how many times did I get myself into mess? And Karen would say to me, did you pray about that? Oh, I hate it. I would hate it when she said that. It didn't happen more because I pray about everything, but it's so easy to take matters on our own hands. It just, it really, it's crazy. We know, we quote, we sing about scriptures. We say we believe them. Trust the Lord with your whole heart. I talked to a Christian all time. Oh, I trust the Lord of a whole heart. Oh, yeah. Really? That's interesting. The statistics tells that 73% of all Christians are in fear. Okay. About something. They're living in fear. Folks, if you're living in fear, you're not living in faith. Can't think about yourself. Are you worrying about anything? Something bothering you? When you pray, do you pray and then release it and know it's done, or do you pray and then keep on worrying about it? Get it up personally. That's what most Christians are doing. So I suspect some of you, in fact, you may be doing that very thing. You know, there's just a portion of James chapter one. It says, you know, you can ask for whatever you want. I want to bless you. I want to bless you, but do it without wavering. If you're waver, you're like a wave of the sea driven by the wind and toss. You're double-minded. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And then he goes on to say, let not that person expect to receive anything from me. So if you are praying a lot, I've been there. I did that a lot. So I know how to pray and worry. I got really good at praying. I got stories. I'm not going to go there right now. The fact of that is if you're praying and worrying and wondering why God isn't answering your prayers, now you know why. I mean, He makes it real clear. Jesus actually said, unless you have faith as a little child, okay? Child doesn't have to be very smart or they believe. I mean, little child, not big. It changes. But you know, the two-year-old, if you're the dad of the mom, you say we're going to do so. So we're going to go there today. They just accept it. Okay, we're going to go. They're not asking how we're going to get there. Is there going to be traffic or we're leaving on time doing enough gas to the gas tank? I mean, it's just, we're going to go. Okay, we're going to go. That's how God wants us to live our lives. I mean, it's how God wants us to live our lives, which sound like faith. So we just trust. You know, when we live for His purpose, even the bad stuff works for good and we live for His purpose. That's the point of all this, isn't it? To understand that it is a partnership. All of life is a partnership. Living for His purpose is repeated throughout the Bible of how we are to do that. It's so simple. When you let Him work out all the details that He will every time, they just work out. After six years of doing this and all the times we've done it wrong, Karen, I have now come to the point where we just, we literally don't worry about anything and things go wrong in our lives on a continual basis. We know that we don't even want to praise, how should I say this? We stopped. I think we do pray for things, but for the most part, the big things in life, we stop praying for them. The big problems in our lives, we stop praying for them because we found out God's ways are higher than our ways. And when you trust Him and it just keeps getting more comprehensive, I don't know. It more saturates you folks. You get to the point where Karen, I will say life is so easy. I not saying we don't have problems. We go into challenges, but life is so easy when you just stop worrying. Worrying is overrated. Worrying gets you nowhere. And worrying is saying to God, I don't trust you God. I gotta work it on myself. I gotta figure it out. Every time you worry, you're saying to God, I don't trust you God. He's got it all worked out. Our perspective is like this. His perspective is like this. You keep your eyes on God. And he takes your place you can't begin to imagine. It's just he never, he never fails. I've been through lots of problems. And if you've been listening to me very long, you know what some of those problems are. But I've been there and done that. It's not academic for me. And I can tell you where the rubber meets the road. This is term, let go and let God, that's a kind of a trait term. I've heard that for a lot of years. Do you know how powerful that is? If you're in struggles right now and there's no way out, there's a way out. Here's a way out, you can't begin to imagine. And so we've gone to where we don't ask, we ask God, we thank God in advance. God, I, this is a big problem. And we don't see any way out, but you do. And so we're going to thank you now for for how you're going to get us out of there. And oftentimes it's in a different way than we ever expected. I've told this story before, but it probably fits right now. It's a David Wilkerson, the author of the Cross of Switzerland, the founder of Teen Challenge. You can, you can, you can actually Google it or go on YouTube right now. David Wilkerson, write song, write wrong side, write song, wrong side to talk about the without going to all the details with children of Israel. They're finally getting free of Pharaoh and they're all happy and you read the scriptures until they get down to the water right and then all of a sudden they're not happy at all. They're doing the Moses. Now, are we going to die back in comfort? Don't know, you're going to have us die out here in the desert. I mean, they're just, of course, the ride in the water breaks in the dry land and the miracles, unbelievable. They get the other side, the water comes back. And what do they do? They build an altar and they sing. They rejoice. Thank you, God. Thank you, guys. And David says, write song, wrong side. Should have been praying on the other side before the, before the ride went in the water, okay? That's what he should have done. No worries. As we rushed to surgery, I was dying, okay? They're rushing beyond a minute. I've told this story before, but it fits. And I'm watching the can. Let's go. I'm going to lay my back and going down that hallway. And they're running. It's emergency surgery. And my daughter Nicole was right running beside me as hard as she could. And she was yelling. Guess what? She was yelling. She wasn't yelling. Dad, keep the faith. Dad, I'm praying for you. Dad is going to be okay. She didn't say that. You know what she said? She's dead. This is your testimony. What? This is your testimony. And then it hit me. Yes, this is my testimony. I know I'm fine. I have no fears. I'm going to be this going to be, I know fine before I go through those doors. And for the last 12 years, I've been able to give my testimony that I sang the right song on the right side. And that's what I'm really saying to you today as fear is overrated, worries overrated. There's no room for that. You know, 365 times the Bible. 365 times the Bible God says fear not. Okay. Fear not. Fear is the opposite of everything we've believe in without faith that's impossible to please God. Hear me on this. And the way we know it is to do our part of the puzzle, our part of the equation. Love God with our whole heart. Just love him with our heart. Nothing separating us. God, I love you with everything. You know my heart. I love you. There's nothing separating me. And when we do that, we automatically do this to the first work. We automatically love our neighbors as I said. We automatically are enthralled with God. And so excited about God and bubbles out of us. And we can't help but lead everybody around us closer to God. That's the answer. It's so simple. I hope you get the message. See you next time.