God is Enough.

I recently had the honor and opportunity of preaching for the very first time at my Dad’s church. God truly moved and blessed me in ways that I have not yet been able to articulate (I will write about it soon). I wanted to share the sermon that God gave me, so here it is.

Jeremiah 31:1-3

1 “At that time, declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.” 

2 Thus says the Lord:

“The people who survived the sword

    found grace in the wilderness;

when Israel sought for rest,

3     the Lord appeared to him[a] from far away.

I have loved you with an everlasting love;

    therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

Ephesians 3:14-19 - Prayer for Spiritual Strength

14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family[c] in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10

9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

INTRO

Preparing for this day proved to be extremely difficult. So many things came to mind and I was overwhelmed with fleshly pride. I had tied this opportunity to speak to a lot of different variables. On one hand I wanted to impress or please my parents and make them proud of me. On the other there’s this feeling of coming back home and wanting to prove myself, my value, my worth, and my knowledge. I wanted this to be a moment of validation for me. I wanted to prepare a standard message, with an outline and a text of scripture that I could break down, teach and display what God has been doing and revealing to me over the past two years. But, through this process God began to highlight these very prideful desires and exposed a deep wound that I have been nursing my entire life, a feeling of inferiority and un-importance. This inferiority is and has been the root of pride, envy, and impure motives for most of my life and as I began to prep for today it was the motivation for the words I wanted to speak. Usually when this type of thing comes up in my heart, I sit with God, repent, and rationalize why my feelings are not reality, I take the thoughts captive and move on, which is great and is what the word calls us to do. But God showed me that I wasn’t actually receiving healing in this area, I was only nursing and bandaging a wound that needed to be exposed, surgically dealt with, and healed. There was something deeper he needed to uncover.

As I continued to prep for today, I was forced to face these feelings head on like never before. God was no longer going to allow me to bandage this wound and stuff the feelings back down. I was triggered everywhere I turned for a solid week. I felt inferior, small, unseen, and ignored in every room I walked into especially the church and in these moments, it was easy to place blame on the people and internalize that they were making me feel this way, but obviously that was not the case.

Truthfully, this led me to a space of not wanting to do what God has positioned me to do. I even questioned God on why he would choose me to speak to his people when I felt so lowly and unqualified but also, I had this underlying idea that someone who is preaching shouldn’t be dealing with this kind of issue. I got really down on myself and I even wrestled with the idea of abandoning all together the path of purpose and the call that God has so graciously placed me on because I couldn’t stand the idea of having to continue feeling the way I felt or feeling like I wasn’t good enough. Quitting, in my mind would eliminate the feelings.

See, my issue is that for most of my life I’ve felt all of these things and I tried to invalidate my feelings of inferiority by doing impressive things that I knew would allow me to be seen. I was always after the next best thing. I wanted to do and be the best of the best and I strategically placed myself in places where I knew the perception would be that I was doing great but deep down inside of me was an emptiness, a feeling that I did not matter, and a deep place of unfulfillment. I filled these holes with things that the world advertised to me as a fix, but of course, it didn’t work. Nothing I did worked. Nothing I received worked. Great jobs, new hobbies, new cities, new adventures, dating, partying, traveling, drinking, friends, family; nothing.

In moving to LA, and encountering the love of God in a way that I hadn’t before, truly walking with the Lord.(There’s a difference in being a Christian and walking with the Lord in full surrender) I felt that I had dealt with my past and that I no longer had these feelings anymore. I thought that I had internalized that we are all equal and that I am a child of God just like everyone else. But truth is I still struggled whether I wanted to admit or not. And I struggled even more so as I began to prepare to speak today, these old feelings began to come back up in a more blatant way as God released me into something that I know he’s called me to do. It didn’t help that for the two weeks prior I was crippled with discontentment with where I was in my life. I was feeling like I wasn’t far enough along and that I was a disappointment. I felt unfulfilled.

In this ugly place, God brought it to my attention that I had lost sight of what really mattered and that there were some things that I needed to be reminded of. I sat with God in this place where I felt attacked and alone and he reminded me of his love, his promise, and his purpose. As we sat together God began to speak to me and ironically what he spoke to me is what he’s asked me to remind you of today as well.

HIS LOVE FOR YOU

God is deeply and madly in love with you. He is obsessed with you. He has loved you with a love that knows no end and transcends your thoughts and emotions. He loves you. When you feel that you haven’t done enough Christian-like things throughout the week, he loves you. When you feel like you are dealing with old feelings, old sin, or old habits, he is relentlessly in love you. He is not disappointed in you and he is not done with you when you have negative thoughts and when you feel ungodly things. Your mistakes are where grace abounds. In the garden, when Adam and Eve fell, his very first words to them were not “How could you do this” or “What did you do”.  It wasn’t “I’m so disappointed” or even “You did something wrong”. His first words were “Where are you?” He was seeking after his children who in their weakness made a mistake and he lovingly corrected them.

He loves your weaknesses. He actually says that we should boast in our weaknesses because in our weaknesses his power is perfected. You can stop striving to be strong, you can stop striving to be better, and you can stop striving to do more for God your own strength. He doesn’t need you to change or be perfect.  He needs your heart to be transformed and change flows out of transformation. He is less concerned with your actions and behaviors than you think he is because in reality your actions and behaviors are only symptoms of something much deeper than you can even see.  

God loves you is a statement that you hear a lot in church, and, truthfully, it is one that has lost its potency in our lives unfortunately. As I struggled with feeling inferior, part of the problem is that I had not become okay with just being loved and seen by God alone. In this space when people would tell me “God sees you and loves you” it would upset me and discourage me even. I had been living in a space of comparison and placing the heavy weight of expectations on others to see me, validate me, and affirm me when the truth is that this weight was only ever meant to be carried by God.

We often seek fulfillment masked as love in all of the wrong places and when we are told “God loves you” we brush it off as a cliché, but God wants to remind his children that there truly is no greater love than this. See what happens as we seek fulfillment outside of the love of God we begin, like me, to feel a huge lack of love from others. We begin to feel as though no one cares for us and the truth of the matter is that it is impossible to truly receive love if you have not prepared your heart to be loved. You have to first go on a journey of truly understanding and internalizing the love of God.

 His love for you cannot be contained. Because of his love and not any other reason, you have authority, you are above and not beneath, you are blessed, and you have eternal life.

HIS PROMISE FOR YOU

 Out of God’s love for you comes his promise to always be near to you. Most of my life I have mistaken God’s promises for my life as his plans and his goodness. I come to God to ask for things and when he answers I’ve chased after what he’s given me and then weeks later find myself in a space of discontentment. Some of us have become discontent with where we are and have become disappointed with God because we are not where we thought he promised we’d be, have what he promised we’d have, and done some of the things he’s promised we’d do. But as I struggled with feeling inferior and became discontent with where I was I felt like God spoke to me that his promise and his plan are two different things and that maybe, just maybe if we are reminded that his promise has never been a place, a purpose, a plan, an amount of money, a lifestyle, or even happiness our discontentment would be eliminated. His promise throughout his word was not about a destination it was always about his presence, God with us. It was all about proximity.

The entire bible is full of promises made to his children but if you look closely the basis of all his promises made was “I will be with you”. Repeatedly throughout scripture God repeats “they will be my people, and I will be their God” and he fulfills this promise through the sending of Christ. His desire is to be near you, close to you, and to draw you into deeper intimacy with him. His promise to you is that even in the moments that you feel alone, you feel inferior, you feel like you’ve failed, you feel like giving up, and that you feel like there’s nothing more that you can do, he will be there in it all and through it all. His presence empowers us.

The truth is that nothing can fulfill you outside of his presence and there is no worse pain in thinking something will fix your discomfort and finding out that it isn’t it. The truth is that you don’t need a better environment or a better job or a better anything. You just need his presence in your life. You need to be close to him.

His promise is that you have access to his presence because of what Christ died on the cross.

His promise is that you have new life because rose again.

His promise is that his spirit lives within you because Christ ascended.

His promise is that you are sons and daughters and our Father promises to never leave us or forsake us, even when if feels like he’s absent.

HIS PURPOSE FOR YOU

The last thing I was reminded of was his path of purpose. When I was thinking through this my instinct was to think of his amazing plan for me and all of the things that I’m going to do and receive from God, but he stopped me and reminded me that I don’t know the plan and I may never know the plan but he’s revealed the path.

Often, we get too caught up in the plan and desiring to know the plan but all throughout the word God never reveals the complete plan to anyone. He told Abraham to go and I will show you. His word says that he knows the plan and about 75 times that he will reveal the path. If you remain on the path, you remain in purpose.

Purpose is something that we all have a desire to fulfill. However, I think at times in my own life I’ve sought for the things of God to fulfill me. This week when I was feeling inferior it was what I was doing and where I was, and what I had that was no longer fulfilling to me. The truth is that it shouldn’t have been fulfilling me in the first place. I’ve had to take steps back and realize that (one) our purpose first and foremost to become more like Christ, grow in proximity to God and to advance his kingdom (the great commission). That’s what he’s purposed us all to do ultimately. (Two)God has an individual call on each of our lives. He has uniquely purposed us to do something specific, but that purpose was never meant to fulfill us, it was never meant to be the goal. It was always meant to help fulfill his universal purpose of becoming more like him, advancing his kingdom, and loving others the way he loves us. The moment we begin seeking purpose as a route of fulfillment, in an effort to eliminate our own negative feelings about our lives, we begin to our own kingdom. (Three) Our individual purpose, however, is not a destination. We never arrive to monuments of purpose. Instead we are on a constant journey towards God and as we draw near to him we will naturally bump into purpose.   

CLOSE

All in all, I sat with these three things and understood that what I had lost sight of is that God is enough. My discontentment and feelings of inferiority were rooted in comparison and comparison just means that I was looking at others instead of looking at God. God is enough. Him in and of himself is enough. Being loved by him has to be enough for us because his love is the only love that can affirm us. Being seen by him has to be enough because he is the only person who with just one look at us can change things in an instant. His presence has to be enough because only in his presence is there the fullness of joy. His purpose has to be enough because nothing else is truly fulfilling than becoming more like him.

 I feel like I was sent here to encourage someone. To tell you that you are set apart, and that you are universally and uniquely purposed. You feel unseen because the enemy wants you to believe that you are alone when you have the presence of God all around you. You feel inferior because the enemy wants to trip you into the trap of comparison and trick you into believing that you are behind in life when you actually are ahead because you are with God. The enemy wants you to believe that you will never be or have more than what you have now. I felt like I was sent to just tell someone that God loves you and he sees your heart and the dreams and the desires that HE placed there. He’s just asking that you fixate your eyes on him and that you would by the power of the Holy Spirit open your heart to allowing him to be enough. The discomfort that you feel is an indicator that God is drawing you and that if you just lean in and chase him everything around you will work together for your good. God loves you.

This church is set apart.

God is looking for a church after him.

What he will do and release into your life for the next 35 years has everything to do with the way you chase after God.

You have cultivated an environment for God to move and now he’s asking that you set your thoughts and your hearts on him.

He is about to blow your mind. This is the season of ascension and as you ascend unfortunately distress will come but distress will lead you to your destiny. As you ascend you have to look toGod and become okay with him being enough, otherwise you won’t make it to the top.