Get Ready!

It was 2023, mile 12 of the Chicago Marathon, and I feel my knee instantly tighten up, like someone was grabbing the muscles in and around it and just yanking it. And I didn't know what to do. I'm running like this, and every single time my left foot hits the ground, boom, boom, boom, boom. Pain. Pain. a gigantic reminder that I have 14 more miles to go. I wasn't always a runner. I remember the first run I did after Shannon and I got married. I decided I was going to take it up. I wanted to be a little healthier, and so I started with half a mile, just something small. And when I finished that half a mile, I came across my little finish line, and I'm gasping for breath. I'm trying to find any water I can near me just to recover. I was not naturally built for it. But over time, I worked at it, I kept at it, and I got better. And I decided that the marathon was something that I wanted to go for. I wanted to feel that accomplishment and cross that finish line. So I trained. I trained for months. Learning how to run longer, how to keep my pace, how to hydrate and take care of my body so that my body could hold up for 26 miles. And on the day of the race, things were great. The first 12 miles, everything was okay. I had injured my knee during some of the training, but it had started to feel better. I was getting back into long running, and I said, okay, you know what? I'm gonna go for it. We're gonna do it. And everything was working out normally. It was a great weather day. Everything was beautiful. I was hydrating. I was keeping my breathing up. My pacing was good. But at mile 12, when my knee injury flared up again, all bets were off for me. I didn't know if I was going to make the end of this race. But I kept pushing, just make it a little longer. Hey, stop, take breaks, stretch when you need to, just keep going. Because of the injury during my training, I had never run over 15 miles because I couldn't. I had to stop and do some recovery. But On this day, I had to run 11 miles more than I had ever run before. And they say the middle miles of the marathon are the most discouraging because you've been running for, if you're like me and you're not breaking a world record, you've been running for hours already, and you still have about the same amount of hours to go. And so I was discouraged. I felt that. Mile 17. I just wanted to be done. But something in me said, just keep pushing. Keep going. Go a little farther. I did. And about mile 23, I had my phone on me in my hand because I wanted to listen to music while I was running. I needed something to distract me. But that means Shannon could text me while I was going. My number bib on me had a tracker in it so my loved ones could see where I was in the race and when I was going to finish. And the thing about the Chicago Marathon is that in order to be a qualified finisher, you have to finish the race in six and a half hours. And so Shannon's checking the time for me, and she texts me around mile 23, and she says, if you want to finish this race, you're going to need to run like you've never run before. You're on pace to finish a little behind six and a half hours. And so I booked it. I pushed. I ignored the pain in my knee, and I just kept going. And actually, some of my fastest mile times were at the end of the marathon, not at the beginning, because a part of my training was to pace yourself at the beginning. Don't start out too hot. You got all these people cheering and holding up signs, and it energizes you, and it makes you want to run faster, but you need to slow down so you have some of that energy at the end. I made it to the finish line. I booked it around the corner. I think it's pretty maniacal to put a hill at the end of the marathon, but they do. There's a hill at the end of the marathon that you have to trek up. It's not a large one, but it was enough to annoy me. I turn the corner, and I get to the finish line, and I finish in six hours, 28 minutes, and 15 seconds. I had a minute and 45 seconds left to spare before being disqualified as being a finisher of the race. I came across that line, and my body's done now, so I stumble on over to the awarders, and they put the medal around my neck, and I have tears in my eyes because this was something I worked hard for. I put physical, emotional energy into finishing this race, and I finished it. And I had the prize to show for it. As important as this race still is to me in my life, it's not the most important race I run. The most important race I run and the most important race that you all are in as well as the spiritual race. Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 9 that runners run to receive a perishable wreath, but we run to receive an imperishable wreath, a prize that's given to us by God and never fades away. My medal certainly lasts a little longer than a wreath, but at the end of the day, it will fade away. And even if it doesn't before I die, I don't get to take it to heaven with me. And it doesn't get me anything if I was to give it to the Lord and say, hey, just buy me it. No, it doesn't buy me anything. The prize we get from running the spiritual race well is far greater. And we want to run that race well. Today's sermon title is Get Ready because how we train today influences how we run the race tomorrow. And we're getting ready to come into a new year today. that's going to have a lot of hardships, opportunities, decisions to make, blessings to receive. And if we're not training now, then we won't be prepared when those things come. And the thing is, about those things that we face, is that they're going to come and we're not going to know it. We're not going to see it coming most of the time. Yeah, I had that injury that flared up during the marathon was something that I faced in training, but it's not like I had a countdown timer saying, you know, at mile 11, in one mile, your knee's going to go out. Deal with it. It was just there. I had to deal with it. We're going to be faced with things that we don't see coming, but we better have trained for because otherwise we're going to be caught unaware. And I'll tell you this about my marathon. I finished, but I also see the gaps in some of my training, the things I could have done better and how I could have ran the race more effectively if I had trained in different ways. We want to be ready for the moments that we face. How do we get ready for the moments that we face? Well, I've got three training tools that I'm going to give you today that will get you ready for your mile 12 moments that you're gonna face next year. Training tool number one is that we need to practice repetitive reliance. Repetitive reliance. Every day, has a million little decisions, a million little moments where we choose, am I going to go my way? Am I going to go God's way? Am I going to trust in Him to do it in His strength, in His timing, in His ways? Or am I going to try to get it for myself, in my way, in my strength, in my timing? The Bible has a litany of stories about this, some models to follow and some models not to follow. I think about Abram and Sarai in the book of Genesis. They're more commonly known as Abraham and Sarah, but at this point in the story, their names hadn't been changed. So they're Abram and Sarai. And God takes Abram out. into the wilderness, and he shows them the night sky, no Chicago light pollution, so he sees all the stars in the sky, and he says, I'm going to make your descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky. This was a big promise, because at the time of the promise, Abram and Sarai had zero children, and Abram was also 75 years old, and his wife was 65 years old. This ain't happening without God. But Abram believes God for it, and it's credited to him as righteousness. Where the story gets difficult is that from the time of the promise to the time of their child, Isaac being born, it's 25 years. Abram is 100 years old when Isaac is born, and Sarai is 90. That's a long time to wait for a promise to flourish. And it's a promise where there's a lot of having to actively follow God and believe him and then be disappointed. A lot of sitting and waiting. Will this be the time? No, it's not the time. I feel for Abram and Sarai because that's a lot of emotional energy being used up and a lot of waiting. And I can understand where they would feel impatient. And they did feel impatient. It got to a point in Genesis 16 where Sarai concocts a plan of her own because in her mind, obviously, God isn't going to do this the way he said he was going to do it, so we've got to make something happen. And she says in 16.2, Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant, who is Hagar, and it may be that I shall obtain children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. This one pivotal moment of doubting God to the point where they took matters into their own hands has a trickle-down effect of destruction in the lives of those involved. Abram listens and impregnates Sarai's servant, Hagar, and there grows this animosity between Hagar and Sarai. And then there's an abusive relationship where Sarai begins to mistreat Hagar, Then Ishmael's born, but the destruction isn't over because then Sarai kind of turns her disdain towards Ishmael. Even after Isaac's born, she becomes intimidated by him. And she goes to her husband and says, you better believe that kid of yours isn't getting any of my kid's inheritance. You need to send them away. And Abraham listens and does. Now Ishmael has to live the rest of his life without a relationship with his father. God protects Ishmael, gives him descendants, but the thing is, is that Ishmael's descendants become enemies of the people of Israel. And so there's this destruction, this animosity, this broken relationship. All of that stems from this one moment where they doubted and they feared and they said, we can't trust God for this. We have to do it ourselves. When we get to that point, destruction is the only thing that comes because we're not capable of doing anything in our own strength, in our own timing, in our own power. We're designed to rely on God. We see this better lived out in the book of 1 Samuel. King David, he has a similar story of waiting. He's promised that he's going to be king. Actually, if you could take that slide off for a second. He is promised by God he's going to be king. He's anointed by God. There's a 15-year waiting period from when God first promises him that to where he sits on the throne. And it's not passive waiting. It's not like waiting at the DMV where it's boring and you don't want to do it and it stinks. But at the end of the day, it's just waiting and you're okay and you make it out. David's actively running from his life. King Saul, who God has promised is going to get the kingship ripped from him and his family won't have it either, is intimidated by David. And so he's actively trying to kill David. And so David's running. David's hiding in caves and in towns of people who hate God and God's people because there's no place in Israel that's safe. He records in his waiting times of anxiety and depression and despair because of all of the things that are against him. Even though this promise has been made to him, it hasn't come yet. Well, there comes a time in 1 Samuel 24 where David looks like he's getting his moment. One of Saul's men alerts him of where David is hiding out in this cave system out in this valley. And so Saul grabs 3,000 men and starts to head out on a hunting party for David. And he finds David. He just doesn't realize that he's found David. He goes to take a bathroom break in a cave. And it happens to be the cave that David's sitting in with all of his band of misfits that are hiding out with him. And his men go to him and they see Saul and they say, look, this is your chance. The Lord's given you into his hand. This can all be over right now. Just kill him. David has a different idea. It says for Samuel 24, 8 through 10, this is after Saul's gotten up and he's left the cave. It says afterward, David also arose and went out of the cave and called after Saul. My lord, the king. And when Saul looked behind him, David bowed with his face to the earth and paid homage. And David said to Saul, why do you listen to the words of men who say, behold, David seeks you harm? David understood something here, that yes, God had anointed him to be king, but God also anointed at one time Saul to be king. He promised he would take it away from Saul, but he hadn't done that yet. And it wasn't David's job to take it. It was David's job to receive it and receive it in God's timing. We are called to do the same thing. Next year there are going to be moments, there are going to be times where you've received a calling or a promise from God but it hasn't materialized in maybe the time frame that you wished it would. It's not your job to take it. It's not your job to make it happen. God may lead you and call you to do things in obedience that will eventually get you to that point. But wait on him. Live in a posture of reliance on him who takes care of everything. Our daughter's name is Eliana, which means God has answered. Shannon and I, we wanted a child. We were trying for a child. And if you've tried for a child at all, you know how hard it can be to receive the not pregnant result on a test. Because you want it. You want it so bad. And you have no control over it. After a particularly hard, not pregnant test result, Shannon had the idea that we needed to get together and spend the afternoon just with the Lord, in his word and in prayer and in worship. And so we did. We got together and we sat and we opened up the Bible. We didn't know where we wanted to go. We just said, you know, let's look for somewhere. We opened up to Ruth and it felt like that was where we were supposed to be. So we read. We didn't know why. The story of Ruth is about her following her mother, her mother-in-law after her husband passed away. And God takes care of her by bringing her a new husband who will provide for her and take care of her because the culture is different there. Widows were looked down upon. We're a part of a group of people that didn't have a lot and weren't taken care of. And so God brings her a husband. And at the end of the book, it says that God opened up Ruth's womb to have a child. The only thing is that this isn't like some of the stories in the Bible you hear where Ruth had a problem of infertility. This is just, Ruth is a normal person. She has no ailment that's causing her to be infertile, but God was still the one who opened the womb for her to have a child. And it made us realize something, that this was all gonna be God's doing. That it was 100% or 0% every single time because God's the one who's in charge of it. And that prayer was comforting to me. In the moments where I want to think and I want to scheme and I want to worry and all this stuff, I could sit and I could say, God, it's 100% or it's 0%. I didn't live it perfectly all the time, but when I was able to come back to it, it was comforting because I knew that he had it, and it's not on me. It's a freeing life to live when it's not on you. Don't put it on you. It wasn't meant to be there. Rely on God, and you will be ready. The second tool that will get us ready is to create patterns of prayer and worship in our lives. This is one of my favorite stories from the Old Testament. It comes from 2 Chronicles. It's about the King Jehoshaphat, and he was one of the few good kings of Judah. He wasn't perfect, but he loved the Lord, and he led his people to the Lord. And one day, it says at the beginning of this chapter that we're about to be in, that three nations were coming against the nation of Judah. It was the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Metonites. And they gathered together to go against Judah, and Judah was extremely ill-equipped for this battle. The army they were going against was just too great. And King Jehoshaphat is warned by one of his men that these armies are coming for him. And in verse 3, I love it, it says that he was afraid and he sought the Lord. That fear is okay when we're faced with extreme hardship. And he felt that. But his first inclination was to go seek the Lord. To find him, to look for him, to communicate with him. And so what he does is he gathers an assembly together of the people of Judah to have a prayer session. And he leads them in this prayer session, talking about who God is and what he's done for them. And then at the end of the prayer, he prays this, 2 Chronicles 20, the second half of verse 12. He says, Think about how humbling of a prayer that is. This guy is the king of the people he's praying in front of, and he's openly admitting, I don't know what to do. I don't have any ability to handle this. And all these people are looking at him saying, handle this. He could be off in his bunker planning with his soldiers on how they're going to attack this battle. He could be running and hiding and hoping these nations don't find him. But he prays. He prays in front of his people in open humility because he realizes something. That although he's the king of the nation, he's not the king of the nation. It's on God. And he's got a direct line to be able to talk with him. And so he prays, we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. And immediately God answers the prayer. Someone from the assembly stands up and the Lord starts to speak through him. And he says, I tell you that tomorrow when you appear for battle, you will not have to lift a hand in battle and I will do it for you. I will take care of this for you. I want you to show up, but so that you can see what I'm going to do. And immediately, the prayer session turns into a worship session. Because they recognized the goodness of God and they wanted to praise Him for it. Their relationship with Him was that connected. They felt free to ask. And then when they saw His goodness, they were willing to worship Him. I love this part of the chapter. The next day they get ready for battle and they go down. And you could think maybe Jehoshaphat's wondering, well, in case we have to do something, I'm going to put my biggest men out front, you know, just in case. But he does this, it says 2 Chronicles 20, 21. And when he had taken counsel with the people... He appointed those who were to sing to the Lord and praise him in holy attire as they went before the army and said, give thanks to the Lord for his steadfast love endures forever. What Jehoshaphat is doing here is he's putting the worship team out in front. He's not putting the guys with the spears and the swords out in front. He's putting the guys with the guitars and the drums out in front because he is believing God that he is not going to have to fight this battle, but all he does is just need to praise the Lord. And I love this because it says, as soon as they started to play, God sent an ambush upon the other army. They all began to attack each other. And by the time the army of Judah showed up, every single one of them was dead. Not a hand was needed to be lifted in battle for God to take care of it. And he waited for them to start the worshiping before he fulfilled his promise. They believed him for it and he came through for them. We see another story like this in Acts 4 where Peter, this is after Jesus has been crucified, resurrected, he's now ascended into heaven and now the disciples are preaching about Jesus but without him physically there. And Peter and John are arrested by the chief priests. They healed a man and so they came to see what was going on and they heard them preaching the resurrection of the dead in Jesus' name. And so they get arrested. And you can imagine the fear that are in their hearts as they're being threatened because these are the people, they're standing in front of the people who were responsible for killing Jesus. And now they're the ones being threatened by them. First, Jesus was there and he was getting the threats. Now it's the disciples. What are they going to do? Well, after they're sent on their way and they receive all these threats, they go back to the other disciples and they have a prayer session. They get together and they pray, and at the end of the prayer, Acts 4, 29 through 30, it says this, They looked at the hardship that was in front of them, and they prayed that God would continue to make them more bold. They prayed that God would help them, because they knew what God was calling them to, And there was going to be opposition, and they didn't want to fear the opposition so much that they stopped their calling. And I love when Pastor Carl talks about this chapter. He says, you can't have an Acts 5 church without an Acts 4 church. Because immediately after the prayer, the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit, and they begin to preach more boldly and perform these signs and wonders that... the people can't deny it. And in Acts 5, it says a great multitude was added to the Lord because of the boldness of their preaching. God answers our prayers, and He wants us to communicate with Him. Sometimes, and I've said something along the lines of this myself, when we're in a situation, sometimes we say, well, I guess all we can do now is pray. Prayer is not a last resort. It is the first line of defense. I had mentioned earlier that I'm on the radio with Carl, and we had a guest. We have him regularly. His name is Dr. Sam Storms, and I agree with him on this, what he says, that he believes there is a storehouse in heaven of prayers just sitting there, waiting to be answered, but they're not because no one ever prayed the prayer. God wants to talk with us. He wants us to talk with Him. And sometimes He is waiting on us to participate with Him in order for Him to answer us. He wants us to be a part of it. He wants us to trust Him enough that we will start the conversation with Him and tell Him what we need. He knows what we need, but He wants us to talk to Him about what we need. And sometimes He's sitting there waiting to answer. I'm not going to say that he's always going to answer your prayers the way you want him to. He doesn't answer all my prayers the way I want him to. But he does answer my prayers. And sometimes the answer to the prayer is, I love you and I'm with you. I'm not going to give you what you want. But I'm here. And that's enough. If we've got him, it's okay. But we have to trust Him enough and treat our conversations with Him enough like they are the first thing that we're doing. Because we have a God who's holding the universe in His hand. And He's given us a 24-hour hotline to talk with Him. Why would we not talk with Him? When we face impossible hardships next year, Let's be the ones that say, Lord, we don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. Lord, I don't know what to do, but I really need you right now. That will get you ready to handle the most difficult moments that the year has to bring. The final training tool that will get you ready is to remember regularly. It may sound simple, But if we don't take time to intentionally remember, we are going to forget. Some of the most important things in our life, we look at and we say, oh, I'll remember that. That was too big for me to not remember. But then we don't take time to intentionally dwell on that at all, and we do forget it. My memory is horrible. Last night, Shannon and I were getting ready for bed, and she said, hey, would you mind laying your clothes out so that it's easier in the morning? We've got to get a kiddo ready. And so we lay them out, and then it'll just be easy to get ready. And I said, yeah, that's a great idea. I'll do that. I go into the bathroom, and I brush my teeth. And then I walk over to my side of the bed, and I'm setting stuff up, getting ready to hop in. And she says, did you set your clothes out? No. It's been like five minutes. No. and I already forgot. I wanted to do it, but I already forgot about it. And so, we need to take time to intentionally remember. God frames remembrance for us a lot in the Bible, a lot. Just a few examples. In Leviticus 23, He outlines some of the feasts that He wants the Israelites to participate in, and the They all have things that were designed to help them remember God. Take the Passover, for example. The Passover was a feast of celebration of deliverance out of slavery from Egypt, and God wanted them to remember how he did that for them by the passing over of their houses from the blood of the Lamb. God wanted them to celebrate that so they would remember his goodness and how he delivered them. You think about when in the book of Joshua, when Joshua is leading the Israelites into the promised land for the first time, God cuts off the Jordan River so they can cross through it. It's like a Red Sea moment. But what he does, he said, I want you to take 12 stones out of the riverbed and make an altar to me on the other side so that when you walk by it and your kids see it and say, what's that? You'll be able to tell them what I did for you. You think about the decree that God gave to new kings in Israel. When they were becoming a king, what they had to do was write a copy of the law in their own hand. And that was meant to remind them that although they're the king of the nation and God anointed them, they are not above the law. It was to remind them who God was and who they were. God wants us to remember because if we don't remember, we will forget. Remembering is important in a lot of different areas of our life. In hardship, it can remind us how God has been there for us in the past so that we can trust him for the future. But I feel like we don't often talk about remembering him in blessing nearly the same way. And there is a preparation that has to be done for receiving blessing in our lives. Blessing is good, but if we aren't training our hearts to receive blessing in the right way, we will receive it the wrong way. We'll forget God in the midst of it. In Joshua 24, he's giving a farewell address, basically, to the people of Israel. He's led them for a time. They've conquered some of the promised land. There's still some to conquer, and he's kind of giving them some last bit of advice. And in the first part of Joshua 24, he's laying out for them everything God did for them. This is what God says, I delivered you from Egypt, I brought you into the wilderness, I parted the sea, I kept the Egyptians from you, I provided for you in the wilderness. And then he says in verse 13, I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities you had not built, and you dwell in them. You eat the fruit of vineyards and olive orchards that you did not plant. God's taking the time to remind them, I've given you everything. Remember how good I am to you, how much I love you. And then the following verses immediately are a charge. With how I've provided for you in mind, make a decision on whether or not you're going to follow me. He says, Joshua says to them in 24, 15, and if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your father served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. How we remember God and his goodness to us dictates how we serve him and follow him in the future. The people of Israel at this time, they respond to Joshua by saying, absolutely, we will follow God. Yes, we're in agreement with you. We're going to follow him too. And when Joshua passes away, they continue. In the book of Judges, it describes more of the taking of the land. And I think about Judges 8. After Gideon has brought them through a battle and now Gideon is dead and gone and it says the people went back to following the gods of the people who were in the land and they forgot the Lord and how he delivered them from enemies on every side. They forgot him and they stopped following him because they didn't remember how good he had been. They didn't remember his character and if you don't remember his character, why would you follow him? So they go back to what they know. I think about this book I read in college. It's called the Plymouth Plantation. It's a non-fiction book. This guy, William Bradford, he wrote it in the 1600s. It was basically his journal entries while he's on this trip from Europe to America. And as he's recording the time, he... He's writing about storms on the seas that are almost ripping the ship apart. But how God provided for them and got them through it. And praise be to God. And when they make land on America, it's winter. And the ground is hard and they can't plant crops. And so they don't have a lot of food and they have to just barely make it by. But God got them through it. And it was good. But then you look at the next chapter written about a year later. And everything's been good for a while now. The crops are growing. People are in their houses. They're well cared for. Everything's great. And God and his provision and his care over them and giving them everything they need is mentioned a total of zero times. When things were hard, it was easier to see God. But when things got really good, they stopped seeing God's hand over them. We have to be careful next year because there's going to be some hardships. There's going to be some trials and some opportunities, but there's also going to be some blessings. How are you going to handle the blessing? Are you going to remember God? Are you going to remember that it was his hand and not yours that gave you everything you have? It's a slippery slope to not remember God. Make a pattern of remembering him now so that when those days come, you'll know exactly who gets the credit and you'll follow him deeper. I leave you with this, the turning point for today. We've got a couple weeks left in the year. This is a good time of year for it because it's all about remembering. Remembering the birth of Christ and what he's done for us. I want you to pick one of these training tools. Is it that you're going to have repetitive reliance? Is it that you're going to create patterns of prayer and worship in your life? Is it that you're going to remember regularly? take one of them and find a practical way to apply it each week until the new year. I want you to keep it in the new year, but just take one right now, start small, and think of a way. How can I practically apply this? If it's reliance, maybe it's that before I make a move, before I make a decision, I stop and I see what God wants. If it's prayer, maybe it's that I set a time each day that I'm going to pray. And no matter what I'm doing, I stop what I'm doing and I talk with him about what I need, what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking. And then maybe it's remembering. Maybe you need to have a journal writing down all of the things that God has done for you. And then take time to go into that journal and not write anything down, but just read it and see how he's been good to you. You hold on to these things and you practice these things in your life and you will be ready. Finish the race. Receive the prize that doesn't fade away. Hear, well done, my good and faithful servant, because you've trained. And celebrate with him because your training paid off. Let's pray. Father God, we confess to you, I confess to you, that I need training in my life. Left to my own devices, I will not. God, I pray for a holy discipline in each one of us today, that we would train when it's hard, that we would train when life is busy, Because this is the most important race we're running. And we want to be ready to handle the hurdles that we're going to face. Get us ready, Lord. And let us celebrate your goodness and the blessing that comes from getting ready and being ready. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.