Bobby Schuller - The Win is in the Waiting
Well, whoever you are, would you stand with me? Hold your hands like this as a way of receiving from the Lord. Let's say this together. I'm not what I do. I'm not what I have. I'm not what people say about me. I am the beloved of God. It's who I am. No one can take it from me. I don't have to worry, I don't have to hurry. I can trust my friend Jesus and share his love with my neighbor. Thanks, you can be seated. I wanna begin by talking about the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I've had a lot of luck in my life. Man, I am lucky that I was born in America, an industrialized, Western, free country like this, full of opportunity, that was a lucky thing. That's not the luckiest, though.
I have great parents and step-parents and cousins, I have parents who love me, grandparents who love me, a great family. Wow, that is lucky. Not something everybody gets. But that's not the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I'm an avid fisherman. One time I caught a 271-pound thresher shark, and I reserve the right to tell you that at least once a year. That was lucky, but not the luckiest thing. The luckiest thing that's ever happened to me is that someone invited me to follow Jesus Christ, and I chose to do so. I would trade everything I have, everything, for that one thing. You don't understand, this is the luckiest thing, the best thing that can happen to a person is to know Christ.
When you know Christ, everything else in your life begins to change, and most importantly you have an assurance in your heart. There's this looming fear of death and aging that all of us face, but confidence in Christ either dulls that or just takes it away completely, and so I want to encourage you today, many people just don't make a decision. They're not against God or for God, they're not religious or not religious or anything, they just kinda waffle, and that's a very normal, human thing to do. I did that. But at some point in life, you have to make decisions if you want your life to change. Decide today to follow Christ, and you will say in a couple of years, "That's the luckiest thing that ever happened to me".
I wanna encourage you to do that. If you made that decision today, or maybe you're watching on television, shoot me a text at the number on your screen and text me the word "Hope," and that way I can know that that's you and I can pray for you. Like, why does he want me to text that? To be honest, it's just a personal goal I have. I want to keep track. It's been said you do what you measure. I think one of the most important things I can do is invite people to be saved, so if that was you, plug into a good Bible believing church, maybe get baptized if you haven't done that, make some friends who can help you grow in your faith.
I recently was in Holland, one of my favorite countries, and, you know, there's a lot of things I Love about America, but there's something I hate, and that is the infrastructure here. Every European who visits tends to tell me, "How do you get around in this country"? And the answer is you drive. That's it. There are buses, there are buses and trains, but they stink, both literally and figuratively. Netherlands has this wonderful thing called a bicycle. Have you ever heard of it? They all have, and actually the whole country is so wired for bicycles.
We go all the time, but this recent trip we did, we had a little bit of a slower time, and we were able to relax a little bit, and we rented a couple bicycles, and we got to experience, Hannah and I, Netherlands the way you're properly supposed to experience it, and that is on a bicycle. I could not believe how they had bicycle highways, bicycle stop lights, and very often the bicycle lanes would have tunnels where it'd be separated from the main road with gardens. You could get anywhere on a bicycle, and they were good at riding bikes too. Think of how healthy these folks were.
I remember riding into town on my bicycle, and an 80-year-old lady just went zipping on by, and I thought, wow, she's in good shape. And, you know, very often here in the states not all of us can ride a bike, but when we think of people riding bike, you think of it as an extracurricular fun thing, maybe a silly, zany thing you do at the beach or something you do when you go down to the park, but not there. We had the former prime minister of the Netherlands visit us at one of our events, Jan Peter.
Now, first of all, I couldn't believe it the prime minister of the Netherlands came. He watches the "Hour of Power". But the second thing I couldn't believe is there was no, like, secret service or anything, he just rode his bike, rode his bike. Came on over, said hi to us, that was cool. Here's the royal family riding their bikes. I'm sure they do it all the time. It's a great country, Holland. And one of the things I realized is even though I've been to the Netherlands many, many times and love the country and love the people, I had never quite experienced Holland the way I did this time on a bike. And I asked my colleague, Chris, I said, "Is there anyone in the Netherlands who can't ride a bike"? And he said, "No, not anyone".
We were having coffee, and I saw a young girl in a wheelchair, and she was eating with her friends at the cafe, and they were having a grand old time, and a thought occurred to me. There is someone who can't ride a bike, you know, that's kind of sad that she can't ride a bike. And then I saw that they all left together, and she wheeled out, she went out to where all the bikes were, and there was this attachment. She rolled her wheelchair into this bike attachment, latched it on, and she and her friends, she had, like, a hand pedal, wheeled away. Isn't that cool? I thought that was really precious and very cool.
So, here's the question. Riding a bike is a skill that not everyone has unless you're Dutch. Everyone in Holland does it. Would it be worth it if a 50 year old achieved acclaim, successful CEO from the United States, decided to retire in Holland, if he moved to Holland, would it be worth it for him to learn to ride a bike? And everyone should say of course. Of course, right? Let's say it together, of course. Even though he would look a little silly, even though the kids would laugh at him, even though he might fall over a couple of times in his silly suit, right? Would it be worth him learning a skill of riding a bike? And the answer is of course. Why? Because Holland opens up in a whole new way when you learn to ride a bike.
This is the thought that occurred to me. Many of us have so much of life that would open up, but the thing that stands between us and that life is a set of skills. The thing that stands between us and where we want to be is a quiet, personal, but devout devotion, redundant, to learn a skill that opens up the whole world. Today I want to answer this question. Very often we find ourselves in an in between place. What do I do when I find myself in an in between place? Maybe you want to get married, maybe you want a new job, maybe you're waiting for an application to go through to start a business or a ministry, maybe there's some goal, maybe you had a prophetic vision, maybe some crazy thing happened and a note was dropped from a bottle from the sky that said, "You will such and such," and you're really hoping this thing happens, and maybe you're believing this thing will happen.
What do you do when you're in an in between place? What do you do while waiting? What do you do while you're waiting? Today's message is called "The Win", the win, the victory, "The Win Is in the Waiting". We always think the win is when you cross the finish line. We think the win is when you hit the high C in that song. We think the win is when you receive the trophy or when you receive the promotion or when you get the great moment in life to perform in the place you've always wanted to perform in. But the truth is the win happens before those things.
The win is in becoming a person, and becoming that person happens when nobody's watching. It happens on your free time, when everyone else is scrolling on their phones and you're reading a book, when everyone else is doing, you know, watching TV or falling asleep on the couch, and you're seeking out new information, or expanding your network, or even better, going into a time of prayer or studying scripture. There is something in the waiting that creates in us who we need to be to get the things we want. If you have a pen or maybe a phone with those little, like, note apps, I would write this down. God is way more interested in who you become than what you accomplish.
I'll say it again, because if you catch what I just said, your life will change forever. God is more interested in who you become than what you accomplish, because if you become the right kind of person, you can accomplish anything you put your mind to. The people who accomplish the goals they set out to accomplish have become the kinds of people that get those things. Hopefully this will make more sense as we go along. But God cares very much about who you become. That's what discipleship is about. Matthew chapter 15, a strange story that Jesus seems to be a mean guy. You might have heard it before, it takes place in Phoenicia.
Now, remember, the New Testament is always meant to have hyperlinks back to the Old Testament, especially in Matthew, which was written to Jews. When you hear the story, two characters come to mind. Both are women, one is a villain, and one's a hero. The first is Jezebel, rich, wealthy queen, but evil. And the other is the widow of Zarephath, poor, destitute, but full of faith and miracle working power. She's the one who cares for Elijah when he goes to the gates. It's in the same place that Jesus travels to, for whatever reason, we don't know, and he's walking along, and a woman starts yelling out after him to heal her daughter.
"Heal my daughter," yelling out after him, following, "Lord, heal her, Lord, heal her, Lord, heal her," until finally Jesus's college age disciples say, "Will you tell her to shut up"? You have to read it in Greek to see that bit. They say, "Send her away". Let's read it together, Matthew chapter 15. Jesus did not answer a word. You ever feel that way when you're praying to God? It's easy to feel when Jesus doesn't answer a word to think that the word he answers is no. That's not the word you get in this story. Okay, "So his disciples came in and urged him, 'Send her away, she keeps crying out for us.' And he answered, 'I was sent only to the lost people of Israel,'" who's that? The Jews. She's not Jewish.
"The woman came and knelt before him. Lord, help me, she said. And he replied, 'It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to dogs.'" Dogs? Dogs? Toss it, you're a dog? If that sounds bad in English, I promise you it sounds, like, a million times worse in Aramaic. It's obscenely offensive to the max, incredibly offensive. Dogs? She wants him to heal her daughter, and he calls her a dog? Goes right over her head, right? "He says, 'It's not right to take the children's bread and give it to dogs,' and she says, 'Yes it is, Lord.'" Ooh, talking back to God. "'Yes it is, Lord,' she said. 'Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.'"
You hear what she says there? "Yup, I'm a dog. Call me whatever you want, just heal my daughter. Call me whatever you want, just give me my miracle. Say whatever you will about me, I need a miracle from you. Call me anything you want". I love lines like that too. It's a very Middle Eastern thing, wonderful culture, full of cleverness like that. I just think turning it around, and Jesus said to her, "Woman, you have great faith". Only two times in the whole Bible Jesus says that. This is one of 'em. "You," everybody else, "of little faith," everybody else is the little faiths, not her. You have great faith. Did Jesus love this woman? The answer is, of course. He's teaching his disciples something about real faith. "And the request is granted, and her daughter was healed at that moment".
What do we learn from this passage? Here's two things I pick up from this passage that if you learn today, your life will change. Number one, this woman cared more about her miracle than she did about her ego. This woman was unoffendable. There's a superpower. If you're looking for a superpower to achieve great things in life, here's one. Become, as much as you can, become unoffendable. That's hard to do in a day that's all about trophies and glory and labeling everything on earth that's offensive. We don't want to be offensive, but you know we can be is unoffendable. That would be a great thing to have.
One commentator on this passage said she was too desperate to take offense. How desperate are you? How desperate are you for that thing, that dream, that goal, that thing that's laid before you? How bad do you want it? Do you want it so bad that you don't care what people say about you? If you do, you just got a superpower. Congratulations. How do you become unoffendable? There's lots of ways, but I remember being with a friend of mine and some random stranger, probably had some kind of mental illness or something, just started saying the worst stuff to my friend, and my friend looked at this guy and he said, "Hmm, that's interesting".
And I thought, that's a good line. Everybody, that's interesting. If someone says something horrible to you, you can say something horrible back, can't you? If someone says something horrible about you, you can mull it over and not sleep all night, right? Or here's something that can happen, if someone says something about you or you hear that they said something about you to a third party, that's even worse, isn't it? Here's something you can say, that's interesting. That's interesting. There's something I can learn about this person. There's something I can learn about myself. That's interesting. I promise you that if you work on being less offendable, you will have more power in your life.
This program makes a promise, it's called the "Hour of Power," and one key to power, personal power, is understanding that the more power you have, the more people will offend you, the more people will criticize you, the more people will go after you, and in large part your success is completely also related to your ability to withstand criticism and let it roll off your shoulders by simply saying that's interesting. Interesting. Okay.
So, that's one thing I learned, is that she cared more about her miracle than she did her ego. Her desperation for a miracle was greater than the offense. Number two, Dr. Schuller said it best, God's delays aren't God's denials. Right, Jesus is walking around, she keeps saying, "Lord, heal my daughter, Lord, heal my daughter, Lord, heal my daughter, Lord, heal my daughter, heal my daughter," and what does he say? Not a word until his disciples say, "Tell her to shut up". It even sounds like a no at first, doesn't it? She just will not accept a no. God's delays are not God's denials. Maybe you're crying out to God, and you're asking him for something, but it's just silence, it's just silence.
Sometimes what God is doing is giving you a space to become a different kind of person, and this is the key to everything I wanna say today. The win is in the waiting, the win is in the in between, the win is taking your eye and fixing it not so much on a goal, an achievement, as much as becoming the person who can get that kind of achievement. It's such a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference. What do you do when you're waiting for God? You work on you. You develop in yourself the skills, the knowledge, the ability, the network, the spiritual life, the things you need to attain what you want in life.
You can grow, you can grow as a leader, you can grow in your language and vocabulary skills. You can grow all sorts of skills. You can grow in your spirituality, you can study people, there's a good discipline, studying people. You can develop good friendships. Yeah, you're gonna take things off of the friends that you have, all the good things and bad things, it will rub off on you. These are things that you can do in the in between. You know, nobody is born with leadership skills, nobody is born with language skills, and if you want to be different than whatever... and get what everybody else isn't getting, you need to become a different kind of person, and you can today.
Nothing stopping you from making a decision to become who you need to be to get what you want to get. I am your friend, Let me tell ya something. I am giving you some really good advice that will change your life forever. Become the kind of person you want to be. Joseph was given a dream, you remember that, a wonderful dream, but he had no idea the kind of person and the kind of suffering he'd have to go through to become the kind of person to get what he got. You have to go through a lot to become a great leader. Moses had no idea, right, of the kind of, he had to become a totally different kind of person. He had to not be a prince anymore, he had to be a shepherd.
And how old was Moses when God called him to free his people from Pharaoh? Do you remember? If you watch the movies you think, oh, 30, 40, maybe 50 with some steroids, right, looking a little bit buff, nice jawline, perfect teeth, great teeth in those days. No sir, no sir. Moses was an 80-year-old shepherd, remember? He was a prince, and he lost everything, and he was a shepherd. God needed a shepherd, not a prince. He had to become a different kind of person. Before Israel, Israel was promised a land, remember? But before Israel received the Promised Land, they had to become a different kind of people in the wilderness.
Saul, no doubt, thought he was doing good work for God, but Saul had to become Paul before he could do what he was called to do. God is looking for you in the waiting to become the kind of person first. Work on you. There is an inherent need in every single person for progress. Here's something that you may not have recognized about yourself, but the second I say it, you'll know it's true. All of us want a sense of personal progress in our lives. And the way most people measure personal progress is with personal milestones. You get married, you have kids, you get tenure at your school, you get partner at your law firm, you get a promotion, you get the ideal job, you sell your business, whatever. You have these things in life, but the problem with these milestones is they're not always within your control, and they don't happen every day all the time.
So, if enough time goes by without a great musical performance or without a great whatever, enough time goes by, the sense of meaninglessness in life grows because the meaning of life really for many of us is about progress. But here's something that you can control. See, all those things I talked about are outside progress, that's the stuff people can see. I'm convinced very few people would run a marathon if they couldn't talk about it. There's, like, 3% of marathon runners would keep doing it if they couldn't mention it to anyone, you know? What are they doing? They're looking for, and rightly so, achievement, something to brag about or to feel proud of, that's good. But many of the outside things that people see in life are out of your control.
Here's something that's under your control. Personal development. Personal development. Here's a progress you can make, on the inside, you can make progress on the inside. You can become a different kind of person, and inside can always happen. It can happen in a jail cell, ask Dr. King. It can happen in a hospital, it can happen if you're a homeless person on the street, because before the big things happen out there, big things have to happen in here. I want to build a big church, but God is not looking for big churches. He's looking for big Christians. He's looking for people that are developing here.
One big Christian can do a lot more than 1,000 big churches, that's a promise. There is no limit to what you can accomplish or do for God if you allow God to do something in you. And if you think about that waiting period between point A and point B as where the real progress happens when you become a new kind of person. The inside has to be bigger than the outside. The inside has to be bigger than the outside. Almost every single person who wins a fortune in the lottery loses all their money, ends up in debt, breaks up their family, or dies of a drug overdose. In almost every single case, and there have been many, many studies, people who win the lottery, their lives end up worse five years later. Why? Because what's on the inside is not what's on the outside.
The fortune is bigger than the person, you see? And what has to happen is the person needs to become bigger than the fortune. I knew a man who was already wealthy, and this seems so unfair, doesn't it? And he and his wife would play the lottery every Friday night, and then he won millions of dollars, and guess what? He turned that millions into millions and millions of millions, why? Because the person was bigger than the fortune. He was a CPA, so he knew how to handle money. The bigger thing on the outside must be bigger on the outside than what's on the inside. I often think about this. Do today's college students, what do they want more, a diploma or an education?
That's a good question, isn't it? If you had to choose between the certificate or the education, what would you pick? Here's how I used to think when I was in college. I was 100% about the diploma, right? Like, just my favorite thing to say, C-s get degrees, right? You just, it's all about just getting that diploma and getting that job. I remember when I went to business school, and my goal was to find the easiest professor I could find, all right? The ones who gave the least amount of homework, the ones you could definitely get an A no problem. I still remember, it was a business degree, I got a financial professor, when we were getting ornery, he would just give us the answers on our tests. Can you believe that?
He seemed burned out, by the way. Can I tell you that was everyone's favorite professor. But what a disservice he did to us in our foolishness, in our immaturity that we think a diploma matters. Diplomas don't matter. Knowledge matters. Yeah, a diploma might get you in the door, but if you lied and you don't have financial knowledge, you're gonna get what? Capital F, F-F-F-Fired, right? Nobody wants someone with a diploma that doesn't have an education. The market does not pay you for your diploma, the market does not pay you for the hours you work, the market pays you for the value you bring. You can become more valuable, and a lot of college students have never learned this fact.
There's a professor named Maitland Jones, this story just came out in the New York Times about a organic biology professor at NYU who is apparently a really nice guy, his colleagues liked him, he wasn't abusive, he didn't shout at students as far as I understand, but it was really hard to get an A in his class, and students didn't like that, so 82 out of 350 of them signed a waiver asking to get him fired because they couldn't get an A, and guess what? NYU, NYU fired him. What is happening? And even though there was an outcry of other students, the ones who got the A-s, I'm sure the ones who did the work, the ones who had what it took, the ones who didn't make excuses, they cried out and said, "What are you doing"?
This is NYU, NYU, one of the most prestigious universities. This isn't UCLA. Was that good? Just kidding, Mark. Where did Mark go? I'm sorry, my friend. Why I oughtta. When prestigious universities are firing their professors for making organic chemistry too hard, you know who takes care organic chemistry, don't you? They're called doctors, they're called physicians. Can I ask you a question? Do you want the doctor who got an A in that guy's class or a doctor who signed the waiver that said, "I deserved an A"? I bet I know which one you'd pick. I know who I'd pick. See, the education matters more than the diploma. The person matters more than the achievement.
You see, it's about becoming someone. I saw an article recently that said, yeah, prices are coming down on homes, but unfortunately you millennials, I'm a millennial, will never be able to buy a home. Everybody repeat after me, hogwash. Let's say it together, hogwash. I promise you, yesterday a millennial bought a home somewhere, I promise you today a millennial bought a home somewhere, and I promise you tomorrow, guess what? A millennial is going to buy a home.
See, the people that are not going to buy a home are the people who read articles like that and believe ideas like that. That's the idea of an excuse. It's a new thing you can blame, but nobody really wants a good excuse. Most people want a good house. Am I right? So, here's a good goal. Here's a good goal if you're a millennial. I want to buy a house. That's a good goal. Here's a better goal. I wanna become the kind of person that can buy a house. Do you see the difference between those two things? And you say, well, what's the kind of person that can buy a house?
Well, that's a good question. Why don't you make a list of the kinds of millennials that can buy a house? You might put Mark Zuckerberg up there. I immediately can hear everybody's eyes roll. "Ugh". All right, okay, fine. Work your way down, right? What is the kind of person, you could make a list of all types of person. You probably know a person who can buy a house, and now you begin to ask a better question, how do I become the kind of person who can buy a house? Ooh, here's a better question. How can I become the kind of person that can buy three houses? See, now you're thinking like a Schuller.
See, that's a Dr. Schuller, not me. I'm talking about my grandpa. That sounds arrogant, and it is. You see, it begins here, friends, it begins here. It begins not in the goal of what you accomplish, it begins in the goal of who you become. Here's a good question, here's a good goal. I want to get married. Here's a better goal. I wanna become the kind of person everyone wants to marry. I remember in college there was a gal that I thought was, I mean, she was cute, I guess. Didn't really to me, you know, I hate talking about people's looks but, you know, but guys went crazy for her.
I had one guy that told me a part of his body he would cut off if he could marry her. It was his left hand. It was his left hand. He would cut off his left hand, and I believed him. And so I said to him, "My friend, I don't think she wants to date someone without a left hand. Why don't you just ask her for her number"? And he said, "I already did, and she said no thank you". See, there's something about that girl that made her alluring to people that wanted to marry her. She had her pick of the litter because, so here's a good goal. If you wanna get married, become someone that everyone would love being married to. Here's a goal, good goal, I want to have children.
Here's a better goal, I wanna be an amazing father. I wanna become an amazing mother. Here's a good goal, I want to start a ministry. Here's a better goal, I wanna become the kind of person that everywhere I go, somebody receives a touch from the Lord, that everything I say inspires or encourages people. I want to have the kind of skills and understanding of the scripture to communicate it effectively to everyone I meet. That's a great goal. See, someone like that doesn't have to try and start a ministry. A ministry just evolves and develops around them. Are we getting it?
Some of you are getting this, I can tell. Some of you are seeing that the slight difference in goals from I want to get this to I want to become this is the biggest change you can make in your life. And that always happens, almost always, in that waiting period, in the free time period, in the time when everyone else is just bored and trying to be entertained. When you do something there to become a different kind of person, everything changes. Well, we can't become who we want to be without the master of life, and his name is Jesus Christ, and we need him to teach us all that there is to know about living a fruitful and godly and awesome life.
And so, we ask you, Jesus, to help us. Thank you that your living Spirit dwells within us, that your living Word is given to us, and we can study it. Thank you that your followers are all around us and we can learn from them. Father, put the right kind of people in our life that we need to become the people you've called us to be. We entrust our lives to you. It's in the strong name of Jesus we pray. All God's people said, amen.
And now the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift his countenance upon you and give you his peace. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
And now the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift his countenance upon you and give you his peace. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.