Steven Furtick - Why You Can't Give Up
I’d like you to write this down somewhere: feelings come. I like to start somewhere nobody can argue with. If I start my sermon saying, «Jesus is the only true way to God. He is the Son of God, and he died for your sins and rose again,» you may or may not believe that. I believe that, but you may not believe that. So let me build a little bridge. This is what John 4 is about, that Jesus is the Messiah, but let me start with something we all can agree with. Feelings come. One of the things that happens in worship a lot of times, when we come to church, is we will come to church not even wanting to come, and then when we get into the atmosphere of God’s presence, we are glad we came. We’re so glad we didn’t obey the way we felt and let it keep us from what we were supposed to receive.
I feel this way every time I do a physical workout, like a weight lifting thing or something like that. I never work out because of how I want to feel in that workout. I meet psychopaths who do CrossFit. I’m not wired like that. They say they enjoy the actual workout. I am getting more to that point, but what actually puts me in a workout is the way I want to feel after the workout. That became a powerful journaling exercise for me. I call it reverse journaling. After your day you usually go, «Well, I did this, and I shouldn’t have. I ate this, and I shouldn’t have. I went there, and I shouldn’t have. I said that, and I shouldn’t have». I do plenty of that. Trust me. But if you can reverse journal sometimes, it’s a really good spiritual practice.
It’s like asking the question, «How do I want to feel when this day is finished»? You ask it in the morning, and then you try to work toward that with your actions. If you just wake up and let the feelings come, they’ll come. Sometimes the feelings come, and they catch you before you’ve even had your coffee. What I’m trying to say is feelings come, but they don’t come first. That might be one of the most powerful things I’ve ever learned, and I’d like to break it down with you a little while today. Feelings come, but they don’t come first. The feeling of being tempted is never a sin. It is when the temptation takes the throne in your life and leads you to a place you have no business being that the sin is committed. Feelings of sadness do not negate the joy of the Lord, but it’s when I allow the feeling of sadness to become the primary soil in which my life is grown that it becomes a problem.
Feelings come, but they don’t come first. What I mean by that is, first of all, sometimes you have to do the thing and the feeling follows. Sometimes you have to lift your hands, and the burden is lifted as your hands are. If you wait for the burden to lift for your hands to follow, you may keep them in your pockets, and you may never feel the freedom you could have felt, because feelings come, but they don’t come first. All I’m trying to get you to see today is that God is very aware of the hard places in your life. The very clear thing I heard God saying to me today to preach to you was he will help you in the hard place. Encourage your neighbor. They need to hear it. «God will help you in the hard place».
See, when you say that to her, you don’t know what her hard place is, but you can be sure she has a hard place. «No, she doesn’t. She has plenty of money». Well, then she has plenty of taxes. God will help you in the hard place. «Well, they have kids. They’re not struggling with infertility». Fertility has its own set of problems. You never hear anybody say that, though. «I’m struggling with fertility». The truth of the matter is whether you’re struggling with something you can’t have or something you do have, the pressure is real for all of us. The assuring word of the Lord is that God will help you in your hard place. I’m not sure if the section of the text I read got the point across that Jesus and his disciples were traveling through a hard place. We know that because verse 39 says, «Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony».
There are two things in this text I want to give you before we really get practical here. Samaria was a place that was very hostile to the Jews, and the woman had lived a very hard life and had been through several men. In fact, she had been through five men, and she was currently in a situation with number six. Into the complexity of this situation there comes the presence of purity, the presence of purpose, the presence of potential in the dirt of a place they didn’t want to be. Samaria was a place that was racially tense. Samaria was a place that was religiously polytheistic. Not that they didn’t each think they were right. They just worshiped in different places in different ways.
So, everything is against the disciples and Jesus in this text. I think that’s worth its own sermon, because some of the things God teaches us that go the deepest happen in the places we did not choose to be in. You don’t really get to sign up for a class to learn the things Christ wants to teach you. I’ll prove it to you right from the text. Look at verse 27. The disciples were surprised to see Jesus talking to a woman. That lets me know, if they were surprised, they did not get a syllabus. I have a son going back to college this week. Some of the stuff that gets taught is not on the syllabus. When we read «discipleship,» we think class, because that is our modern, Western interpretation of learning, but God’s version of learning usually looks like this: «I am going to show you how strategic I was after you survive the surprise».
So, what happens is life catches you off guard. «Oh, whoa! Hey, I didn’t even see that coming. Oh! I didn’t even see them coming. I definitely would have ducked. I definitely wouldn’t have answered if I knew that’s what they wanted to talk to me about». You know people who bait you with a text, like, «Hey…» and that’s all it says? I never respond to that. I’m going to need more information. That is inconclusive data to give me. Surprise! He’s talking to a woman. Surprise! He’s sitting down having a chat. Surprise! She’s somebody you don’t like. She’s a Samaritan. Surprise! See, they thought, «We went through Samaria because it was shorter geographically».
The Bible says Jesus took them through Samaria. Well, most Jews walked around Samaria so they didn’t have to deal with those people. Now Jesus is talking to one of those people. And not even one of those people…a woman, which was not very good PR strategy for a rabbi. Yet I have learned in my life… You can get this lesson at age 13, you can get it at age 31, or you can die not getting this lesson, but you’ll find out one day that God is often most strategic when you are most surprised. That means God will allow things to come into my life, even my day, or even my feelings that I did not expect.
What I have to learn how to do in those moments is what Galatians 6:9 says. «Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time…» One version says, «…in due season». At the proper time. «…we will reap a harvest if we do not give up». But if your feelings come first, you give up while it’s growing. If you cannot separate the feeling, you will never experience your due season. But this is the tricky thing. How do you do in a season what is due in another season when the feelings don’t come to support you? You say to me, «This has nothing to do with Jesus and the Samaritan». It has everything to do with Jesus and the Samaritan. It has everything to do with you and your kid. It has everything to do with the fear you feel about your business.
I think this passage speaks to every one of our fears and every one of our frustrations. And it speaks to something else we should talk аbout: the fatigue we feel while we do what we do and what is due doesn’t come. What do you do when what is due doesn’t come? The Lord might have sent me to preach this message for myself. If that’s the case, I invite you to listen in. Too many times in my life, I have thought only about what I am sowing in this moment, and I lose consciousness of the harvest that awaits me if I don’t give up. It looks like this. Galatians 6:8: «Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction…» That’s another way of saying just doing what you feel, sowing to the flesh. «…whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life».
That’s how we’re trying to think now. We’re trying to think about the lasting thing. We’re trying to think about the eternal thing. We’re trying to think about the long-term thing. We don’t want to be so into our feelings that we only sow into what we feel like. It looks like this. I may want to eat the ice cream at 10:00 p.m. I don’t want to feel the ice cream at 3:00 a.m. I don’t want to see the ice cream… If I sow into what I feel, then my feelings come first. Rather than thinking like a reaper and thinking, «Well, if I eat the ice cream just tonight, that’s fine, but if I eat the ice cream every night (I mean every night), and then I go back for a fourth scoop because I had a very stressful day (don’t judge me about it)…»
I won’t like what I see, but I will like what I feel. I need you to start growing into a place in God where when you go to speak an unkind word, you can think like this: «If I sow this unkind word, what will I reap in this relationship later»? I’m going to tell you the truth. It’s going to feel good to say it right now. It’s going to feel good to go off right now. As a matter of fact, when the woman in the text was talking with Jesus (the part I didn’t read you), she was so in her feelings she went off on Jesus. Jesus said, «Give me a drink». She said, «You don’t have a bucket. Why are you talking to me anyway? I’m a woman. You’re a rabbi. I’m a Samaritan. You’re a Jew. You don’t have anything to do with me». «No, I have everything to do with you».
What you do in this moment where you feel offended, what you do in this moment where you feel weary… What you do in this moment will determine whether your due season is going to be full of thorns and thistles or fruit and favor. I am not saying, by the way, that God’s love is on the basis of our behavior. I am saying the consequences are built into the system of humanity. To think like a reaper is to become conscious of the consequence. Pattern recognition. «Every time I go down this road, every time I respond out of what I feel, every time I continue to rehearse this thing that happened three weeks ago, every time I let myself go there in my mind, every time I indulge in it, I hate where it takes me».
That’s my conflict, because for some of the things in my life, I love what they bring me, but I hate where they take me. If you’ll be honest with it, there are certain vices, certain things, certain actions, certain states, certain relationships… Oh, don’t let me preach a relationship seminar. I’ll preach about the certain things that make you feel a certain way but take you a place. What do you do when you love how they make you feel but hate where they make you go? Jesus is going somewhere. He’s going through Samaria. He’s working on something. That’s why the disciples were surprised. When they left him, he was sitting on a well alone. They went to get food, and Jesus started talking to a woman. We call her the woman at the well. She’s much more than that, as I will show you in a moment. And so are you.
Where she was was not indicative of who she was, and what she had done was not indicative of who she could become. When they left Jesus, he was sitting down. The Bible actually says he was resting because he was tired. So, tired becomes the camouflage he uses to fulfill the purpose he came for. When they left to get food, a woman came to get water. When the woman came to get water, Jesus started working on her. He started asking her questions. «Can I get a drink»? She said, «You don’t have a bucket, and I’m not a Jew, and I’m not a man». He said, «Well, if you knew who was talking to you, you’d ask and I’d give you the drink». She said, «Are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us this well»?
Jesus is thinking, «Actually, I really am. I made Jacob, but let’s not get to that right now». And they started to argue. «We worship here. You worship there. You’re like this, and I’m like that». All of a sudden, Jesus cuts through all of that, because he was thinking like a reaper. Now, this is difficult for us, because as we go through life, we only see seeds, and the seed looks nothing like what it’s going to be. What the disciples would have seen if they had been in this scene would have been the woman who had had five different husbands, the woman who was not worth Jesus' time, the woman who had made so many mistakes or had been through so many relationships, whether her fault or the other, that her broken heart would make a horrible place for a new beginning. But Jesus thinks like a reaper, and a reaper begins with the end in mind.
How many of you have had somebody in your life at some point who saw something in you you didn’t see in yourself and you’re grateful that they invested in you? How many people wish you could be that person the person who believed in you saw? I told a buddy the other day, «Sometimes I’m sad because I’m grieving the 'me' I thought I would be by now. I am grieving the absence of the patience I thought I would have by now. I am grieving the 'let it go' I thought I would be able to access in stressful situations». This woman is not necessarily looking for an encounter with the living God, but she gets one, because Jesus sees what she can be.