Steven Furtick - Don't Cry Over What's Lost
This is an excerpt from “Stop Crying, It's Coming!”
When you find yourself in a period of reinvention and nothing seems familiar and nothing seems normal and nothing makes sense and nothing matches your prior map of meaning or knowledge, nothing looks like where you've been before, and you're looking at it going, "Where's the gold? Where's the temple we heard about? Where's all the stuff that used to happen"? Or if your body is starting to ache in ways it didn't ache when you were 24, and you're figuring out how to work around that… God said, "Speak to the remnant". The remnant could represent a fragment. Remember, there were hundreds of thousands taken to Babylon. Only 60,000 came back. That can discourage you, especially if you're a leader, like Zerubbabel. Do you know what the hardest thing about staying in the ministry for 15 years has been for me? Having to keep a good spirit even when people leave and it breaks your heart. Not if they leave to go on and do something great for God.
I'm talking about people who just flat fall out, and you go… This is how some of the campus pastors feel about the people who haven't even come back to volunteer yet. "After everything we did for you… Really? You? I was praying for you for every ingrown toenail. You called me at 2:00 in the morning because you had heartburn and thought you had to go to the hospital, and I would pray for you, and you can't come back? Let me run into you in Ruby Tuesday. I will cuss you out". See, if I'm the Devil (and I'm not), if I'm the Enemy, I'm going to try to get you so focused on who left you don't see what's left. There's still a remnant. Even if it's a fraction of what it once was, there's still a remnant. There is a remnant. "Yeah, well, I don't have anything to be grateful for". There's a remnant. You just did it. Did you breathe in? Did you breathe out? Well, let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Even if you lost your business, you still have breath. Even if you lost your boyfriend, you still have breath.
Hey, who's not to say that dude was rubble? Maybe God was clearing him out so you could get ready for something better. God said if you stay so focused on who didn't come back, who didn't support, who didn't "like," who didn't endorse, who didn't click through, who didn't do it… This is what the Lord said to me in one season of ministry. He said, "If you keep focusing on who left and what's lost, you are not going to see who's lost and what's left". I was crying because some people left out on me who I thought wouldn't. "Oh, we'll never leave". Be careful of those people. That's like Peter saying, "I will never deny you, Lord". Jesus was like, "Before that rooster says 'cock-a-doodle…' He's not even going to get to the 'doo' and you're going to say you don't know me. You're going to cut the rooster off mid-crow and disown me".
While I'm crying over who left, God has given me a mission, as a pastor, to reach people who are lost. That's the mission of Jesus: to seek and save what's lost. The Devil can't take… This is one thing he can't do. He can't take what God gave you. He can't. But if he can get you so depressed, so distracted, so disappointed… He wants to keep you crying to keep you from seeing what's coming. Stop crying; it's coming. For everything that left your life, God has made a covenant with you. "I am with you to this day". Let me finish the sentence. "If God is for us, who can be against us"? If God is with me, he is more than the world against me. I know you've been crying. It's all right. God sent me with a prophetic word like Haggai. I see him reaching through the centuries to tell you, "Stop crying; it's coming"! You don't want to miss what's coming because you're crying over what's gone. What's coming is better than what's going. God is taking you from glory to glory to glory.
If you feel comfortable, touch your neighbor and say, "Stop crying; it's coming". Put it in the chat. Stop crying; it's coming. How long will you mourn over what God has rejected? Fill your horn with oil. David is in the field. It's coming. I don't say that by feeling; I say it by faith. It's coming. Joy is coming. Peace is coming. Praise is coming. Restoration is coming. It's coming! In fact, lift up your eyes. The harvest is here! Not four more months…right now! Fill the temple with praise! Stop crying; it's coming. If the Enemy can keep you crying, he can keep you from seeing what's coming. Haggai said, "I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking it too. This is nothing compared to that. I saw pictures of Solomon's temple on Pinterest. It was expensive".
It was the same place Solomon's temple was but wasn't made of the same stuff, because God is reforming it. He's reforming your life. He's shaping it like a potter and the clay. He's reforming it. That's what it is. It's his hands, not the Devil's. When we write songs, the worse they suck when we start them, the better they get when we finish them. Then we take it home, and we have the demo, which is the rough version. There's this thing called demoitis. It's when you listen to the first version so much you start thinking it's perfect, but it really needs a lot of work. The Devil has some of y'all in demoitis. You thought the first version was the only version of who you are, of what you do, of what your gifts are, but the Lord said, "I can't make it better if you keep going back". Stop crying. I know it sounds insensitive. "Pastor Steve, Jesus wept. Didn't you see that"? Yeah, I'm the one who told you about that. But that's not all he did.
Look at John 11:38. It says after Jesus cried, which is important… Trauma is real. Seventy years in Babylon will make you cry. It'll make you forget to sing. When you find out what your kid has been doing behind your back, it'll make you cry. When you and your husband don't even look at each other except when you're around people so you can fake it real good, it'll make you cry alone. God doesn't correct the sisters, but I'm glad he didn't stop there, and you can't either. In John 11:38 it says not "Jesus cried," but "Jesus, once more deeply moved, came…" So, he cried, and then he came. Stop crying; it's coming. I don't want the old temple to keep me from seeing Jesus. Seriously. You know how it said in the verse in Haggai "From the day I brought you out of Egypt until now…" Did you catch that? It's a really small thing in verse 5. I didn't make a big deal out of it, but it is a big deal. They thought Pharaoh had to let them go for them to leave Egypt. That wasn't their biggest problem. Their biggest problem was letting go of Moses.
See, Moses gave them the Law, and they were so committed to that that when Jesus came, who is the true image of God, to show them what God is really like… Not to break the Law but to fulfill it. When Jesus came, they could not recognize better because they were stuck in before. So, while we're fighting like, "Hey, Pharaoh, let me go. Hey, addiction, let me go. Hey, temptation, let me go," God is like, "The thing you're holding on to is the former glory". I don't know who it is. If it's three people, it's worth saying. You have to let go of former glory to receive present help. Now, that means a lot of things. It means the same Jesus who cried at the gate came to the tomb. It didn't stop him from doing what he came to do. He didn't come just to cry or give them a Hallmark card. He didn't just bake them a roast so they could eat it three days later. He came to show them who he was. He came to reinvent their concept of God and to switch their template of truth, that "Not only am I a healer; I am resurrection". He came to prefigure what he would do. He came.
So, he cried. (Come on, don't tap out on me. This is the best part of the sermon. I know y'all aren't going to listen to a sermon about the glory of the latter house and skip the end of the sermon. This is the part I wanted to preach us to.) He cried, and you've been crying. You have a Christ who cries, so that's fine. He will cry with you. But then you have a Christ who, after he stopped crying, came to the tomb. So, he's coming to the tomb. He's coming to the part that's buried. He's coming to the part that's broken. He's coming to the part that's dead. He's coming to the part that stinks. He's coming to the part that's rotten. He's coming to the part that has given up on. He cried, he came, but that's not the good part.
The good part is verse 43: "When he had said this, Jesus called…" So, he cried, he came, and then he called in a loud voice. I hear that voice calling today through the halls of history, from the pages of Haggai to this very moment in the house of God. "Lazarus, come forth! Come forth"! He's speaking to your joy. He's speaking to your peace. He's speaking to your strategy. He's speaking to your spirit. "Come forth"! So you cried a while. It's all right. I am convinced that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed.
Did you catch that whole sermon? He cried. He came. He called. You have to call some things out today. They're not going to come automatically. You can cry over it as long as you want, but I believe something deeper is calling from the inside. What the prophet told the people was, "You have to do the work". Is wishing for something you don't have keeping you from working with what you do have? I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I needed this word. The Lord said, "You can cry, but eventually you have to come, and you have to call those things that be not as though they are, beneath your feelings". The promise is… It's a covenant, not a commitment. Commitments can be broken; covenants cannot, especially when one of the parties is the one who cannot lie.