All Your Heart - Proverbs 3:5-6 - The Greatest Commandment

Amen. Guys, I love that story.

I love the froats. They not only give time and treasure but also talent because that dude can smoke the meanest pork butt you've ever seen in your life. And he is a wizard at finding any type of ammo there is in the world for any caliber. He will find it. So that's just a little free for you guys, alright? So hey, if you are brand new with us, we're excited to have you today and you are coming in the middle of a series, but we want to catch you up, alright? So if you're brand new, a lot of us have these books and we want to give you one. It's a sermon companion guide, alright? So if you would just lift your hand, maybe this is your first time ever here or you've been around but you just didn't bring your book or whatever it is.

We have people around the room that are going to make sure you guys get one of these. There's sermon notes in it. There's an opportunity for you to catch some of our vision as those guys are passing those out. I want to try to connect some dots for y'all that sometimes are very hard to connect in terms of vision, okay? As you guys give your time, talent, and treasure back to the Lord through his local church, there are things that happen that we can put our finger on and then there are things that happen that we just can't really put our finger on but we know are happening, okay? And I want to encourage y'all today, as you guys give your time, talent, and treasure through Mercy Hill, you are sitting under a staff team that is very intentional about multiplying those resources beyond just Mercy Hill, okay?

I was, you know, my dad just ingrained this in me as a child. To whom much is given, much is required. Jesus said that. And what we really feel at Mercy Hill is, man, God is really blessing our ministry here and he's done some incredible things and we want to multiply that out among many, many churches. We are so open handed and want to give away all the resources that we can in terms of the things we're doing.

We want to help train, equip. Churches have been that way to us that are a little bit further ahead and so we want to be that way to others. And it really comes as you guys are continuing to lean in and follow leadership and trust us with your resources.

I wanted to give you guys a cool little snippet here. This week was our first ever Breaking Growth Barriers Conference. We had over 50 churches from all over the eastern seaboard come land at Mercy Hill and just talk about vision for ministry, nuts and bolts for ministry. It was an incredible thing. We really tried very hard in this conference to get people to see the connection between growing where you are and then going to the places where Jesus has not been named to send people out on church plants and mission teams all over the world. And so it was really fun.

It was pretty awesome. We had a bunch of churches come in. And one of the things that we tried to do was just to speak courage and boldness into some of these churches.

Guys, I get to live in a lot of ways in a dream world for a pastor because we have an awesome church with a great culture with people who want to follow. They want us to lead. You guys want us to go hard and empower us to do that.

There's a lot of guys that are in my boat that aren't in a situation like that. And we wanted to try to speak courage and boldness into them. And I think we had the opportunity to do that. One of the pastors said, this is a quote that he gave us.

He said, I felt so renewed this week. I felt empowered to lead. It feels like I've gotten hammered for years for my own style of leadership. Now I realize it's time to bounce back, stop apologizing and get after it in terms of the way God has wired me to lead.

And that is exactly what we were trying to do in this conference. I just want to tell y'all, man, if you're giving, if you're leaning in, if you lead things at Mercy Hill, if you're very faithful and consistent here, it is not only making an impact here, but it is making an impact in churches really all, I mean, starting to be all across the country. And so we're grateful for you guys for that.

All right, let's dive in. We're going to be in Proverbs chapter three today, and we're going to talk about how we're going to trust God today with our whole heart and not half of our heart. All right, so you know we're in this series called Greatest Commandment, Mark 12, this concept of love God with everything you have, love others.

Okay, that's sort of the idea. And what we're doing is we're drilling down on some things with that from some different places in the Bible. And today what we want to do is drill down on this idea. We will not love God with everything in us if we do not trust God with everything in us. If we don't trust Him with our whole heart, it is going to be very hard for us to walk in His ways.

One of the greatest Bible verses that I know that I would go to about trusting God comes out of Proverbs chapter three. And this is one that if you've been around church for a while, you probably already have heard or know, if you haven't been around church. You know, Mercy Hill is this beautiful mess across all of our different campuses, Clifton Road, High Point, our northeast campus, our regional, you know, north campus. If you guys are here at Mercy Hill, you're probably in a situation where either you've been around Mercy Hill for a while, or you're brand new to this whole thing of Christianity and we're all thrown together in this beautiful mess.

Okay? And it's an awesome thing to behold. In either case, Proverbs three, five, and six is going to be really awesome for us today, I think. Because if you've heard it a million times, there's more to learn. And if you've never heard it before, oh my, there's going to be such freedom today that is found in this passage when we talk about trusting God with everything that we have.

I was one who heard this verse as a very small child my whole life. Okay? I grew up in a situation where church was just, I mean, it was every day.

I mean, it was Sunday morning, it was Sunday night, it was Monday night, it was Wednesday night. Okay? Very early in my life, I developed a drug problem. I was drugged to church every time the doors were open.

All right? And I don't know, maybe you grew up that way. If you did, you probably know this verse. When I was a kid, we had these things called Bible drills.

People call them sword drills. I don't know if anybody remembers this, if you grew up in church. If you didn't grow up in church, you're going to think this is really weird.

Okay? But it was teach the kids how fast they can find a Bible verse in the Bible and then pit them in fierce competition with one another over it. And one of the sword drill, Bible drill verses always was Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 is one of the most notable scriptures in all of the Bible. Of the millions of coffee mugs that are out there with scripture on them, this one has got to take a high percentage because it tells us to trust the Lord with all that we have. Here's what we're going to see today. We cannot trust God if we are bent on leaning on our own understanding.

Now, that's a big idea. It's really just the retelling of the verse that we're going to get into today. It's going to be hard for us to trust God with our whole heart if we are bent on leaning on our own understanding. And what I want you guys to see today is this.

This is very important. We all, I mean if you're a believer especially, even if you're not a believer, we all trust God right up until the point that we don't. We trust God with some of our heart and then all of a sudden there comes a line where we're like, well I don't really trust anymore.

Man, I trust him in these areas but I don't trust him in these areas or I trust him in these areas to a point and then it kind of stops. And then what happens in my life? Man, we get into this self-protection mode. I got to grab the reins of my own life. I got to make sure I'm okay. I got to make sure I have purpose. I got to build it.

I got to get my identity straight because I'm not going to be anything without that or whatever it is. And we grab for what only God can give us. What I want to call you to do today is trust God with everything in your life. Trust him with all. Trust him with all of our heart. Don't lean on our own understanding. Acknowledge him in all our ways and then we understand a promise from God. He will make our paths straight. That don't mean everything in our life always works out the way we want but it does mean that a straight path is a godly path and we can walk that road.

Let's dive in today. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.

What we're going to do today is just walk through this phrase by phrase and then I'm going to apply it at the end. Trust God with everything you have and then we'll be done. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. The first thing that we see here is that trusting God is the very foundation of the Christian life. Now admittedly this ties back into our sermon from last week a little bit that we would trust God with everything in our life. So I think about trusting him with our families. I think about trusting him with our finances. I think about trusting him with our career. What is it that you're looking for today that will give you significance?

We trust him with everything in our life. Guys, one of the most controversial things that I said in the last six months was that Rocky III was my favorite Rocky movie. And I had people email me, you're not American if you don't believe that Rocky IV, and I understand that. Okay, Rocky IV. You guys remember Rocky IV? Rocky IV, he's fighting Ivan Drago.

He's up there. He's fighting the Soviets and all that kind of stuff. And I just heard recently that the guy Paulie passed away that was Paulie in the Rocky movies. I don't know if you guys saw that or not.

That's kind of sad. But Paulie is there in his corner and Duke is there in his corner. Duke was the trainer for Apollo. And they're telling Rocky, it's funny because Rocky ends up saying, they say, what's Ivan doing to you about halfway through the fight? And he's getting his snot beat out of him like he does in every one of them. And he says, what's happening to you? And they said, what is Ivan doing? And Rocky says, he's winning.

That's what he's doing to me. And they said, well, what's going on? He said, I'm seeing three of them out there. And he's like, well, hit the one in the middle. I'm like, well, that's great coaching.

Okay. But what did they say? What did Ivan and Duke end up saying? Duke said something to Rocky right when the fight begins to turn that is one of, I think, the most iconic lines for me in all the movies. And me and my boys and my daughter watched some of them.

But we watched all the Rockies this summer and it was really fun. But here's what Duke says back to Rocky in the moment where the fight is turning. He looks at Rocky and he says, right now is the moment, all your strength, all your power, all your love, everything you have right now. And that's always stuck in my mind because I thought when you tell somebody not only all your strength, not only all your power, but all your love, you're telling them to pour everything they got into this moment right now. And I think about that for us today because what we're being called to do is trust the Lord with strength, power, love. Trust him with everything that we have. You're trusting ourselves more than God will lead us to disobedience and foolishness. But trusting God with all we have will lead us to not lean on our own understanding. What happens when we lean on our own understanding?

You can think about it like this. Just look what the verse says. Trust the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. If we are trusting the Lord with all of our heart, we won't lean on our own understanding. But what is the tell of not trusting the Lord with all of your heart? The tell is that we want to grab and lean on our own understanding. This idea of trusting God and leaning on God, actually the very foundation of the book of Proverbs, fearing God.

They're all very closely linked. We're trusting God or we are leaning on what we can understand. You say, what does this look like in our life? Well, we trust God right up until the point that we don't trust God.

And so we're like this. We're like, hey, God, I trust you with marriage. You instituted marriage. I want to be in a godly marriage. And what we say, Ephesians 5, I'm going to give everything that I have.

We're going to be one in every area of our life. And people trust that right up until they don't. And then they say, well, God, I trust you with marriage, but I do think we're going to live together for a couple of years first. You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it.

That's what people say. So why don't we just kind of test drive the marriage a little bit here? Don't you understand what's happening in that moment? I trust God right up until the point that I begin to lean on my own understanding. I trust God until I get a little bit scared and then I want to grab for control. I think about this with disciplining children. You know, Proverbs 22, 15 tells us this, that foolishness is bound in the heart of a child and the rod of correction will drive it out. But here's what a lot of parents will do in our society today. They'll say, well, that's too old school. What we want to do is we want to trust God right up until we don't trust him with the discipline of our children. We want to do free spirit, creativity, never tell them no and give them nothing but affirmation. And then we'll see how it works out.

Well, trust me, all your friends see how it's working out. They know. They can see in them kids how it's all working out. We trust God right up until the point that we don't trust God. I think about this. You know, we trust God with our whole heart. Then we start to lean on our own understanding when we, and I know this series, we're going to get into this towards the end of the message today in terms of our giving and all that, but when we live a lifestyle that produces no margin to be able to give. I mean, Proverbs 21, 20 tells us only a fool devours all that they have.

There should be margin in the house of the righteous. And I know that can sound pretty tough because you're like, man, we live in this pretty tough economic times and all that, and I fully understand that. But at the end of the day, sometimes it's not that stuff. It's decisions that we make that are just decisions that were fully in our hand. Hey, I want to go to that school, even though it's going to cost me $150,000 of debt to end up with a degree that I may or may not even use.

That's a decision that we make on the front end. I've got to live in that neighborhood. Why? I just have to.

Why? Well, you know, you're going to end up with a house payment that's going to eat up all the margin in your life. I know, but we just got to be there. We trust God right up until the point that we don't trust him anymore. And what I want us to see today is, wait a minute, trusting God with all of our heart means continually turning everything that we have over to him. That hearkens back to the sermon a little bit last week. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on our own understanding.

That's what the Scripture is telling us to do. You know, what I'm talking about today for us is the most countercultural thing in the world in our day. What is the mantra of our day?

The mantra of our day is trust in yourself and everybody around you is there to affirm whatever that is that you figure out. That's our culture. That's where we live, work, and breathe and swim. Okay, this is where we are.

And yet what the Scripture is calling us to is, no, no, no, trust the Lord and don't lean on yourself. I've told you guys this before. One of my favorite movies of all time is the movie The Sandlot. I'm realizing now probably 30 years later there's a lot of politically incorrect stuff in it, but it's a heck of a movie. And what happens at the end of the movie The Sandlot? They're trying to get the baseball back. You know, Benny the Jet Rodriguez is now deciding he's going to pickle the beast. And they've got to get over this fence and get the ball before this man-eating dog kills them.

And it's awesome, okay? And so the night before, Benny the Jet Rodriguez decides he's just going to hop the fence and grab the ball. He gets a, because the ball's been signed by Babe Ruth and they've got to get it back, and he gets this ghost, comes into his room or whatever it is, vision or whatever, and it's Babe Ruth. And you guys remember, it's an interesting conversation, but what does the babe end up saying to him? He says to Benny the Jet Rodriguez, hey, heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Then he says, follow your heart, kid. You'll never go wrong.

It makes for an awesome movie. Bad life advice. Right? Because our heart will take us right over a cliff. The Scripture tells us that your heart is deceitfully wicked.

Who can know it? It's everything different than what we see in the media today. And I reference this stuff with media and music.

You know, Schaeffer had this right. Music and movies are the way that the common man translates what happened in academia and philosophy. So in academia and philosophy, we are going to a place culturally that comes out in our everyday mediums that people like me and you probably can understand. And so we see it in this stuff.

Trust yourself, and no matter what anybody else says, and one day they'll all recognize how right you were. Is that not every Disney movie you have ever seen? Right? It's even The Karate Kid, for crying out loud.

What does Mr. Miyagi say? If it comes from inside, it is always right. I mean, it's everywhere that we look. And what the Bible is calling us to is the exact opposite of that. To recognize in us there is flaw, there is problem, there is deceit. And what we need to do is this whole thing of giving over to the Lord rather than taking back. We don't trust our own understanding instead.

We trust him, and we are giving him the things that we have in this life. We are giving over our control all of the time. Guys, I get emails like this or I get people will ask things like this periodically. And this is just a very common one. It will be something like this.

Some social issue or some issue in our culture. It will say something like this. Hey, I'm looking for a new church. We want a biblically sound church. We want a biblically sound church. We want a church that is engaged in the community. All that kind of stuff is great.

And then it will say something like this. Oh, and we want a church that, for example, affirms women to the pastorate and they preach on Sunday mornings. Can you let us know how Mercy Hills stands on that? And I try to be as gracious as I can be, right? I'm like, man, I want people to come to our church. I want this person, whoever it is, these type of people to check out our church. I think they're going to see some things about us.

But then I have to send them back something that's basically like, wait a minute. You say trusting the Lord, trusting the scripture, preaching the Bible, but then talk about how a woman is affirmed as a pastor and preaches on Sunday morning. That runs contrary to the scripture. How do we have these two things? It's like, hey, I want to make sure they see our statement of faith. God has created men and women equal before him in dignity and worth.

But that does not mean that they are the same thing. He has roles and responsibilities that work beautifully together. And so at a church like Mercy Hill, the role of elder is reserved for a man.

We believe men are called to lead their family. These are things that the Bible is clear about. But when an email comes to me like that, what I can see is, hey, we trust God right up until it rubs me the wrong way because our culture doesn't like that. And now I want to lean on my own understanding. I want to trust God into a point and I want to lean on my own understanding to a point. What the scripture is calling us to do is trust him with everything that we have. And we trust him and his character revealed to us in his word.

Now, what does all that look like? All right. So here's verse six.

All right. If you trust him and don't lean on your own understanding, what does it look like? It looks like in all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. We will acknowledge God in all our ways. Y'all only after we have trusted him with our whole heart. I mean, this is the wisest man that's ever lived writing this.

It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? When you trust God with everything you have, you don't lean on your own understanding. When those things are true of your life, what happens? You will acknowledge God in some of your ways, most of your ways.

No, no, no. In all of your ways. Now, what does it mean to acknowledge someone?

Let me give you an illustration, okay? I want to take you back to about seventh grade sitting in a lunchroom. You got beef with somebody at school, okay? Or maybe there was a breakup or somebody did your friends wrong or whatever.

And here's what happens. It's all this awkwardness and all this tension and somebody walks in the lunchroom and you know they're there, but you don't look at them. You don't want to make eye contact.

You don't want to have to have that moment of, what is that word? Acknowledgement. You can know something without acknowledging it. You can know someone's there, but people would even say, you didn't even acknowledge I was in the room.

You didn't even acknowledge I was there. What does acknowledge mean? What does it mean to acknowledge God in all of our ways? It doesn't just mean to know. Here's what it means. Acknowledge means to know and to show that you know.

That's what acknowledge means. That I would know something and I would show that I know it. Now how do we do this in all of our ways? This is how we do it. In every category of our life, we are yielding our hands like this and saying, God, I not only know that you have a plan that is revealed in your word for this, I know that you have a protocol, if you want to call it that, for what this is, but I acknowledge that.

I not only know it, I show it. I want to live by it. I want to do marriage in the way that you're talking about. I want to do money in the way that you have taught me.

I want to do college years, for mission in the way that you show me. I want to handle my vacation. I want to handle alcohol. I want to handle diet. I want to handle things like exercise.

I want to handle my body. I want to handle all of these things with an acknowledgement of you, with a knowing and a showing that I trust you. You can say it like this, there isn't a bucket of life where we should not be asking, how do I praise God with this? How do I acknowledge him with this? How do I show what I know about what God wants me to do in this?

What we want to do, y'all, is segment off different parts of our life. I'll acknowledge you here and here, but not here and here. Man, I acknowledge you on Sunday.

I acknowledge you at group. I don't acknowledge you in my business dealings. Maybe you have somebody who's a terrible boss. Maybe you have somebody who, you know, wants to, I don't know, man, they're a horrible boss. They're a person who has got no problem backstabbing and swindling and all this kind of stuff. But then on Sunday they're, well, hey, and what do they say? I'm just a businessman. It's just part of business. Cheating, lying, stealing is just part of the game.

It's like, wait a minute, are we acknowledging him with every bucket of our life? You know, when we first moved here, the first year we were here, we put a softball team together to reach Greensboro, okay? Mercy thrill softball team, okay? Guys went out there to play softball for the mission. I'm going to be honest with you, it was the exact opposite of mission.

It was a train wreck, okay? I mean, our team, our mercy thrill team's over there screaming at each other in the dugout, about to fistfight the other team and all this kind of stuff, okay? And I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, are we acknowledging God in all of our ways here? What we say is, well, that's just sports, that's just the game.

Wait a minute. Are we acknowledging the Lord in every one of our areas? In all your ways, acknowledge him. And what will he do? He will make your path straight.

I love this. Acknowledge him in all your ways. Last time we'll read this verse, Proverbs 3, 6. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. What does it mean to make a straight path? It means that it is a God-honoring path. It is the morally correct path. You don't choose that, God chooses that. He chooses what that is. You know, we live in this culture, sometimes around church, where we're not sure what God wants us to do. We're asking him all of these non-moral questions about what we should be doing. And instead, what we ought to do is realize there is a straight path that comes simply by acknowledging him in all your ways.

I want to tell you the freedom that is here, okay? Man, we've got all this culture that is wrapped up in, did I make a right decision? Did I make a wrong decision? Did I make a right decision? Did I make a wrong decision? Was it on the straight path or was it not on the straight path? Do you know right now, you can have certainty that every decision you ever make for the rest of your life will be right and straight?

You can have that assurance. That doesn't mean it's always going to work out the way you wanted, okay? So you say, well, I started a business and I did it godly way, godly finance with good counsel, it didn't work out. That doesn't mean that it was wrong.

It just means that it didn't work out. Right and wrong, straight and not straight, these are categories of what the Lord does as we acknowledge him in all of our ways. When we are acknowledging God in all of our ways, rightness or wrongness of a decision is always made on the front end.

That's a front end thing. Now whether it works out or not, that's a different category. But we know if it was a godly thing or not. Y'all, we've had people in this church that have walked through very hard things like this. Man, they walked through, you know, they walked through a courting season or dating season. Friends, community, church, parents were on board.

You know, people affirmed it. Seemed like it was godly, equally yoked, a few years into the marriage, somebody turns out maybe not even be a believer and walks out. Man, what we do?

Man, I made the wrong decision. What do you mean wrong? That was on the front end. Right or wrong, straightness or not was on the front end. Man, did you acknowledge God in all your ways? The best that I knew how according to the scripture.

Well then in what sense was it wrong? Like what we need to realize is sometimes things work out, sometimes things don't work out. But what God wants for us, the rubric of what he wants for us is as plain as day and it's right in front of us.

And do you know what a pretty good protocol for it is? Trust God, not yourself. Acknowledge him in all your ways and then trust that whatever happens in your life, if you've made those decisions on the front end, are God's plan, super plan for his glory. And that you're doing the best that you can. And there's such freedom in that.

You know, I think about the straight path. A lot of people wake up about where I'm at in life, okay. They're about 40 years old and they have what people call midlife crisis. I don't know what it is, they cut their hair weird, they get tattoos.

I don't know anybody like that, okay. But, you know, the thing is, a lot of people wake up in this kind of season of life and here's what they realize. They realize they're not on the straight path. They all of a sudden realize God and money, all out of whack.

Balance of work and time and family, all crazy out of whack. Kids in the relationships, the way we're going right now is not going to lead to a flourishing relationship later in their life. They start realizing all of this stuff and what happens is an immense amount of guilt and shame can come crashing in. Now, part of this is not that encouraging. What I'm going to say, the second part is super encouraging. If you have found yourself in that situation, here's what you got to understand. That situation is not because it's working out or not because it's working out.

The straightness of a path is determined on the front end. So maybe you made decisions that weren't right. We got to just acknowledge that. But here's the greatest news, okay. Man, God's mercy is new tomorrow morning. And if we're not on the straight path today, let's make the decisions that are needed to get on the straight path tomorrow. You say, Andrew, what does that mean? It means acknowledge him with all of your ways.

Start today, repentance, moving back towards a godly way of life. The straightness of a path is determined by whether or not we acknowledge God in all of our ways. That is true. It was true we got off the path.

It's true now. And by God's grace, we can get back to that. All right, let me apply this to us and then we'll start moving toward a conclusion here, okay.

All right, so here's the application. It's very straightforward. Trust God with your whole heart. Don't trust him with half your heart.

Trust him with your whole heart. You know, I read some research, peer research put out in 2019 and we all know this. Americans trust in one another is declining rapidly. We all know that. Americans trust in institutions is declining rapidly.

We kind of all know that. How do we know who to trust? How do we know what to trust?

Why should we trust? Especially because trusting God, listen, trusting God feels like such a loss sometimes. You know, wisdom and foolishness are mirror opposites in terms of this. Wisdom feels like a loss in the short term, but it's a gain in the long term. Foolishness, exact opposite. Foolishness feels like a gain, but it's in the short term.

And in the long term, it's not, but it feels like such a gain. You guys have all been there. It's 10 o'clock, you're driving home from a ministry event, not saying this is a true story or not, okay. You're 10 o'clock and then all of a sudden you see it out on the horizon. You see the sign, the Krispy Kreme sign and it's lit up. You know what I'm talking about? Or then you pull off and you realize there's not only a Krispy Kreme there, there's also a cookout there where you can actually, I mean, corn dogs as a side, okay. And they got the milkshakes and all that stuff.

And what do you do? You end up, man, it's 10 o'clock. You end up making, it's a short term gain until you wake up the next morning and you realize like I'm going to be hungover for three days off of all this sugar. But my point is this, whatever's foolish feels pretty good like right then, but it's not. We know that. And so how do we trust God enough to move from it feels good in the short term to, man, I'm going to trust you with long term gains in my life. How do we get there? Well, we got to get there by understanding that God is trustworthy. The Bible is calling us to trust him. That is the foundation of the Christian life. That we would trust him with everything that we have. How do we get there? We trust him because we know that he is trustworthy. Now, how do we know that he is trustworthy? Well, you go back to the story of the whole Bible and here's what you're going to find.

There is a God in heaven who created humanity and put them in perfection so that they would enjoy relationship with one another, enjoy relationship with the earth, and enjoy relationship with God for all time and forever. And what did they do with all of God's goodness? They broke it. They rebelled. We can't throw rocks at them. We have chosen their path pretty much every day of our life at some point.

We were rebellious as they are rebellious, right? And they rebelled against God and they shattered the relationship they had with each other, the earth, and God Almighty. And God could have wiped them all away, but instead, he sends them a promise.

One day, through you, I will send a Savior who will crush the head of the serpent. And he gives them this picture, this beautiful picture in the garden. He clothes them in animal skin. How do you get there? You only get there through sacrifice.

Something's got to die if I'm going to get clothed in animal skin. He's baking all of this imagery into the very beginning. And what it all comes to is one day, his only son, the third member of the Trinity, he would come to save us. He would live the life that we didn't live in terms of sinless perfection. But at the end of his life, he would trade his life for ours. And he would die on a cross in order that we could live with God for eternity. And that happens in our life if we would just trust him. Admit that we're sinners, believe in what he has done, and confess him as the Lord of our life.

Now, this is my point. How can we trust God? Why should we trust God with everything in our life?

Because he is trustworthy. Man, he created us in perfection. He has recreated us and given us a purpose and a future and a destiny that is going to be ours one day. We sang earlier, build my life. I will build my life upon this rock.

The rain comes, the wind comes, but I have built my life on you. Have you done that today? Have you built your life on the God of the universe who is offering life to you? And would you come and trust him today? Would you admit, believe, and confess today? I pray that you would, or if you have over the last few weeks, I want to remind you again, we're having baptisms next week, November 2nd and 5th.

And it's an incredible time that you can come and go public. You can put the uniform on of what God has done in your life and get on the team formally. You're already saved if you've already believed, but why not go and make that public? And I pray that you will. So if you're not a believer, I would call you to get saved and get baptized. But what if you are a believer and you're struggling to trust God today? I know this is true in my life. Let me give you one area. I want to trust God's word as sufficient.

I want to trust his way of discipleship as sufficient. But you know what happens in a culture that we're in right now, and I've got kids from 6 up to 14, is that we get in, if you're in my life stage, you know this, we're inundated with pressures from the world that's like, man, if you don't do every single activity and every single way that your kids can get ahead, and everything that is possible, every sport, every activity, everything at their school, if they're not in the right school, if they're not doing college stuff the right way, then they're never going to make it. They're never going to be what you wanted them to be. If you don't do all this stuff exactly right, man, I can get caught up in that. You know what happens? I trust God, trust God, trust God, and then all of a sudden I find myself leaning on my own understanding, leaning on my own understanding. And what I need to do is realize that the same discipleship pattern is true for them as it is for us, as it is for you. Word taught, life caught, gather groups give go. I've got to trust that my kids are in the right stream. God's going to move them in the current. And I've got to be willing to say we have to have margin and we can't do every single thing that there is under the sun for them and I can't feel that pressure.

That's only going to come from me realizing in the gospel there is a God who has proven himself to be trustworthy, so I'm going to trust him. What area of your life is that way today? Man, is there something with your health? Is there something with your parenting, your marriage? Is there something with the way you're handling your job?

Man, is there something with what you're thinking about for the next few years in terms of big moves that your family is going to make? I don't know what it is. What is God putting his finger on in your life? Is there a decision that you're about to make that really is trusting your own understanding? And God's calling you back to say, man, trust me with that decision? I don't know what it is, but whatever it is I pray that we'll repent and confess that today. And the last thing that I want to do is I want to just kind of turn this thing all the way back to deeper for just a minute, okay?

Midpoint of deeper. Guys, we're going to have a commitment weekend next weekend. I committed last year. Our family is excited to do this again. It's a spiritually significant moment and those don't come around like every single day, okay? I mean ones that you remember, you know, and so I'm excited for this. We're going to be using these cards next week.

These cards are midpoint commitment cards and basically while they don't look all that heavy, y'all, they weigh a ton spiritually because commitments shape us in a lot of ways. Now I've talked about a lot of areas of our life today. Man, marriage, I've talked about, you know, what you're doing in your career, decisions you need to make, parenting, all that kind of stuff. But another one of those areas is how we trust God with our resources in terms of generosity. We have an opportunity to put that on paper next week. And I'm going to pray that you will. I'm going to pray that you'll be really thinking about this over the next couple of weeks.

You can say this, like this, what does it look like to acknowledge God in your generosity today? What does that look like? Let me give you a few categories and we'll be done, okay? The first category is this. Hey, for some of us, we're going to call you to jump off the sideline and onto the frontline. And what I mean by that is you weren't here last year when we went through this and now we're calling you to jump in. You're brand new.

You've been here for less than a year or you've been kind of really connected for less than a year. Probably five to seven hundred of you are in that category and we're going to call you to jump in. The church went forward.

The leadership blazed a trail. You're here now. Man, jump in with us, right?

So what does that look like? Well, it looks like you wrestling in the same way we did. We have a huge mission in front of us. Man, the new home and hub, we're regional and regional north are going to come back together. It's going to be something I think changes the face of our community for a long time. We have other ministry endeavors that we're going to do.

We still have our budget to cover for the rest of this year and next year. All right, so we have a lot of ministry that needs to be done. It happens through your generosity. But at the same time, I would say it's deeper than that. It's a sign of who we trust. Trust the Lord with all of our heart and lean not on our own understanding. Some of you are like, man, I've never done this before. I have no idea where to start.

Well, let me tell you at least where you need to start or at least where you need to start building to get to. We call it first fruits giving at Mercy Hill. The floor of first fruits giving is the tithe. This is what God calls us to in the Old Testament and, man, in the New Testament things get ramped up.

They don't get dialed back. So I would think about verses like this. Proverbs 3, 9. Honor the Lord with your wealth and the first fruits of all of your produce.

I would think about Malachi 3. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. I would think about 2 Corinthians 9, 7. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. Now the baseline for Christian giving, what we would say is the floor is 10% of what God has given to you through your work, you know, through what you get paid. Jacob did that before the law.

Abraham did that when he tithed to Melchizedek. Man, this is something that's baked in at the very beginning. So I would call you to think about that, but maybe you can go way beyond that. Either way, if you're brand new, you jump in with the rest of us. I pray that you'll do that next week. The second category of people is those who are in this finish strong category.

The fruits were in this category. It's like, man, we made a faith commitment last year and we want to continue in that. Maybe things have gone really well for you, maybe they haven't. It's a chance for us to re-up and tell the world, get our family around the kitchen table again.

Hey, this is what we're going after. We're praying that God is going to do it over the next year. And the third category, of course, are those who made commitments last year, but God has moved in your life in incredible ways.

I've met some of you that are like this. You fulfilled your commitment in the first year. Why? Because God doubled your business. Man, you sold something significantly higher than what you thought it was going to be.

The stock market went crazy for you or whatever it was. I don't know. But if God is doing that, man, then don't let your relationship with this question, as God's your deepest desire, be static.

It ought to be dynamic. What is God doing in your life now? Now, whatever category you're in, whether it's jump in, finish strong, or maybe even increase according to what God has done, man, I want to tell you that there's a missional side of this that's important.

Y'all, we've been, you know, we've been our directional team, our lead team. I mean, every month, I mean, we're gathering numbers, we're looking at all this stuff. Guys, this stuff is very important, not only that the money comes in, but how it comes in. I want to demonstrate this to you. I've done this before, but I want to demonstrate it to you one more time. If you've got a finance background, you're going to understand this, but I want to say it in a way that even somebody like me can understand, okay?

And so here's what I want you to see. Think about two years ago. We had one December and then two years, okay? So we wanted to see, I'm just using the big numbers, we had $30 million that we wanted to see come in in 25 months, right? It was one December and then two years, so that's 25 months, and the original goal was $30 million. Now, that would spit out, if you thought about it, it would spit out like some metrics of like, oh, what we thought we'd see a month and what we thought we'd see every December, and it would just kind of build itself out in terms of like a projection.

But here's the thing, and I've mentioned this all the way starting about two years ago. We've been talking about this because we understand it's a cash flow issue from a business sense, all right? A full third of that $30 million is allotted for the new home and hub, but that didn't have 25 months. Right now, our best guess is that that had about an 18-month ramp.

Why? Because we're going to be moving in in April or May. So do you understand, if you've got spreadsheets in your mind and you're that type of person, you can see kind of the cash flow issue here a little bit. Is that, yeah, there's $30 million over 25 months, but there's such a chunk of this that is outside of our normal budget that is coming fast.

And so not only the money coming in over two years, but the way that it comes in. My point is this, guys, now is the time to deploy, if you can. You know, now is the time to jump all the way in. It's not the time for us to shrink back. It's the time for us to go, all right? Especially if you guys are new or, hey, I've mentioned this before.

Y'all, if you're new, I've really got to push you to jump into this and make a year commitment. You know, you guys remember merry-go-rounds as a kid? I don't think they do them anymore, okay? We bubble wrap our kids, and if they have a scrape knee, it's called an incident report now, okay? Well, merry-go-rounds, shards of metal, and, you know, the whole deal. But you remember merry-go-round, right? Merry-go-round, the whole point is, see if you can get the thing going fast enough to throw kids off of it.

That was the whole point. Well, now, you know, I don't know if they do that, but I want you to think about us all, all of us. The whole church is on the playground, and we're pushing a merry-go-round. Next thing you know, five to seven hundred people show up and jump on the merry-go-round, but what if they refuse to push?

The thing's going to slow way down. You see? So it's like, man, if we're jumping in, we've got to all commit to jump in and push that wheel together so that we don't slow down. I pray that you will, all right? Man, let's go to the Lord in prayer, and then we'll respond. Father, we come before you, and we ask right now, Lord, that you would move in our midst. God, I pray that you would convince us to trust you with everything that we have. With our hearts, with our life, God, we would trust you with our whole heart, not half a heart. In Christ's name we pray, amen.