AUG 14 2022 | Paul’s Second Missionary Journey S1E3 | Paul’s Vision of the Man of Macedonia

Sea Change Church · AUG 14 2022 | Paul’S 2Nd Missionary Journey | Ep. 3: Paul’s Vision of the Man of Macedonia
Acts 16:6-10
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the providence of Asia. When they came to the border of Mishia, they tried to enter Bethina. Bethina. But the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mishia and went down to Troas. During the night, Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, come over to Macedonia and help us.

After Paul had seen the vision, he got ready at once, we got ready at once, to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to him. The word of the Lord. The word of the Lord. The word of the Lord. On this journey. He ended up taking with him Silas. He picks up Timothy along the way. Really important that Kim used the word we there, because it shows that somebody was added to the story, and it's the writer of the book of Acts.

That is Luke. Luke wrote the book, and it looks like he joined them along the way, and so that is why they used the word we there, and so we see him there. Now, as we look at today, today is super interesting, because it talks about, this scripture talks about how we determine God's will. How do we know when God is speaking to us? How do we know when it's just us?

How do we follow God? And it's really important, because there's particularly four instances here that would be really easy to miss that all use different verbiage to conclude of what God's will is and what it is. Now, I want to say that in the midst of following God, there is a key premise as the journey begins. You're going to see in your notes in Proverbs 16, 9.

Really important, and I think this is something we need to understand as we follow God. We make our plans. Proverbs 16, 9. We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps. God's sovereignty, God's providence, it's not all upon you. You can make mistakes as a believer and still be following God, and God can lead you in the right direction. You can go left, even when you're supposed to go right sometimes, because perhaps you misunderstood, or perhaps you just followed the wrong desires, and God has this incredible ability to be sovereign.

He has this incredible ability to know what's happening and to guide you in the right direction where you're supposed to be. So I just want to say, if there's any stress, if there's any navel gazing of like, well, should I go left? Should I go right? Because sometimes when we start following God and we get really interested in spiritual awareness, like what is God saying in the moment, it's really easy to become paralyzed.

The paralysis of analysis of God's will, and sometimes we just need to see, God, I did the best I could, I'm going left, all right? And if you want me to go right, then you're going to have to take me through a non-secutious route to get to that spot, and God has the ability to do that. So once again, I just want to set the ball on the tee, and the young adults group will need a tee to hit the ball, I'm sure, because I'm not sure they could hit the, nonetheless.

Whereas the challenge, the challenge is on, young adults versus college, or excuse me, young adults versus married, so that's the softball game, encourage you to be there. I want to set this up on the tee as we look at God's will and following God. Take a big breath, God's in charge. Chill out, God's in charge, he's totally got this. Now, I was told I might not be using the right word.

Sometimes people will come up to me after the sermon, and they'll say, hey, there's this word, and you said focuses, and you don't want to use the word focuses because there's no such word as focuses. The word is foci, and that would be a plural. And then right before the sermon, someone from the media team came up and said, are you sure you want to use the word foci?

That's not the correct word. So, I said, nonetheless, I'll make an interesting point, and at least people will listen for that quick moment. So, there is a sermon, foci focuses, fociosis, and how do we determine when you feel like doing something, if it's from us, or if it's from God? Is it from us, or is it from God? And so there's two fociosis. One, dealing with impulses.

You get an impulse. I want to buy that new house. I want a car. I want to go on a trip. I want a new job. You know, whatever it is, we have these impulses, these thoughts that come up. Are those thoughts from us, or are they from God? So, the first one is, how do we deal with our impulses? How do we deal when something bubbles up within us? How do we put that on the scales, and not just immediately follow something?

Just because you have a desire doesn't mean it's right. Just because you want something, although we live in a world that tells us that whatever you want is right, and that's not always true. Sometimes what you want is absolutely wrong. So, how do we deal with impulses? And the second one, how do we discern God? You're going to see three unique instances here where God spoke in a different way.

There's this full myriad of the way God speaks to us. Why does he speak to us in multiple ways? Well, because he wants to develop relationship. God is about relationship. Could God show up with a fiery angel and a sword every single time and say, henceforth you shall go to the right and then turn left and then you will, no, don't go there and hold your hand.

He could totally do that. He's God. What God wants to do, though, is develop relationship. He loves the relationship. He loves the journey. He wants to know you in the process, and whenever you come to a fork in the road in your life of decision, it is an opportunity where God is calling out to you to say, I want to know you better. But God, if you love me, you would tell me.

You would tell me what this means. Well, think of your children. Are there certain things you don't tell your children when they're young because it's maybe not appropriate or maybe they shouldn't know yet or maybe it's not for them? You see, regularly where God says to people, it could have been Peter running alongside the resurrected Jesus asking about John and Jesus says to him, that's none of your business.

Or, you know, in heaven with the different prophets, they'll ask a question and the angel will say, it's none of your business. And so, God, what are you doing? God's developing relationship. He wants to know you. And so, as you'll see at the end of the sermon, one of the practical points is just asking God, God, what are you doing? I'm at the fork in the road.

What are you doing? I want to know. So, two things, dealing with your impulses and following God. Let's start with number one, dealing with your impulses. Go to Acts 15.36. Now, this is not in your notes. If you have your Bible, 15.36, you're going to see it up on the screen. This is the impetus, this is the impulse that launches the second missionary journey.

Just like any thought or impulse you might get, let's, you know, you're sitting at home and all of a sudden you think, I want to buy a new car or I want to ask that woman out or I want to start a new job or I want chicken salad. I don't know. Whatever it is, you get these impulses. The second missionary journey is launched off an impulse. It's not off an angel coming through a divine manifestation of God's presence.

It's not a mosaic burning bush. It's not an angel coming before Joshua and saying, you shall not pass like he did. It's not Balaam, you know, being spoken to by a donkey. It's just an impulse. It's just a desire. And so, we see that in 15.36. sometime later, this is after the first missionary journey and after the disagreements, after the first council, Paul says to Barnabas, let us go back and visit the believers in all of the towns where we preach the word of the Lord and just see how they're doing.

Let us go back and just see how they're doing. Now, when it comes to impulses, I don't know if I put this in your notes or not, but it should, I think it should be there. I find that there's four places where the majority of our impulses, come from. Whether it's the chicken salad, the new Jeep Rubicon, helping your neighbor, there's four places that these come from.

And being aware where an impulse comes from. Asking yourself the question, when you get an impulse, where is this coming from? So, the first one that I have identified is your dreams. Sometimes we have dreams, right? There's nothing wrong with dreams. We follow our dreams, but I do think we live in a world that highlights dreams and desire above some other important impetuses in our life.

But, dreams is one. You have a dream. You've been following a dream for a long time and that dream keeps showing up. You want to write a book. You want to dance your dance. You want to sing your song. You want to have a child. There's these dreams that you follow. And so many of our impulses come from our dreams. The question, I think two things is, is one, are you dreaming the right dream?

Are you dreaming the right dream? And number two, are you okay with God if your dream doesn't happen? You see, so many of us have our faith shipwrecked because we don't get what we're dreaming for. And we think that every dream that is, you know, not an unholy dream is from God. He wouldn't have given it to me. He wouldn't have made me think this way if it wasn't for this dream.

The older I've gotten, my birthday was yesterday, the older I've gotten, the less I care about my dreams. And the more I care about what you'll see here in a moment, one of the other ones. So you have your dreams. The other is your desires. Dreams aren't always desires. Desires can come from the flesh. Desires can come from God. Desires can come from your emotions.

Desires can come from a desire to serve the poor. There's nothing wrong with a desire. Satan will sometimes tempt you with a desire and then try to make you feel guilty about the desire. And what you have to say is, there's nothing wrong with a desire. Do I entertain an unholy desire? Or do I pursue a desire that is perhaps from the flesh, perhaps from the world, perhaps temptation?

Understanding, is this coming from my dreams? And am I okay to hold those loosely? Is it coming from a desire? Do you have that? And all of us have desires and there's nothing wrong. Let's just, let's just get, you know, change the pH balance of our desires and put them at neutral and then step back and look at our desires. Is this a healthy desire? So many of us fasted on Thursday and I felt guilty because Bucky, our counselor, came to me on Thursday at 11.

He says, are we still on for lunch at noon? And I was like, okay, what do I say? It's been a month and a half waiting. Do I say no? And I went, you know, hey, look, if it doesn't cause your brother to stumble, you can do it. So I decided, I'll go to lunch. I'll break my fast at noon. Little did I know that Bailey, who's in the band, would be at the restaurant that I went to.

Now I'm feeling guilty, right? It's like she is watching me order at Breakfast Republic a burrito the size of a horse's leg. What if somebody sees me? There's all this guilt, you know what I mean? And I was just like, dude, just let it go, dude. I think God's cool with you. You made it to noon today, all right? And I had lunch with Bucky. So if you saw me there, that was happening.

Sometimes we have these desires. There's nothing wrong with the desire. And so when I mentioned the fast, I was with one. I've been really impressed by you guys. I mean, I really have been impressed by the people in our church and challenged. One of the people in the congregation came to me and said, hey, after you challenged me for the fast, I did a four-day fast.

I'm like, I've never done a four-day fast. That's amazing. Really? You did a four-day fast. Can you preach this week for me? Because that's amazing. He said, I just have a desire to be holy right now. I just want to go for it. And I was like, that is so, so cool. So desires. You have dreams. You have desires. You have destiny. There's some things that you can't stop.

God's going to do it. I've seen that in my life, especially when I was in my days of going after drugs and all those different things. So many times there was a left turn where God protected me. The amount of times where destiny stuck in and God's just like, no, we're not allowing that. I don't care what you want to do. We're putting you over there. That happened to me so many times.

You have your dreams. You have your desires. You have your destiny. And then one that I think is foregone, I think our culture doesn't really care about it. It's called duty. It's actually doing something because you said you were going to do it. Because you know that you should do it. This entire second missionary journey is Paul following duty. He's doing something.

He says, you know what? It would be right for us to go back to these churches and see how they're doing. Matter of fact, as you'll see in your notes, one of the things I wrote in the notes, I put much of God's direction in our lives involves responding to duty rather than hearing directly from God. What I have found is, I was trying to think of the right percentage and not be hyperbolic.

I think 70% of my following God at this point in my life is just what I know I should do. It's what the Bible tells me to do. 70% of hearing from God. It's probably only 30% where God is using the other three that we'll see in just a moment where I'm looking for God to desperately to speak. I need to know about this. I'm finding that duty is oftentimes the way God speaks to us.

He's all, I've told you that. The Bible tells you that. Do I have to direct you? Because it's there. Just follow duty. And so the word there that it says in this verse, in this, in Acts 15, 13, when he says, let us go back, that let us go back, there's a Greek word. It's called epistikeptomai. Epistikeptomai. So I'm, Kim and I are struggling today. So it implies a call of duty.

Now I practiced that word and I just butchered it. But nonetheless, all the Greek scholars in the room. It implies a sense of duty. It actually says this. Paul says, we should be going back. We should be going back. I want to say in the first thing with following God in regard to your impulses, your dreams, and your desires, I think oftentimes shepherding that in duty.

We do live in a culture that says emotions and what you want is what shepherds. What you want, what you think, and what you feel is the most important. I rarely make a decision personally based on how I feel. Now I was funny because I was talking to Bucky this week and he's an empath and he said, man, the beginning of most of my direction from God is from my emotions.

It comes from this emotive feeling. I get this deep feeling and it's out of that that I have to process. He has to be careful with that but I also have to be careful that I'm not just a spiritual automaton just doing the duty of God, you know, following God and I'm just going to, you see that in a lot of big Bible carrying churches. We will just do what God says and anything that is from the emotions is wrong and charismatic and we don't want that in our life.

There's that balance there but for me, personally, about 70 to 80% of what I do is just duty. I get up, I do my quiet time in the morning. I love my wife, you know, probably oftentimes when I'm trying because emotions don't well up within me for anything. I don't get huge emotion. I'll get a thought of like, you need to speak kindly. You need to be gentle and it's a sense of what I know to do and I work out of that place.

Now, that's okay and you can do that but whatever side of the spectrum you're on, whether you're highly emotive or whether you're, you know, working more from a linear perspective on what is right, we still have to find that balance and develop that. So, just know that this first missionary journey in regard, number one, following our impulses, our dreams, our desire, our duty, and our destiny, that needs to be packaged in the understanding that, that, of responding with a filter of asking God, what are you doing in this place?

What are you doing in this moment? So, that's the first one. That's how we deal with our impulses. Now, the next three instances we see in this passage that Kim read today, there's a different Greek word each time when God moves. You see some really interesting things. At one point, it's like, the Holy Spirit wouldn't allow them to do it. He's all, you know, basically forbid them to do it.

And then there's another part that says, the Spirit of Jesus, he wouldn't let them go in. I'm like, what does that all mean? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Did I show up and like, no, Paul, no, you may not go to Bithythia, you know, or whatever it was called. You know, as we see that. And so, as we look at that, go to Acts 16, 6. We're going to look at these three.

The three are an inner voice, divine intervention, and divine manifestation. Those are the three that we're going to see. Before I read Acts 16, 6, as some of you are looking at and finding it, I want to give a side note here. Paul's second missionary journey did not accomplish what it set out to do, nor did it contain the originally proposed team. Show the map, if you would.

Let's go back and visit the churches. Let's go back. That was his plan. That's the plan he had. Actually, there's a whole bunch of churches. You'll see the red and the blue. The second missionary journey is the red. He actually, if you were to go study, he has to skip three or four of the places he visited. How interesting that Paul himself has this idea to go do something.

It doesn't end up happening. God doesn't allow him to do the thing that he felt called by duty to do, but God, in his providence, expanded what he did. I think God is expanding our territory. I want to be a person of expanding territory, expanding influence, expanding care, expanding love. God is eternal. Satan is not. God is eternal. We want to continue to be growing in what we do.

As we follow God, we want to grow in understanding how he leads us, how he's leading our marriage and what he does. Just for all of you that are worried about making a mistake, realize Paul didn't even finish it. He didn't do what he set out to do, but God had bigger plans and God takes him to Macedonia. All right, Acts 16, 6. This is the inner voice. This is the first way of the divine intervention.

The first was dealing with your own impulses, where they come from. They might come from God. And the second is when God steps in. So this is the leading that most people care about. Like, when is God going to show up with an angel? When am I going to hear a voice? When am I going to, somebody's going to walk up and say, you know, on the street, you know, hey, I've got this word for you and I want to give you a word.

You're like, whoa, that's exactly the Bible scripture I read today. We all love that, right? That's what we want. Well, the first one is developing an inner voice. 16, 6. Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Pergia and Galatia. I got that one right. Having been kept having been kept by the Holy Spirit, circle that, from preaching the word in the province of Asia.

Now, why did God not let him preach the word of God? Of course God wants you to preach the word of God, right? No. For some reason, God's like, no. You know, there's many times where Jesus is, you know, they're like, hey, you're the Christ. He's all, shh. It's called the divine secret. He's like, don't tell him that. God knows what he's doing because he's working things out.

And so it says that the Holy Spirit, now, how did the Holy Spirit tell him? Did a dove descend on his shoulder or whatever it is? Well, interesting. There's a Greek word there where it says, having been kept. That Greek word there is kuluo. And it means to be forbidden. It's a word of forbading. But when it's forbidden, it is often forbidden through the counsel of others.

So it's a spoken, forbidden word where someone has spoken to you. So we can assume here that when that word was spoken, that it was their inner voice that they were hearing. There was a sense of deep foreboding. It says to be, that word means to be forbidden, often through the counsel of others. And you see this in Matthew 9, 14, when Jesus says, do not forbid the children to come to me.

It's a spoken word. There's another time where they tried to forbid Paul, they bade him not to go, to forbid him to go to Rome when he wanted to go. This is referring to, we're understanding that when the Holy Spirit spoke, there was an inner voice. Now I want to ask you this. Do you have an inner voice from God? Do you have a sense of the inner voice from God that you hear?

I want to say, when it came to my children, it was more important for me to teach my children how to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit than to know the difference between right and wrong. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't teach them what was right and wrong, but let me tell you the difference. I was at a conference. This woman came up after I spoke. Terrified.

Panicked. Oh, this is 15 years ago. I've got, you know, these children, and what if this happens? And I gave her an answer. And she said, well, what if this happens? And I gave her an answer. We were there 45 minutes. And I eventually just said to her, look, you can't plan for everything that might happen. Let me just, and this terrified her. I said, let me just, let me just assure you that Satan will find something that you've never prepared your children for, and he'll present that.

And you can't do anything about it. She was like, oh, that's not encouraging. I said, what's more important is that you teach your children how to hear the voice of God within themselves. Because I always knew there would be a moment when my child is 17 years old and it's prom or a weekend and they're getting ready to get into a car with a friend who made a bad decision and that friend's been drinking and they get to the car and there'll be that moment because we all had that moment, right?

We all had those moments, most of us at least, where you got there and you either made the right decision or you made the wrong decision. And I always felt that it was a little more trustworthy as opposed to my child thinking, well, dad has said that I shouldn't get in the car if someone's drinking but they only had two beers so they're probably good even though it's a girl and she's 94 pounds but nonetheless and they were 40s.

I don't want her working on that logic system. You know the system I want her to work on? Something in her heart says, no, no, do not do that. You see, that's a forbading. That is the voice that we see. When you're following the Holy Spirit, you've got to open your awareness to what God's saying in your heart to slow down and to listen to the whisper.

Like when Elijah went up to the mountain and said God came in the thunder and he came in a roar and he came in lightning but then he came and he came in a whisper and he came in the silence. That's the first one. So that's the first one there. Are you developing that? If you say no to that on a regular basis, you will callous your sensitivity to the Spirit.

If you say no on a regular basis, so if you're in the office and you're like, well, I'm going to take this but it's no big deal. I'll just take it. It'll be fine. Then pretty soon, well, I'll take two of those and then pretty soon you're cheating on your taxes. Next thing, you're in jail. When they asked, it was not Shuler, it was in the 80s. There was a big faith scandal and I forgot, I think I forgot what the gentleman's name was but it was with Baker and it was his chief finance guy and I heard him speak at a conference and after the conference he wanted to hug every person as he apologized but he said, you know what it started with for me?

Paperclips. I mean, it stole millions from people. Went to jail. He spent, I think, 12 years in jail. Horrible thing. He said, it started with paperclips. I was there and I thought I should take these and something in my heart said, don't take those. They're not yours and he said, I can trace it back to that. The inner voice. Yes, don't do this. Do do this. It is a sense of right and wrong and the more you fine tune it in, it's like an old radio.

I know most of us don't use the radio anymore. Back when you had, remember you had to just tune that in and then all of a sudden you'd finally get it. B-100. Shotgun Tom Kelly would be there. You guys remember that? That's what you gotta do. You gotta be sensitive like that. The more you just go like, ah, forget it, forget it, forget it, you will callous yourself to it and you won't even be able to hear from God.

But, you can put some ointment of God's spirit on that. Second one, that'll soften it again. Alright, the second one, after, the first is the inner voice. This one's kind of cool. This is a divine intervention. God steps in the way and he totally intervenes. And so, go to Acts 16, 7. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia. But, the spirit of Jesus, John 14, if you want to study the spirit of Jesus this week, it means the Holy Spirit, is in John 14.

It's all about his spirit. So, you can study that on your own. But, the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. This is the same spirit that it speaks about a verse earlier. So, there's no difference between having being kept by the Holy Spirit and the spirit of Jesus. It's just different ways to say it. Would not allow them to go. The word there is permit.

E-A-O. And so, you want to circle would not allow. Now, this is a little more aggressive. God's given that, you know, that protective energy right here, right? He is stepping up and saying, okay, you're not listening or perhaps they are listening but I'm going to step in a little bit more and I'm going to put a hindrance in front of you. It implies a misgiving that goes with the allowing such as pointing to a lurking danger.

The word here is God didn't allow it but there's something that's not good for you or something else that is better for you. There's a lurking danger. How often have you been in the airport or something like that and all of a sudden your flight gets canceled? You're angry. You're upset. You didn't get the loan that you wanted to get. Nothing happened. You're angry.

You start treating people really bad because of that. I mean, Balaam did this because, you know, God said he was protecting him. Sometimes God's just protecting you. But we get all angry. We get all angry and upset because we don't get our dream or our desire or get what we want. We totally change our countenance. We take off the clothing of righteousness because we didn't get what we got and God's like, dude, if you would just pay attention, would you just give the option that I stopped you from going there?

I have a friend that had this house and they had a prophet come up to them and they had this house that they wanted and a prophet came up to them at a conference. So if you're Pentecostal, you know what I'm talking about if you're not plagiarist. And so the prophet comes up to them and he says, hey, I see a house and it's by a river and I see a fruiting tree and there was a fruiting tree in the yard and they left that conference going, oh, we're going to get the house.

I don't remember if they were at escrow or what it was, but it was after they had, you know, wanted it, had seen it, maybe they'd put an offer in on it and they were told by a prophet it was coming. And then it fell out of escrow and they didn't get it. And they said it was a year and a half of being angry with God. They stopped going to church. They were so upset until they learned that a registered pedophile lived next door and, well, we won't go into the rest of the story, but was right next door to the house.

And then they were like, thank you, God. Thank you, God. You protected our children. They had small children. All of a sudden, the perspective changed, doesn't it? How many times have you been upset? Something hasn't gone. You've missed the flight. Do you just go into angry mode or thankful mode or ask God, God, what are you doing in this place? So it is there.

It is an obstacle, a divine intervention. So the first one is an inner voice, an obstacle, divine intervention. Be careful when those happen. Always ask God. And then finally, verse 16, 10, a divine manifestation. This is the ones we like, right? It's the angel showing up. It's the dream. It's some cool thing happening. It's the prophet giving you the word.

It's 12,000 coincidences in a row that never could have happened. Let's go to verse 16, 10. After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia. Ready at once. Concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. So the first thing, there's this divine manifestation. They had this dream. They had this incredible dream and they could have followed that dream.

I think dreams are awesome. Multiple people in our church have told me about different dreams that they've had. I would say hold a dream, a dream, not only your dreams, hold dreams lightly. I love, I used to tell when I was really into the prophetic and the charismatic movement and moving into Pentecostal circles, I would say something and I had a professor at a zoo that will say, he'd say something like, well let's see how that goes.

Let's keep praying over that. Let's keep following that. Let's see what happens. Whereas my Pentecostal friends would be, yes, yes, jump off the bridge. God will be there. Jump, jump, jump, jump. You know, it's just wait and see. And so we see that they give this word. I said sometimes God does give definitive words but this doesn't negate the faith component.

Look at what happened there. It says, go back to verse 10, after Paul had seen the vision, he saw a vision, legit vision, we got ready at once, concluding, circle concluding, that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. It didn't say obeying. Obeying would have been a definitive. It says they concluded, which means he, after seeing the vision, he's like, he had to ask himself the question, was that from God?

I want to say, if an angel comes to you tonight in a dream, within 72 hours, you will probably be asking yourself, did I eat bad soup? Did that really happen? You see, once it's over, you're no longer there anymore so you're looking back and you're like, you have to believe in faith that that was God. Even if God shows up nine days in a row to your bedside and reads you bedtime stories, within a week, you're going to have to ask yourself and make a conclusion.

And so, if something radical happens with God, we can't get rid of the other filters, the filters of counsel, the filters of going back to God's word, the counsels of our inner spirit. I want to say that Satan brings dreams too. Doesn't mean he brings them all. But we don't want to just follow something because this divine manifestation happens. They still had to conclude.

Well, let's finish with a couple practical takeaways and we'll be done. First is this. Here's your first practical takeaway from this whole series. The first is dealing with impulses. How do we deal with those impulses? A lot of times that's dreams, desire, duty, and destiny. And then the other one is how do we hear from God? Through the inner voice, through being aware of obstacles and divine intervention, and then making conclusions after divine manifestations, which are oftentimes rare.

Here's the first one. Practical takeaway. Nurtural spiritual awareness. Meaning, real simple. Something happens. God, what are you doing right now? I was in a conversation a few weeks ago and somebody was, they were, I was in a hurry and I really wanted to go and do something and they were talking. Talking. Talking. Lots of, lots of, of, of points and they wanted to make sure I knew everything and I'm one of those people that the more points you give me, the less I hear.

And there's some people, if you're like me and many of you are, what people think is I just got to give him everything because I got to make sure he understands it all. But my brain just goes, run, run. And I was sitting there and I just felt this in my spirit and I thought, God, what are you doing? And so my wife has this thing where she says, you just plant your feet, wherever, if you're in a situation and pretend that you grow roots into the ground, just, just root yourself and pay attention to somebody.

My mom loves that, pay attention. And I said, God, what are you doing? What are you doing in this moment? And it might have just been caring for someone. It might have just been slowing me down. I don't know what it was but I sense in the moment, God, what are you doing? That can be when you're making a decision, am I going to book that trip, buy that house, ask that woman to marry me, am I, whatever it is, asking God on a regular basis, God, what are you doing?

Nurture spiritual awareness, also when you feel that sense in your spirit. The second one, after nurturing spiritual awareness with that question, God, what are you doing? It says in James, he will tell you what he's doing if you ask him. It says, is foster spiritual agility. Go to verse 10. Verse 10, I asked you to circle this earlier, it says, we got ready at once.

We got ready at once, quickly. They moved quickly. They made a conclusion but then they moved. Are you spiritually agile that God can say, I want you to go left, I want you to go right. I want you to have, in this moment, to give the word of God. I want you to, you know, stop what you're doing and miss perhaps what you had planned because I want you to spend some time with this person.

It's a spiritual agility or is everything based on your own desires? I don't really want to do that. I'm not really up for that. No, we'll see. Are you obstinate to the spirit? If you are spiritually agile, the spirit will employ you more. You're going to say, okay, that person's willing. He always says, I'm looking for someone I can use. The more agile you are, the more open you are, the more he's going to use you.

So one, nurture spiritual awareness. Two, foster spiritual agility. And the final point, trust God's sovereignty. God's in charge. This is not an algorithm. Right? It's not like a TikTok algorithm that we're going to figure out, we're going to work out. Some people love to get their Bible and they'll figure out how are we going to hear from God and they put the lines together and this and that.

He's going to be like, no, no, going to go out of the box. He's not going to be in a box. God's not going to be in your little box. He's going to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. And he really doesn't care if you like it or not. He's not asking you to like. He loves when you like it, but he's not asking you to like. He's asking for obedience.

And so it says here, trust God's sovereignty. It's not an algorithm. God will figure it out. This is one of my favorite verses that I lean into regularly. Romans 8, 28. And we know that in all things, not some things, everything, all things, God will work together for good for those who love him have been called according to his purpose. This is the sovereignty of God.

God loves you. Let me just say this. God loves you. Separate of how many mistakes you made, how much sin you're in, whatever your father might have told you growing up, God loves you deeply. And he wants to be in your story with you. He wants to go to school with you. He wants to raise your children with you. He wants to be in your job. He wants to go out when you go to the desert and drive boats.

He wants to do it all. He wants to play in the field that is your life. He wants to enjoy you deeply. But he wants you to be aware of him no matter what you're doing. And this is what this is about. Paul had all of these components going. Within one chapter, four different ways God spoke to him. He was Paul. Why not just give him a vision every time? Because Paul was a human being just like you.

And God didn't treat him like an automaton, a spiritual automaton. He treated him like a human being who he loved. And God loves you. Amen? Let's stand if you would. Want to pray for you? I want to bless you. If you need prayer today, you will know. Listen to your Holy Spirit little voice. It will tell you if you need to come forward and pray or pray for someone else or put a prayer card in.

Come forward. We have people that will be here to pray for you. If you want to get baptized, some of you need to get baptized, some of you need to, you know, God is calling you to a deeper relationship. If you want to go deeper, that next steps table, that's how you get connected here. You get connected through the next steps table or through the area on the website.

You go there and say, I want to get connected. It could be playing in the softball game. It could be getting into a small group. It could be asking for salvation. That next step table is going to hook you up. And then if you want some fellowship, great cup of coffee, stop at the cafe on the way out. If you extend your hands, this is a habit of ours, blessing you.

It says to Abraham, whom you bless, I will bless. So you can choose to bless whoever you want. I choose to bless you. So Lord Jesus, I bless this church. Thank you, Jesus. We bless them, God. We cover them. Cover them with your anointing, your freedom. It is for freedom that you have set us free. May you be free. May you be their master, their savior. Jesus, Lord.

God, will you touch their hands for ministry. Some of them, they're calling. There's ones right here that you're calling to something deeper. You're calling them out. And I see a picture of you saying, hey, I'm out in the deep water. I want you to swim with me out here. But I can't swim. Come on, let's go. Some of you are being called out, but your desires are holding you back.

Lord God, we pray for a high sense of duty and dreams and desire and your destiny on your people to change this world, God, and to rest in you today and to run with you in the field of our lives. We bless you in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Bless you guys. We love you. See you next week.