Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through 1 Corinthians 13:7, emphasizing the actions of love: bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring. He illustrates how love supports others through hardships and encourages trust and optimism, even in difficult circumstances. The sermon highlights that true love is active and persistent, urging believers to embody these qualities in their lives and relationships, ultimately reflecting God's love in all situations.
Welcome and Church Information
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen.
If you have a child to be the Smith of Children's Church, that would be the time now to do that. And thank you for all of our Children's Church workers.
That's an amazing ministry they get to do to minister to the kids and help us be able to pay attention while we're in here. And I thank all of our Children's Church workers as they do that.
If you have your Bibles, it will be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 this morning. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, we're just going to look at one verse in this passage. And we are three,
two more weeks of 1 Corinthians 13. This series of this book has radically transformed my life as I've been just evaluating my life of love.
And if you've been around me for any moment of time, you know I love people. I love being around people.
And oftentimes, I'm taken back to a question that was asked to me while I was in college. One of our professors looked at us and he said, why are you going into ministry? In my simple 19,
20-year-old mind, I raised my hand and I said, I love people. And he goes, that's good. People aren't always going to love you. You need more of an answer than that. And I thought,
man, I just love people. I love being around people. People say, what are your hobbies? I really don't have a lot of hobbies. People are my hobbies. I love being around people.
But really dissecting this and when you preach, it'll be about 10 weeks on 13 verses. It changes the way you look at this passage.
It changes the way you look at your life. And the Lord has been working in my life a lot through this passage and through these last couple of weeks. And I really hope that even today, because we're transitioning, Paul's talked a lot about some attributes and some attitudes.
But now we begin to transition into a different area. And so that's where we're going to be at this morning in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 7. We'll stand and read just one verse and we'll jump right into it this morning. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 7. The Bible says,
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Father, we love you. We love what you've done for us by sending your son to die for us on the cross 2,000 years ago. So, to bear our weight of sin upon his body.
Prayer for Understanding
Lord, I thank you for showing us mercy and grace. I pray this morning that you'd help us as we dissect these four small little statements that are so profound and so life transforming. We thank you for what you've done in your name we pray. Amen.
You can be seated. Thank you for standing. Amen. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Several years ago, there was a story of a guy named Larry Walters. Larry Walters was a 33-year-old man who decided that he wanted to see his neighborhood from a new perspective. This was before GPS drones.
This was before satellites had gotten popular and we could see up-close pictures through Google Maps.
He wanted to see what all of his neighbors were doing. And so, in his energetic 33-year-old mind, he went to the local Army surplus store one morning and he bought 45 used weather balloons from the Army.
That afternoon, he strapped himself to a lawn chair. Several of his friends tied the now helium-filled balloons to the lawn chair to which several of his friends said, What are you even doing?
And he said, I just want to see from a different perspective. He took along with him a six-pack of beer, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a BB gun.
And he figured, as I got a little higher, I could begin to shoot the balloons and I would slowly come back down. So, I was ready to do this.
And so, he assumed the balloons would lift him 100, 150 feet in the air and he could see all the houses and the farms and the different areas there in California. And it caught him off guard when he soared more than 11,000 feet in the air.
He was in the middle of the air traffic pattern of LAX airports.
And at this moment, he was too afraid to shoot any of the balloons. And so, as he was sitting in this lawn chair strapped to it for two hours, it forced every airplane in LAX to shut down.
It had forced them all to return to the airport or to not even be able to land, causing long delays from flights all across the country of people trying to come into LAX.
Soon, the Air Force came in and was able to get him back safely to the ground and the police came along.
They sided him with a couple of tickets and a reporter came to him and asked him three questions. I thought these three questions were really eye-opening for us this morning. First question was, were you scared? His response was one word, yes.
Second question, would you do it again? He said, no. The third question,
Evaluating Our Life's Purpose
why did you do it? It was more than just one word. He said, because I can't just sit around.
I think that when our life comes to beginning to ask ourselves, what are we doing with our life? Why are we doing things? This should be the response of, I just can't sit around and do nothing. Paul begins this passage by saying,
man, I'm going to give you this prominence of love. I'm going to tell you that love without love, you're nothing.
And then he says what love is. And we talked about a week of that, about love is patient and kind. And then the last four weeks, we talked about what love is not. It's not envious. It's not boastful.
It's not arrogant. It's not rude. It's not selfish. It's not easily angered. It's not resentful. And it's not joyful over evil.
But then he gets to this portion where he says, this is sort of the attitude of love and the attributes of love.
But now he says, this is the action of love. This is the attitude is great, but the action is so much more important in our life. And when we begin to evaluate our life, we have to ask ourselves, what am I doing for the cause of Christ? What am I putting into actions?
What says my life has meaning? And this is why I'm going to show the world what I believe and why I believe it. So he begins to lay out four.
I mean, they're small statements, but they have such a huge impact on our life. And we really begin to dissect our life and say, what am I doing? The first thing he says is love bears. Love bears things in life.
I say this often. I've said this probably more times in the last seven weeks than I've said since I've been here, but life is hard.
If you've lived any moment of life, you have had heartaches, you have had struggles, you have had famine, you have had depression, you have had anxiety, you have had the world and the politics and life can be hard. Love steps in and love bears us up. Love strengthens ourselves to our bone.
Love is steadfast in the face of destruction and destitute. Love comes in and says, I need you to be courageous right now.
I need you to sort of, as I had a friend named Dan that I worked with, he was from New York, he wasn't a believer. It was one of my first jobs at a cabinet shop. And Dan would always say, as my mom always used to tell me,
got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And he'd always say that. When you get knocked down, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
And I've never forgotten that because love is the same way. Love is the action of not giving up too easily.
Oftentimes, as a coach, as a teacher, as a mentor, as someone who wants to invest in other people, coaching is a lot like burying things.
And it's telling others to stand up in the face of adversity. Stand up and don't give up when things get hard, but dig in and do what's right. Dig in and do the best we can.
Sorry about my mic, it's making some weird noise. Anyways, but as I was thinking through this thought, my mind went to one particular movie that came out a couple of years ago.
And it's facing the giants. And I was going to just sort of tell the scene, but I found the scene. And I began just, you know, the longer I got to thinking about it, I'm like, man, I just want to show this small scene.
Bearing Burdens in Love
Because it shows us how bearing one another's burdens and caring for one another is what love does.
And so watch this short little clip, and then we'll talk about it for just a moment. You may have seen that clip before, and you may have remembered just the emotional side of it.
But as I saw that, and as I was thinking about that this week, this is what love does. Love pushes us beyond what we think we can do.
Love, when life gets hard, it helps us to bear the load of someone else and the burden of someone else and carry them beyond what we even thought humanly possible that we could do. I deal with people and hurt people on a daily basis.
People come by my office, people call me, people, Pastor, I need you to help. I need you to help me during this time.
And one of the greatest joys of my life is holding the hand of someone who has been hurt, who has been beat up spiritually or physically, and help them bear the burden of the cross that God has placed on their back.
Jesus said, if you're going to be my disciple, then first you must take up your cross daily and follow me. It's a hard cross.
He didn't say this in a way of put this little cross around your neck and carry that cross daily. No, he said, when he was to say, take up the cross, he was saying, taking up the execution of your life, the electric chair, the noose. This is what the cross was to them.
It was death and certain death. And Jesus says, love takes up that cross daily and follows him so that the world can see that there is something bigger and greater in our life if we trust and bear the burdens God has put on us.
Not only does love bear, he continues on and says, love believes. He says, it just doesn't stop with bearing the burdens of one another and carrying that burden, but it begins to take a step further and believes. Love is not suspicious or cynical.
I know oftentimes in my life, I have someone will tell me something. I'm like, man, did that really happen? We have this wonderful thing called Google now. We can Google everything and we can see if what someone is saying is true.
And if I were to get up here and make this crazy, audacious claim of a team in 1972 who never lost a football game, who went all the way to the Super Bowl. And there was no such thing as Google.
You'd have to sort of just take my word for it. But now we can Google it and be like, oh, yeah, it was the greatest team ever.
It was the Miami Dolphins. They won and they went all the way. They went undefeated. Love oftentimes is cynical and it's suspicious. And we begin to second guess what someone says. Love should trust and have confidence.
We seek to see where each person is coming from in life. We should begin to put ourselves in that person's life and say, this person's coming to me in a hard time and in a time that's difficult for them. It may not be difficult for me. I want to understand their complexities.
I want to understand what they're going through in life. I want to believe what they're saying.
Often in my mind went to a couple of different stories here of Jesus and the woman at the well. Woman came to him, saw this man who shouldn't have really even been there in this time of the day. And the woman came to Jesus to draw water and Jesus just let her talk.
Jesus was bearing her burden, but he was believing what she said. And even when she said something wrong, Jesus in a loving way corrected her and began to encourage her. Often think of Job's friends in this moment.
Job, I've said it often, but Job is the best of us. You look at Job's life, he was given everything he could have ever imagined. The greatest wealth, the greatest family.
He had servants. He had farms. He had buildings. He had his kids that loved him who had meals often with him. And when everything was taken away, Job's friends came to him. And they began to doubt that he was ever the man that they thought he was. And they said,
Job, did you sin? Did your kids sin? I mean, I know you told us that you love God, but in this moment, look at what's going on around you.
And they doubted that he was ever even a trustworthy person. It's oftentimes in our life, we don't believe the best in people.
See, I believe that through the grace of God, that God can take any wicked man or woman, and through God's grace and his mercy can radically change their life, can radically make them into a new person.
They don't have to be stuck in the ways that they once were. And through God's mercy and through God's grace on the cross, he came into this world to say, I'm going to redeem humanity so that they can reach the world.
Now, I don't want you to, I say this often in my mind and through other things, but I don't want you to hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying to have blind love.
And that everything that everyone says you should believe. We should have a love that is verified.
God's Purpose in All Things
Romans 8.28 says it like this. And we know that all things work together for good, for those who love God and who are called according to his purpose. You see, the clause here is this. We know that those things work together for those who love God.
And we have to believe in our mind and our heart of hearts that if we love God, what I'm going through right now in my life is for the purpose of God and to give glory back to God. See, oftentimes we'll say, we'll use this as a genie in a bottle.
Well, God, I really want this new thing. And so I'm just going to pray about it. And then tomorrow I'm going to wake up and this new thing is going to be in my yard. Right? Jade tells me often, Dad, I really want a horse. I want to have a horse so bad.
I want a yard with a horse in it. And she can maybe even pray at night, God, give me a horse. God, give me. I need this horse. But what's she doing? She's using it for her own sake of advantage.
And it's not really a need. And God is saying here, if you love God and you are called according to his purpose, then we know that all things work together for good. We know that God is working our lives together for his purpose and for his glory.
As we continue on, I came across Romans 8.39. Romans 8.39, one of the strongest verses that we can grab hold of when life is going hard and there's not a lot of belief left in our life. It says this,
And he goes through a couple of verses earlier than that where he talks about principalities and powers and things in this world and things of this world.
But he says there is nothing that has been created.
There is nothing that God has put in this world that will separate us from the love of God. If we believe in the Lord.
If we believe that God is here for us and he has created us for a purpose in this world. Philippians 1.6 says it like this, I am sure of this one thing, that he who started a good work in you will carry it out into the completion unto the day of Christ Jesus.
I am sure of this very thing, church, that as Christ has come into this world and died on the cross for us, I am sure that he has started a good work in us and we must continue on and believe that God is going to carry it out until his completion.
And we must get to the point where we say, God, I am going to believe what you have done in my life.
I wrote this statement down. The Lord gave it to me. Hatred believes the worst. Love believes the best. Hatred believes the worst. Love believes the best. Oftentimes in our life,
someone will come to us and they'll say something and because we don't like that person and because they maybe have animosity toward us, we'll believe the worst about that person. But the contrary that Paul says here is
love and the love of God believes the best in someone's life. When trust is broken,
love's first reaction should be I'm going to heal and I'm going to restore what is going on in this situation. I'm not going to try to ridicule.
I'm not going to run their name through the mud on social media, but I'm going to step in with love and I'm going to react with healing and restoration.
I say it often and me and Brody talk about it often in Romans chapter 12 where it says if your enemy is hungry, don't laugh at them and mock them and persecute them,
feed them because love takes care of someone and by doing this it's going to make them mad that you're loving them. It's a reaction of healing and restoration because we should be loving and caring for one another. Galatians 6.1 says this, brothers and sisters,
someone around you, he's talking to the church, is overtaken in any wrongdoing.
He doesn't say if he's overtaken in something that you don't agree with, he doesn't say if they're overtaken with something that makes you mad, he doesn't say if they're overtaken in something that's going to make you happy and allow you to excel in life. He says if they're overtaken in any wrongdoing,
you who are spiritual, the church that is spiritual, that has been founded on the truth, this is what he says, restore such a person with a gentle spirit. watching out for yourselves
because one day you may also be tempted and this could be you in this situation.
You see, love comes in in heartache, love comes in in wrongdoing, love comes in when life is at its worst moment possible. Love steps in and love says, let's build you back up.
Let's give you the strength that you need so that you can step forward and you can take this, as Scotty said this morning, this ashes and you can turn it into a beautiful story and God can redeem these
things in our life, but it starts church with the church stepping up and restoring people to a work that is greater than any one of us that are in here.
And we must step up and we must believe people, we must restore them and allow the Lord to take care of the rest. So love bears, love believes, third thing, love hopes. Love hopes.
Stated often in this series, the situation, oh my goodness, I'm sorry, the situation at the church at Corinth was an utter mess.
These people were some of the worst stories that you can imagine if you read through the book of 1 Corinthians. Paul, in his inspiration of the Holy Spirit, never gave up hope. He doesn't despair and he doesn't walk away from them. Paul writes to them. Paul visits them.
Paul sent some of his closest friends in the ministry to encourage them and the most faithful thing that we can see here as we read through the book of 1 and 2 Corinthians, Paul prays for them.
Paul prays that God would step in, change the hearts, change the lives, and begin to work in this church in a supernatural way so that they could go out from here and change the world that's around them. One commentator, his name is Strouch, he said it like this,
faith in God, quote, faith in God, ultimate triumph, and in God's good intentions for his people gives realistic optimism, even in the face of repeated difficulties and disappointments,
end quote. Hope in the Lord and trust in his plans. This enabled Paul and this enables us to not put our problems, our failures,
our things that are in our life, it allows us to put them into perspective and understand that God is working this story out in my life in a way that I don't even understand it. And this is one of the, someone asked me this morning, how's my buddy Nathan doing?
We talked about it this morning in Sunday school when I said, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we were planning his funeral. I'd already told Allie, I said, if he passes,
I'm driving down to Georgia, I'm going to be down there for the family. Part of me almost left two weeks ago on a Wednesday when the convention was going on and I almost drove down to the hospital just to be with the family because they had called the family in and the
doctor says there's no hope. And I was talking to his wife and his wife put on Facebook, even if the Lord would have said no, we would have gave him the glory. But we were just hoping and praying that God would step in.
And the doctors came in on that Friday morning and the doctor said, he's awake and he's calling for his family. This was the night before when he was having seizures. His body was uncontrollably shaking.
They said there was blood clots and bleeding on the brain. And on Friday morning, he's awake and alert and he's asking for his family. Love steps in.
Hope in the Lord steps in and says, God, I don't know what's going on in this situation. I don't know why this is happening right now, but I'm just going to trust in you. I'm just going to trust that you are greater than all that I can ever understand or imagine.
Galatians 5.10 says it like this. I myself am persuaded in the Lord that you will not accept any other view, but whatever it is that is confusing to you will pay the penalty.
He's saying here, listen, I'm not persuaded in my life that no other circumstances in my life are anything greater than what the Lord has for us. Second Thessalonians 3.4 says this.
We have the confidence in the Lord about you that you are doing and will continue to do what we commanded.
He says, listen, church, I've got confidence that the Lord is doing something great in your life. I don't know what it is, church, in Thessalonica.
I don't know what it is, church, in Corinth, but what I do know is God is working in a greater way than we can ever imagine or we can ever think. And then he writes this little small book to Philemon.
And he says in Philemon, that's got one chapter, in verse 21, he says this. Since I am confident of your obedience. Paul is saying,
Philemon, I'm so confident in you. I'm so confident that you're obeying the Lord. I'm writing you this to know that you will do even more than I say.
You can even go on a step further and you can do even more than what I've done.
And see, Paul was saying to Philemon, you are so faithful and you are so obedient that I'm confident that the Lord is going to work in you in a way that the world will not even understand.
And we've got to step back and we've got to ask our life, is our hope and our love that we have, is it like this where we're saying, God, situations don't look right.
Situations are hard and life is hard, but I'm trusting in you to do something great.
My mind went to Peter. The apostle Peter, a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Israel and standing where they think, you know, they don't have specific ideas of some of the things, but the bank where they think that Jesus came to Peter
when Jesus had just been crucified and Peter had denied Jesus three times and he was out on a boat and he was fishing and he only cared about his own self.
And Jesus is at the bank and he's made some fish and he's cooking breakfast and he calls out to the boat, hey, Peter, come on in.
I got breakfast made for you. You see, Peter thought that the choices that he made was the finality of his life and that failure was final for him. But Jesus stepped in and Jesus said, Peter, just come on back to the boat.
Just come on out of the boat and come back to the shore. Come to where I'm at. I'm here and I'm calling you. And Peter could have looked at Jesus and said, I'm not worthy. I don't deserve you. I'm just going to stay out here and stay fishing. But Peter, in his humility,
in his understanding that God is greater than my situations and my circumstances,
took off his cloak and began to swim back to Jesus because he said, Jesus is enough. And he got back and he understood that Jesus was there in his deepest, darkest moment and he was there to offer hope. Church, I think oftentimes,
Jesus is standing there at the shore and he's saying, hey, come on back. I got hope. I know things right now look difficult. I know things right now are not the way you think. But just come back to me.
Just come back and receive the gift of mercy and grace and compassion and the peace that only I can give.
You see, Jesus is standing at the sheeshore and he's looking at us and he's saying, come back to me.
And ultimately, we have this choice of are we going to turn from what we're doing and come back to Jesus? Are we going to live in the ocean of despair away from God and away from where he's at? Are we going to turn and repent and come back to him? See, love hopes.
Love has an end goal of saying, I am going to trust in God. But not only does love hope and believes and bears, but love endures. It sort of goes hand in hand to that first one, love bears.
But it goes a step further. It goes a step further saying that I'm going to bear what is going on in my life, but when times get tough and I'm at the end of my rope and I'm about ready to break, I'm going to
Endurance Through Trials
endure to the end. This is the staying power of love. This is when times get tough in a marriage. This is when times get tough in life.
This is when times get tough in a job. When things don't ever look like there's going to be an end to the tunnel of despair,
we begin to look back to God and say, God, I'm not going to give up. I'm going to stay and I'm going to take, like I like to put it, I'm going to take the long view of love, not the short view. The short view is,
what can I have and how quickly can I get it? And if I don't get it quick enough, if I don't have my, about Allison likes to make popcorn, I'm not a big popcorn guy, but at nighttime, she'll throw the bag of popcorn in the microwave and two and
a half minutes later, she's got a fresh bag of popcorn and she eats it. That's the short view.
The long view is getting out the pot and the pan, the oil, and you begin to heat it up and you put the kernels in and you put all the flavoring in and you begin to work it and
you begin to work and you begin to see this fruition of these kernels of corn coming into popcorn. That's the long view.
That's the hard view. That's the view that we don't like to take. We like the convenience. We like the instantaneous microwave popcorn and it's good.
It's, from what I understand, I don't eat a lot of it, but it's good. We like that view. The long view, we don't like in life. We want to take it and we want to say, how quickly can I get to the end of whatever situation I'm in?
A couple weeks ago, we went to the corn maze and we're out at Alpha and Omega and we're running around.
The kids are enjoying their time and I pulled up the map so that I could see the corn maze.
It was time to go through the maze and I noticed, okay, this is going to be a long way to get around and Jeremy, our leader of the guys team, stepped up and goes, hey guys, I know the quick way. You just follow me.
I'll get you out of here. It had been a couple times. He may have made this path himself. I don't know.
And so we went in and we took a right. I'm like, I remember looking at the map.
We were not supposed to take a right. We were supposed to take a left. We were supposed to go out and around and the girls, they went their own way and he was like, all right, here it is guys.
He come over and there's a little path that someone had cut in and he was like, right here, this is the exit. We're going to sneak through and then all of a sudden we get out and we're outside the maze. It was like two and a half minutes, if that.
And so we pulled our phone out and we FaceTimed the girls and we're like, ah, we're out, we're out, we beat you. It was great. I began to think, how often in our life is it,
and I'm not saying Jeremy's wrong in this, but how often is our life that we take the view of Jeremy and we take the shortest way possible?
We say, well, there's got to be a shortcut, a way out of my trials and my temptation and my persecution and so I'm going to take the shortest way possible to get there.
And God looks at us and he says, no, I need you to take the long view. I need you to go the long route.
I need you to go through this path of persecution, this path of heartache, this path of trials, because when you come out on the other side, you're going to look back and you're going to say, it's only through God's grace that I came through this.
It's only by the grace of God that I came through this situation. I didn't try to find a shortcut. I didn't try to find a way out. I just endured to the end and I look back and I said, God, you are the one that is ultimately working through our story.
You know, see, as I read through my Bible, as I love God's word, I often see that God is the best storyteller. He tells the best stories in the ways that we don't understand.
I was talking to a lady just the other day and I said, as I'm thinking through Christmas and thinking through a couple things, I said, if I were writing the story of Jesus, the name Rahab the harlot wouldn't be in his lineage.
Rahab, who was a prostitute, who had done wrong her whole life, was met by these two men and she said, I'm going to step out on a limb and I'm going to encourage and I'm going to help you
and God used that situation to redeem her life and put her life in the story of Jesus. How often do we want to take those muddy,
disgusting moments of our life and we want to rip them out of our story and God says, no, that is the reason for your story so that you can look back and you can say, I've endured,
I've done these things and God is the one that has enabled me and strengthened me and given me the purpose and the courage to go through this but it's the endurance and the end that allows us to get
Moses as an Example of Faith
to the end of our story and see God working through this. As Terry comes and we close down, I want to give one illustration from Scripture as time allows to give us one example of a man that I believe exemplified these four statements. He bared, he believed,
he hoped and he endured. This man's name is Moses. I'm sure you've heard the name Moses, I'm sure you've heard the story of Moses where he was supposed to die and he was supposed to be killed as a young man, as a baby and his mom
saw fit to try to circumvent what the world and the government was doing. He spent 40 years in Pharaoh's house and then he killed a man and spent 40 years on the backside of a desert. 80 years of his life.
Some of us in here are 80 and even older. God looked down at an 80 year old man and he said,
I'm determining with your life that there's a purpose to your life at 80 years old. That your life's not over, that your life's not done, that I'm going to use you in a way that is going to transform a nation, transform a people, if only you'll trust me.
Now Moses, he could have looked and he could have said, God, I'm 80. I'm done, man. My life's hard. My life's been tough. My own people abandoned me.
They tried to kill me. I was ran out of my home. I've been on the backside of the desert. I don't think anybody knows who I am anymore. And God said, no, I've got something great for you. And you think, man, okay, something great's coming. I'm 80.
It's going to be awesome. And he says, I need you to go into your people, into Egypt, and I want you to lead them out of bondage.
That sounds good. I'm going to be the hero. I'm going to be great.
This is going to be awesome. They're going to write about me. I'm going to be like one of these statues and monuments that are made. And I'm going to be, it's going to be awesome. So he comes in and he leads these people out after some trials. And for the next 40 years,
God saw fit to put him back in the desert. Now, if you're like me, you would think, God, I've been in the desert the last 40 years. You promised me a promised land. What are you doing?
But Moses began to bear the burden of the people. On four separate occasions, the people turned against Moses, the people turned against God, and on four separate occasions, Moses went before the Lord and said, Lord, don't destroy these people. I know they're hard.
I know they're difficult. But I'm going to bear their burden. Punish me instead. Don't punish them. He continued on and he believed God was holy. He believed God was promising him
something great when that burning bush happened. He believed in God. He believed that the end was there. He believed that there was something great. And he just said, I'm going to trust in God no matter what happens. I'm going to keep going. He continued to go before the Lord.
He continued in hope for these children of Israel that was wicked people oftentimes that would turn their back on him, would turn their back on the Lord. And he just said, God, I want you to give them hope. I know that you're true. I know you're holy.
And he endured to the end when the Lord called him home right after the Lord took him up to the top of a mountain
and said, I'm going to let you look into the promised land. You're never going to step foot into it, Moses. You did some wrong things, but I'll grant you because you endured to look into the promised land. He never stepped foot there. He never had the moment to step into this
wonderful promise that God had for his children. Now, the children of Israel eventually did step into this land and they're there now. But I want us to sort of take our mind to this situation. If we were in the desert for 40 years,
and you can read through all the different situations the children of Israel went through, would we have endured to the end?
Or would we have gave it up after two years? Would we have gave it up after two months? Moses, for 40 years, was in the desert and he still believed, he still had hope, and he still endured to the end.
You see, the phrase that I've left out of this whole statement was this. He believes all things, he bears all things, he hopes all things, and he endures all things. all things is repeated four different times in this one verse. And it's a reminder that in all things,
we need to trust God. In all things, we need to bear the burdens. In all things, we've got to believe what God's doing. In all things, we've got to hope. And in all things, we must endure to the end.
Even when times are looking difficult, even when times are looking hard, and life doesn't make sense, and we begin to question God, we've just got to come back and say, God, I'm going to, in all things, believe you. In all things, I'm going to trust in you. I know they don't make sense.
My co-workers are telling me they don't make sense.
My family's telling me they don't make sense. Everyone around me is telling me they don't make sense. I'm sure Moses had these people in his life that said, Moses, what in the world are you doing? Man, you had a great life over there on the other side of the desert. Jethro, the greatest father-in-law ever, he comes and he encourages you.
Why are you giving up? Why aren't you giving up? And Moses just said, I'm just going to trust the Lord.
And at 120 years old, the Lord used him in a way that the children of Israel now as a nation, we look at them and we see, all because he didn't give up. The ultimate question for you this morning is this, how soon are you giving up on the Lord?
How soon are you giving up on the story that God is trying to write in your life?
All because times get hard and you don't want to do it anymore. You don't want to endure to the end. You see, love is not an easy thing. But God is calling each and every one of us to love in all things.
Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. God, I thank you for the strength that you've given us, Lord.
The encouragement as I've been reading and meditating on this passage for the last 10 weeks or so now, Lord, you are so good to us. And how often do we turn and spit in your face? How often do we turn and say, I'm good.
I'll figure it out on my own. But Lord, help us this morning to turn and say, I'm going to believe you, Lord. I'm going to trust in you. I'm going to endure to the end. I'm not going to give up.
Closing Prayer and Thanks
I'm going to trust in you. Lord, I thank you for what you've done. I thank you for this church, the encouragement they've given me, my family, Lord. I love you. In your name we pray. Amen.
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