Don't Forget to Remember

Your future, it can seem mysterious and frightening, but there's good news. God has a promised land for you to move into, courageously and fearlessly. And the book of Joshua shows you how it can happen, how to live your promised land life.

Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to church today. I'm one of the pastors. My name's René. How are you guys doing today? There it is, the sun coming up one hour earlier. I don't know how that happens, but it does once a year. Hey, grab your message notes that looks like this. We're gonna continue our series in the book of Joshua in the Bible. That is a very ancient book that's all the way back in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, about a commander of the Israelites named Joshua and how he led these people who had just come out of slavery in Egypt into their ancestral homeland, the promised land.

And it's such a great book to read because it's full of exciting and interesting and weird stories, but also because there's a lot of principles for you and me about how to go into the promised land life that God has for us to live spiritually. All kinds of promises about the character of God that apply to us just as much as it applied to these people 3,400 years ago or so. So if you're just joining us, quick review, week one, chapter one, we were on the border of the promised land, and the principle was God has a future for me. I want you to say that out loud with me. Say, God has a future for me.

Week two was chapter two, Rahab's story. Rahab was a prostitute, and the whole principle, Adrian hit it out of the park on this message, was that my mess can become part of my message, that God can redeem anyone. God can redeem me and make something out of the mess I've made of my life. Say that together with me. God can redeem me. And then week three, Mark did a wonderful job in Joshua chapter three and a little bit into chapter four, and the principle was this, say it with me, God is always with me because they were crossing the Jordan, and if you're crossing into unfamiliar territory in life, there were some great lessons for you there.

And then week four was a fascinating week because Joshua in Joshua chapter five is getting ready for a series of battles, and he sees a vision of God, and he asks this commander of the Lord's army, whose side are you on, our side or our enemies? And do you remember what he says? No, neither, I'm on the Lord's side. And it was a good reminder that, say it with me, it's not all about me. And then week five last weekend was about the walls of Jericho coming down. And if there's walls facing you that need to come down, what you need to do is trust in God, trust in God's timing, trust in God's promise, and you could be right in front of a breakthrough, which they saw on day seven of marching around the city.

So the principle was, say it with me, don't stop on six. You could be right next to a breakthrough that's gonna change everything in your marriage, in your life, in your job, in your ministry, in your relationship with your children. So don't quit, don't stop on six. And now this week, there's a very unusual principle, and here's why it's unusual in the book of Joshua. Because as you could tell, the entire book so far has been about moving ahead, right? It's just been about just taking the land, moving ahead, taking one step after another, moving forward into the life God has for you.

It's been about pell-mell, momentum, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. And in this week's scripture, God says, stop. And before you take one step further, God says, I want you to go back and do something that's going to help you in the future. If you have your Bibles with you, I want you to turn to Joshua 4, and I'm gonna look at just a few verses in Joshua 4 that Mark just touched on at the end of his great message, which was mostly about Joshua 3 a couple of weeks ago, and I'm doing this because it's the annual meeting weekend, and this directly relates to that.

Let me explain. God teaches the Israelites a lot of great lessons as they go into the promised land in the book of Joshua. But there's probably not one lesson that is more important to their survival and impact as a nation than this lesson that we're gonna learn about today. Whether or not they took this lesson to heart would determine in many ways their destiny as a nation. And whether or not you and I take this lesson to heart determines in many ways our destiny, our impact, even our happiness as individuals and as a church, and yet most of us do not apply this lesson to our lives.

Even though it's a command of God that starts right here in Joshua and is repeated all throughout the Bible, most of us, even though it would make us happier, even though it would help us, do not do this simple thing. And let me just tell you how I learned about it. I was going to seminary. That's grad school where you get a master's degree or a school where you get a master's or a doctorate. I was getting a master's in ministry. I was studying to be a pastor. And I became so depressed and so in doubt of God, not of God's existence. I was in doubt of whether or not God cared about me or any one of us.

And here's why. Some of the things that happened to me in just a span of just a few months in seminary. I was up in Portland, Oregon studying and I got a call from my mother. She and her second husband, her first husband had passed away. My stepfather and my mother lived up at South Lake Tahoe. He had dedicated his entire life to the Lord. He had been a missionary. He was now a pastor at a little church up there in Tahoe. Just 24/7 it seemed like. A minister that just devoted his life. And he had just retired probably three or four months before from a lifetime of ministry and they were looking forward to spending some time together.

And they were driving back up from the Bay Area up to Tahoe. It was snowing. It was winter. And he said to my mom, I want you to time me 'cause I'm gonna break a personal record when it comes to putting chains on these tires because there's snow up ahead. And so he got out of the car and she's timing him and it keeps going on and on. And she's thinking he's not gonna break that personal record. And finally she says, I wonder what's wrong with him. And she looks out the window and he's sprawled on the back in the snow and he's dead. Because he'd had a heart attack while putting chains on the tires.

And now my mother's a widow for the second time and my stepfather after a lifetime of devotion to God and as a retirement present from the Lord, he gets that. After I got back from winter break, I learned along with the rest of the school that one of our seminary professors had put a gun in his mouth and had taken his own life. One of our leaders who told us all about the benefits of living a godly life and how to find fulfillment in life and how you just keep your eyes on the Lord and he took his own life. Also discovered that one of my favorite teachers at the seminary had apparently had a moral failure and was leaving the seminary under this cloud. This man who had told us about God's will and about morality and off he goes.

I also had a skin disease and that sounds like such a light thing but I thought it was going to drive me crazy, it was so maddening and if you have one, you know what I'm talking about, the constant itching and the constant pain and I'd been to doctors and there didn't seem to be anything that they could do to touch it, not to control it in any way. Now on top of that, I had just broken up with my long time girlfriend who was Laurie and I had no idea of course that we'd end up being married to each other years later but at the time, I was devastated because this wonderful relationship was over and on top of all that, all my funds were gone, I had no money left to pay for school, I was out of funds.

You heard the old joke, I thought I finally saw a light at the end of the tunnel but it turned out to be an approaching train, right, you heard that? That's exactly how I felt at the time, it's like I'm hearing one bit of bad news after another. How do you get through times of doubt and trial like that? I trudged into chapel one day, you know, you've got to go to chapel at these kinds of schools. Filled with doubt about it all and the speaker turned out to be another one of my seminary professors, a guy named Jim Andrews. Now I did not wanna be there but one minute after his talk started, he had me riveted and hanging on every word because he starts out by saying, what do you do when you ask God to just fill your cup and he steals your lunch?

He said, what do you do when you're bleeding and God won't even give you bandages? He said, what do you do when things are going bad and you beg God for relief and it seems like he won't even hear your request, ever felt like that? That's exactly how I was feeling. And he went on and he said, let's be frank, there are times in all of our lives when if our lives at that moment were used as evidence for the existence of an all powerful, all loving God, they would not make it. There are times in your life, just slices, where if at that moment in your life you were brought into a court of law and a jury was asked to decide whether or not God exists based on your life at that moment, they would decide against the existence of God.

He said, so what do you do, and here was his line, he said, what do you do when your experience betrays your theology? What do you do in times like that? He said, what do you do in times like that? Just have faith, blind faith? He said, if by blind faith you mean faith without evidence, then blind faith is not the answer because blind faith is for gullible people and it's for superstitious people because real Christianity was never meant to exist in a vacuum of evidences. So if blind faith is not the answer, then what is? He said, what you need in times like that is not blind faith. What you need is monumental faith.

I wanna hit pause on my seminar professor's talk for just a minute and I'm gonna explain to you what he meant by that, but first I wanna tell you the story of the first time you see this principle of monumental faith in the Bible and it's right in the book of Joshua. As I mentioned earlier, it's in Joshua 4. Now let me just remind you from Mark's message a couple of weeks ago, the Jordan River is at flood stage. And the people have gotta get across the seemingly impossible obstacle to get into the promised land and suddenly the flow of water stops and they get to walk right through the riverbed to the other side into the promised land.

Now I want you to imagine emotionally how pumped they must have been at that moment, something that seemed to be impossible to get past. They got past, I mean they must have felt like running full speed into Cain and thinking we can take anything, let's just go, go, go. And that's when God says, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. Turn around and go back into the riverbed. They must have said, what, what? We just escaped with our lives from this thing. He says, verse two, I want you to choose 12 men from among the people, one from each tribe and tell them to take up 12 stones in the middle of the Jordan from right where the priests are standing with the Ark of the Covenant in the middle of the dry riverbed. And I want you to grab those 12 stones and carry them over with you to the bank.

Wait a minute, God, I don't wanna go back into the middle of the river. We were lucky to get through the first time. That's dangerous out there. We can hear the water kinda echoing down the canyon. He says, this is really important, do it. So they go back in, they get the big stones, they hurry out and the Bible says, no sooner have they set their feet on the dry ground than the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and ran at flood stage as before. I imagine the noise. I imagine shouts and cheers and then the shouts and cheers are drowned out by the rushing of the water coming through the canyon and then rushing down toward the Dead Sea and then the shouts and cheers die down and the sound of the water dies down and suddenly it's just lapping at the shore and the birds are singing and everything's quiet and the people are over on the other side going, did that really just happen?

Because it looks like nothing, 'cause everything's back to normal now. Were we just dreaming that? So often when God does miracles in our lives, it's easy for us to forget the miracle when things get back to day to day normal and we go, did that really happen? And that's exactly why God says, yeah, you need to stop and make a monument of those 12 stones. And he says, verse six, they will serve as a sign among you in the future when your children ask you, what do these stones mean? Tell them, tell them the story, tell them about the river, tell them about the obstacle, tell them about how God made a way when there was no way. These stones are to be a what? Memorial to the people of Israel forever.

Read a Stanford University study this week on memory. This is really interesting. They said, we tend to remember negative life events far more easily than positive events. They did study after study, it doesn't matter what age, what gender, we remember the details about negative things that happened to us and often we forget the good things. They said to remember good events, we must deliberately associate them with strong positive emotion because strong emotion, positive or negative, is apparently what brands your memories onto your gray cells. So if you wanna remember good things, you gotta associate it with lots of joy and that's exactly why God says here, you gotta celebrate, you gotta stop, you gotta party and brand this memory into your brain with a joyful celebration and making this monument.

See, monumental faith doesn't mean big faith. Monumental faith means faith that looks at past acts of God for reassurance that he will act in the present. Jot that down. Monumental faith looks back on those times that God has worked in the past and it says, I know God did this and even though it feels like my back is up against it right now, I know God did this and I know God has not changed and I take that as evidence that he is going to help me again as he sees fit in my future. And you see this principle all throughout the Bible. Now these principles, these verses rather aren't in your notes but in 1 Samuel 7:12, jot down this reference, it says, then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and he named it, what did he name it? Don't you love that? He names his rock Ebenezer and in some of the translations it mentions that he had a little pebble then he named Tiny Tim. Why did he name it Ebenezer? What's that all about? Well, Ebenezer means stone of help and so it's a monument he's setting up. He's saying, we gotta remember, the Lord helped us so far, thus far the Lord has helped us. We have come this far by his help and so God is going to lead us safely home.

God did not help us in the past only to set us up to fail. And then this one isn't in your notes either but jot this down, in Psalm 77, the psalmist is just going through terrible depression and if you're going through depression, read this Psalm 'cause he describes your symptoms in the first nine verses. And I know because I struggle with that sometimes. And then he says in verse 10, I said, this is my anguish, what he just described, but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. Yes, I will remember the works of the Lord. Not blind faith, monumental faith that looks back to the monuments. You could call this the power of positive memory and I want you to add to the bottom of page one this, the power of positive memory admits an undeniable fact. You can't see the future but you can see the past.

So when you're afraid of the future, you look back and see how God has acted in the past and you remind yourself that God has not changed and you go, I don't have blind faith, I don't have faith without evidence, I got a ton of evidence from the past and I'm using that as ammunition to fight my doubts that God's gonna help me in the future. Now, this sounds great, doesn't it? So how do you and I apply this? How do we actually do this today? How do we develop monumental faith in our own lives for those inevitable times where we're gonna have doubt and despair and depression? Top of page two, four very practical steps that you and I need to take to make this into a habit.

First, just notice God just did something great. Would you agree with this? So often God answers prayer and we don't even notice, right? Well, you know, you tend to see what you're looking for and so look for it. Notice God just did something great. And then second, keep concrete evidence of what he did. Again, Mark mentioned this a couple of weekends ago, photographs of the miracle, little mementos, write in a journal. You know, you can self-publish a book very easily these days. You can do it on iPhoto or a million other programs where you can put photographs and you can type in captions and you can hit print and they'll send it to you in two weeks and you got a little book.

And then display that evidence in a way that prompts reflection. What I'm saying is you put that monument or that picture or that book or that rock or whatever you're keeping somewhere that people are gonna ask about it and number four, you keep telling the stories. This is the key. You gotta keep telling the stories or people are gonna forget. You're gonna forget. The next generation will never know. You say, what stories? Would you flip your notes over to page three? Do you see on page three of your notes, I put some prompts to help you remember some of the great things that God has done in your past. And I just wanna encourage you, use this this week and use it as ways to start conversation in your family. Just glance over those for just a second. This is how you can start developing, start building the monuments, start remembering and retelling in your own life.

Now, in case you're still a little bit unclear about what I'm talking about, what does a modern monument of faith look like? I wanna give you three quick examples of what I'm talking about. Modern monuments, example one. I was helping out at this orphanage in Mexico with Baymont Middle School about six or seven years ago, just a great place to connect with these adorable kids there. And I noticed up in their kitchen was a framed photograph of a bimbo bread truck. And bimbo's the name of the big multinational bakery company. And I asked the orphanage director, why do you have a picture of the bimbo bread truck up on your wall? And she said, oh, that's what we call the bimbo miracle.

And I said, that is a great title. Tell me about the bimbo miracle. And she said, well, one day we literally had run out of food for the kids. We were, it was gone. And she said, so we gathered them together, we gave them the last of the food we had and we prayed with them. We told them what was going on and we prayed, Lord, you, we look back to the miracle of the manna. You sent manna from heaven in the Bible and you have not changed. And so we just wanna claim that and know that you have the power to help us. We wanna ask you to send bread. Shortly after they prayed that prayer, they heard a beep beep behind the kitchen and it was the bimbo bakery truck.

And get this, the driver said, you know, I was driving down the road past your orphanage and I just had a feeling I should pull in and give you all the bread in my truck. And he said, now I didn't wanna get fired so I called my supervisor and told him about this. I said, I know it's crazy. And he said, you know what? I think you should do it. And we will do, we can bake more bread. You should give all the bread in your truck. By the way, I checked this with some bimbo bakery executives that I met later and they heard the story and they said, we actually encourage that. We said, we encourage people to look for ways that they can show generosity. Obviously they said, we can't do it all the time because we'd run out of bread and wouldn't make any money. But they said, that is right in line with our core values.

So the executive said, yeah, you can go ahead and do it. So he shows up at the bakery and moments after the kids have prayed for bread, they see an answer to prayer right before their eyes. And they said, we put up this picture for the kids who were too young to remember so that they see it and they ask questions about it. And we put it up there so that people who volunteer see it and ask questions about it. And so that that prompts us to keep telling the story of the bimbo miracle. And that's what I'm talking about. That's the power of monumental faith.

Let me give you another example of this book. My wife, her family, her maiden name's the Eddinger's and her family put together this book. It's called "Footsteps of Faith." It is full of monuments of faith. Again, just self-published with great pictures of miracles and primarily about stories involving her grandparents, Ed and Grace. Now, this is not like, you know, Hallmark, card, chicken soup for the soul stuff. This book is full of some tough stuff. There's tuberculosis and there's alcoholism and there's orphans and there's some tough stuff in this book, but this book is about how God redeems all those things and makes miracles out of them.

Just one example, 1930. Stock market crashes in '29. The Depression hits in 1930. A ton of people lose their jobs, including Ed, Laurie's grandpa. And so Ed's like, "Well, I lost my job. I guess I got some time on my hands. I'm gonna go volunteer with the Union Gospel Mission in downtown St. Louis because, little benefit to that, I hear that you get free food when you volunteer for the rescue mission." Well, he goes, he becomes a trusted volunteer in short order. He gets very concerned about the people in downtown St. Louis who are out of a job and who are lost and there's suicides on the rise. So he goes to downtown St. Louis and he organizes and often preaches at evangelistic meetings in downtown St. Louis, puts together music and puts together sermons and guest speakers and tons of people start coming and there's photographs all throughout that book of meetings that her grandfather is leading in St. Louis in 1930.

Now, in light of our grace and race panel last weekend, I noticed something unusual for the time about these pictures. Do you know what it is? Can you see it? These meetings are integrated. There's black and white meeting together. Now, in 1930 in St. Louis, you wouldn't expect to find this, but there it is. Somebody could tell me about it, but there's actual monuments. There is concrete evidence of what God was doing through Laurie's grandparents so that now we can, we wouldn't have known these stories. We wouldn't have had these monuments, but they built a monument so that now we can tell the stories to ourselves and we can tell the stories to our children and we can tell the stories to our grandchildren and say, this is your DNA. This is who you are. These are your people. So when you're doing ministry, you are doing something that is in line with God's purpose for our family. This is what God tells us to do and we keep telling the story.

Third example, this was in 1930 in St. Louis. Let me tell you about something else that happened in 1930 in Santa Cruz. At this place, an old wreck of a building called Twin Lakes Church. Twin Lakes was started in 1890, but by 1930, it had been closed for eight years and I mean, shut down. Locks on the door, bars on the windows closed. Nobody doing any maintenance. It was a leaky roof. The windows were all broken and let me show you a monument. We have a piece of paper. I wanna show you a picture of it. I show it to everybody in every new members class here at Twin Lakes Church. I mean, honestly, it chokes me up almost every time.

You see the date, March 30th, 1930, it's a meeting in the Twin Lakes area of Santa Cruz County, California and the following people are meeting together to restart Twin Lakes Church and there's a list. And if you see the whole piece of paper, you know how many grand total names are on the list? 11. 11 people meet in 1930 to restart this place and then they took these meetings in longhand, but somewhere along the line, somebody gave them a typewriter. So a few months later, we have this bit of board minutes. They had paid all their bills finally for getting the place open again and look at what it says, balance on hand, 19 cents. I put it in my pocket, 19 cents. This is a nickel and a dime and four pennies. This was the seed that was left in their seed bag when they started this place. 11 people in 19 cents. And this whole place, this campus in Camp Hammer and all the missionaries we support and all the churches and clinics that we build all over the world, 11 people in 19 cents. You are sitting in a miracle.

This came out of this much, but unless we keep retelling the story, we will forget the miracle. So you gotta remember and retell, remember and retell, remember and retell and you know what? We need to keep building those monuments. This is one of the things I love about Twin Lakes is that we have the annual tradition of the annual meeting because it forces us to just stop our pell mell forward motion and go, wait, wait, wait, what did God do last year? We always do it around a march and we look at the previous year. So in 2016, what did God do? I wanted to give you all a monument so that you could remember and retell and we're gonna give you one. As you leave today, you are all going to be handed this. Our graphic designer, Kayla, put it together. When you unfold it, it is a little poster and it is filled with pictures of different things that God did here in 2016. And a Bible verse, come and see what God has done.

Now, honestly, my life changed in 2016 too and I thought of making this just a gigantic picture of me and my grandson because this happened in 2016 also. And that was the most important thing that happened in 2016. But there were other things that happened in 2016 too. And you look at this, and I wanna invite you to just kind of put this up somewhere. You might not have a lot of wall space in your house, but what about in your garage? What about on the side of your fridge? What about on the back of your bathroom door or just some place where you're just gonna see it occasionally? You can see the front on the back, there's some stats and there's some quotes. You look at these things and you remember the stories and you praise God for what he has done.

Like, for example, one of the pictures that's on the front of this is a picture of the dedication of the brand new children's building that we built as part of the 2020 Vision. And also another picture is the brand new clinic and classroom building that we built in India as part of our 2020 Vision program. Those buildings are brick and mortar reality now, but it's like the Jordan River has flowed back into its banks and it's all back to normal. And we're like, the memories of the miracle is fading. But do you remember? Do you remember how the existence of these buildings just dangled on the thinnest of threads? How not once, but twice, we went to a local government authority, the second time it was the local water district. And we were asking for approval and it was five people on the water district.

Do you remember how we all showed up and packed the ballroom of the Seascape Resort and packed the lobby of the Skis Seascape Resort and we prayed and tried to stay positive and tried to be present? And there was nothing we could do. It was an obstacle we could not cross. We had done everything we could do. It was out of our control. And we had to get it passed. And two people on the board voted no and two people voted yes. And there was one fifth member who was the tiebreaker vote. And do you remember how he processed his vote verbally and said, well, I could vote yes. And we all went, and then he said, but I could vote no. And we all went, and he did this like a dozen times. And then finally he paused for what seemed like an eternity. I thought I was gonna die. And he said, I vote. And honest to goodness, I consider it as much as, I really do consider it a miracle like God parting the Jordan or drying up the Jordan. He said, I vote yes. And we erupted with joy. We couldn't believe that God was answering our prayers in this way and these buildings got built and all the ministry that happens here and all the ministry that happens with the kids in India and these buildings hanging by such a thin thread.

Don't forget the miracle just because the Jordan's back in its banks. Remember and rejoice. And you know why we need to do that? Because it's easy to forget. And what happens when you forget is you stop moving forward with confidence. Like I'll be very honest with you. You totally like lift the hood on the car and let you peek inside. We're in the fourth year of a four year pledge drive to build these buildings, right? Now the buildings are built, the Jordan's back in its banks. So it's easy to think, I guess the buildings are built. So I guess I'm done with my pledge. Experts say that the fourth and final year is the year that some people stop giving. But if we look back and remember, and by the way, we're pretty much right on track. We've gotten about, we're about 75% through. We got 75% of the funds. But if we look back and remember the miracle God did, then we are motivated to finish strong and to move forward into the promised land that God has called us to move into.

That is why you look back in your own life, not to dwell in the past, but to help you move forward with confidence and finish with a surge. See, the Bible's very specific about why I should develop monumental faith. There's two reasons that God gives Joshua very explicitly here. Number one is this, jot this down, to remember the works of God for us. Not to brag on us, not to say, look how great we are. Starting in verse 20, it says, "And those 12 stones which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal," watch this, "and he said to the Israelites, 'In the future, when your descendants ask their parents, What do these stones mean?' Tell them, Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground." Now watch this, "For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you, until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea. The Lord your God did it. The Lord your God did it, not you."

God is the fountain of every blessing from our salvation, which is all by his grace, to miracles like we've experienced here, which couldn't possibly have just come about by human intervention. God did it all. So I need to memorialize that. What's interesting to me is the Israelites could have memorialized a lot of negative things. They could have memorialized their wanderings in the desert. See, the question is not, am I going to memorialize something? Am I going to remember something? I'm gonna memorialize something. I'm going to enshrine something in my memory. Is it gonna be pain or is it gonna be progress? The question is will I memorialize the misery or the miracles? Am I gonna memorialize the misery or the miracles? You gotta be very deliberate about this because if you're always focused on pain, you will not make much forward progress. That's why I need to remember.

And then second and finally, we need to do this to reveal the power of God to others. To reveal the power. It's not just for ourself getting over our own depression. It's for God to be revealed to others. Joshua says, Joshua 4:24, he, God, did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear that is obvian awe and reverent respect of the Lord your God. Kind of a true confession here. I used to think that I should never talk about the good stuff that the church is doing because that would be immodest, right? And then somebody showed me Matthew 5:16, where Jesus says, don't hide your light under a bushel. He says, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father who's in heaven.

And you know who showed me that verse? It was Brian King who used to be president of Cabrio College. And Brian said, René, Twin Lakes is doing some amazing things but you're hiding your light under a bushel. He said, you need to go out, you need to get into the community. People need to know about what you are doing already. And Brian's urging, I got involved with things like Second Harvest and met some of the mayors and police chiefs and muckety mucks at different companies and so on, people that I'd never met before. And last Wednesday night, for like the fourth time, at an annual banquet where all these types were, I received on your behalf a trophy from Second Harvest Food Bank denoting that once again, Twin Lakes Church has given more to fight hunger in Santa Cruz County than any agency, than any government, than any company. Twin Lakes Church gave the most food and gave the most money. Twin Lakes Church did.

And you know, I gotta tell you something. This is why this is important. I cannot count now the number of people who've come up to me kind of on the QT and said, you know, my whole opinion about church, my whole opinion about Christianity has changed because of Twin Lakes. Because of what you are doing for the poor. This is what Josh was talking about. The other, all the nations of the world will see the miracles of God through you and this is why you have to stop and remember, somebody said, monumental faith assaults doubt with memory. When things are going so wrong, you feel a sale by doubt like being a sale by a hurricane. You seek shelter in the monument. I did. That year at seminary, my whole outlook changed.

I sat in that chapel after Jim Andrews spoke and I remembered how when I had run completely out of money to pay for school a couple of years previously, I got a letter in the mail, it was from a Swiss uncle I had not heard from personally in years. I'd never even told him I was in grad school. And he said, I just had an inkling that this would be useful to help pay for school and in the letter was $5,000. Now that does not happen very often. It does not happen to me nearly often enough. God. But I sat there and I thought, no, I'm gonna remember that monument. It came out of nowhere. I believe that means God wants me here and God has not set me up to come this far to fail.

See, the memorial stones were there so that Joshua could point to them and say, kids, next generation, a lot has changed since that first day we crossed over. You're facing some different enemies now, but one thing has not changed at all. The God who did that is still your God. The God who did that still is a purpose for you in the promised land and he did not bring you this far to fail. And you know what? A lot has changed in our culture since Twin Lakes was started in 1890 or restarted in 1930. And we can say to our next generation, I know you're facing a lot of foes that maybe that first generation or two did not have to face. A lot has changed, but some things have not changed. We still serve the living God who did those miracles for this church and he has not brought us this far to fail.

He is faithful to all his promises. That has not changed. We serve a risen savior. That has not changed. We are served by God, saved by God, sovereign grace. That has not changed. Nothing can separate us ever from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That has not changed. In other words, nothing that matters has changed. So you can move forward with confidence, but you can only do that when you don't forget to remember. I'm trying to encourage somebody here today. Is somebody in need of encouragement and been encouraged today? Let me hear from you. Have you been encouraged today by God and his work?

Well, I think you'll be encouraged by this. I wanna show you a highlight reel as we close. Sports teams show highlight reels sometimes. This is a highlight reel of some of the lives that were impacted in 2016. Every person you're going to hear from on this video was impacted by this church in the year 2016 because sometimes we throw around statistics, but behind those stats are souls that God reached through you. So I thank you and I thank God and get ready to praise God as you watch this video. Look at this.