Trusting When God Seems Absent

Well, it's been about 15 hours and you're still all here. So, proving once again the Bible means it when it says nobody knows the day or the hour. Do I hear an amen on that? You gotta pay attention to the Bible when it says something.

You know, one of the things that I think is always so sad when people concentrate almost exclusively on the end times and the rapture and the great tribulation is that they lose a practical focus on how to handle the tribulations that we go through every day in life. And that is what I want to talk to you about this morning.

Grab your message notes that look like this. Our series for the month of May has been called "Trusting God in Troubled Times." And while you're taking those notes out of your bullets, I want to show you something that is, I think, a great example of the subject this morning.

I want to show you a commercial from TV that may be familiar to some of you, but this is basically the topic today. I want to know if you have ever felt like the guy on the other side of the pane of glass in this spot. Have you seen my new pillow windows? They're stunning. But look at this. The shades are in the windows? Yeah, so they don't get dirty or damaged. And they work like regular shades? No, even better. They're cordless. Look at that. I want it so easy to change the shades, too. Oh my gosh, look at that. Do it again. The new designer series, "Windows and Doors," only from Pella. Eventually, you look through them.

How many of you have ever felt like the guy on the other side of the window in that commercial, right? Like, everything's going wrong. It's all falling apart, you know, one thing after another. And God is like one of the women on the other side of that triple-paned window, completely oblivious to all my cries for help. You ever feel like that? I've felt like that before.

I look back on times in my life when I have felt just like that man. One of the first times was back in 1984. I'll never forget it. Today I want to talk about how to trust God when God seems absent. And that's exactly what I felt like at this point in my life.

Here I was in seminary, Portland, Oregon, studying to be a pastor, right? Studying learning from great men of God, I'm assuming, seminary professors who are going to teach me how to teach other people how to trust in God. And then the barbecue explodes and lands on the doghouse and everything catches on fire.

One of my seminary professors resigned because of a secret sin, as he put it, that he'd been hiding for his whole life. So he left the seminary. That took us by surprise. Then shortly after that, another seminary professor was left by his wife because she said he has abandoned our marriage for the work of the Lord. And I thought, wow, that guy was like my second favorite seminary professor. My first favorite was the guy who resigned.

And then while I was still reeling from those two resignations, another of our seminary professors put the barrel of a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and committed suicide. So one by one, all these great men of God are falling. And I reached into my pocket one night and realized that the change that I had in my pocket was all the money that I had left in the world.

I still remember it was a quarter and a dime and a nickel. I was dating Lori at the time, and I held out my hand and I showed her the change. I said, you know what? This is all that I've got left. I thought God wanted me to come to seminary. How am I going to pay for it? How am I going to pay rent? How can I keep applying for jobs and I never get any of the jobs that I apply for?

And then Lori, who, as I said, I'd been dating for years, well, our relationship hit a very rough patch and we broke up. This woman that I thought was going to be the love of my life, the relationship was over and that shattered me as well. It was one thing after another.

And then this is going to sound like a comedy routine or something, but I got this severe skin rash all over my body. And I felt like, God, are you kidding me? I went to three different specialists and nobody could get to the bottom of why this thing was just creeping all over. And if you ever had something like that, you know, it's not only, you know, itchy, but it gets to be painful and almost maddening.

And then it got really bad because to top it all off, my stepfather, my beloved stepfather, who had served God faithfully a lifetime in ministry six months after he retired, he had a fatal heart attack, leaving my mom, a widow, for the second time in her life. She of course had to move out of their house and she ended up selling it and moving all her stuff into a storage unit.

And then just a couple of months after he died, her storage unit flooded, ruining most of her belongings. My heroes, my loved ones, my own finances, my own relationships, one thing after another falling apart. And I remember thinking, how am I supposed to encourage other people to trust in God when I'm going to seminary and I don't even think that God's paying attention to what's going on in my life right now?

How do you trust God when God seems absent? Where is God when you're bleeding and you've run out of bandages? As a friend of mine put it memorably at that phase of my life, what do you do when you ask God to fill your cup and he steals your lunch?

Let's be frank. There are times when your life would not make a very good argument for the existence of a loving, all-powerful God. Am I right? There are times when if you were dragged into a court of law and your experiences over the last say nine to twelve months of your life at some given point in your life, those experiences were used as an argument in front of a jury to decide whether or not a loving God exists. It would not make it.

So what do you do in times like that? The cliche answer is just have faith, but if by faith you mean blind faith, then that's not the biblical answer because blind faith is no faith at all. If by blind faith you mean faith without evidences, then blind faith is for gullible people and superstitious people and possibly naive Christians.

But in real life blind faith does not work and biblically Christianity was never meant to exist in a vacuum of evidences. So what's the answer? Where do you go when everything's falling apart and God seems absent? Well in search of an answer we're going to go to Psalm 77 in the Bible today. If you have your Bibles, turn there. If you don't have them, grab one of those brown TLC Bibles and turn to Psalm 77.

This is a fascinating Psalm. It was written by, not by King David who wrote most of the Psalms, this was written by a man named Asaph. This is a guy who really struggled with discouragement in many of his Psalms. He's a fascinating writer. I wish we knew more about him. He is our most Bono-like writer in the Bible. Very confessional, very artistic in the ways he expresses himself about his relationship with God.

And there are times he says when I feel like God is just not paying attention, when the heavens seem as brass, when he's on the other side of the window oblivious. I want you to look at the symptoms of his discouragement here in Psalm 77 and let me ask you, do you relate to any of these?

The first symptom is this, I feel like praying does no good. Do you ever feel like this verses two and three, when I was in distress, I sought the Lord. He says I tried. At night I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered you, O God, and I groaned. He says, oh yeah, I thought about God all right, just groaned. No comfort there.

Second symptom, I can't sleep. You kept my eyes from closing. He's got insomnia and he's blaming it on God. You kept my eyes from closing. I was too troubled to speak. He's saying I even have a hard time verbalizing the problem. And I dwell on how good things used to be. Ever do this verses five and six, I thought about the former days. The years of long ago I remembered my songs in the night. He says, oh yeah, those were the days. We used to sing and dance and have fun, not like now. This is what I call negative nostalgia. You know, when nostalgia just makes you feel negative. You ever have this?

And then the final symptom, I fear things will never get better. Psalm 77 verses seven and eight, will the Lord reject me forever? Will He never show His favor again? Has His "unfailing love" vanished forever? Has His promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? I want you to look at all those forever words. Forever, never, for all time, forever again. You know, feeling like this is just human nature. When you're down, you think you'll never be up again. And when you're up, you think you'll never be down again. Am I right?

I remember when our daughter Elizabeth was only four years old. She went through a phase whenever she was upset. She used to say, oh great, now I'll never be happy ever again at four years old. You know? But that is just how Asaph is feeling and that's human nature. But look at this list. Any of these symptoms of despair sound familiar to you? They sound familiar to me. In fact, this is exactly how I felt during those dark days in seminary.

So what's the answer? You know, everybody's sitting on the edge of their seat going, okay, Asaph, you know, well, what's the answer? Tell me the solution. But at this point in Psalm 77, there's a word, "Sala." What does that mean? Remember, these are all ancient song lyrics in the Psalms. And "Sala" is a Hebrew word that means something like a musical pause. And this was apparently when the instrumentalists played and there were no lyrics for a while. Why? Why would he put a "Sala" here? It's very artistic.

I think the words of Asaph's frustration are meant to echo in your head for a while while the music plays. Asaph is willing to let the tension hang in the air. You know, this Psalm is art. It's not a Sunday school lesson. And he means to leave people uncomfortable for a little while. You know, leave them twisting in the wind with this tension unresolved for a moment before he rushes to a solution. You're meant to feel like, wow, yeah, there are definitely times that life feels like this. Absolutely.

And you're meant to ponder what is the answer to those deep blues? Because if the answer isn't blind faith, what's the answer? Well, there is an answer, but it's another kind of faith. After the "Sala," after the pause, the lyrics kick in again for the next verse, the solution. Asaph says, "Then I thought to this I will appeal the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember the miracles of long ago." Don't miss this.

The key is not to try to look ahead because you can't. Even though when things are going wrong, that's what you so desperately want to do. You're standing there and everything's falling apart and you're going, "What's going to happen next?" And you try to peer through the veil of the future. But as some people sadly discovered last night, it's impossible to predict the future ever. You can't do it. There's no such thing as a crystal ball.

And so even though you want to know, "How am I going to get out of this? What's God going to do next? It seems like situations are desperate. What's the next chapter in my book?" You can't know that because nobody knows the future. So if you can't look ahead no matter how desperately you want to, where can you turn? You turn to the past because while you can't see the future, you can see the past. And you use what happened in the past as evidence for trusting in the future.

You could call this the power of positive memory. Not positive thinking, positive memory. Now positive thinking is great as far as it goes, right? What's the alternative? Negative thinking? Now I want to be a positive thinker, but there are times positive thinking just does not work. Times when you are too blasted by doubt and stress. Times when you need facts. Not just positive thinking that you drum up in your own strength because you don't have any strength anymore. And you get those facts through positive memory.

You remember facts about how God has worked in your past. I was thinking about sports. There is probably not a field of human endeavor where positive memory plays more of an obvious role than sports. Sports teams love to put out highlight reels and DVDs, right? I've got some of these myself from the Niners and from the Giants. This is what keeps people coming back to see the Niners, the Giants, the Sharks, the Warriors, whatever. People love to watch highlight reels. I do too.

Every real sports fan remembers the catch, right? The drive. The great hit. The great comeback. The great season. Now a non-fan goes to a game and without any of those memories it just all seems ridiculous and absurd, right? I take my mom sometimes to sporting games. Well not anymore but I used to take her to sporting games and she'd sit there, she's from Switzerland, none of these cultural memories attached to baseball or football and she would just sit in the stands the whole time and go, "I don't think this makes no sense to me. People running around this is a ball. I don't understand. Stupid. Stupid." You know?

"Mom, don't you understand what could happen next?" "No, I don't care." Right? A non-fan goes to a game and goes, "This is boring but a fan knows the next moment could bring a catch or a hit or a drive or a comeback that will be remembered for generations." That's what keeps them hanging in there.

In fact I was thinking about this, this is why teams with great histories always have a mental advantage over other teams. Teams with solid sports traditions because they think of themselves, in fact they even use these words as a team of what? Destiny, right? We're a team of destiny. Look at our history.

Well I want you to think of the obvious application. Why don't I have a spiritual highlight reel of awesome things that God has done in my past that I look back on and get encouragement for my future? I don't know about you but I tend to do the exact opposite. I tend to run a blooper reel, right? Do you do this too? I remember stupid moves from 20 years ago. Why did I say that? It's so stupid. Stupid. Instead I need to run a highlight reel.

And let me give you a great example of this. I mentioned briefly last weekend that I was on a Mexico mission trip with seventh graders from, now these are not the seventh graders, but the seventh graders went to this place. We went to an orphanage down near Tocati, Mexico and the kids down there are just absolutely adorable. But I discovered that there's a little game that is apparently universal. Kids love it all over planet earth and the game is this. You pretend to be in a shootout with the kids. And then you go, "Ah, you got me!" And you stay down until suddenly, "Ahh!" You wake up and surprise them when they run away screaming and then they want to do it all over again, right? Kids all over the world I think absolutely love this game.

But I gotta tell you something, one thing that the director and his staff do very well at this orphanage, they have a highlight reel. A highlight reel. Stories they tell and retell. The orphanage director told me, "René, I deliberately tell and retell these stories to remember in the tough times how God has always come through for us in the past." Three quick examples.

Way back in the early days of the orphanage, the kids really needed food. And they were desperate, they were out of money and they said, "God, we believe you called us to start this orphanage, but we don't have the food to adequately feed these kids anymore." They were feeding them nothing but starches. They said, "Specifically, God, we need protein. We need protein for these kids." The next day, a truck pulls up from the biggest chicken producer in Mexico and it's got the logo on the side. They think, "Unbelievable, God answered our prayers." And the guy says, "You know what? I was praying. I talked to my boss about this. He agreed. We want to give you all the chicken that's in this truck." And they're thinking, "Amazing, you know, chicken breast or something that's in there."

And he opens up the truck and it's 300 live chickens. They don't have a chicken coop or anything to put these things in. They said, "Well, we can't even afford to feed these chickens." He said, "Well, I think God just wants you to have them. So here you go, and now there's chickens all over the place." And so they had to put the chickens in a little shed, like a storage shed, and they kind of cranked them all in there and they thought, "Now what do we do?" Luckily, they had a neighbor who was a rancher and he says, "Well, you know, you have a freezer, so you got to slaughter the chickens." And they're like, "Well, can you do it?" He says, "No, I'll teach you how." But he says, "You got to get everybody involved because 300 chickens, that takes a long time."

So he says, "Bring the kids over. I'll teach them all how to slaughter the chickens and prepare them, pluck their feathers and everything." So they said, "Well, the kids are learning how to be farmers." And so they all learned this. All the orphanage kids from little to big and the director and everybody, 300 chickens later, their freezer's full of protein that fed them for months. That's great, right?

One small awkward moment was the next week the kids go back to school after vacation and the new kindergarten teacher asked the kids to draw a picture of what they did their last week of vacation. True story. All the kids from the orphanage are drawing pictures of headless chickens and bloody axes and they get a call from the school, "What's going on over there, you know, at the Stephen King Home for Children? What's going on?" But you know what? They still have a couple of those crayon drawings of headless chickens that those kindergarten kids drew. They still have them taped up to a couple of walls in the kitchen. Why do you think they kept those? Because that's on the highlight reel.

And they look at those pictures, they go, "That's right. No matter how desperate things get, God provided for us in an incredible way and I know He's going to do it again." They've got all kinds of stories like this. One day they were praying for bread and a bimbo bread truck pulls up. Bimbo is the name of the biggest commercial bakery in Mexico. Anybody ever heard of bimbo bakery before, right? And so the bimbo truck driver says, "God just gave me an impression that I needed to just give you guys all the bread in the truck." And they go, "Great. Now they call it the bimbo miracle." That's what they call it.

I was thinking about this. The potential for humor here just staggers the imagination. I don't want you to leave just hearing this, but have you been praying for your bimbo miracle, people? I'm going to ask you. Just one more quick example. You know, they're in a very, very dry part of Mexico. And when I was there nine years ago with our oldest son, their wells were completely dry, appeared down into them, and they had to import water in big water trucks at great expense.

Well, a couple of years ago, the orphanage director said, "Wow, this is really hurting our bottom line and I wish there was a way we didn't have to do this." He's talking to the neighboring rancher. You know, "Mr. I'll teach your kids how to slaughter chickens." He goes, "Well, you know, those wells back when this was a ranch, those wells were used to have water." And the orphanage director is like, "Well, what are we doing wrong?" And the guy says, "I don't know." They tapped right into some underwater river back in those days, but then they went dry.

So the orphanage director goes back to his staff and he says, "Well, if it used to have water in it, maybe it can again. Let's just pray." This isn't even really asking for a miracle. It's just asking for God. They used to have water. Can they have water again? He says, "To show you how little I actually believed that that would happen." He says, "I'm asleep the next week and I hear water gushing and I think, 'Great, one of the delivery trucks hit a water main.'" And he goes, "I went up to shut off the water and instead of water gushing out of a broken pipe, he said it was water spilling out of one of the wells because the water had filled up the well that far, but it gets better."

Shortly after that, the director had to go away for a week and he tells the facility manager as a joke, "Hey, this is great, but what I really want to see God doing is I want to see us selling water in water tank trucks to some of the other ranches like we used to have to buy water now. That would be a miracle." He comes back after a week and the facilities manager tells him, "Guess what?" He says, "I filled the water towers with water. I filled the swimming pool with water. The wells were still producing and so I called up some water truck companies. We've been selling water to the ranches around us for the last four days. And I saw those wells full of water when I was there nine days ago. How do you explain that? You explain it with God provides."

The orphanage director told me, "I have to have these highlight reel things in my head because there are times when things get desperate." Right now, in fact, people are so afraid to go down to Mexico because the violence they hear about two years ago, they had 200 American mission teams go down there to help them with the orphanage. Last year, they had 20. And he said, "I think sometimes, God, what are you doing?" And he said, "I try to peer into the future, but you can't see the future." He goes, "That's when I remember what's on the highlight reel."

Now that's good as far as it goes, but some of you are going, "Okay, what's the secret to having a great highlight reel like that?" Well, the secret is a principle in the Bible that that orphanage director is practicing. It's a principle that can change your life starting this morning. Principle taught all through the Bible that so many Christians ignore. It's a principle I learned during those dark days of 1984. It's the principle of monumental faith. Not blind faith, monumental faith.

I will never forget sitting in chapel when another one of my seminary professors, Jim Andrews, taught the lesson. I must have gone to 100 chapels and there's only two I remember. And this one I remember word for word because he taught us the principle of monumental faith. And it hit me right where I was living back in those dark days. And he said, "Those times when God seems absent," he goes, "you look in the past for evidence of how he's worked in your life." Really it's kind of the scientific method for faith, isn't it? Scientists can't see the future. They look at the past and they look for patterns.

He goes, "You look for patterns. You look for how God has worked and you use that as inspiration for the future." Monumental faith, that doesn't mean big faith. Monumental faith. It means faith based on monuments. You see this principle all through the Bible like when Joshua leads the nation of Israel across the Jordan River. The waters part, the people walk through on dry land. Now this is the second time a miracle like this happened for the children of Israel. What was the first time? The Red Sea, that's right.

But that time, 40 years before the waters of the Jordan part, the Bible says that the people forgot what God did for them. And so Psalm 78 says, "Terror and fear struck their hearts when they thought about going into the promised land because they forgot the wonders of God." So when it happens again, 40 years later, Joshua says, "Stop!" As they're ready to move on, he goes, "Time out! Everybody go back to the riverbed while it's still dry and pick up a big old river rock." Look what he says in the next verses. Take up a stone to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, "What do these stones mean?" you tell them the story.

He's saying, "Let us not make that mistake again. Let's let these stones serve as a monument." And you see this principle over and over. I could give you a hundred examples, just one more. Later on in the Bible, the prophet Samuel does the same thing after a miraculous victory. Verse 12 of 1 Samuel 7, "Then Samuel took up a stone and set it between Mizpah and Shem, and he named it Ebenezer." Now when we hear that word, it sounds funny to us because we think of a name. What do you think of when you hear Ebenezer? Ebenezer Scrooge, right? So he named the rock Ebenezer. That's a little strange. This is my pet rock Ebenezer. Samuel needs to retire pretty soon here. He's crazy, but that's not what it is.

It's not a man's name here. Ebenezer is actually a great Hebrew word which literally means stone of help. And Ebenezer is literally a monument of faith saying, "Thus far the Lord has helped us." That's the principle. Monumental faith sets up reminders of great acts of God in the past and in times of great discouragement looks back to those monuments for hope.

Monumental faith admits the undeniable fact that we talked about earlier. You can't see the future no matter how hard you try, but you can see the past pretty easy. So you use past examples of victory to get inspired about the future. You go, "I know God did that. I know he did. That's the truth. And I know God has not changed. So I know that somehow as he sees fit, he's going to see me through again." Check this out. Over a hundred times the Bible tells us to remember God's deeds. This is something God knows will really help you.

So you say, "Great. How do I develop this?" Three action steps I want to close with this morning. First, you have to notice God working. At the end of Psalm 77 there's a great verse. Asaph writes, "Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen." Think about it. Footprints are never really seen, but if you notice, you see that he was there. David is a great example of this kind of monumental faith. When David's just a kid facing Goliath, he says, "The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion," when the lion attacked my sheep, "and the paw of the bear," when the bear attacked my sheep, "will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine giant."

Now what's funny to me about this is I think most of us, I know I would have gone, "Are you kidding me? Am I like a magnet for bad luck or something?" I mean, first the lion attacks my sheep, then a bear attacks my sheep, and now I'm delivering cheese to my brothers, and there's a giant in the field. Are you kidding me? Right? But David doesn't look back and see all these things as a string of bad luck. He sees them as a parade of victories that God worked in his life. You've got to choose to notice God at work.

Now I might say, "But I'm new to the faith. I don't have a lot of these stories in my life." Well, I'd encourage you to be aware of other people's stories. You say, "How do I do that?" I give you some suggestions there in the notes. First I'm a big fan of this. Read books about other people's monuments of faith. We've been talking about sports this morning. If you're a sports fan, a Giants fan, read the Dave Dravecki autobiography, "Come Back," and the sequel, "When You Can't Come Back." Great, well-written, fun, inspiring books about how this famous San Francisco Giants pitcher found his faith challenged, but then got seeing him through the time when he had cancer and his arm was amputated.

Here's another great monument of faith book currently on the New York Times bestseller list written by the author of "Sea Biscuit," Laura Hillebrand's book "Unbroken." This is a book about Louis Zamperini, who's the famous runner. He has a great story, and when you get to the end, you see how it is one giant monument of faith and how God worked in his life. There's so many other examples of great books that you could read. I really would encourage you to do that.

Movies, maybe you're not a book person. Go see great movies like "Soul Surfer" about Bethany Hamilton, which is out right now in the "I Really Liked." Or maybe you're a computer person. Go to websites like "iamsecond.com." This is nothing but video testimonies. That's the only thing that's on this whole website. So inspiring. These are just a few examples of how you can look at other people's monuments of faith. So faith-building. Get to know them.

Next, you've got to build your monument. Actually build it. Now, of course, you don't have to build your Ebenezer out of actual river rock. Here's some other modern building materials you could use. How about just a simple paper journal like this? You can pick these up three for a buck at the dollar store. You grab these, and you're right in one maybe every night. Usually typing my sermons is basically my journal every week, but when I'm away from the pulpit, I grabbed a journal like this and I stuck it in my backpack when I went down to Mexico.

How do you think I remember those orphanage stories? Probably if I hadn't written them down, I would have forgotten them because there's so much stuff you get exposed to every day. But two or three times a day, I grabbed my journal at the orphanage, jotted down what God's teaching me, what's going on in my life, remembering those monuments of faith. Here's how important this is.

You might know that when I was very young, my dad got cancer, lymphoma, and about three years after this picture was taken, he was dead of lymphoma. He wrote in journals just like this about his experiences, his prayers, his fears, his faith. I've got a small stack of his journals that he wrote in, and they're precious to me because if he hadn't recorded his thoughts, how would I possibly know that he was thinking things like this?

Here's what he wrote in one of those journals. I place my future into God's hands knowing he is fully able to heal me or to comfort my family if this were not his will. Either way, he wrote, only God knows what's best. Now, if I didn't have a record of his thoughts, to me, thinking of his death without being able to talk to him about it would probably be nothing but an absurd tragedy, but I have his words. And so that tragedy has turned instead into a monument of faith about how to handle tough times.

You say, "I don't know. I'm not very good about writing down things in journals." What about just a computer file, like a Word document, right on your desktop? My wife, Lori, has a file she just calls "Journal." And it's right on the desktop of our iMac at home. It's been on the desktop of our Macatoshes way back when we had the second Mac model ever produced. She's just transferred that document every time. So it goes back literally a couple of decades.

And every once in a while, she pops it open, types some things that God is teaching her, or some funny things that happen that she wants to remember. I'll give you just a few examples. I'll start with some funny memories. These are verbatim. I literally just copied these right out of her journal document, pasted them into my sermon. July 1993. Some of these are funny. Jonathan is three now, and the potty training seems to be going so slow. Today Oma, that's my mom, Oma is Swiss for grandma, was over visiting. The kids were playing in the family room, and suddenly I smelled the familiar smell. I checked Elizabeth Dipper, who was one years old at the time, and she was fine. And so I turned to Jonathan and asked, "Did you go poop in your pants?" And he quickly responded with concern. "No, did you check Oma?"

There are so many entries like this of fun things that kids do that you forget if you don't write them down, right? But there are other entries like these that are more serious. August 1989, Laurie wrote, "We've been going through these infertility treatments for months now. I'm so tired. Maybe God is just saying, 'No, no baby.'" Well, if he is saying no, I'm at peace with that. September 1989, I can hardly believe it. I'm pregnant. November 1992, Elizabeth nearly fell down the stairs in her walker today at church, one full flight of stairs onto a cement floor. Imagine what might have happened. Thank you, God, that you gave me wings, and I was able to grab the walker before it tumbled down.

June 1993, Twin Lakes Church in Aptos has asked René to candidate to be their new senior pastor. "Lord, help us make the right decision." One entry after another, "These are monuments of faith for me. Do it. Think of the inspiration you will be building for yourself, for your friends, maybe for your kids or your grandkids." By the way, the computer file doesn't have to just live on your desktop. These days, how about updating your status on Facebook with something more than trying to decide whether to make pancakes or eat cereal? Do something like this and really inspire people. Put on photographs. Put on video clips about your monuments of faith.

Imagine that. What about making scrapbooks? These days, you can make scrapbooks the old-fashioned way of putting pictures in of your monuments, or you can, through things like iPhoto and Creative Memories, you can make really nice-looking scrapbooks that look like permanent books. This is one that Kelly and Lori Welty made of their adolescent children, Nate and Maddie's, recent mission trips. One went to India, and one went down to Easter Island, both to help missionaries down there. There's pictures, and there's their children's own memories and reactions.

I just borrowed this from Lori and Kelly on Thursday, and as we were thumbing through it, they both just broke down in tears, thankful to God for how He provided for the kids' ability to go through this, and how He, He, They said, "There are things that we have forgotten just months later, lessons that our kids learned. These are huge monuments to faith." You can even, these days, self-publish books. This is a book called Footsteps of Faith that my wife's family put together, and it gathered several generations' worth of great stories about how God came through, you know, kind of in the clutch and answered prayers, and there's even pictures in here about previous generations and their answers to prayers, and they made about a hundred copies of this and gave it out at a family reunion.

And you know what this does to generations of the same family? My kids look at this and they go, "We're on a team of destiny." You know? Our family is a team of destiny. God works through us. Look at that book, Footsteps of Faith. These days you can do this so inexpensively, and it's such an encouragement. Or if you're more artistically inclined, you can make art. You know, paint pictures and do all kinds of things. This is a little piece of art. This is a Bible and a little pulpit that is made out of wax and string. A gentleman came up about a year ago after a service, and he had this in his hand, and he goes, "There's a story behind this."

He said, "I just got out of prison, and I started coming to Twin Lakes Church by watching the videos in prison." And he said, "That's where I committed my life to Christ." And he says, "I made this with the materials that I had available to me, wax and string, to remind me of what a difference the Bible, when preached from a pulpit, has made in my life." And he said, "I want you to have it, and I've got to tell you, this may be made out of wax and string, but to me it's as good as a granite monument in terms of inspiration that's sitting there in my office, reminding me of the power and the reach of the Word of God." You can put together pieces of art.

This same gentleman also made me a little cross out of wax, this cross. The older I get, the find that the more I appreciate the symbol of the cross, because it's the ultimate monument of faith, isn't it? You ever go through tough times? You think back to this monument right here, because what God did here was He took a symbol that meant nothing but horrific suffering and humiliation, and He turned around the whole meaning of it. Now it means liberation and redemption and salvation, because what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross.

So you can make pieces of art as well. Whatever you do, build those monuments. Now I really want you to do this and not just kind of think, "Oh, that was a good idea," and go off and not follow through on this. So turn over to pages three and four of your notes here, where it says, "Building Monuments." This is, look at this, this is a series of verses and questions designed to inspire you in your own brainstorming when you write a journal or to inspire a dinner table conversation with your kids or friends or your spouse. Really do this. I encourage you as your pastor and friend to start building the monuments.

We'll go back to page two, because finally, of course, you got to tell the stories. You got to tell the stories. The Bible says, "We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord." If you don't tell other people what God has done for you, you know what happened? You built a monument and I got buried by sand. When you tell people, "You're blowing away the sand again and you're revealing the monument again," we had a birthday dinner, a dual birthday dinner, last Sunday afternoon for my wife's birthday and my son, Jonathan, my oldest son, turned 21.

And so we're having this birthday dinner and there was a special time that Jonathan and I had after dinner in the living room. I told Jonathan the story of his birth, which he has heard several times, but the thing is you tell and retell the highlight reel stories, right? I told him, I said, "You know, Jonathan, before you were born, we didn't know if we could ever have babies and we were resigned to the fact that it was impossible for us. And then you were conceived and it was like a miracle." And then that day when it was time for your birth in Carson City, Nevada, I was so excited until the doctor came in and said, "We've got to do an emergency C-section. We might lose the baby, get her into the surgery room, stat, and I had to scrub up really fast and I barely got into the surgery room in time to see the emergency C-section happen."

And you came out and they just put you next to mom's face just long enough for her to whisper a few words and kiss you and then they had to wheel her into recovery and they gave you to me and it was just you and me sitting on a rocking chair in the new baby room. And while I was praying so desperately for my wife, I was kissing you and kissing you on the top of your head and I told you over and over again, "Your daddy loves you and your mommy loves you and Jesus loves you." And then when Lori came out of the recovering room, I knew that the most desperate prayers I'd ever prayed in my life had been answered and God gave you to us that day.

And I said, "The fact that you were conceived and the fact that you were born healthy and happy that day, that means God has you here for a purpose. You are here for a reason. You're an answer to prayer." And retelling in that story that day, that was a monument of faith, not only to me, but to him as well. See, the big idea this morning is this, monumental faith assaults doubt with memory. Monumental faith won't let the protests of the present drown out the evidence of history. Monumental faith retreats from the heat of doubt to the shade of the monuments.

It worked for me in 1984, I have to tell you, and I know it can work for you too, but you gotta be prepared. Build those monuments whenever you can and then when discouragement tries to blast you away, cling to those monuments for dear life. I was talking to a woman after the first service and she said, "The biggest difference in my life in the year since I became a Christian, she said is this. In the old days I used to say, 'I'm just barely hanging on.' And she said, 'Now I'm holding on.'"

Monumental faith gives you something to hold onto and that's a key to trusting when God seems absent. Let's pray. Would you bow your heads with me and close your eyes? I wanna ask, rather than lead you in a prayer, I wanna encourage you, wherever you're sitting, to pray to God right now and to thank Him for monuments of faith in your past. Think back on how you came to know Him or think back on how He supplied for you in tough times or think back on times when you were lost and alone and God reached out to you.

And as you think of those times, specific times, say, "God, thank you and now help me to have hope for my future as well. Lord, thank you for your deeds and wonders of the past, our past and the past of many others." And I pray that we would not let the protests of the present drown out the evidence of history. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.