When I'm Insecure about my Future

Well, good morning. It is great to be here with you whether you're joining us live here or watching on Facebook live or over in the venue service. It's great to be a part of this. My name is René, one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes, and this morning we are going to wrap up our series called Living in the Goodness of God. We've been for five weeks going verse by verse through the amazing 23rd Psalm, but before we dive into that, I want to give you a quick preview about what's coming up in the next few weeks here at TLC sermon wise.

Mother's Day, I will be doing a message about life's most important relationship principle. This is going to impact every single relationship you have with your kids, with your mom, with your spouse, with your co-workers, friends. I really, really encourage you to invite all of those people. I really think it's going to change those relationships in a positive way. Then the next weekend, we begin a new series called Focused, going through the book of Colossians in the Bible because as Christians, it is so easy to get distracted from what the Bible says is central to life, central to our faith. The Colossians were getting distracted. That's why the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to them that wound up in our Bibles as the book of Colossians. So much great stuff for us Americans to learn about, to correct about our own focus. So I hope you stop by for that. That's starting in two weeks. I can't wait for that.

And again, this morning we wrap up our series that we call Living in the Goodness of God. We are in the very last verse of Psalm 23 today, verse 6. It is so powerful. So we're gonna put it on screen and let's read this out loud together. Let me hear you: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I don't know if you remember this, but when we launched the series five weeks ago, we talked about how some churches do a little call and response thing where the pastor says God is good and the people say all the time, and then the pastor says, and all the time, and the people say God is good. Okay, so let's try that. Ready? You ready for this? All right, here we go: God is good and all the time. Now wait a minute. Wait a minute, man. You're sitting here like all the time. God is good. Come on! Believe it! Say it like you mean it: God is good and all the time.

Is that really true? Really all the time? All the days? Does his goodness and mercy really follow you all the days? Even the lonely days? Even the bad days? Even the days full of suffering, the days full of grief? We can say this, but is it really true? I know you suspect that sometimes it's not true. Sometimes I suspect that it's not true. What about the days I'm not feeling it? Well, we're gonna dig into this just word by word in just a minute. But first, I want to invite somebody up here for kind of a reality check.

Because we've got a man with us today who works with some people going through extremely bad days. He helps lead a ministry in Amman, Jordan, and we serve with this ministry. We send short-term teams to Jordan to help him every single year. Jordan, the little country of Jordan, is right on the border of both Iraq and Syria, and so millions of refugees from those wars have poured into that tiny little country. And we send teams to help serve the refugees there through this man's ministry. He deals with people going through some very tough times, and I want to ask him a couple of questions about this. So from Jordan, would you please join me in welcoming Jamal Hashway as he comes to join us? Good morning. Good to see you. How are you?

Jamal, when I heard that you were going to be here, I really wanted to take this opportunity to have you on stage first. Briefly, we hear about these wars in the headlines all the time. You're literally miles from the borders of both of these hot spots in the world. You see all these refugees. What do we need to know about it?

Well, first of all, I greet you in the name of Jesus and bring you the greetings of the live church in the Middle East today. The Lord is working in supernatural ways. After all, Jesus Christ actually was born in our area a few miles from home. So we're just inviting him again to walk in the streets and do what he did in the past and continues to do that. Jordan, as a country, continues to welcome people, actually from the Old Testament with the cities of refuge. And Jordan actually is open as a small country to continue to welcome refugees since 1948, '67, and then the Lebanese in the '70s, and the Iraqis in the '90s, and then the Syrians eight years ago. And the Iraqis today, we have one out of five in our country is a refugee. Isn't that incredible? And it's amazing. I like to call them guests because they are beloved, each one of them Jesus died for. And as Jesus sits on the only and highest throne in the universe, there's nothing that comes by coincidence. Jesus really allows this, that people come out from their places where it was difficult to reach. Now they're at our doorsteps, maybe needing a little help. And as we share the love of Christ to them, we are actually sharing what Jesus' heart is, and they're asking the question, why?

Sure. So as the saying that I love very much, that when people hear the music of our lives, they'll ask for the words, and it's so true. Let's play them the music of heaven, then they'll ask for the way. I love that. And you played in the music through medical clinics and through helping out refugees with heaters in the winter, with fans in the summer, and much more. But I specifically wanted to have you up here because we're wrapping up this series Living in the Goodness of God. Is that a fantasy, or do you actually see people who have lost everything who still are experiencing the goodness of God every day?

Well, let's look at one example if we may. This lady that we can see here up here, her name is Atoof. She came from Iraq with four little girls. Her husband divorced her because she only brings girls. So she came to Jordan literally with nothing. We found her living underground. It was winter, it was cold. Kids were shivering. The girls had nothing. They didn't have any food. What do you do? I mean, do we just tell them, go and be blessed and be fed, or do we think of God's goodness? And then for some time, we continued to try to help her, paying rent, all that. And then someday she came to our office. She said, I want to talk to you. She said, I go and help in cleaning up homes and all that, and I'm misused by men and others, and they all want something from me. What do you want from me? I told her we want something. We want to show you that we're your brothers. We care for you. She said, okay, tell me more. At the end of that time together with my secretary, we saw this lady saying yes to Jesus after all these years. And the next picture we see a new transformation, a lady that now follows Jesus Christ as her own Savior and Lord. This is what it's all about, not just feeding people, but beyond that to help them geologically and also spiritually. And Pastor René, this church has and continues to be a close partner. You have responded to so many proposals we asked to help us with many of these needs with the heaters. Now we have a program for fans in the summer. You're sending teams. You're praying for us. Thank you very much for doing that, Jamal. Thank you so much for being with us. It's a blessing to have you here. God bless you.

And Jamal is going to be here after the service if you'd like to talk to him, or you're gonna be hearing more about the summer fan program for the refugees here at Twin Lakes Church. You know, Jamal, I remember meeting an Iraqi refugee in church there when I visited, and he told me there in Amman, Jordan, he said, I lost everything. He was a doctor, and he said, I lost my clinic. I lost my car. I lost my house. I lost all my money. It was all confiscated by ISIS, and they slipped away, and he had nothing there in Amman, Jordan. And he said, I lost everything. But he said it was the best thing that's happened to me in my entire life because I found the Lord. And that's somebody who's seeing the goodness of God even in really, really bad times.

You say, well, that's great for these amazing stories happening out of Jordan, but what about this country? We experience nothing like the deprivations of those refugees, and yet the level of anxiety about the future that Americans are feeling has literally never been higher than it is right now in the history of our country. There has never been less personal confidence. There has never been more loneliness. Psychologists say we're in an epidemic of anxiety and loneliness right now, even though we're not experiencing those kinds of bad times like those refugees are. So let me just ask you personally, are any of these feelings true of you? I dread the future. Every day I feel a little bit overwhelmed about what's ahead for me. And I do worry that I'm not competent or I'm not prepared to face what's next for me. In fact, in general, I would say I have a lower self-esteem now than I did a few years ago. I sometimes, many times, I don't even feel worthy of God's love.

The good news is all of these problems are dealt with here in the last verse of Psalm 23. And yet they're dealt with in a way totally different than the way our culture in America tends to deal with these questions. We live in a culture that tends to deal with questions of anxiety about the future or low self-esteem, low confidence with pep talks. That's the way our culture deals with everything—pep talks. You know, you're okay, you're awesome. Don't have no confidence. You're us. Your future is gonna be awesome. The problem is people who really struggle with all those things don't believe a word of that. It doesn't work. So what does work? Well, the Bible deals with these problems in a way that's much more satisfying to your soul, as you're going to see here in verse 6 of Psalm 23.

Now I think that you're gonna leave here feeling inspired and exhilarated and confident, but not because you got some pep talk from me. It's because you heard from God's word. And I am very indebted to a writer many of you know, Max Lucado. He's written not one but two books on Psalm 23, and he has so many insights on this particular little verse that have meant so much for me. For example, let's just look at the very first word, the word surely. The good David didn't say maybe the goodness and mercy will follow me or possibly goodness and mercy will follow me or I have a hunch goodness and mercy might follow me. There are words for all those words in Hebrew. He could have used any of those words, but he uses the strongest word he could use: surely, for sure, certainly. I mean, I would have probably written this bit full of disclaimers, very Eeyore-like, maybe, but probably not, you know? But he's so confident. Why? Because he's confident of God, not him.

Like the Bible says in 2 Timothy 2:13, if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself. And the book of James talks about God this way: God is the father of heavenly lights in whom there is never the slightest variation or shadow of inconsistency. In other words, my mood shifts, God doesn't. My mind wavers all the time, God doesn't. I am very inconsistent in my devotion, God is not. He will always definitely, certainly, surely do what? Look at that expert goodness. This is saying you're gonna be riding a wave of goodness. You're gonna be propelled forward by God's goodness like a surfer's propelled by a wave, not because of your own energy, but because of the energy of the wave coming from God. You see, what do you mean? Think of all the greatest things in your life—the world around you, the sun, the rain, the flowers, the food. It is only because of God's goodness that you have those moments.

Think of your relationship with God. You only have that because of God's goodness, not your goodness. Think of the people who love you. They are gifts to you. You have those loving relationships because of God's goodness. Think of your existence. You're alive. Your heart's beating right now. You exist because of God's goodness. And you can take that one all the way to a cosmic level. Scientists say this planet can only support life because of very rare, very fine cosmic tuning, so rare that the odds are incalculably against life on earth being just some accident. And that means you are breathing. The animals around you are breathing. Life exists—every tree, every blade of grass—because of the goodness of God.

In fact, before you were even aware of the fact that you exist, while you were forming in the womb, God was already giving you wave after wave of goodness just to bring you into existence. What I'm saying is the goodness of God already surrounds us so much that we don't even notice it because we're like fish swimming in water, and we don't notice the water because it's just sort of our environment. We swim in God's goodness. We move in God's goodness. We are here because of God's goodness. We have this church because of God's goodness. And David is saying you will see new goodnesses every day—the beauty of nature, an unexpected little kindness done for you, or the beauty of a word well spoken, or maybe a song you hear at the perfect time. Every day there's goodness.

And it gets better because look at the next word: there is mercy. There's mercy, forgiveness. Let me ask for a quick audience vote here, quick show of hands. Anybody ever find that you need the mercy of God? Anybody here ever find that? We all need it, and guess what? You get it. The Bible says every day his mercies are new. Every morning, this word is a great word in the original Hebrew language that this was written in—the word chesed. Say that out loud with me: chesed. Get that going, ready? Here we go: chesed. You know what that means in English? It's very tough to translate. There's no exact English equivalent to this word, and that's why it's so hard for translators to figure out how to render it accurately because it's so packed with beauty in various versions of the Bible. It's rendered as kindness, faithfulness, mercy, loyalty, steadfast love. Mercy is you don't get what you deserve; you get the steadfast, loyal love of God.

And now you take those two awesome words and put them together. What a statement! Just look at the size of this idea: Surely, definitely, of course, certainly, both goodness and mercy are lavished on you every single day. Now, this is important that you see both of these. I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, I think my deficiency in understanding the gospel is I only thought about the mercy part—the forgiveness part. You accept Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior, and your sins are forgiven. What I never thought about, like not even one time growing up, what I didn't realize was then when we receive the mercy, we also get God's goodness heaped upon us, lavished upon us, goodness after goodness, grace after grace. Isn't that awesome so far?

Well, it gets better because the next word, follow, is—oh great, check this out—it's the Hebrew word for pursue or hunt down. This is like relentless pursuit. It's almost kind of funny because usually the word in the Bible is elsewhere used in kind of a negative, kind of a scary way. It describes pillaging armies or even curses that go out after somebody. You know, it's kind of like the nightmare that there's something chasing you and it never gives up. No matter how many houses you go into, no matter how many doors you slam, the zombie just keeps coming after you, just relentlessly pursues, keeps on coming no matter where you go. And the writer of Psalm 23 here, David, is using that word to describe the goodness of God. Don't you love that? It's like God hunts me, pursues me relentlessly to be good and merciful. Don't you love that?

What a surprising way to describe God, right? As the one who pursues. Max Lucado, in one of those books, says we're so used to thinking of God as somebody who stays up in one place, right? Like he's sitting up on his throne, and he's kind of ruling the world from his throne, directing the cosmos. But as he puts it, do you dare to think of God like this? As the one who follows you, follows you every single day, tracks you, hunts you to be good to you? Like Jesus said, the Son of Man came to save the lost. What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays, he leaves the ninety-nine and goes to look for the one that is strayed, doesn't he? It's like the lyrics to that song: Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. It chases me down, it fights till I'm found, it leaves the ninety-nine. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it, and still you give yourself away—the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. There's no shadow that you won't light up, there's no mountain you won't climb up coming after me. That is the sense, that's the image, that's the emotion being conveyed here in this verse.

And when you think about it, isn't that the God described all through the Bible? Every single story? I mean, you go back to the very first story in the Bible: Adam and Eve, our ancestors, rebel against God. And as God sits up on his throne waiting for them to come back, they're gonna come to their senses someday, maybe I'll think about letting them back in. No, God, it says, goes down into the garden and he seeks them. He seeks them. He seeks them. Every story. Think about Moses, right? He's raised in privilege, but then he murders someone and he runs off to the desert, you know, an escapee from justice. He's a fugitive, and I'm sure he felt like his life was just a waste. And when he's an old man out there in the desert, he sees a bush burning and it's not consumed. He goes closer and he hears a voice: Moses! And he discovers that God has chased him all the way down into his failure.

Think of the Samaritan woman in the Bible. I mean, story after story. Here's a woman who has been divorced five times, even more of a no-no in that culture than it is in ours. She's living with somebody she's not married to. She's rejected by the religious people, which is why she's drawing water from a well in the heat of midday. There's nobody else out there except Jesus. And she discovers the good shepherd who has chased her all the way into her loneliness, seeking, seeking, chasing, pursuing. Think of Peter. We talked about this before Easter. Peter denies Jesus when he's being scourged with an oath, and he quits and goes up to Galilee, takes up fishing again. Surely he felt like a complete loser, failure. And then he hears a voice on the seashore, and he sees someone cooking fish, and suddenly it dawns on him who it is. It's the risen Jesus, and he's tracked him down and haunted him all the way into his failure. That's what Jesus does. He pursues you.

Last night after the Saturday night service, I met a young man who it was his first time ever in a church in his life, ever, ever, ever. I said, what brought you here? He said, well, I was an atheist my whole life. He said, he kind of laughed. He said, I was raised by two parents who actually were Hell's Angels. So he said there was just drugs and so on in our household all the time, and I was an atheist, no interest in Christianity, never been to church. And he said about a year ago, I just got what I can only describe as a nudge, and the nudge said, read the Bible, pick it up and read it. And he said, I argued with the nudge. Why would I want to read the Bible? I think it's a joke. And then he said, I'm a journeyman engineer, and I realized, you know, engineers check things out. And so I decided rather than what everybody tells me the Bible says, I'm going to read it for myself and see what it actually says. And he says, when I got to the gospel of John, I decided I wanted to follow Jesus. He said that was a few weeks ago. And so I thought I really should be going to church. I said, well, how did you find Twin Lakes Church? He said, well, I just said I live in Aptos. I started googling different churches, and somewhere on your website it said that you guys were started in 1890, and I thought, well, if it's still around, it must have something going for it. And so he showed up last night. And he said during the service when you talked about how Jesus hunts us down, he said, I just got goosebumps because I thought I know that happened to me, the nudge a year ago. It's real. It's real. And maybe you've been feeling it.

Do you remember the video that we started off the series with in week one? It was a video shot in Palestine by a guy with a drone, and this wasn't staged. He caught this little guy, this little sheep, who had wandered away from his flock. It was all alone. He was just kind of wandering around through valleys and so on, and he had no idea what was happening. And then the shepherd had left the rest of the flock and had showed up to find his lost sheep. And watch what happens next. The Lord haunts that sheep down, relentlessly, relentlessly pursues, tracks. Why? To beat him up with a stick? No, to show him goodness and mercy. And that's what God does for me and that God does for you no matter how far you go. He pursues you. He follows you with his goodness, with his mercy, and then it gets even better because David says this goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. All the days. Say those three words out loud with me: All the days. Say it again: All the days. Days you are bad. Days you spit in his eye. Days you wander away. Days you don't feel him. All the days, his never-ending love is relentless.

Now, David's not saying life is easy here. That's not what the goodness of God every day means. David's life was not easy. He's not saying surely all my days will be full of only goodness. It's not all good. No matter how many times people say that, it's all good. It's not all good. He's not saying that. What he is saying is surely goodness and mercy will be with me even on my worst days. Now here's my question. Do you, like David, anticipate that? When you think of your week ahead, what do you see? Maybe tough days full of a lot of work or maybe long days at a job that's seeming more and more like a dead-end job, or maybe long days taking care of kids at home, or maybe long days of loneliness. David would say, you know what? Maybe those days will have all of those elements. Might be, maybe, but you know what? You can say for sure every one of those days will have something of God's goodness in it, and every one of those days will have something of God's mercy in it every day.

So when you look at your week ahead, will you also anticipate that? It's gonna be tough, but every day I'm gonna see something good from God. Every day I'm going to receive the mercy of God because if you notice, we tend to see what we look for. We tend to see what we are looking for. So will you be looking for this every day? And it just keeps building because finally David says, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. And the emotion that David is conveying here is, are you kidding me? His goodness and mercy follow me every single day of my life, and then I get to live with him forever? That is the best! So much optimism about the future. And this is, again, so important because so many people in our culture, how many people do you come across on an average day who are stoked about the future? How many people in America do you come across on an average day who are excited about the future? No, for some reason our world today has a very bleak idea about the future, and this is causing so much anxiety, especially among the young.

But if you take all these words together, this is a statement of just bold faith, of optimistic faith, and it makes a difference. There's a woman named Lisa Takoch, who was here at TLC for many years and did amazing ministry with the veterans over at the VA hospital in Palo Alto. And on one occasion when I went with her to visit veterans over there, we visited people in hospital rooms and so on. And one of the men that I visited was a man, I'll call him Dave. He had had cancer, which was taking his life. It was terminal, and it had already robbed him of his ability to talk. And so how he communicated was a pad of paper, and it had a string, and he had taped a pencil to the end of the string, and that's how he had to communicate. So Lisa introduces me to him, and I decide I'm going to read the 23rd Psalm to him. So I read Psalm 23. And then I prayed with him, and one of the things I prayed was, Father, I pray that Dave will sense your presence so that when he goes through the valley of the shadow of death, he will not fear. And I'm thinking to myself, that's a pretty good prayer. See what I, I hope he notices how I can, I worked Psalm 23 into my prayer. That was like, that was pretty good. And after I said amen, Dave grabs his pen and paper and he vigorously writes in all caps, I am not afraid. And then he writes, perfect love casts out all fear. And I looked in his eyes, and they were shining, and he was smiling, and I knew it was true. And then he wrote, listen, we all have to go sometime. I am at perfect peace because I trust God implicitly. And that is the whole point of Psalm 23. Don't miss this. Psalm 23 is a statement of faith and trust in God and not in myself. This is so important. I just think people miss this. It's not about working up these feelings in yourself. Probably some of you are thinking to yourself, I appreciate what you're saying, René, but it just doesn't always feel like all this stuff you're saying is true. It's so hard to live like this. It's so hard to really believe this every day. Maybe, but I would say it's probably not as hard as you think because it's about trusting God implicitly, not yourself.

As we wrap up this whole series, let me just ask the question, how can I always truly live in the goodness of God every day? Because God wants you to. Try these ideas. First, I need to trust my faith and not my feelings. Nobody feels spiritual every day, but your feelings have zero impact on God's presence. You know, there's a man who attends church here that many of you know, Dr. Ralph Kemp. And Ralph gave me a copy of a book that he recently wrote. Guess what his little book about his life is called? The Lord is my shepherd, the first line of Psalm 23. And he wrote the book because Ralph found out that he's a medical doctor, and he found out back in September that he's dying. And so he wrote this book about coping with that. And I love this line from his book. He said, there are two kinds of Christians: those driven by fear and uncertainty on the one hand, and those driven by expectation and joy on the other. The former, those locked into fear and uncertainty, are locked into a partial belief in the cross. And he's exactly right. You need to have a faith that's firm enough so that you're trusting your faith, your faith in Jesus Christ and his finished work on the cross, and not your feelings.

Second, keep my eye on the big picture, not the little picture. We live in a world full of headlines and tweets and Facebook alarming messages that just focus us on small picture, small picture, small picture all the time. They're all just about the latest alarming thing, no context. Psalm 23 gives you the real context of your life, the big perspective: your good shepherd's always with you. And third, I need to measure my value through God's eyes, and not my own eyes. There will be times you do feel as dumb and as dirty and as defenseless and as disoriented as some lost sheep. And you know why you'll feel that way? Because you will be that way at various times all through your life. But this psalm is not about how well-behaved the sheep are. This psalm is all about the shepherd who loves you so much. Think of what we studied in this series. Sometimes the sheep are in green pastures and everything's awesome, right? And sometimes in dark valleys, like Mark talked about last week, in the presence of the enemies. But good times, bad times, in-between times, through it all, wherever the road goes, your good shepherd is right there with you. Every day, every time. That's really the key concept of this whole series. I will be living in experiencing the goodness of God when I realize my good shepherd is with me through it all.

And it's kind of the closing illustration of this series. I'm gonna invite Trent Smith to come back with a couple of our musicians to sing a song that he wrote called Through It All that I think wraps up the point of this message and this whole series so well. And it says particular meaning for me. The first time Trent ever sang this composition was at my own mother's memorial service. But as you listen to this, I want you to think of all the hills and valleys of your life and give God thanks for how through it all, every day, your good shepherd was right there with you. That gives you confidence for the future. That changes your self-worth. And as Trent sings the song, we're going to distribute the elements of communion. You know, Jesus said in John 10, I'm the good shepherd, and the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. And communion is how Christians have been remembering this for 2,000 years. So here's the way we do this in our church. The communion servers are going to pass the trays with the elements, a little piece of bread and a little cup. You don't have to be a member of this church. If you have trusted in Christ, you could take a piece of the bread and a little cup and meditate on its meaning until after the song, when I will lead us all in partaking together. And I just want to invite you, if you've been hearing the call of your shepherd, feeling the nudge, and you're not sure if you have ever asked Jesus to be your good shepherd, this moment is your chance to do that. Just to say, Lord, I am a sheep. I'm such a sheep, but you are the good shepherd, and I want to follow you. What a great way to wrap up this series. Through it all, from the first day to the last day, the hills and valleys, the good shepherd is with you.