Week 3

Brookside, I love it

when we get to do that opportunity because I know that there's so many different people here at Brookside on any given week that are just checking us out and like I don't know these people, they don't know me. And so I hope that you take that as an opportunity to just really make a great connection because let me remind you once again of our vision. We believe that we're here to build Jesus centered homes through healthy relationships. And we believe when those healthy relationships happen more and more, more of our communities will be saturated with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so let that continue to fuel your relationship here at Brookside. If you have your Bibles, open them if you wouldn't mind to Mark chapter 11. Mark chapter 11, if you don't have your Bible, that's fine. It's gonna be on the screen as well, but I'm gonna try to do my best to abbreviate what was originally a 45 minute message.

So we're gonna do what I can. Let me start by, saying you you might be surprised when I tell you that growing up I was a really quiet kid. I didn't really speak a whole lot and when I did I was fairly quiet when I did speak and so it it was fairly common for people to say, hey, Eric, you're gonna have to speak up, I can't hear you. In fact, if you ask my parents, they'll confirm that when I grew up I rarely put 2 words together to form a sentence, and so you can imagine their shock when in college I informed them that I planned on becoming a preacher. To which my dad responded by asking, Eric, do you realize what preachers have to do? They have to speak a lot really loud. And so it was a shock to my system. But now growing up being quiet like that was was generally fine, no no problems, until about 5th grade when I'd get my very first, presentation on a report in front of the entire class. It was a simple assignment, really it was.

It was simply pick a topic and then do some research on it, and then take 3 or 4 minutes to present your findings. So pretty simple job, don't you think? And so as I stand in front of the class and I'm presenting my report, shortly after I begin, the teacher stops me. He says, Eric, hang on. Stop. You're gonna have to start over again. We can't hear you. And so I started over again, but then again he stopped me and he said, Eric, you're gonna have to speak up because at the back of the class, we can't hear you. Finally, I spoke up loud enough so that the last people in the class could hear me and I finished my presentation.

But when I was done, the teacher took me aside, said I have another assignment for you. I want you to go home and practice projecting to the other side of your living room. Imagine we're all at the very back of your living room and every one of us desperately needs to hear what you have to say. So practice projecting. What he was trying to teach me is something I hadn't discovered yet, but it's a really important principle of life, and that is I realized my problem on that day in the classroom was not my confidence in the content. I did my study, I did the research, I knew

what I was talking about. In that moment, in that classroom, I was the one that I was talking about. I was the one that I was talking about. I was

the one that I was I knew what I was talking about in that moment in that classroom. I was the highest authority on that topic. My problem was not my confidence in the content. My problem was my confidence in my voice to project it loud enough. So if that's the reality, it doesn't really matter how confident you are in the content or even what the content is. Because if you can't project it loud enough for people to hear it, then the content can't do its work in the people's lives. The content couldn't teach the students what they needed to learn. So I discovered something important especially as I went into preaching as a career.

I discovered it's not only important that I'm confident in the content that I'm preaching to you, but it's as important that I project. I have authority in my voice when I speak it so that the content can do its work in the people who are listening. It's an interesting principle that I learned. When I read the life of Jesus, I recognized, surprised when I first discovered it, how good Jesus was at both. It's no surprise to you that Jesus was confident in the content of the gospel that he was presenting. The crucifixion, the resurrection, the salvation, all of that. Right? But it's as impressive when you hear how he communicated it. Oftentimes, when he spoke to a crowd, the crowd would respond by saying, oh, man, who is this guy who speaks with such authority? There it is.

That's what I'm after. I'm not just after the authority of the content. What I'm after is the authority of the presentation. Does that make sense? So I found a place that exemplifies this in Mark chapter 11. I wanna take you there. Go to Mark 11 verse 12. This is what's happening. Jesus and his disciples are headed to Jerusalem to spend some time in the temple.

On their way there, they stop for the night in a village just outside of Jerusalem called Bethany. Listen to what happens. The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree and leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves because it was not the season for figs. And then he said to the tree, may no one ever eat fruit from you again. And his disciples heard him say it. Now if I'm one of his disciples, I'm thinking, alright.

Jesus has just gone crazy casting some curse on a tree that did nothing to hurt him or he's just hangry. Raise your hand if you know what hangry is. Right. I get hangry about 11:30 every day, and so when the team meets with me, they're like, alright, we gotta stop talking, get Eric some food. He's hangry. What is it? Is Jesus is Jesus just throwing a curse on the fig tree or is he just hangry? As a disciple I'm thinking, alright, He's just hangry. So you leave the area, you go to Jerusalem, you get lunch eventually. Watch what happens, verse 20, in the morning as they're leaving Jerusalem heading back towards Bethany, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots.

Peter remembered and said to Jesus, Rabbi, look, the fig tree you cursed has withered. My alarm's going off. That's crazy. Back to my message. Back to my message. I'm so sorry. Anyway, back to it. The fig tree you cursed has withered.

Now if I'm Peter, I'm thinking, how in the world did this happen? Because you have to recognize, gee, Peter is not speaking the obvious. He's not stating the obvious. He's asking a question. Here's the question. Let me rephrase the passage as such. Rabbi, look, how is it that you spoke to the fig tree and its reality changed? How did you do that? How is it that you spoke a word and there is so much authority in your word that it changed reality in the thing you spoke to. Now when you are new to faith in Jesus Christ, that's a question that you ask all the time. How is it Jesus that your word spoken to my life and things have changed? How is it that you've spoken to my life and my marriage seems to be getting stronger? How is it that you have spoken into my life and the anger that used to consume me is now going away and I'm far a more peaceful person? How did you do that? It's the same question Peter asked.

What Jesus wants you to get to is a place where you're not asking how did Jesus speak into my life and change it, but instead say, Jesus, speak into my life because I now am confident in your voice to change things in my life. And so Jesus, speak a word into my marriage and change it. Speak a word into my addiction and save me. Speak a word into our financial reality and give us wisdom. See how this works? It's a shift from asking how did you speak to an invitation to speak. Does that make sense? Jesus gets the impression that Peter's asking this question. So in verse 22, he answers it. Listen to what Jesus says.

Have faith in God. Now stop. What does that faith look like? Let me give you an example. In Matthew chapter 8, there's a story of a person, we don't even know the name, we just know his rank. He's a Roman centurion. Right? High ranking Roman Centurion. He comes to Jesus and asked Jesus to help him heal his servant who's suffering from paralyzation. Listen to what he says.

The centurion replied, just say the word. I don't need you to come to my house, Jesus. I don't need you to lay hands on him. I don't need your disciples to throw a bunch of oil on him and say some kind of healing prayer that's canned. I don't need that. All I need is for you to say a word and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority with soldiers under me and I tell this one go, and he goes and that one come and he comes. I say to my servant do this and he does it.

Verse 10, when Jesus heard this, watch this, he was amazed and said to those following him, truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. Stop. How does Jesus define faith? Jesus defines faith as recognizing his authority and then accessing that authority for a need in their life. Jesus says that's faith. That's faith. In other words, the Roman Centurion says all I have to do is say a word and my soldiers do whatever I tell them to do. That's authority. And so when he recognizes authority in Jesus, he says all you need to do is speak a word and everything that has to submit to you will submit to you, including paralyzation.

Just say the word. And so Jesus looks at Peter and He says have faith, there it is, in God. Recognize God's authority over everything. And then invite Him to speak a word into your life. Jesus says, that's faith. So faith in Jesus' word. Faith in His ability to project so that those of us at the back of the classroom can hear Him, but more than that, the content that He is communicating will do its work in our life. So I guess my question is, when God speaks with authority, are you listening? Can you hear Him? Can you recognize His voice? Jesus says, my sheep know my voice.

So that when He speaks you can see Him working. Now I have to tell you I could probably end the sermon right there and it would be an encouraging enough of a principle for us to live by. Go therefore and hear the word of God speak authority in your life. In fact, use specifically the prayer request that you want to give him, like, Jesus, speak a word over my marriage. Jesus, speak a word over finances. Speak a

word over my health. Whatever it is.

I think we could probably end there and be fine. But when I go back to verse 22, I noticed Jesus doesn't end it there because I saw something subtle I've never seen before. Jesus doesn't actually answer Peter's question. Peter's asking the question, Jesus, how is it that you spoke to the fig tree and your word changed reality? Jesus says have faith in God. Now you know what he doesn't say? He doesn't say the way that I could speak and change the reality of the fig tree is because of my faith in my heavenly father. Now that's true, but that's not what he says. He says you have faith in God. That's a he's taking the emphasis off of himself and putting it on his disciples.

There's one way to interpret this. The faith that gave Jesus' words power and authority is the same faith that gives your words power and authority. Now you're like, dude, are you telling me that we can speak like Jesus spoke and see the same kind of things happen? That's some, like, weird translation. No. No. This is not some weird Eric translation. Jesus confirms it in verse 23. Listen to what he says.

Truly I tell you, if anyone, not just me, but anyone says to this mountain, go throw yourself into the sea and does not doubt in their heart, but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. How many of you have read through this passage and just skipped it because it's so confusing? I know I have. I know I have. Because I'm like, wait a minute. Mountains? I can tell a mountain to go throw itself in the sea? Is that even possible? And so I gotta tell you, if you are scientifically minded or even rationally minded, this verse sounds more than ridiculous. I mean, there have been some, like, religious crazies throughout history that have made all kinds of claims to faith and miraculous abilities and so forth, but I've never read in any history book, nor have I read in any geology book, a story of a mountain just all of a sudden lifting up, throwing itself into the sea. That's never been recorded. So two possibilities I think are true potentially true from this.

Number 1, either Jesus is some lunatic that's making crazy faith claims that are impossible, or number 2, you and I just simply don't have the spiritual confidence to move a mountain. Now I believe that from my experience with Jesus that he's not a lunatic, so the option for me that's left is I must not have the spiritual confidence to tell a mountain to move and it move. So let's talk about that. What is spiritual confidence? If you're writing notes down, here's spiritual confidence. It's the ability to leverage faith to produce kingdom outcomes. Spiritual confidence is the ability to leverage faith to produce kingdom outcomes. Let let me give you an example of what this looks like. One day Jesus and his disciples were in a boat, they were crossing the Sea of Galilee after a long day of ministry, and they're tired.

Now it's about an 8 mile row across the Sea of Galilee, so it's gonna take a bit. While the disciples are rowing, Jesus is sleeping in the front of the boat. Now as it can happen on the Sea of Galilee, a storm shows up all of a sudden and it picks up in strength. The disciples are like, you know what? We can handle this. We've all been on this sea for most of our life, we know how to handle storms like this, but the storm grew stronger, the wind grew louder, the waves got bigger, and so did their risk of capsizing. At one point they realized we're not gonna make this. They're wondering why is Jesus asleep, and so they go and wake Him up and say, listen to what they say to Him. Jesus, why don't you care that we're about to die? Jesus gets up, looks at the storm, says, peace be still.

The whole storm goes quiet, everything goes calm, and then He looks at His disciples. Listen carefully to what He says. Why are you so afraid? Where is your faith? Where is your faith? Now notice what he's not asking them. He's not asking them to have enough faith to calm a storm. He's asking them to have enough faith to calm their fear in the storm. Does that make sense? There's a difference. So the faith that Jesus is expecting of his disciples in the storm is not the faith to calm the storm. Only Jesus can do that.

But he is expecting them to have enough faith to calm their fear in the middle of the storm. So again, what is faith according to Jesus? It is recognizing his authority over all created things, including the storm. So if I have faith in Jesus, I'm fixating on his authority more than the authority of the storm. And in that moment, my fear subsides and my spirit grows calm. Jesus says that's the kind of faith I wanna have you. So watch this. When the disciples see the storm, what they should have done is speak a word to their fear And say, you have no right in me. You have no authority in me.

You have no prerogative over me because I belong to Jesus. In other words, the faith that gave Jesus words power is the same faith that give your words power. So my question is, are you speaking? I know it might be awkward for us to do this because I I feel like sometimes if we try to speak authoritatively to a reality in our life, it's like it's like we're trying to act like a magician. Like that's out of bounds. We shouldn't do that. All we should do is pray that God takes care of stuff. But when I look at look at Jesus, I see him, no, no. I want you to have faith in me so that you can speak to your fear and let the holy spirit calm you in the middle of a storm.

So when I go back to Mark chapter 11, I'm asking the question, where does my confidence come from to speak to a mountain, tell it to fall into the sea? Where do I get that confidence? Listen to what this says. Verse 22, it has everything to do with faith. Do you know what this means? Your spiritual confidence to move mountains has nothing to do with you and has very little to do with the size of the mountain. It has everything to do with the size of the God you've put your faith in. So you can have faith in anything, lots of faith in anything. You can have faith in the tooth fairy. You can have faith in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. But you will be disappointed because there's no substance to any of them.

You can have all kinds of faith in those things but there's no substance. So the question I'm not asking you is how much faith do you have, what I'm asking you is how much substance does the god have you've put your faith in. That's the key. God's not saying have given you magical powers and whatever you speak to the world, boom, done. He's not saying that. He's saying, when you have your faith in me, then you can speak my will, you can speak my purpose, you can speak kingdom outcomes and see things happen. What is a mountain in scripture? Landmarks and physical features of the earth often represent spiritual realities. So mountains, watch this, don't always represent the physical mountain.

It represents impossible barriers you can't get past. The way you get past these impossible barriers is by speaking faith to them so that your faith or let me say this, the authority of your God overwhelms the authority of the impossible barrier. Let me give you an example. In your old testament, when the Jews were set free from Egypt. Right? They crossed the Red Sea, they're now in the desert, they're on their way to the promised land, they all come up against, watch this, Mount Sinai. Right? When they're at the foot of Mount Sinai, God calls Moses up to the top of it whereas you know the story, God gives Moses the 10 Commandments. If you remember the story while he is up on the mountain, the people are still down in the valley. A group of these people say, you know what? In the desert here, we don't have many much food at all.

But I remember back in Egypt when we were slaves, man, we had 3 meals a day. We had a roof over our heads. Man, did he just lead us out in the desert to die? And so a whole group of them said, you know what? Let's head back to slavery and abandon our journey towards freedom. When Moses came down the mountain, he saw the rebellion. Let me skip to the end of the story. Every single person who gravitated back to slavery never got past the mountain. But every person who abandoned slavery and embraced freedom by putting their faith in the God of Moses Got past the mountain and went on to freedom. Watch this.

A mountain is something watch this. A mountain is something in your life that will break you or empower you. The faith that you speak to the mountain will determine what happens to you when you encounter the mountain. But can I just make a quick observation about the story of the Exodus? The thing that kept an entire generation from moving past the mountain was their sin against their God. And the thing that made the people move past the mountain towards freedom was their obedience to their God. So when I go back to mark chapter 11, I hear the same sentiment. See if you can spot it. Chapter 11 verse 24.

Therefore, I tell you who have whatever you asked for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. But verse 25, and when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them so that your father in heaven may forgive you your sins. Let me ask you, what is the thing that's keeping the authority of God out of your speech? When you speak faith to something in your life, what is the one thing that's keeping the authority of God from flowing into you through your words to change the reality in front of you? Jesus says, your sin. If you are being attentive to the holy spirit, he will reveal if and what sin is in your life that is blocking the flow of God's authority in your life. Let me analogize it this way if I could. The only way that you get to turn lights on in your house is because the you have a relationship, a contract with the electric company. Now let me tell you what belief is. Belief is even though you know how to turn light switches on, even though you know how much electricity you need or even though you know how electricity works, it doesn't matter if there's no relationship with the electric company because there's no electricity coming into your house.

But when you have a relationship with the electric company and they bring their electricity so that you can embrace the electricity and use the electricity, that's called belief. Let me tell you what faith is. Faith is when the electric company is pushing electricity into your house. You have all of it that you need. Every ounce of electricity is at your disposal. But you never turn the light switch on. You never plug in the appliances. Faith is recognizing the power that is at your disposal and then learning how to turn the light switch on so the electricity can flow in and through your house and you get the outcome you want.

Remember, spiritual confidence. Spiritual confidence is leveraging your faith in Jesus, knowing his authority, bringing it into your life in order to get kingdom outcomes. Notice I didn't say in order to get your outcomes. Jesus is not some genie in the bottle where you get to rub it 3 times and then all of a sudden you get 3 magical wishes. You don't get to do that. It's kingdom outcomes. So what is the kingdom out outcome? Jesus calling for your marriage. What's the kingdom outcome? He's calling for your finances.

What's the kingdom outcome? He's calling for your community. Speak that. So how do we do this? Three quick take homes, guys. Number 1, remember faith is acting as if God is telling the truth. What is God saying to you? I have all the authority, all the power over all created things. And so acting like he's telling the truth means that I speak the authority that God has given me. Number 2, spiritual confidence comes from consistently trusting Jesus. Consistently trusting Jesus.

So what is it that you need to trust him for right now? Learn to trust him there. And then later on there'll be something else in your life that demands you trust him again. Trust him again. And then a year from now, there would be something probably bigger than what the first two were that you were required to trust him. Trust him there and see the authority of God, the authority of Jesus pouring into that scenario. Number 3, repenting of sin restores spiritual confidence. I wanna read to you very quickly something David says in Psalm 51. Just listen to it, don't turn there.

Just listen. Have mercy on me, oh God, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my inequity and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me, yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb. You taught me wisdom in that secret place.

So cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean. Wash me and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. That sounds like confidence, doesn't it? Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my inequity. Create in me a pure heart, oh God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. The word steadfast, watch this, your version might translate it as confident spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of my salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. What I'm looking for this morning is freedom from our sin, so that the authority of God can flow unhindered into our lives so that we can project that authority into the things of our lives and see kingdom outcomes. Here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna sing one more song. While we're singing, I'm gonna encourage you to do some business with your God. If you wanna stay in your seat that's fine, but what I'm gonna encourage you to do is actually to come up to the to the stage, spend some time at the altar, where you first and foremost say, God I know my sin, you know my sin, it's always before me. Forgive me of my sin, cleanse me of all unrighteousness, restore unto me a confident spirit within me, And then say, heavenly father, give me the confidence to speak loudly enough so that the enemy all the way at the very back of the class can hear me. The enemy all the way at the very back of the class can hear the authority coming out of my mouth. And when I speak your kingdom into that situation, he has no choice except to run and hide because nothing can stand against the authority of God when it comes through our lives by faith.

And so maybe some of you need to come up to the altar and just speak the word of God over something in your life so that the devil flees and you find kingdom hope. So we're gonna do that. It's an opportunity that you can choose to take or not take. So heavenly father, thank you for being a God that has all the authority over all creation. That at your very word, everything was created and at your word, everything submits. We are humbled and grateful that those of us who are in Christ Jesus have the same authority to speak your word into our world so that we see the kingdom outcome that I know you and I both desire. Thank you, Jesus, for being so good. We pray this in your name.

Amen.