Matt Chandler - Drawn Out

Well, if you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. We’re going to read ten verses together today. I think, whether you have a church background or not, you’ll know those ten verses. While you’re turning there, I want to address the fact that this is the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States of America. It’s a strange thing to think that ninth graders have no memory of a pre-9/11 world, and so it was on 9/11 that I believe the United States was brought into the chaos that the rest of the world really operates under. From that day forward, we have seen and experienced, in some ways, the chaos and brokenness of a fallen world as a country. It is a good thing for us to remember how horrific that day was. Many of us remember exactly where we were and exactly what was going on. We found ourselves trying to explain it to our ten-year-old, who has no memory of it, and why it was such a huge deal on that day. And yet, the lessons we’ve learned over the last four weeks from Exodus have weight, and they bear significance on our experience of 9/11 today. What we’ve said for the last three or four weeks is that we have looked at this really dark period of human history being unpacked in the book of Exodus. We watch in that text that God has a plan, that that plan is good, and that God is working that plan, even though it doesn’t look like anyone thinks it should look. Our confidence, even in the midst of what appears to be chaos everywhere, started that day when we really became aware of just how nasty the world is. We might have been aware, but it was way back in our conscience, in a way that now is front and center. And yet we are confident as Christians, even as we mourn and remember the loss of 9/11, that God is good, that He has not panicked, and that He is in control. We mourn as those who have hope that the sovereign God of the universe is working things to His glory and our ultimate good, even as we can’t make sense of things now. And that’s okay that we can’t make sense of things now, right? If God is infinite and we are whatever age we are, there are going to be some things that He sees more clearly than we do. I don’t pretend to be able to understand that or put it all together for us, other than to say our Bible is filled with this God at work in the mess. As Christians, we cling to this fact; we cling to the reality that not just 9/11 but all of the chaos and heartbreak birthed after 9/11 is somehow like Pharaoh’s decrees playing into God’s endgame to bring glory to Himself and joy to the hearts of mankind. That’s where we’re going to camp out as the people of God; that’s where our confidence lies as the people of God. As we rightly remember today, I want you to be built up and rooted in what we’ve been learning about the nature and character of God as it relates to the affairs of man. Alright, I was at Village Chiropractic a couple of weeks ago. I was feeling a bit off and just needed to be straightened out. One of the women who works there, when I got to the church, mentioned that it would be 14 years next month for me as pastor of The Village Church, which is crazy to think about, right? She was in fifth grade when I got here, so this is starting to happen to me now where this fifth-grade girl is now a woman who has a job. She said, «You always have to be careful when someone starts like this: 'Hey, I’m not trying to be offensive, but what do you do during the week? '» It’s like an honest question. What do pastors do during the week, right? But during the week, what do we do? Now, what was fun for me is that I hadn’t seen her for about six weeks on the weekend. So I said, «I’ll unpack my week if you’ll tell me what you’re doing on the weekends.» We had a fun little moment there. I don’t want this to make you nervous about seeing me out and about; don’t avoid eye contact with me, right? But it was just a fun conversation. I know her family, and it was enjoyable. So, what I thought I would do is this: to get us into this very well-known text, whether you’re a Christian or not, I thought I could talk about The Village Church. There are over 180 staff members at The Village Church now; that’s a church of over 10,000 with five locations, and so there are kind of two…