Unwanted Gifts

1. Read 1 Peter 1:3-4. Why does Peter describe this "new birth" as a "living hope"? What are some of the characteristics of the inheritance Peter describes in verse 4?
2. Read Romans 5:3-5. Why do we rejoice in our sufferings, according to this passage? Do you have an example of what joy in the midst of suffering looks like?
3. Why is it important to grieve losses and disappointments in our lives?
4. Mike described "unwanted gifts" as the gifts you really need, but would never ask for. What are some unwanted gifts you've received that have come out of suffering?
5. How can you actively choose to prioritize your relationship with God in the midst of suffering?
6. How does remembering the suffering of Christ bring us hope and endurance?

Prayer + Practice:

1. Scripture Meditation: Choose a specific time to meditate on 1 Peter 1:3-4. Spend a few minutes reading the verses slowly, reflecting on their meaning, and asking God to deepen your understanding and appreciation of the living hope you have in Christ. Consider journaling what comes out of this time or memorizing these verses so that you can recall them throughout the day. 2. Intentional Conversations: Make it a point to share the hope and joy you have in Christ with at least one person this week. This could be a friend, family member, or even a stranger. Pray for God to open up an opportunity and be on the lookout for it. You can share how the promise of an eternal inheritance through Christ has impacted your life, offering encouragement to those who may be struggling or seeking hope.

Well, normally, this would be a very emotional talk, but luckily for me, I'm not that emotional when I teach, so this should be pretty, pretty easy to do this morning with all of these students that I love in here so much.

You know, for a lot of you, you know, that about ten months ago is when we said, hey, it's time. We're finally getting ready to move. We have been here for a long time, and Texas has been so good to us, but it's time to get closer to family. And I know we were kind of ambiguous, and so a lot of people have assumed that we're heading up to Pennsylvania. We actually are headed to Nashville.

That's where I have some more family there, and that's where I'm hoping kind of the next generation of our family kind of all ends up in Nashville. Although my wife and I love Pennsylvania, we don't love the winters, and we don't love the seasonal depression you get from October to April when you don't see the sun for all of that time. And so we feel like we're getting about as close as we can to the north while still staying in the south, which is what we really have enjoyed about here. One of the things, and in these last couple months, as things have been winding down, you know, myself, my wife, have been able to reflect just on the blessings and the gifts that have come over 14 years. That is a long time.

Like, I'm too old for this hillside. Okay, I have been too old for this for too long. But to look back and just see the blessings and the gifts that have come in that time period, to see all of these things that we hoped and we wanted 14 years ago, to be surrounded by such unbelievable friends, to have that blessing in our lives of so many people that have been in small groups with us and our inner circle and have just been there for us to be able to be surrounded by mentors, some that just kind of, at this church that just came out of the woodwork, wouldn't even have known. I would have never thought I would connect with another man the way that I did in just our time of life and our seasons and what we were talking about and thinking through and what God was teaching us and just so many men that have surrounded myself and so many women that have surrounded Beth, the elder support that exists here at Hillside. And just to have all of the elders there for us through whatever was going on, to be blessed by a healthy church, not a perfect church, a healthy church.

You don't stay somewhere in ministry for 14 years, unless you love the people that you serve with and you love the people that you do staff life with. And so just to be surrounded by that type of health parents, to be trusted by you is a gift. It's a blessing to not have every decision that we make in student ministry get eight emails about, why are you doing it this way? That doesn't fit my kids life. Okay?

Like, to be trusted even when you didn't understand something or didn't agree with something that you still trusted, that's a blessing and a gift that you have given as well. To buy our first home during the recession, we just closed contract or, like, got contract yesterday. Like, recession homes are good gifts when they sell. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, a gift.

And to walk for so long, I won't keep him up here for too long, but to walk for so long and be waiting for this little guy, he just turned one month last week. And you know what I hate about, you know what I do dislike about the infant stage is when we brought him back from Florida, I just wanted to take him out and show him to everybody. Like, I would have loved for every single Sunday just to have him roaming through the crowds and then ignorant me. My wife's like, you can't really, like, expose infants to thousands of people. I'm like, well, that stinks.

Cause we're leaving soon, you know? But all of the prayers, all of the support over all of these years is such a blessing and a gift. And another thing I've realized is if you have a baby, no one really cares about you anymore. So, like, if I kept him up here for too long, you really would pay zero attention to what we're talking about. Grandparents don't care if you come on vacation anymore.

They only care if your child comes on vacation. And so just such a blessing and a gift. All of these things that when my wife and I left Virginia in 2010, we could have hoped for, that we prayed for. And God has just been so faithful to bring all of those things in our lives and surround us with so many amazing people. And then, as we're going to talk about this morning, we have had unwanted gifts in our lives.

You know how when you're a kid and you have a birthday party, some people show up with the things that you really wanted, or you are now an adult and you bought your first home, and so you're having your house warming party and people show up and you're like, wow, that's a really nice, shiny, expensive thing that they just got me like, how amazing is that? And it looks good, right? And you're, as a kid at your birthday, you're so entertained for a little bit of time by this really shiny awesome. You see it in the commercials all the time. You think, surely this is gonna change my life.

This gift is gonna change my life. But then there's times where the unwanted gifts that someone brought you that at first you were like, why would you have given that to me when I just bought a new house? And then like a couple years later you're like, actually this was the best gift that I had been given. Everything else is broken, everything else has become useless. This actually ended up being the best gift someone could have given me as a kid.

Like the thing that I thought I was going to play with all the time, I actually spent 24 hours playing with it. And then the thing that I thought I was not going to care about at all is the thing that has stuck with me for years, right? That's one type of unwanted gift that sometimes we get. The other type of unwanted gift are not the things that we don't think we want. They're the things that we know that we want, but we don't know if we want to go through what we have to go through to get them.

We don't want that part of the journey.

And so this morning we're going to talk about the unwanted gifts of our lives that happen. Unfortunately, in most of the worst moments of our lives that happen in the valleys of our lives.

I have not shared a lot from the stage about what the last twelve years have looked like in my wife and I, in our marriage, in our lives. Some of that is because honestly, it was just too raw at the time. Some of it, honestly was I didn't want the focus on what was going on in our lives. I'm a teacher and a preacher and a pastor and a shepherd of the gospel of Christ, and so the focus needs to stay on him. And so at times I just shied away from sharing kind of what was going on in the valley of our lives so that we could just kind of keep moving and keep going.

And I know that there were close people to us that knew a little bit more and supported us through it. There were a lot of people on the peripheral that loved us and supported us, even if they didn't know the exact details of what was happening in our lives throughout these past twelve years. And the other thing that I didn't want through any of it, and even now, right now, as I share with you, Hillside. I don't want this now, either, is I didn't want pity. Okay?

So after we talk about this and we just kind of go down these unwanted gifts that come in some of the moments of suffering in our lives, I don't want a thousand hugs. Like, I'm sorry. I don't want that. I want hugs of, I love you. I'll see you again.

We'll talk soon. But I don't want the. I'm so sorry. That's not it. The other thing that, as I speak now and in the past, what's kind of kept me from speaking is sometimes, unfortunately, when you share about what you're going through, it creates this.

This hierarchy with people. And so when you talk about suffering, and since I kind of have a stage to talk to hundreds of people at a time, they think you think your suffering is worse than their suffering. They think that there's almost like a. Well, let's compare mine to yours. Like, how much did you cry?

How much did I cry? Nope. That's not what I want from this, either. Cause honestly, what I have noticed as a pastor is that as I have gone through the hardest moments of my life, it actually has not created the separation or an alienation from you, from the congregation, from the students. It actually has connected us in so much deeper ways.

Because obviously, when you're a pastor, whether it's you sitting across the table from a student or a parenthood, and you just found out that they just heard the worst news of their lives, something is going to be forever altered, and you just have the gut punch of kind of empathizing and shouldering some of the weight of the pain that they're going through, or even if it's just in a meeting and we're talking about care needs and prayer requests at a church that is this size.

I know, and I hate it for you, but I know that there have been, over the past 14 years, so many diagnoses that have gone bad. And what you prayed for, you actually got the opposite. I know over the last 14 years, there have been so many of you in this room, they have had to say goodbye to loved ones. Sometimes you were expecting it, but sometimes you weren't either. I know that relationships have failed.

I know that businesses have gone south. And it's just a lot. It's a lot. And so I never wanted to bring my suffering from a stage to feel like, well, your suffering doesn't matter. Because over the years, what I've actually found is the exact opposite.

It was in those moments that now me and that student or me and that parent or grandparent or me and that leader now are talking the same language because we have gone through hell in life. And so as long as you're okay with that being the ground rules for how you receive some of this, I'd like to share a little bit my life and then talk about all of the unwanted gifts that have come out of that. Twelve years ago, that was when Beth and I started doing our family planning. And I know there's students in the room, parents, they already know about this topic. So there was a lot of practicing at the beginning to try to start a family and it took a couple of years and we went, something's not going well here.

At the same time, we've always had this desire to adopt and we actually had thrown out the idea that we were going to adopt and then build a family around the adopted child rather than adopting at the end of having a family. And so we started going down that road too, and both failed. Both just kind of dropped out. We took longer than we should have to start kind of seeking some medical what's going on here. But then we finally did, and in the course of that time, we got pregnant, saw a heartbeat, and then a week later found out that that heartbeat was no longer there and that we were going to lose them.

And a lot of you in this room have experienced that. A lot of ladies have experienced that type of pain. It is an unbelievable gut punch of pain. I call it the double edged sword of the value of life that we as christians have. Right.

As followers of Jesus, we believe that every life is so saint, is so sanctified and so precious, and it just is so important. And then when you lose that, it hits that much harder. And so life changed. Grief enters into our reality in a way that I never expected it to. Obviously, no one hopes for that.

No one prays for that. It just happens. And then now you have to start dealing with it. In the midst of all of that, as we're trying to do some medical things and seeking out kind of what's the next move for us? And not really ever getting any clear answers as to what was happening other than just what seems like you can get pregnant, but for some reason you're not.

And then, oh, you do get pregnant, but then for some reason you don't carry very long, just not conversations, obviously, or things that you want to be dealing with. Infertility was something that I never thought would be a part of our journey, just like people in this room that never thought it would be this hard to do something that seems so easy for other people. And now going through it. Infertility is something that I've realized I would never wish on my worst enemy if I had one. Because it wrecks every part of your life.

It wrecks, like, your family planning. You don't realize how much you are planning for as a couple until the one thing that you want the most isn't happening. Right? And so it messes all of your dreaming. It messes all of your planning up.

It destroys your finances, because if they tell you it's going to cost $10,000, it's actually going to cost 20. And so you're just wondering, like, where do we sacrifice? How do we make this work? And so it wrecks that area of your life. An area that we probably never thought it would wreck is your self esteem.

Because you start looking around going, goddess, am I going to be that bad of a parent that you will not entrust me with a child? Right. It's just hard. It's just crushing. It affects so many different areas of your life.

And as we're walking through all of this and we're kind of getting to that next stage, we came around to trying to adopt again. And after doing months of that, they get on the phone with us. After going through trainings, after going through orientations, they get on the phone with us, and they said, we're just having a really hard time convincing people that you will be good parents. And I'm like, wait, do you think I work, like, 100 hours a week checking the stocks all day? Is that, like.

And then my wife's, like, a high powered attorney, and, like, she's never home. Like, what? I'm a pastor. Like, literally, I've spent my life dedicated to the development of children. My wife has an early childhood development degree.

She's nannied. She's been in preschool. She's been in elementary school. Like, what is the disconnect here? And just over the years, time after time, like, we tried so many.

We were actually zero for six. Okay? I'm a baseball guy. We were batting zero. Zero for six.

We got into the late 2020 area, started trying some different things, and actually, in a year, had three pregnancies and lost all three of them. And so it's just been times devastating. It has been hell on earth at times, grief just overflowing, just every area of life affected. Just like I said, this is not me telling my story. This is us connecting, because I know that in some ways, the same exact situations that my wife and I have gone through are the exact same for some of you in this room.

But even if it's not, I know that you have had goals and plans and dreams that have been forever altered because something completely out of your control has happened. It's just hard. And so, honestly, batting zero for six when our dear friend approached us and said, hey, I'd like for you to consider, like, would you guys be open to letting me carry one of your embryos for you, I, to be completely honest, was like, well, it's not gonna work. For some reason, God is against us. He, like, literally does not want Beth and I to have kids.

We have tried too many things for too long. Nothing is gonna work in this situation. But what the heck? And out of it comes this little beautiful boy that has a beautiful story for the rest of his life. And it's in those moments, Hillside.

It's in those moments, students, when things are not going the way that we ever wanted to or ever foresaw them going. It's in those moments that we start getting these unwanted gifts. They're not shiny, they don't stand out well. It's the things that you honestly, you don't want to go through what you have to go through to get them. But on the back end, you go, God.

Even in the silence at times, even in the confusion, the disorientation of everything, look how you have been faithful. So if you don't mind, I would like to share a few of those things with you. I won't. I won't take long. The first thing that maybe you have felt, or maybe you are feeling right now, is the first gift that suffering generally has, is a gift of humbling.

You know why? Because now life is out of your control. And can we just be honest? Okay. Westerners living in the suburbs, we generally control every area of our lives, right?

We pick the house that we want, we pick the car that we want. We have pretty good freedom in the job that we want. You pick the school district. Do you want for your kids? Like, we literally have so much control of our comfort, of our security, we can make all of these decisions for ourselves.

And when you start going through the valley, guess what? You learn really fast. I'm not in control.

I'm not in control. God, I don't know what the heck you're doing right now, but I'm not in control. And for twelve years, I like to think of my soul and my mind and my heart as like a bucking bronco. Because for twelve years I have been trying to buck off that idea, right? Nope.

God, you are not in control. I am still in control. I can do things how I need to do them. I have said things like this to God. I hope none of you have, and I hope you're not overwhelmed that a pastor has said these things.

God, if you just get out of the way, I can figure this out myself.

I'm in control. God, for twelve years, that's how long it took for God to like, nope, you don't have to keep bucking this idea off, Mike. You're not in control. I am.

The second thing, the second gift that grief brings to us and suffering brings to us is that grief, the understanding that grief is not just confined to loss of life. I kind of brought that idea into all of this. I had lost some loved ones in my life and thought, those are the moments that you grieve. But Hillside, can I be honest? You grieve the loss of anything.

And if you aren't grieving the things that you have lost, then you're probably bottled up, if you get what I'm saying. You have to grieve the loss of everything. You grieve the loss of plans, you grieve the loss of hopes and dreams. For me, I grieve the loss of financial security. I had to grieve those things.

I had to let it go. I had to go through the stages, I had to go through the anger, I had to go through the denial, I had to go through the bargaining, I had to go through times of acceptance. And can I just say, I spend like probably 80% of my grieving in anger. That's where I end up. I've just got, I'm so mad right now that this is going on.

Another thing that has come out of my mouth, the entitlement of me, is God. I cannot believe that I have been faithfully serving your kingdom and your people and this is how you're going to treat me right now.

I just had to grieve, let it all go, get to a place of acceptance with all of it. And if there's one thing that I think we can learn from the past, and one thing I think we can learn about grief from the present is that our grandparents and our great grandparents, when they had hard times and grief, you know what they did? They just kept moving. If you keep moving and that's all you do, then that's how you get to really unhealthy places. You bottle it up, you never process and you just keep moving.

If we can learn something from our little postmoderners that are in the room right now is, you know what they do really well? They process. Oh. I could never do anything else in life until I have dealt with this one thing that is weighing so heavily on my heart. So, mom, dad, I'm not going to get a job for a year because I just need to kind of hang out and figure this out.

Okay, you know what? You actually need to do both. You need to do both. There has to be a tension with grief hillside where we keep moving while processing. Both have to be happening.

And when I say keep moving, I don't mean you have to be making a mile a day. There were some days where literally I felt like maybe I had moved an inch in what I was going through, but I wasn't going to go back. I was going to keep moving and keep processing what was happening and dealing with the grief and overcoming it and having God teach me things all throughout it. We have to keep moving in all of the ways that we have experienced loss in our lives, but we also have to process at the exact same time. This third thing, this third gift is actually a potential gift that comes because suffering has a way of unifying relationships, families, marriages, or it has a way of disintegrating them.

You don't go through the worst moments of your life with friends, family, spouse, whatever, and stay neutral. It doesn't happen. Right. Everything is too escalated, it's too hard. In those moments when you're not even sure you can get out of bed that day.

How on earth are you going to cooperate and mingle with other people around you that are also experiencing the same levels of suffering that you're experiencing? And so, you know what you got to do? You got to set in your heart with those people that you're going through it with. No matter what, we're going to experience a lot of things together. But no matter what, this is the goal.

And I don't have a perfect marriage, but I can tell you all in this room that my wife and I are emotionally and spiritually more intimate and healthy than we have ever been in our marriage. Because at the end of the day, no matter what we experience together at different times, obviously, as we grieve different things and we move through all of this journey together at different paces, the end of the day, you know what was our highest priority? We're going to stay a team in all of this. We're not going to blame, we're not going to point fingers, we're going to have to have, unfortunately, at times, some really hard conversations about what's next or what just happened. But you know what?

At the end of the day, we're still a team. We've got to get through this together. And I do a lot of premarital counseling. I know that when I move to Nashville, I should just tell anybody in the room that has done premarital counseling with us. If you need more counseling bills, when I leave, just send them.

I'll send you the address. Just send them straight to me. Okay. And one of the things that we talk about is in your marriage, which applies to family, it applies to friends. If one of you wins and one of you loses, then you both lose, because at the end of this, we have to still be a team through it all.

And so a gift of suffering is that it has the potential to unite you in ways like nothing else will. But if you don't set those things in your heart, then it also has a chance. If you're not intentional about conversations, if you're not controlled and healthy in how you approach it, it also has a chance to disintegrate as well. And often, it's slowly. You know, if you try to grab a cotton ball and you try to pull it apart as fast as you can, probably you're gonna have a really hard time with it.

But if you take that cotton ball and you just slowly pull on it, that's when the fibers release. And that's kind of what suffering can do to you. If you're not intentional. And on top of things, if you don't have the right mission and goals in front of you, with your friends, with your family, in your marriage, then it has the potential to slowly just pull apart as well. I have a love hate relationship with a lot of these gifts.

That's why they're unwanted. This is the one that I probably love hate the most. I'm like, 51% love, 49% hate. What I'm about to say. I'm just warning everybody in the room.

The gift of suffering, one of them, is that it correctly teaches us a fuller understanding of God's goodness. Did you hear me, students? You hear that? A gift of suffering is that it correctly teaches us the proper definition of God's goodness. You know why?

Because we start to realize that God's goodness is not contingent or constrained by the circumstances of my life. His goodness does not change. No matter how great my life is going, how horrible my life is going the same to you as well. His goodness does not change. And when you're in it, you have to come up against that reality over and over and over again.

God, if you loved me, would you not be better to me? Would your goodness not extend towards me? You have to come up against it. You know, one of the ways that I hear it incorrectly stated and thought about all the time hillside is when you get a prayer request answered. You know what?

People say a lot. God is good. Wait, what? Oh, God's only good because he answered the prayer request that you have of him.

Find that in the Bible.

You can say God has blessed you, but you can't say God is good, because you know what you have to be willing to say as well. When you have to say, he didn't answer the prayer, he said no. He said, wait, the thing that I've been wanting the most, he is not granting it. You know what you have to say in those moments as well. Even though I don't really understand all of it, I understand that God has to remain good through anything and everything.

How my little ordinary, simple life is going does not determine whether or not the God of the unity. Think about how crazy that is. Does not determine how the God of the universe, if he's good or not, he's always good. And when you come up against it, those worst moments of life, you have to have that all reoriented, because our tendency is the thing. When he does good things for me, he is good.

When he doesn't, therefore, he must not be anymore. Can't change.

Couple more things. A couple more unwanted gifts that come from the worst moments of our lives. Suffering has a way of setting our spiritual priorities right. Think about all the things you hope in. They're not even bad things.

Just think about all the things that in your day or your week or your month or your year that your heart and your soul set their hope in. Not bad. Well, like to have a house. I like to be financially secure. I like to have kids.

I like to have a good job. I like to get an education. I like to whatever. None of these are bad things, but they're hopes and things that can't really fulfill it right. And suffering makes you get your spiritual priorities in order so fast.

You know why? Because every hope and every dream when you're in hell in the valley gets swept away. And so you have to figure out, what do I really hope in? And can it actually hold me up? Peter says this of hope.

He said, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by his great mercy, he gave us new birth. Into what? Into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, that is, into an inheritance imperishable. You know what happens in suffering? Things perish.

Oh, it's also undefiled. You know what happens in suffering? You realize that the earth is a sinful, broken place, and it's unfading as well. You know what happens in suffering? You realize you can lose things.

They can fade away. And Peter says that in Christ, all of the things that happen to all of the other things in our lives where we hope and we put our kind of our focus on, and sometimes, unfortunately, they become foundations of our lives, they can't last. Only this hope. He has to be your highest spiritual priority of hope. Only that hope brings about unperishing, undefiling and unfading.

That's it. That's the only one that happens. And so when you suffer, one of the gifts that comes out of that is that you start to realize, I can't really let my hope be in anything of this world. I mean, trust and hope have to exist for us to live, but not ultimately. Ultimately, my hope cannot be in the longings of my heart for this world.

It has to be in the longings of my heart for something else, for the next. I know that the parable and the image that Jesus gives of the shepherd leaving his 99 and going after the one is very much has a salvation salvific implications to it. Right? But how often I have felt over all of these years, that as my soul has hoped and it's wandered and it's become fickle, and I go from losing one thing that I'm hoping into to kind of trying to go to the next and figure out if that one will do it for me. How often the good shepherd has come back over and said, mike, this isn't going to do it.

And suffering has a way of making sure that you must hope in the right things. That's the only way to survive some of the worst moments of our lives. The last thing is that suffering, and this is, again, one of the things that I hate to have to admit, but I do. Suffering develops in us. The gift is that it develops in us godly growth like nothing else can.

There's a reason why the greatest missionaries, pastors of the early church, wrote very similar things on the topic of suffering.

Paul says, we rejoice in sufferings. Wait. We rejoice in them. Why? Because there's an unwanted gift that comes through them.

Because knowing that suffering is producing endurance and endurance is producing character, and character is producing. There it is, hope. Hope in the right thing, the best thing. And hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Paul says, at the end of this suffering, if you endure, you get these things.

Now look what James says, my brothers and sisters, you would almost think they were in the same room writing it down at the same exact time. Consider it nothing but joy when you fall into all sorts of trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces, there it is again, endurance, where we see it. Endurance. You know that when you are tested and when you are tried, the first part of this is you have to endure. You have to keep moving because he says, and let endurance, let the daily stepping, the daily faith, let that have its perfect effect so that you will be perfect and complete, not deficient in anything.

But here's the worst part of this hillside students. Here is the worst part of this. If you don't endure, then you don't get the gifts. You don't get the gifts. If you don't endure, if you give up too soon, then what Paul claims you'll get out of this.

And what James claims you get out of this, you get none of that. You get none of it because you gave up like a week and a half ago. I got to have kind of my, my last night in student ministry on a Wednesday night. They were so kind. They honored me.

We did a bunch of things that, like, are kind of near and dear to my heart. And I got to just share the last message basically with them.

And there's an image that Pete gave in 2012 at a little young adult, small group that has stuck with me for the last twelve years. I use it once or twice a year in the student ministry because they're probably not paying attention. And so they don't even know that I just used it a few months ago, right? Let's be honest. And I just told them a couple weeks ago, it's the image of a snowball, and it can apply to so many areas of our lives, but I distinctly remember the room we were in when Pete shared it.

And it's this image of a snowball, this small snowball, and being from the north and knowing how snow operates. Like, I'll tell some of you Texans later, I only know that you have no idea based off of how you drive whenever there's a light dusting in the DFW metroplex. But being how snow works, if you take a small ball of snow and you roll it around or you send it down a hill, you know what happens to it? It just keeps accumulating, keeps growing. Get some momentum on that snowball.

And by the end of it, you got a little base of a snowman because of what's happened. And Pete that day said, there's areas of our lives where we have to decide if we're going to allow these small balls of snow to roll down this side of the mountain or roll down this side of the mountain.

And what I share with the students then, and what I'll share with you guys now, is Paul and James both say, you have to endure. And when I think about what I was as a little 24 year old punk when I showed up at Hillside, I was probably the perfect definition of wanting. Security, comfort, no stick to it ness in me, a product of my generation, and the ease at which, can we be honest, we live most of our daily lives.

And in the middle of this last twelve years, I just had to get to the point. And you have to get to the point too. And students, you got to get to the point too. I don't care what your friends do, I don't care what anybody else in your lives does, you got to get to the point where you say, no matter what happens in my life, the snowball is going to roll down the side of the mountain. That is perseverance and endurance, not the side that is I'm giving up now.

Not in school, not in sports, not in your job or your careers, not in your life in general, you've just got to make the decision. Regardless of what else I understand about God right now, regardless of what I understand about life, no matter what, I'm not giving up. I have to endure. Because if I don't endure, I lose out on all of these things. And if I don't endure, especially on the topic of faith Hillside, then you have just given up on the thing that matters the most to your life.

And so you just have to say, I'll fail. I'll fail 100 times, but I will not give up. Because if I give up in the smallest areas of my life, you know what? I'm more likely to build momentum to give up at the next area of my life as well.

Students do not give up, obviously, with me leaving, been saying goodbye to a lot of people, had a lot of college students that have gone back to school. And so this last couple weeks, been trying to meet up with them really quick before they go out of town and I know we'll see each other again, but just kind of having our last goodbyes, and one of the students that we've been discipling one on one for the past six years, I'd say have grown really close. I've seen him come from the, you know, the stupidity of his youth and just turn out to be this unbelievable young man that loves God and treats people so well and has such a heart for those that are in, are far from God is just so easily able to just interact with them and present his way of living as a follower of Christ. He just does it so seamlessly. Like when we left the meal that we were sharing together, he gave me a note, and to be honest, like, as I read it, I was expecting a lot of it.

We've spent good time together. I know we both love each other. I know that he knows how proud of him I am. And just as we talked about the next stage of his life and what he's going to do in this next year and just talked about spiritual goals and everything, like, I knew a lot of what was going to come up in this letter. This was the thing that knocked me off my feet, though, because it reset for me.

How to endure and why to endure in your faith, he said, mike, I think the most impactful thing that I saw and learned from you is how to remain faithful when your life is hell. When you were trying to have a kid and roadblock after roadblock kept hitting you, you remain faithful. And I witnessed that. You'll never realize how much of an impact me watching you handle that hell has now made on me. And when you're in it, when you're in the valley, the tendency is to become very me oriented.

God, why is this happening to me? Why is nobody else experiencing this like I am? Right? It's like, why? Why?

Why? Me, me, me? And yet when he said that, it reminded me. Hillside. When you're going through it, obviously God is teaching you things, but you know, what your endurance is doing as well through the worst moments of your life is strengthening the faith of those around you as well.

The beginning of job. Well, obviously God, Job has faith in you. When everything is great, it's the same thing that's happening every day in our lives when we go through it, is that people are going, not only have I seen this man or this woman or my mom or my dad or my grandpa or my grandma or this teacher or this coach or this leader, not only did I see them stay faithful to their God when everything was growing great. But I saw how they stayed faithful when their world was collapsing around them. And I don't know if I can say this and feel 100% accurate, but I think I can.

I think that matters more. I think that makes a bigger impact on the people around us more when we endure. And not only do we get gifts out of it that maybe we never wanted at the beginning of this whole journey, but that other people around us are getting the gift of faith as well, the midst of it.

When I found out that we were actually closing the service with communion this morning, I was pumped, just absolutely pumped.

Because when Jesus sits with his disciples around that table and they have no idea what happening, he breaks off a piece of bread and he says, I want you to remember me. And he grabs a cup and he says, I want you to remember me. And what are they remembering?

That my body was broken for you and my blood was spilt for you. I want you to remember that I suffered. I want you to remember that you're going to be tempted to forget about that aspect of my reality on this earth, but I need you to remember it. And can I just be honest? Hillside there were so many times through these twelve years that nothing about God made any sense.

Does prayer even work? Because we got thousands of people praying on our behalf. God, and you're not doing a thing about it, are you really good? Do you really care? Does faith matter?

Do you show favor to people that are trying to live for you? Like all of these things that honestly, all of my theology had to get tested on, when you're in it, it's disoriented. You know, the one thing, and I'm being dead serious right now, the one thing that I could not budge off of, Jesus, you suffered.

That's the only thing I couldn't budge. Everything else, I was like a freaking professional wrestler with. I'm just rolling in all these other things, these preconceived notions I have for God, how to live, how to live in community with people, everything. The one thing I could not budge, Jesus, you suffered. And if you can suffer when you didn't deserve it, then I can suffer as well.

If you endured the suffering and the shame of the cross, then I can endure whatever I'm going through, too. That's it. Peter again says this, Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring to God by being put to death in the flesh, but being made alive in the, the spirit. I couldn't shake that. I couldn't shake that.

Jesus wanted us to come back to that point. There's a lot of things we need to remember about Jesus. This is the most specific thing he said to come back to. You gotta endure. You gotta endure the worst moments of your life, because I have already gone before you and endured those for you.

And now your hope doesn't have to be in the things of this world that are perishable or that are defiled, that are defiled or that fade that doesn't have to be there anymore. Hillside, remember what I've done, because it points back that you can have hope in me, not everything else. And you need to remember that.

So for some of you in this room, I know that this conversation hits a little close to home right now because you're in it. Like, this is literally, probably you could say this is the worst moments of my life.

So I don't need you to think about everything else going on right now. Now, while we take communion, I just want to challenge you to think about, just remember the suffering of Christ.

And if he has persevered, even if you don't have any of the answers to all of what you think are the most important questions right now, you can just persevere. You can just get through the next day. You can keep moving, knowing that the God that we serve and follow has suffered.

Maybe you're not there. Maybe this is what I like to call, like, a back pocket conversation. Like you're like, Mike, actually, life's going really good for me right now, and I'm actually kind of uncomfortable with you talking about these things because I think you're going to give me, like, a bad juju or like, some type of, you know, like, jinx on me right now because life's going really well. So can we just stop talking about this? All right, I'm with you.

Like I said, I'm a baseball player, so I'm kind of superstitious.

Then take this time to remember the fact that Christ has suffered on your behalf, to give you the hope, the real hope, not one that comes one day and fades the next, the real hope of your salvation.

The innocent blood was spilt to pay for your tainted blood. The just for the unjust, as Peter said, was given for you. And remember that I'll pray you guys can break up after I pray. Just so that we all know, if you do have gluten free needs, this table down here is where you can get your gluten free bread. Let me pray, father, as we enter into this moment together of remembering, for some, it just feels like too much.

Too much right now. But, God, we need it.

We need to be reminded of this unshakable truth and reality about what you have done for us, for your creation, for your image bearers.

God, may we partake in this together, unified, focused solely on you, your work, your suffering, and, God, your endurance as well. In your name, amen.