SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Well good morning to everyone. It's been wonderful to be here already. Enjoyed the worship and enjoyed the scripture reading. And it's uh just nice to see all of you. Um many of you that I know or at least recognize, some of you who I don't know. But uh it has been a good morning so far. I wanted to share about uh a topic that's become kind of dear to me, and it's about committing our battles to God. And it kind of came came out of a uh a story I'd like to tell. Some of you know I moved to Virginia a few years ago and taught school in a little Mennonite community called Whythville, Virginia, for two years. And it was really difficult, it was hard, probably still the hardest thing I've ever done. Um, but I learned some really valuable lessons. I moved down there, I was 21 years old, and I thought I'm gonna take this thing by the horns, I'm gonna do this. I worked crazy hours and put my all into this, and I was not depending on God. I I forgot and I uh yeah, I I kind of felt self-confident. I thought if I just work hard enough, I can be a good teacher. I I had a good heart, I wanted to do my best for my students, so I I did my best, and it was about four or five months in when we started having some big problems. The uh students, I wasn't like their former teacher. Uh, they stuck some of them had some problems with rebellion, and I had a problem of not um communicating to them the way that their former teacher did. And so they started talking to their parents, and uh their parents uh weren't quite as uh defensive, but they they had some questions about me and my the way I was teaching. So I had I had uh a number of phone calls with them, and uh it just had had a hard time having good relationships with everyone. And one afternoon after a school day a school board member stopped by and um talked with me, and I had known there were some problems, but he explained uh in full detail what my students were telling their parents and what some of the parents were telling to him, and it was soul crushing, things were not going well. And I hadn't cried in probably 10 years, but that weekend I cried and cried and cried. It was so hard. And I learned my lesson that if you if you take some kind of a job on your own shoulders and you try to do it all by yourself, when you fail, you crash and burn. Sometime later, a a teacher told me, I was at a teacher's conference, he said that when you go to your classroom, look around at your students, and remember that these are not your students. They're gods. Look at your classroom, look at the walls, it's not your classroom. It's gods. And so that's that's the topic I'd like to um address this morning. I learned through that experience that I need to give it to God. And these two are not mutually exclusive exclusive. We can do and we can give things to God, we can give ownership of it to God and still be faithful. And there's a story in the Old Testament that demonstrates this so well. And I'd like to turn there, and we're gonna read this passage, turn to Second Chronicles twenty-off. This is in the King James Version. And it came to pass after this also that the children of Moab and the children of Ammon, and with them other beside the Ammonites, came against Jehoshaphat to battle. Then there came some that told Jehoshaphat, saying, There cometh a great multitude against thee from beyond the sea on this side Syria. And behold, they be in Hazazon Tamar, which is Engedi. And Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. And Judah gathered themselves together to ask help of the Lord, even out of all the cities of Judah, they came to seek the Lord. And Jehoshaphat stood in the congregation of Judah and Jerusalem and the house of the Lord before the new court. So they were surrounded by uh enemies of Israel, uh the Moabites, the Ammonites, people from Mount Seir, and these were groups of people that when when the Israelites had moved into the promised land, God told them, Don't uh eliminate these, don't kill these uh groups of people, because they were actually uh relatives distantly. They had been they were the descendants of Lot. So now um yeah, they're surrounded, and and Jehoshaphat is crying out to God, why you told us to not uh kill these people when we came into Israel. Now they're about to attack us. Uh we need help. Let's see, Myron, could I ask you to read all the words that Jehoshaphat said um from verse six on? All the words of Jehoshaphat. Well, is that yeah, yeah, from six through as long as Jehoshaphat is speaking.

SPEAKER_07: 7:14

And in that hand, is there enough more in the right for the fundamental are you happy to spend? And then you say one as a space for this house. In that name is this house here and house them here. Oh God. We have no idea to stream how to come up against us. Neither know we what we do from our eyes on the street before the Lord reverse ones the wise.

SPEAKER_00: 8:25

Then upon Jehaziel, the son of Zachariah, the son of Beniah, the son of Jeel, the son of Mataniah, a Levite of the sons of Asaph, came the Spirit of the Lord in the midst of the congregation. Mose, could I ask you to read the words of uh Jehaziel starting there in 15?

SPEAKER_09: 8:49

And he said, Oh children, happened to Jerusalem. Let's say it's the Lord to you. Not afraid of this man, or the reason of this great for the body that's not here's and you should find you to find yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 9:42

Thank you. And Jehoshaphat bowed his head with his face to the ground, and all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell before the Lord, worshipping the Lord. And the Levites of the children of the Kohathites, of the children of the Korhites, stood up to praise the Lord God of Israel with a loud voice on high. And they rose early in the morning and went forth into the wilderness of Tekoah. And as they went forth, Jehoshaphat stood and said, Hear me, O Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, believe ye in the Lord your God, so shall ye be established, believe his prophets, so shall ye prosper. And when he had consulted with the people, he appointed singers unto the Lord, and that should praise the beauty of holiness as they went out before the army, and to say, Praise the Lord, for his mercy endureth forever. And when they began to sing and to praise, the Lord set ambushments against the children of Amon, Moab, and Mount Seir, which were come against Judah, and they were smitten. For the children of Amon and Moab stood up against the inhabitants of Mount Seir, utterly to slay and destroy them. And when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Mount Seir, everyone helped to destroy another. And when Judah came toward the watchtower in the wilderness, they looked unto the multitude, and behold, there were dead bodies fallen to the earth, and none escaped. And when Jehoshaphat and his people came to take away the spoil of them, they found among them in abundance both riches with the dead bodies and precious jewels, which they stripped off for themselves, more than they could carry away. And they were three days in gathering of the spoil. It was so much. And we'll stop there. So amazing story of God's deliverance. But look at uh look at what they did. Well, let's first of all look at what this man named Jehaziel said. It says, The Spirit of God came upon him when they were all together, and he started prophesying. And the the key phrase for me is he says, For the battle is not yours, but God's. He said, We have to commit this battle to God's, uh, it's not our own. And you can imagine when he says, You shall not need to fight in this battle. Can you imagine if you're a soldier and you hear those words, you think, Oh, I have the day off tomorrow. I don't have to go fight after all. I don't have to risk my life. Uh, I get to stay at home with my family. But no, they still go out, um, probably dressed in their battle gear, but not to fight. They just go out to stand still. This is an example of someone who trusted in God. They knew they weren't gonna have to fight, um, they had committed this battle to God. The battle is not yours, but God's, it says. And yet they were obedient. They did. Going back to this uh diagram here, they weren't only doing, they weren't only giving it to God, they did both. And I'm gonna call this faithfulness. I believe faithfulness is when we give it to God, we take it off of our own shoulders, we give this thing to God, hand it over to Him, we don't have ownership of it anymore, but we also do. We're willing to do what it takes, we're willing to work hard, pour our energy into it. But you know what? If it fails, we're not gonna crash and burn like like we do when we're trying to do it on our own. God didn't redeem us uh because he needed workhorses. He was not getting a good deal when he died for us. Um yeah, we're meant to be more than than just people who do his work. He wants us ourselves. And what I've d what I've learned is when we are so focused on uh only doing and not committing our our thing, our battles to God, um, if it fails, uh we get discouraged, we get depressed, we get exhausted. And if this if this goes well, we become proud. It's a lose-lose situation when we try to do this by ourselves. Uh we need to commit it to God um and do. The other thing that could happen is if we would only give it to God and not do anything, nothing happens. We're also called to obedience and do, we have to do the things that God commands. This right here is the sweet spot where you and I want to be. I don't know what um what all your experiences have been, but I imagine there's many of you who had a crash and burn experience like I had in Virginia, where you tried to do it by yourself and not relying on God. And it's a hard lesson to learn, but it's a very worthwhile one. I don't know uh what what you all are are all involved in right now. Um but maybe at your job, think think to yourself, have you committed your job, uh taken it off your own shoulders and committed it to God, whatever your work is? Maybe it's your ministry, uh, your evangelism efforts. Have you are you being faithful? Are you doing? And have you committed it to God? Handed it over to Him. Uh parents, are you exhausted with taking care of your children? Commit that to God and do your best if you want to be faithful. I'd like to hear a little bit from you on can you identify with this? Which of these of these camps are you tempted to fall into the most? And why do we struggle with this? Uh I'll just open it for for thoughts.

SPEAKER_11: 16:14

I've learned uh what uh especially business for us when I give this guy to my special and I sort of make my and it's it's not easy to do sometimes, you know. Do it and sometimes it's harder to just be given up whatever. And there's uh key set now with that on first piece, but all of a sudden it's great.

SPEAKER_10: 17:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

Yeah, and in my experience, once I learned that hard lesson of committing my and the in that case it was my uh teaching, being a teacher, when I learned to commit that to God and still do my best, um, things started to go a lot better. And uh I felt I was a lot more um stable. Uh it was a lot more sustainable in the work I was involved in. Yeah, any other thoughts or comments?

SPEAKER_06: 17:37

I found that uh not committing it to God for me has been deeply deeply wounded. I think what I'm working with is in my trust I've got. Um I believe that I'm giving it to somebody to want to go to teach them something or I think it'll be hard.

SPEAKER_00: 18:49

Yeah, thanks for that. So uh if I'm understanding you right, you're saying that the uh the reason, part of the reason it's so easy to be in this camp is because we have a a bad view of God. We don't believe that he actually cares or is is intimately um interested in our world and and we fall in here. Yeah, that's that's good.

SPEAKER_02: 19:14

Anything else? I don't for me it's been difficult to give something up to, or maybe I should see it this way, it's easier for me to give something up to maybe somebody else that I can tangibly see than to give to God. I know he's there, I have a relationship with God, but I still can't physically and tangibly see him. And then the thing of giving up control that I know that if I give it to him, I'm also saying, okay, yeah, I'm letting go. I'm giving control to you. And that has been that has been difficult trust that something beautiful actually happened out of this. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 20:11

This is what the Lord is curse, and put their trust in me.

SPEAKER_00: 20:51

So good. So then if we're in here, we're like uh a parched plant in the desert or or something like that. Right in this zone, be here if you want to be like a a tree, a green tree that's constantly bearing fruit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: 21:10

So we're gonna have this conversation in the last two weeks, I would say. Yeah. But then we look in the future we can't really see what's happening. It's like we seem to have work in the world. Why is like they've weakened the future, like I know I can trust him, but it's so a lot of times what there's been the game and you know, trying to make it happen, you know, or something like that. Yeah. And we absolutely trust God. Yeah. Thanks, Dan.

SPEAKER_00: 22:22

Yeah, thanks for that. There's something inside of us that just wants to um try to do it on our own and and we lose sight of of God, and we we uh yeah, we trust more in ourselves than than in God many times. I I'm gonna share one more story. Uh talked to a man in uh Tajikistan. He had been it was uh most people in Tajikistan are Muslim, and uh he was as well until he was in his twenties, I think. Uh he was in prison for some kind of a crime. People came doing evangelism, and uh he repented. After he uh was out of prison, he started a children's ministry where they would go out to distant villages in the mountains of Tajikistan, and he would uh have like Bible lessons for the children, uh, have fun activities with them, uh, they'd have a snack, they'd um tell the children about the gospel, and then these these uh children would go home and start telling their parents, and then there, if there was enough interest, their the parents would have a Bible study with him, and then these Bible studies kind of turned into churches. And so there was all these little um villages out in the mountains where churches were being planted because of this man's work. And uh this man, he told me he he was feeling kind of good about himself. It was going so well, and he was he was starting to feel really kind of smug about how much he was doing to build God's kingdom. And then one night at his uh children's ministry, this this couple uh comes up to him and they they ask him, Hey, are you a Christian? And he says, Yeah. And they said, Um, we live way up, even further in the mountains where almost nobody else lives, and we became Christians and we wanted to come meet another Christian. So yeah, he was happy to meet them, and then he asked them, So, how did you find God uh up in the mountains where almost nobody else lives? And they said, We had a television, and we got some kind of a new antenna for our TV that we put up on the roof, and it gave us access to a bunch of new broadcasts uh on the TV that we couldn't watch before. And we started uh watching this one that was like a Christian um evangelism broadcast, some kind of a um TV preacher. And uh they were just moved by what they heard and saw uh over the TV about the gospel of Jesus. And through this broadcast, they also learned about baptism, and so they they felt convicted. They repented, and uh husband baptized wife, wife baptized her husband, and they they were happy to be believers, and they thought they were probably the only Christians in all of Tajikistan. They had no idea that there were any others, even until they heard about this one uh this one man who was had this children's ministry in a distant village, and so they hiked off the mountain and came to meet this man. And this man uh that was telling me this, he said he had been feeling so smug about himself, but he was just crushed when he heard this because he realized that God didn't need him to do this ministry. God can use a TV to reach people. And when we have this view that we are so needed, we're so uh God really needs us to to do the work. We're so wrong. God doesn't actually need us. Um and he said be the important thing he learned from from that whole experience is just be faithful. God doesn't actually need you to do the doing, um, but he he also wants he does want us to to work and to obey him um joyfully. And again, this is the zone where we want to be faithful to God, but also committing our battles, whatever temptation we're struggling with, uh, whatever is difficult in our life, commit it to God and be faithful. Marcus, do I turn it back to you? Okay.