UNHINDERED | Don’t Quiet Quit Your Life
UNHINDERED | Don’t Quiet Quit Your Life
Speaker: Justin Gingrich
Sermon date: September 20, 2026
Scripture: Acts 6:5-15
Series: UNHINDERED
Sermon summary
What do you do when your life doesn’t seem to be going according to plan?
In Acts 6, Stephen is full of faith, grace, power, and the Holy Spirit. Everything appears to be moving forward until opposition rises and his life takes a turn he never would have chosen.
In this message from our UNHINDERED series, we look at how to live faithfully without needing to understand everything God is doing. Peace does not come from knowing exactly how your life will unfold. It comes from trusting that even the parts you would never choose are not beyond God’s ability to redeem.
Don’t quiet quit your life because it doesn’t look the way you thought it would.
Sermon transcript
Lightly edited from automatic captions for readability. Some transcription errors may remain; the recording is the authoritative version. Select a timestamp to open that moment on YouTube.
0:00 · Well, good morning again. If you haven’t met me, my name is Justin. I’m one of the pastors here, and we are in the middle of our series in Acts, Unhindered. And we’re calling this series Unhindered because when you look at the story of Acts, which is the story of the early church, it’s the story of the early Christians, you begin to see all these types of things happen like we see with Stephen happening this morning: setbacks, plans that are made and then change, confusion, discouragement. And yet, at the end of the story of the book of Acts, Luke will conclude with the word “unhindered.” After everything that they experience, Luke will summarize these early Christians and their walk with Jesus as unhindered.
And friends, church, this is what I want for us. I want us to live a life that is unhindered in the Spirit. I want us to live with this bold confidence in what God is doing, even when it doesn’t make sense to us, which I’m going to wager, for so many of us, may be most of the time in our spiritual lives.
And so what we’re going to look at this morning is a particular moment that is confusing. It is a moment when we expect to see God do something, and then something sort of the opposite happens. Okay? So we read the book of Acts, and sometimes we read Bible stories that we’re familiar with in a certain way because we understand how it ends. Okay? But what I want to challenge you to do this morning is to read this story as if you’re hearing this for the first time. Because the reality is, most of us live our life this way. We do not know how our life ends. We don’t know what comes tomorrow.
1:51 · And so, in the story that we read this morning, we’ll actually see this moment where we go, “God must be doing something beautiful here. Look, he’s appointed this guy, Stephen, who has real spiritual power, real spiritual authority.” And then, all of a sudden, Stephen is arrested. And so we start to see our life is going this way, and then, all of a sudden, there’s this almost hard 180 this way. It’s almost like, “I see what God is doing.” And then, all of a sudden, you go, “Wait, I don’t know if I see what God’s doing at all. I thought I understood what God was doing.” God appoints Stephen, but then, all of a sudden, Stephen’s in custody, and the narrative just changes quickly.
So the appointing of Stephen follows after the church realizes, “Hey, we have to start caring better for the widows in our community. We have to start caring better for the marginalized folks in our community, people who do not have the socioeconomic resources to live or sustain themselves well.” And so they start praying about it, and God sends Stephen. And so, all of a sudden, their life and what they think God is doing is very evident in the person of Stephen. He has great power. He’s holy. We see something about him and go, “I trust this.”
And so we would expect the very next part of this story to have some kind of narrative around how well Stephen does in the church, how big he grows the church, how much he does for the church, all that God is doing through Stephen for the church. And yet, all of a sudden, we get to Stephen being appointed in this role as a caretaker of the church, and he’s arrested.
3:33 · And so what I want to do this morning is ask you: When you think of God’s plan for your life, right, as you think of how your life unfolds, how do you relate to God’s plan? Do you receive what God does with your life gratefully or resentfully? Okay? Because the story that we’re in this morning is going to challenge this for us. But I want you to ask that question: Do I receive my life resentfully or gratefully? What do I need to happen in my life in order to receive it gratefully and not resentfully? And when God is doing something that I don’t understand, does it drive me towards agitation? Does it make me agitated? Does it make me anxious?
4:22 · Do I quiet quit my life? For those of you who are millennials and maybe Gen Zers, this term was kind of a buzzword a couple years ago, right? They did a survey: people are quiet quitting. And what they meant by quiet quitting their jobs was essentially they would go to work, but they’d realize, “You know, what I do doesn’t really make a difference here. What I want isn’t going to happen here. I’m not appreciated here. None of this is really playing out the way that I want. But I need a job, so I’m going to quiet quit,” which is sort of this: “I’m just going to go through the motions. I’m going to do what I need to do until I get to clock out at five. Then I’m going to get up at eight, and I’m going to do it again.”
But the reality is, as a pastor, I think a lot of us quiet quit our lives. In fact, as I pray about us as a church, as I pray through the series on Unhindered, as I pray what the next season of Restore looks like, this is something that comes back and back and back again to my heart. I am convinced, as a pastor, many of us even here in this room have quiet quit on life. We’re like, “I’m going to do what I need to do to coast. I’m going to do what I need to get by. But my heart to see God move, my heart to see God change the world, my heart to contribute to that, to be a part of that, is just... I’ve quit kind of doing what I need to do to survive.” And friends, as your pastor, that’s not what I want for us as a church. That’s not what I want for you. I don’t want us to get to midlife... And I see this even in my own heart happening, where I’m like, “I’m just going to kind of coast.”
I’ve had seasons in ministry where I’ve done this, and we usually do it because we feel ineffective, or we do it because we don’t understand what God is doing in our life or doing in the world, and we start to feel a sense of helplessness over it. We start to feel a sense of, “I just don’t think I’m going to really make any difference here, and kind of what I hoped would happen in my life hasn’t really played out. So I’m going to do what I need to do to survive, to sustain, and then I’m just going to kind of clock in in the morning. I’m going to clock out at night, and this is how my life’s going to go.”
And friends, what I want for us, what I want for us as a church, is more than that. I want us to wake up every day with an eager anticipation of what God is doing. I want us to long for it, to yearn for it, to pray for it, to hope for it. I don’t want us to become complacent. I don’t want us to look at our life and go, “I don’t know. I’m just kind of doing what I’m doing.”
I want us to wake up with what I call an eager hope every day that God is bringing his kingdom. Regardless of our political situations, regardless of the economic situations, regardless of our family situations, regardless of our relationship situations, God is bringing his kingdom. He is breaking in through the power of his Holy Spirit to redeem, to restore, to transform, and to change, and to heal. And what I want for us as a church is to wake up in the morning hopeful of this.
But I think a lot of us, if you’re like me, don’t know how to do that,
7:28 · especially when the plans for our life stop making sense to us. Okay? So when we think of God’s plan for your life, I think we have two ways to relate to it. When we think of what God’s doing in my life, when I think of, “How do I understand God’s plan for my life?” I think we have two ways to relate to it. One, I think we try to understand it. And I’ll talk about why I think this is actually dangerous spiritually, why it doesn’t do for us what we think it will do. We can either understand God’s plan for our life, or we can learn how to receive it.
And I think this is exactly what begins to happen in the book of Acts. The church right here could go, “This is not what we had planned for Stephen.” Stephen can go, “This is not what I signed up for, where they appointed me to care for orphans.” Now, some of you know this story. Spoiler alert: this is a three-chapter series on Stephen being falsely accused and then eventually dragged out into the street and killed. And yet, this moment in Stephen’s life, where I doubt he anticipated this coming, he’s like, “I’m signing up to help orphans here, and this is where I am.” The church is going, “We appointed Stephen to help care for the sick and the vulnerable in our community, and look what has happened.” And yet we’ll find that God’s Spirit continues to move and that Stephen himself, his spirit stays unhindered.
And even on the cusp of this terrible thing happening in Stephen’s life, we actually begin to see God’s Spirit move. And this is what I want for us. I want us to stay anchored like Stephen does. I want us, even when life is throwing these unanticipated things on us and we go, “I don’t understand how to do this,” I want our souls to have an anchored peace that is not disrupted when we do not understand God’s plan.
And again, this is why I’m asking you, as we read this story: a lot of us kind of know how the story ends. I mean, I told you how the story ends. The story ends with the word “unhindered,” but I want us to stop doing that for a second and put ourselves in the shoes of the church in this moment. Because if we can do that, I think we’ll relate to how our lives play out.
And so, when we think of God’s plan, God’s plan for our life, God’s will for our life, however you want to phrase it, what God is doing in our life, I think we have two ways to relate to it. The first is what I think is common for us, even instinctual for us, which is to understand it. “If I can understand what God is doing, I’ll have so much less anxiety. I’ll have so much less fear. I’d have so much more trust if my life and the events in it play out in a way that makes sense to me cognitively. Then I could understand, and I could rest. I could sleep at night.”
But this, friends, is not what we are called to do when it comes to God’s plan in our life. We are called to learn to receive it, not understand it. And here’s what I mean by this. Okay? So let me talk a little bit about trying to understand it, which is where we tend to go. And look, there’s a theological library here in Houston I study at sometimes. If you go to the section on God’s will, like God’s plan, it’s massive. It’s stacked, you know, this bookshelf this high, it’s 20 feet long. Our tendency, our instinct, is to try and understand what God is doing in the world, whether it’s suffering in our own life, it’s suffering around us. We want to understand how God is moving, how God is working.
10:49 · And friends, I think there’s actually real spiritual danger in this. And I’ll talk a little bit about this. But when we try to understand God’s plan, here’s what we do instinctually. Here’s what we do. I think all of us do this. I do this. We divide God’s plan for our life up into two: into good things, things that we are grateful for or sometimes what we call blessings, and then bad things. These are things that we try to forget or avoid or explain.
And what happens when we do this, when we start splitting our life up into good and bad, is we actually lose the ability to see God at work in every area of our life. We start to trust him with the good stuff. But when the bad stuff, as we label it, comes our way, as this does with Stephen, as the unanticipated stuff, as the painful stuff comes our way, we start to lose our ability to see God at work in all of our life. And this puts us in a very spiritually anxious place.
And I think our desire to understand God’s will for our life or God’s plan for our life is rooted in our desire to control our life, which is understandable. This is not a shaming sermon, like, “How dare...” But nevertheless, most of us have a strong desire, understandably, to control our life, to anticipate the bad, to prepare for it, to avoid it or protect ourselves from it, and to embrace and encourage as much good as we can. We want to be able to control our lives.
But here’s the thing. I think as long as we want to control our lives by trying to understand all that God is doing so we can anticipate it, get on board with it, I think we get concentrated; we focus too narrowly on the means, on the middle, on what God is doing in the moment, and we lose sight of the end. I think this is what could very well happen for Stephen here. He could go, “Wait a second. I was brought in for this. Now I am here. God’s no longer doing anything. This is not according to God’s plan.” Or he can remember this, what we’ll see in the story: that all of this, his story, the church’s story, is about God moving his kingdom of restoration forward. And this is going to happen regardless of whatever circumstance Stephen finds himself in.
13:17 · And the reason I think we ought to be very careful about how we try to understand or use God’s will in our life is I think we think of God’s will for our life like an investment decision. Okay? Like, we want to be able to do what we can to make good on our investment. But here’s the problem with this. If we think of God’s will as an investment, “If I can find a way to be a part of what he’s doing and avoid some of this,” we become very anxious. We become very preoccupied with God’s plan for our life and that it serves us in some kind of way. It has to make sense to us. And what I want to propose this morning is that what we’re doing in this is we’re trying to alleviate our fears. We’re trying to anticipate what’s going to happen to us so that we’re not so afraid all the time.
But like investments, some of you know this. If you make an investment, what are you doing? You’re constantly watching to see what the market’s doing. You’re constantly vigilant. You’re constantly vigilant about protecting your gains and avoiding loss. And if we start to see God’s will for our life like this... And friends, our Christian faith, our Christianity, is ripe with this. There’s all kinds of language about, “How do I act out God’s will for my life?” Some of the violence that we see politically, underneath that is this undertone of, “You’ve got to get on board with what God is doing in this country,” right? And that’s the same kind of sentiment: “There’s God’s will, and if you don’t get on board, you’re going to end up at a loss.”
And what Acts invites us to do is to begin to trust that, all of our life, God is present. In all that we receive and all that happens, God is there moving and redeeming and bringing about his good purposes. Because here’s the problem with investments. The more and more you make, the more and more you worry about losing. I mean, is that not true? Like, the more and more that you have, the better your investments make, the more, on the other side, you’re anxious about losing what you’ve acquired. And so, if we start to see God’s will for our life as these pluses and these minuses, we’re going to start worrying about losing pluses. And “pluses,” I don’t know how you say that. I’m struggling with grammar here. “Are sort worried about the plus a and gaining too much of the negative.” And so we start to think of God’s plan for our life as: we hope that, at the end of all of this, we collect more good memories than bad ones.
And our life has to make sense to us in order for that to happen. When that happens, our life has to have visual confirmation of its success or of its progress. And so there are things in our life that we quickly ascribe, “This is God’s blessing or God’s goodness to me.” And then there are other things in our life that we quickly call into question whether God cares at all about, whether God is present at all in.
16:31 · And what Acts is inviting us to do is to trust and let God open into every part of our life. Because the truth is, I think we’re actually all a little afraid of God. And so we kind of fence our life in, and we tell God where he can come in, right? Where the entrance is. And very often, I think we’ve set perimeters about where and how God can act and what God can do. And as long as those perimeters are met, as long as he enters in through these ways, we feel safe. Our life feels understandable to us. And the reality is, all throughout the book of Acts, almost never do people’s plans work out the way they anticipated.
And so, when I go back to that question I asked you earlier, when you talk about, “How do I receive my life? Do I receive it gratefully or resentfully?” Friends, this is the crux right here. This is the crux of the spiritual battle that I think all of us face. Am I going to be able to receive my life with gratitude wherever I find myself, whatever unanticipated circumstances I find myself in? Can I see even these circumstances not as a loss but as an opportunity to encounter the goodness of God, to sing unhindered of the goodness of God? Can I see these not as opportunities lost but as opportunities gained to encounter the living God and the crucified Christ and what he is doing in the world?
So here’s what we have to do. Instead of trying to understand God’s will, because, look, honestly, in that way lies madness. Look, as someone who has been in seminary, who spends enormous amounts of time reading, if you want to check out books on how to understand God’s will for your life, you will never run out of books. You’ll never stop reading, right? And so, for us to have a sense of joy in our life, of gratitude in our life, to not quiet quit our lives, it has to be more than just an intellectual understanding, because smarter people than me, with way more degrees than me, have tried and tried and tried for centuries to explain these things. And I think we end up always back where we started. And where we started is: Am I going to be able to receive my life with gratitude, or will my heart become resentful or bitter or afraid or anxious? Will I quiet quit my life? Or can I wake up every day in anticipation of what God is doing, of the healing that he is bringing about, of the kingdom that is breaking in?
19:14 · And so this is why the word I want to use here to invite us to think about is “hopeful willingness.” Willingness. Can I wake up every day in my life with a hopeful willingness? Okay. So I want to clarify something quickly here: a hopeful willingness to approach life, whatever life brings, does not mean I endorse everything that happens to me. It does not mean that I embrace everything that happens to me. It does not mean that I embrace these wounds that I carry and just go, “Well, it’s all okay.” It doesn’t mean that I endorse the ways that I’ve been treated. It doesn’t mean that I embrace injustice. It doesn’t mean that I just accept all of the pain as a good thing. That’s not what hopeful willingness is.
What hopeful willingness is, is a longing. It is a hope that God’s Spirit will allow us to flourish in light of all of the incompleteness that is our life. That God’s Spirit will move powerfully and redemptively even when every section of our life feels complete. Even when the world feels as incomplete as it is. What hopeful willingness is, is not an endorsement of the pain. It is that even in the midst of that pain, I know that God is present and moving and redeeming and restoring and transforming. This is what the story of Stephen tells us.
Stephen is arrested. And as we’ll see over these next chapters, these are the moments in which God actually begins to grow his church despite the setback. This moment that Stephen is dragged before these people isn’t the moment that breaks his spirit. It’s the moment in which his spirit becomes most alive. The text will say his face is radiant like that of an angel. This is the moment in which, in these unanticipated plans, Stephen’s own heart and his own soul most reflect the values of heaven and the kingdom of heaven and the goodness of God. Stephen’s face becomes like that of an angel.
21:30 · And so, when we do this, here’s a couple of things that happen for us. One, the world’s fickle promises lose their hold on us. Okay? So every single one of us has our hope anchored somewhere. But as we learn to receive all that life is, as God is moving, those fickle, shallow promises that gave us inspiration, that made us feel a sense of purpose, those ones that do not hold up in the light of all that God is, in the light of the crucifixion and the cross, they start to lose their damaging hold over our souls. They actually start to lose the false security that they give us. Okay? So one, as we learn to trust God’s Spirit and all that it is, we start to lose the world’s fickle promise. Two, here’s what happens: we begin to receive more than we could ever do on our own.
22:27 · When we stop grasping, when we stop thinking of our life as an investment, we begin to receive far more than we can anticipate or ask because we are trusting the work of God’s Spirit in our life. Which means that we can begin, listen, friends, you can begin to dream of a life that is possible that is way beyond your own resources to bring about. You can begin to dream of a life that is far beyond your own resources that you can provide to bring it about. And how much anxiety and fear in our life occurs because we look at the resources we have, whether they’re financial, whether they’re personal, whether they’re aptitude, we look at the resources we have and go, “I don’t have enough to bring about the rest that my soul longs for.” What trusting the Spirit does in this kind of area is it allows us to go, “I can dream of a life, the deepest longings of my heart, the deep rest that my soul desires,” right? The deepest longings in my heart, I can trust that God is working to bring them about. And I no longer have to feel the limitation and the anxiety that comes with that limitation around my own resources, about what I think I need to contribute in order to get there.
23:47 · It allows us to begin to trust a power that will work through us without us knowing it. You see this? It allows us to begin to trust God’s power that will work through us when oftentimes we’re unaware of that power. And this, friends, is where most of our spiritual anxiety comes from. If we don’t see what God is doing, then we’re worried he’s doing anything at all. And what the surrender does, of receiving our life as God brings it about, trusting his Spirit in each place, is that we are able to trust that his power is working without us being aware of it. This means that God is never sleeping. This means that, for you, there is no point in which God looks at your life and goes, “I could have been more involved there, and I wasn’t. Sorry.” There is no point in your life, if we will trust this promise, there is no point in your life when you stand before God someday, whatever it is that you have faced, at which you will look at that and go, “God was not as good to me as he could have been. God’s goodness somehow just came up just a little bit short there.” And this reorients our entire spirit and our entire soul to approach our life with a bold unhindrance, a hopeful anticipation, an eager hope that, even as God works, we don’t have to see it, trust it. And that as he moves and as he redeems and as he restores, he will work through a power that we do not even have to be aware of, but nevertheless, we can never lose.
25:30 · This allows us to begin to see our pains not as distractions to God’s will for our life, but as places at which God is making our hearts ready to receive him. And I think this is exactly what our hearts need: a place where we can go, “No matter what it is that I face, this is a moment in which I encounter the crucified and risen Jesus.” I think this is the only way that you protect your heart against quiet quitting on your life, in your heart, on your dreams. Psalm 39, verses 9–12, the psalmist says this:
“What is gained if I am silent, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. You have turned my mourning into dancing. You have removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing of your praise and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever.”
Do you see what the psalmist is saying here? What good is it if I’m quiet? And yet most of us, I think, carry a heavy weight on our hearts and on our souls with the circumstances of our life that makes our souls quiet, that makes them scared, makes them anxious, makes them timid. And what the psalmist is saying is, “What good is it if I’m quiet? Lord, be merciful to me and turn my mourning into dancing.” And this is what the story of Acts does. It’s what Stephen does. Stephen’s trouble that he runs into becomes dancing. It becomes this moment in which the beauty and the glory of God and all that God is doing is evident in his life.
And God begins to do something through Stephen. And so here’s what I want to do as we talk about, when I think of God’s will for my life: Do I try to understand it, or do I learn how to receive it with gratitude, to trust it? Here’s what we’re learning to do. We’re learning what the psalmist does. I’m learning to turn my mourning into dancing. I’m learning to turn the things that discourage my heart the most, the things that I have always felt defeated by the most in my life. I’m learning to turn those moments of mourning into dancing through the work of God’s Spirit. And what we begin to see is that both mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace. This is what Stephen does. This unanticipated life that he now finds himself face to face with becomes this moment in which he is radiant with the goodness of God. And as we’ll see later, we’re just starting this story, God will move and bring more and more people to himself through what Stephen does here.
And so, when we see our life this way, every moment of our life becomes a reason to believe that nothing will separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. These are Paul’s words: “I am convinced that neither height nor depth nor anything else nor all of creation can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ.” And so the cross invites us to see grace where there is pain. The cross invites us to see resurrection where we might only see death. And every moment of our life, whether we’ve anticipated it or not, whether we wanted it or not, can become a moment to be claimed through the way of the cross to a new life in Christ.
29:13 · This is the way of Jesus. So you may not know this, but over 65 times, when you think of God’s will for Jesus’s life, over 65 times in your New Testament, 65 exactly, I should say, depending on how you want to translate some of the words, the words used to describe God’s will for Jesus’s life are “handed over.” Jesus is handed over. Not that Jesus never experienced difficulty. Not that everything that happened in Jesus’s life was anticipated or wanted, as we know this: “Father, pass this cup for me. There’s any other way.” Rather, what we actually see is “handed over” is the way that the Scriptures describe God’s plan for Jesus’s life. Let me just read you three of the 65.
This is in Luke 18:32–33: “He will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, and spit on him, and they will flog him and kill him. But on the third day, he will rise again.” He is handed over, but there is resurrection. We see resurrection where we only saw death before.
First Peter, this is Peter speaking here, in 23: “When they hurled insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.” In all of this handing over, what Jesus does is entrust his soul to the one who is just. And then again, 2 Corinthians 4:11: “For we who are alive are being given over to death.” There’s the word again, “given over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal bodies.”
30:59 · And so, as we get ready to close and as I invite the band to come back up for this morning, what I want us to do is begin to see every chapter of our life, even the unanticipated ones, the unreconciled relationships that we have, the political or economic situations around us that feel so far out of our control and sometimes so unjust; to see the struggles that we’ve carried that we kind of thought we’d be able to put in their place by now in our life, but they’ve somehow followed us here; to see every moment of our life as an opportunity to know the goodness of God. Just as Jesus was handed over, in his handing over, he entrusts himself to the one who is orchestrating all things to the first and to the last.
And friends, what this will do for us, I’m convinced this will do for us, is it’ll give us freedom and peace to trust, to no longer evaluate our life based on the circumstances, to no longer evaluate our life on whether they make sense to us or not, but to wake up every morning with this hopeful anticipation that God’s Spirit is moving in your life, even in the places that seem the least obvious to you or the most damaged to you or the least hopeful to you. We can see these moments as spaces in which God’s Spirit is bringing resurrection where we saw only death.
As I invite Genevieve to come up and pray for us, what we’ve been doing is we’ve been praying through Hannah’s prayer. Hannah is the mother of the first prophet in your Scriptures. That’s Samuel. Samuel is the very first prophet in Israel who anoints King David. As we know, King David’s line leads to who? Jesus. Jesus is in the line of King David. Hannah begins this long process in which she invites God’s Spirit to come and redeem and restore, even when the circumstances around her seem very, very bleak and despairing and even hopeless. Hannah prays, “God, would your Spirit come and move?” And little does she know that, when she prays that prayer, she would start this long story that would lead to Jesus. And this is the story of our lives, friends. Every little moment. That’s what I love about the book of Acts, is these little tiny moments of faithfulness become this grand story that leads to Jesus. This is what I want for our lives. This is what I want for each of us here.
33:56 · Let me close with this quote by “Henry Nan”, who wrote a book on this psalm. His book was called Turn My Morning into Dancing. Some of you know “Nwan’s” story. He was a Catholic priest who struggled his whole life with a deep sense of loneliness. None of his relationships had played out the way that he’d hoped. There’s this story of him speaking. He was a popular author and speaker, but there was a story of him at one of his big speaking events. He was feeling so alone. He asks basically the stagehand to just hold him. He said, “Could you just hold me for a minute before I go out and speak?” And what he wrote, as someone who struggled his whole life with a deep sense of loneliness, his life played out sometimes in ways he didn’t anticipate or see, he wrote this:
“It is the life of the divine spirit within us. Become aware of this mystery presence, and life turns around. You sense joy even as others nurse complaints. You experience peace while the world conspires in war. And you find hope even when headlines broadcast despair. You discover a deep love even while the air around you seems pervaded by hatred.
“No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be 10 or 20 years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love.”
Let’s pray Hannah’s prayer together.
35:44 · Hi, guys. In 1 Samuel 2:6–8, Hannah prayed, “The Lord brings death and makes alive. He brings down to the grave and raises up. The Lord sends poverty and wealth. He humbles and he exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap. He seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.” So too do we pray now.
God, you are not confined by the circumstances we can see. You bring life where we see endings. You raise what has been brought low. You lift people from places they thought would define them forever. You are at work in ways we cannot predict, control, or fully understand. So loosen our grip on the life we thought we had to have. When one road closes, keep us open to the one that you are still making. When we are brought low, remind us that low places are not beyond your reach. When our plans fall apart, keep us from believing that your work has stopped. Teach us to trust that you are still moving, still raising, still restoring, still bringing life where we could only see loss. Give us faith to receive the life in front of us because you are already there. Amen.
37:21 · As we move into the next part of our worship service, we’re going to take an offering. This is a spiritual rhythm at Restore that we practice. This is an opportunity to give to God what he has given to us. In the very end of your Bible, in Revelation, Christians are depicted as this fruit that grows beside this river of life that flows out from the kingdom of God. And what the imagery shows us is that that which God gives us becomes fruit and life for the nations. And so this is an opportunity to do that. Everything that you give here goes to supporting the ministry at Restore, our ministries and all that we do. If you don’t have cash on you, you can scan that QR code. Regardless of who you are, wherever you are, don’t see this as an obligation. If you’re not able to give right now, feel free to pass the basket along. There is no obligation to give. But if Restore is your church home, if this is a place or community that’s impacted you, we ask that you would consider being a part of the ministry here and feeding it and helping it flourish. With that being said, we’re going to go into our final set of worship. Let’s continue to worship God this morning.
