Episode 190: July 21, 2024 - In The Middle

Eternity Church PodCast

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. As a child I loved to stare at the globe, to spin it as fast as I could and trace my finger across the continents. How many of us played that game, planning future trips to far off places? The sphere would slowly stop, and where our finger pointed, we would imagine our next adventure. How many of us spent a lot of time in the vast Pacific Ocean as a result! In the history of Pacific exploration, generations before Captain Cook weighed anchor or Vasco Núñez de Balboa set sail, Polynesian peoples were way-finding through the vast, seemingly endless ocean. These intrepid explorers flipped my childhood game into reality. Instead of envisioning the spinning orb of earth beneath their finger, these adventurers set their eyes toward the starry night. They set out, not coursing the pages of tanned maps, but following the constellations of the skies. Our lives in Christ can feel like both. For many of us who grew up in the Church, holding the Bible in one hand and our forming traditions in the other, we think we have an idea of how the world turns. We move along just fine through life until pain or suffering or the unknown dislodges us from our normal way of seeing the world. It’s at those times we need to lift our eyes from what we’ve known to a new way of seeing. This is what Job discovered as he wept his way through the unforeseen struggles that turned his life upside down. The knowledge and understanding which got him to that point in his life wasn’t the wisdom he needed to step into the future. In Job 35, Elihu carefully holds the contradictions plaguing Job’s view of God and offers him a new way forward. As we look forward to this weekend, gathering to celebrate the goodness of our God and the faithfulness of our King, may we take the time to hold each other’s stories well. May we ask the Spirit of God to guide us from the globe we know beneath our fingertips to the unsearchable vastness of His wisdom.