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Max Lucado – Here Be God: Trusting Him When You Don’t Know What Lies Ahead · Max Lucado Daily Sermons

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Max Locato here. God bless you. God bless
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: your day. God give you strength. May God lift you
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  Speaker 1: up wherever you are, whatever you're facing, however weary you are,
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  Speaker 1: whatever questions you may have. May the goodness of God
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  Speaker 1: find you. May he lift you up. I want to
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: talk to you for just a moment about how Jesus
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  Speaker 1: modeled facing a difficult season. I believe that what He
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  Speaker 1: models for us can be a key in giving us
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  Speaker 1: strength to move forward. This may not appeal to you.
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  Speaker 1: You may have no interest in hearing what I need
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  Speaker 1: to say. You may have stumbled across this video by accident.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: So I just give you a heads up so that
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  Speaker 1: you'll know you can turn it off with my blessing.
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  Speaker 1: Go in grace. Go knowing you are prayed for and
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  Speaker 1: thought of. Because every person who posts a prayer request
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  Speaker 1: on this A webpage is prayed for. We really try
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: to pray over all of these many, many requests. And
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  Speaker 1: if you want to talk for just a minute about
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  Speaker 1: how Christ faced the most difficult challenge of his life,
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  Speaker 1: I think I have a word or two that might
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  Speaker 1: lift your spirit. Remember, when Christ endured the Friday of
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  Speaker 1: suffering on the first Good Friday, it was made good
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  Speaker 1: by the way he handled it. How do you handle
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  Speaker 1: a day in which everybody turns against you? How do
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  Speaker 1: you handle a day in which your own countrymen falsely
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  Speaker 1: accuse you? How do you handle a moment in which
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  Speaker 1: you take on the coronavirus of the soul, the sin
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  Speaker 1: of mankind? How do you face that? How do you
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  Speaker 1: pay the price for humanity while hanging on the cross? Well,
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  Speaker 1: the Bible says, for the joy set before him, Jesus
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  Speaker 1: endured the cross. For the joy set before him, Jesus
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  Speaker 1: endured the cross. Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 2. Jesus
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  Speaker 1: was able to look into the future, look into heaven,
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  Speaker 1: look at the next season, look at life after the resurrection.
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  Speaker 1: He was able to anticipate what was to come. He
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  Speaker 1: set his heart on heaven. And the larger heaven grew,
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  Speaker 1: the smaller his problems became. Out of curiosity, I went
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  Speaker 1: through and tallied up the number of times that Jesus
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  Speaker 1: spoke on that fateful Friday. If my math is correct,
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  Speaker 1: he spoke 13 times. Of those occasions, 10 times he
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  Speaker 1: spoke either to God or about God. He used phrases like,
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  Speaker 1: my kingdom is not of this world. The son of
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  Speaker 1: man will be seated at the right hand of the
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  Speaker 1: mighty God. Even hanging on the cross, he was talking
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  Speaker 1: to God or talking about God. When he said, Father,
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  Speaker 1: forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.
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  Speaker 1: To the thief on the cross, today you'll be with
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  Speaker 1: me in paradise. Even his final prayer, Father, into your
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  Speaker 1: hands I commit my spirit. So 10 out of 13 times,
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  Speaker 1: he spoke 13 times. Of those occasions, 10 were directed
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  Speaker 1: either to God or spoken about God. That's about 80%, right? Close.
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  Speaker 1: I'm not that great at math, but somewhere in there.
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  Speaker 1: If someone were to do the math on this difficult
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  Speaker 1: Friday in your life, could the same be said about you?
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  Speaker 1: The Apostle Paul said this. He said, we don't look.
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  Speaker 1: We don't look at the troubles we can see now,
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  Speaker 1: but rather we fix our gaze on things that cannot
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  Speaker 1: be seen. He said, we don't look. In other words,
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  Speaker 1: we don't focus. We don't focus. on the troubles around us,
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  Speaker 1: but instead we fix our gaze on things we cannot see.
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  Speaker 1: He was lifting his eyes up and he was looking
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  Speaker 1: toward heaven. My friend, never to minimize what you're going through. Never, never.
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  Speaker 1: I would never want to do that. But I would
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  Speaker 1: want to maximize what awaits you. I would want to
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  Speaker 1: maximize the things you cannot see. The love of God,
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  Speaker 1: the commitment of God, the sacrifice of Christ. the power
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  Speaker 1: of the Holy Spirit to get you through this, the
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  Speaker 1: promise of heaven. I would urge you to, and I
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  Speaker 1: would urge myself, let's open our eyes to the things
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  Speaker 1: yet unseen. Let's find reason to be gratitude. Recently in
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  Speaker 1: an article that made some circulation, I told about one
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  Speaker 1: of the most fascinating conversations I've had in my entire life.
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  Speaker 1: And I've had some pretty interesting ones. This one was
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  Speaker 1: with General Robbie Reisner, a genuine American hero. For seven
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  Speaker 1: and a half years, the North Vietnamese soldiers held him
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  Speaker 1: and dozens of other soldiers in a POW camp in Hanoi.
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  Speaker 1: It was called the zoo. Misery became standard issue. There
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  Speaker 1: was solitary confinement. There was starvation. There were tortures. There
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  Speaker 1: were beatings. Here's how Reisner described it. He said, everything
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  Speaker 1: was sad and dismal. It was almost the essence of despair.
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  Speaker 1: If you could have squeezed the feeling out of the
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  Speaker 1: word despair, it would have come out gray, dull, lead-colored, dingy,
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  Speaker 1: and dirty. That's how he described those seven and a
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  Speaker 1: half years. So how did he survive? Cut off from
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  Speaker 1: the family and no news from the U.S. What do
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  Speaker 1: you do? Well, here's what Reisner did. He stared at
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  Speaker 1: a blade of grass. And several days into his incarceration,
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  Speaker 1: he realized that the grate on the floor that was
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  Speaker 1: connected to a floor vent could be pried loose. And
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  Speaker 1: he pried it loose, and he stuck his head down,
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  Speaker 1: and he craned his neck in a certain direction. And
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  Speaker 1: in between the brick and mortar, through a pencil-sized hole,
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  Speaker 1: he could see a solitary blade of grass. And he
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  Speaker 1: focused on that blade of grass. He called that a
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  Speaker 1: blood transfusion for the soul. You don't have to go
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  Speaker 1: to Hanoi to experience your version of misery and challenge.
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  Speaker 1: But I would encourage you to learn a lesson from
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  Speaker 1: General Reisner. I would encourage you to follow the example
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  Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ. I would encourage you and encourage me.
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  Speaker 1: Let's look at that which can give us life. If
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  Speaker 1: we only focus on our troubles, we're going to be troubled.
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  Speaker 1: But if we focus on that which gives hope, We
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  Speaker 1: will find hope. You know, when ancient sailors sketched maps
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  Speaker 1: of the unknown world, they would disclose their fears. We
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  Speaker 1: know this because these maps exist to this day. And
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  Speaker 1: over those uncharted waters that no one had explored, they
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  Speaker 1: assumed the worst. And phrases like this would appear. Here
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  Speaker 1: be dragons, here be demons, here be sirens. As we
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  Speaker 1: look out over this unknown journey, these uncharted waters in
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  Speaker 1: which we find ourselves, we were tempted to say there's
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  Speaker 1: dragons and demons and sirens. And if you feel like
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  Speaker 1: that's a description of your world, learn a lesson from
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  Speaker 1: the courage of of Sir John Franklin. He was a
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  Speaker 1: master mariner in the days of King Henry V. Distant
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  Speaker 1: waters were a mystery to him as well. But he
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  Speaker 1: was also a man of faith. Unlike his colleagues, he
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  Speaker 1: believed that God was sovereign over every square inch of
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  Speaker 1: the universe. And the maps that passed through his possession
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  Speaker 1: came to bear the imprimatur of trust. On them He
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  Speaker 1: crossed out those phrases that said. Here be dragons. Here
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  Speaker 1: be demons. Here be sirens. And in place he wrote.
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  Speaker 1: Here be God. Here be God. Here be God. Mark
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  Speaker 1: it down friend. You're never going to go where God
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  Speaker 1: is not. You're never going to go where God is not.
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  Speaker 1: I don't know where we will be taken. Over the
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  Speaker 1: next days. Weeks and months. But we're not going anywhere.
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  Speaker 1: that God is not. Wherever this journey takes us, we
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  Speaker 1: can say this, here be God, here be God, here
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  Speaker 1: be God.