Experience

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well, welcome. It's good to have you here today. We are in our last of the series called Shape. And how we started this series off is kind of how we're ending it, that you are a piece of work. You are God's piece of work, that you are God's workmanship. So the Ephesians chapter 2 says you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. But that word workmanship there is an amazing Greek word that is used by Paul only twice in the entire New Testament. And that word is poiema, where we get the word poem. So you're not just any piece of work. You are God's poetry. You are God's display of his glory and goodness in the story of your lives, in all the ups and downs, all the positives and negatives and everything else that's going on in your life. You are God's poetry. And so we went through five weeks prior to this one on what that all means. And SHAPE itself is an acronym. That is, each letter of SHAPE stands for one of the weeks that we went through. So we went through the first or the five weeks ago SHAPE, S for spiritual gifts, then H for heart, then A for abilities, then P last week for personality, that God uses you and has a personal relationship with you and uses you for his glory in just the uniqueness of who you are. And today we're going to look at E for experience. And I like what Oscar Wilde said. He said this experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. Isn't that true? Yeah. Boy, do I have a lot of experiences. But before we get into our mistakes, I want to talk about the fact that we're excited today. We're launching right now media, which is kind of the Netflix of Christian media in general. There's over 10,000 different 10,000 different videos for children, for adults, for families, for finance, for discipleship, for evangelism. And if we have your email and some of you, we might not have your email. OK, I know it takes email instead of cell phone, cell phone numbers. We will get you on this for free and you can download it to your smartphone, your tablet, your laptop, your smart TV in one form or another. And it's fascinating. So there's like hundreds and hundreds of children's videos, music, all this stuff available to you. And even as we speak, the email went out this morning. So you might even want to look it up and I don't mind if you use your phone in the service to look it up and find out if you're on it. But if you're on it and if you're not, let me know. We'll add you to it. So that's exciting. Today, though, we're getting back to E for experience. How do you experience God? How do you in all of your experiences, how is God involved in them? Is he close to you only in those mountaintop experiences, which we don't have too many mountaintops in South Florida, do we? Is he only in the sunsets and the beauty and the glory and the fun and the excitement? And I'm glad I have those experiences. I'm glad I've had those times where it's like, wow, this is amazing. God, you are so good. But what about all the majority of my time isn't mountaintop experiences. The majority of my time is just mundane, routine, everyday kind of tedium. Is God involved in that? And what about then the other extreme of is God involved in all the difficult times in life? Is God involved in all the stuff that's even more tough to go through? Where do I get to experience and also learn? And how is God involved in my experiences? And I dare say this is going to be the teaching for today. This is the main teaching for today, that God uses your tough experiences to draw you closer to him and conform your character to Christ. So we're going to be going through a psalm, Psalm 107. You might want to look it up or look to the Bible app where we have all the study guides to this. Psalm 107 is a long psalm. But in the whole psalm, 43 verses, actually, it kind of goes through four different case studies, four different situations where God was at work in the lives of his people. And it ends with this verse, whoever is wise, let him attend to these things. Let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord. So we learn about that steadfast love. The beginning of the psalm starts out much the same. Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. And so we're going to learn how does his steadfast love run through what I would say some tough times in life. And so there are four different case studies, four different situations the psalmist brings up. And what do we learn from that? These four examples are that people were walking in the middle of a desert, hungry and looking to find a place to dwell in. They also were then went down to the sea in ships or doing business in a great storm, took them over. Then there were also people sitting in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and irons. And finally, people who were fools through ...