I Decided to Stop

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. Our text today is actually from Exodus chapter 18. It's kind of a short verse. But it's going to be focusing, last week we focused on Daniel, this week we're going to look at a little on Moses. And we're in this series, My Story, and today I decided to stop. Okay? To stop. Some of us are just too busy. Moses is one. Exodus 18, 17-29, Moses' father-in-law replied, What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you. You cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me, and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. So, to catch you up, this is our second in the series. It's a four-week series. In the middle of the four weeks, Father's Day falls, and Guy Lombardo, while I'm on vacation, will be preaching and tying in my story to Father's Day, and to the fact that we are, in Ephesians 2 verse 10, created in Christ Jesus as a masterpiece to do good works. So, he'll be focusing on that, and the four decisions that we were talking about last week, I decided to start. This week, I decided to stop. The next week, I decided to stay, and then I decided to go. We'll talk about those and make those changes in our lives. So, to catch you up, everyone has a story, and there are parts of our lives that we love to share with others. Let me tell you the time when, and you can probably fill that in, right? Let me tell you about the time when this funny thing happened to me, or this event happened, or I was able to go, or I did, or this. And so, those are the fun times that we get to share, and some of us can share a lot about how God worked in our lives. But there are other parts of our stories, at least I know for myself, I don't really want to share with anybody, because I wish they wouldn't have happened in the first place, and if there was some way I could kind of rip out those pages from the book, I would do that, or maybe a whole chapter, or two. You know how it goes. And yet, this is the good news that we have in our God. The book called the Bible is actually a compilation of 66 different books, but there isn't just lots of different little stories in it, there's one grand story of God's involvement in our lives from beginning to end, from Genesis 1 through Revelation 21, and it's amazing how we have a God through the pages of so many other stories in it, we learn about a God who has a knack at redeeming, of buying back, of transforming, of renewing, of forgiving. And the fact that God can even take those guilt-ridden events, those shameful experiences, those negative things that have happened in our lives, and He can transform them into a part of God's story of grace in your life and mine, and what's great about that as well is that we not only get to see how God transforms us stories of grace, they become some of the best parts of our story to share with others, because they too have been broken, and they've messed up, and they need to know they are redeemable, right? Renewable. They are worth it, they are valued, they belong. They belong to this God who chose to start this whole thing off, and even in the middle of this mess and this messy world where we've seen again and again events that we go like, how in the world can this happen? Where we get to witness again and again all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that's kind of the headline of the news, right? That everyone can be justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and everyone is redeemable, and everyone is wanted, and everyone is loved, and God can take anything and turn it around and make it something glorious because of His grace and mercy. So all of us have that kind of a story. So our key verse today for this whole series was in actually Hebrews chapter 12. Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. That's from the New American Standard Bible. Others have used instead of author, pioneer, but I love that word author because it talks about story and the fact that Jesus is the one that we want to be the author of our whole lives, the one who's writing it himself. Wouldn't it be great to just say, hey Jesus, please write the story of my life the way you want it to be. So last week we made that decision to stop. And what we also said is the decisions that you make today determine the stories you can tell tomorrow. Okay, that's one other point that we made. Now Stephen Covey, I don't know if you've ever read any of his leadership books. In many of them, he says this phrase that we are to begin with the end in mind. In other words, see the destination of where you want to go and then start here to get there. But you got to know where you're going. Now he wasn't the first one to come up with this. This is actually a great principle that you can find in scripture. You can find all sorts of places. A m...