I Decided to Start

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. Lord God, we thank you that you have woven us in whatever way, but in so many ways of love and compassion and grace into your story. We thank you, Lord, for this day as we start this series that we can start afresh in your mercies today. We pray, Lord God, that you'd be with us, that you'd open up your, well, open up your word to us and open us up to your word, to the story, to your move in our lives. We pray that you would do that this day. We thank you for the many gospel churches in this whole community, too numerous, well, maybe not too numerous. We need some more, Lord. We need many more people connected to you. But we thank you for so many of them, from Summit to Gulf Coast Church, Lord, to Estero United Methodist. We thank you for their ministry. We pray that you continue to have them grow and flourish this day and that you'd create a movement across this entire community, Lord, a movement of your spirit that we would be centered on the good news of your son, Jesus Christ, and how he can change our lives, not just now, but for eternity. All this we pray in his name. Amen. We are starting this series. And what's great is this is a good time to be a part of a new start. For the next four weeks, well, five weeks, we've kind of got an interim in between for Father's Day. But for four out of the five weeks, we're going to focus on my story. And today, though, we're going to talk about Daniel and the lion's den. You know that story? You've heard that one? Yeah. Maybe you have. We'll kind of explain it a little more. We're going to start actually in the book of Philippians, chapter one, where Paul talks to one of his favorite churches. They were poor. They were persecuted. They went through a lot. It was the first church in Greece, the first church in Europe. And this is what he had to say at the beginning of the letter. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Jesus of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. How many of you do love a good story? Oh yeah, we love to tell stories, don't you? Have you ever been like around a campfire and started talking and telling stories? Not the made up ones necessarily, although those can be kind of fun. But just, hey, I got to tell you the time that I... and you kind of go off on that. Or I got to tell you the time stupid things happened and it still turned out good. Or the time I faced one of the most difficult things in my life and how I overcame that. You can tell all those stories. People love to hear them. And when you tell a story or when you hear a story from someone else, you learn a lot more about that person than if you just learn certain vital statistics. I think, you know, a doctor... I've got my physical coming this Friday. Pray for me. I think I'm going to hear some, you know, news like, John, you might... But the doctor doesn't really know me that well. He's a great doctor. But he doesn't know me because all he knows is my blood pressure, my cholesterol level, my height, my weight. A few more stats about me. Does that really explain John Roth? No. But if I told him my story of my life, he'd know me. And he'd probably understand why my blood pressure is what it is or my weight or my height or whatever. You know, you can kind of tell a lot more when you hear the whole story. And that's true for our lives. I think that's going to be true for this series that we're going to talk about. We've got stories to tell and some of them are great stories we all want to tell. There are a few stories I'd rather not repeat from my life. Do you understand what I mean? Or if I have to, they go through an editing process. Let's put it that way. You might, especially as parents, have had stories about your childhood or young adulthood that you better put through an editing process if you're going to pass on to your children. Right? Yeah. All right. So here's a couple of things, though, that we're going to look at. The stories that we tell today are a result of decisions we made yesterday. And sometimes they're small decisions. And here's the real point of this. It's not to look back and go like, oh, gosh, I should have done or I could have done or I did or whatever. Decisions that we make today will determine the stories we get to tell...