Why is life so difficult?

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. Let's pray. Lord God, this is your day. This is your time. We ask, Lord, that you would draw near to us through your word, that you would inspire our minds, our hearts, our lives. Give us, O Lord, a deeper faith and trust in you, and a love for others, Lord, that goes beyond our feelings or our experiences, that is not based simply on our impressions of things, but based on the rock-solid promises of your word through your Son, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen. So we are in week three of this series called Questions for God, and we've asked some tough questions, I think. I don't know. Maybe you have different questions than I come up with. I sometimes don't know if I kind of fit in with the norm on the questions I have for God. I don't know if you've ever had that experience. And today I might be way off base as to where you are at, but I think it's a common experience, okay? So the first week we asked the question, why does God seem so hidden from us? Why is it that he doesn't just show up, let us see him, everybody believe, boom, like that, instantly, billboards in the sky. He can choose the method, but, you know, whatever way he wants to do it, everybody then knows there is a God, yes, boom, and believe. And we went through that. And you might find it helpful to go to that message a couple weeks ago and look at it. We have an app that Wyatt so wonderfully put together for the iPhone, and it's also on our website as well, and all the sermons are listed there, and you can just watch them, the video of them there. Also what happens is in our sermons we have notes, and the notes are on the You version of the Bible app, so you can download that, and under More, at the bottom of the page when you get into it, you hit Events, and if your location tracking stuff is on, and everybody knows where you are all the time, Thrive Community Church should pop right up at the top of that, okay? And then the notes for today's sermons are there, and you can take notes and then keep them. But anyways, so we asked that question. Then last week we asked the question, how do I know I'm making the right choice? Lots of choices in life. In fact, the freedom to make a choice and the multitude of choices has become the burden to make a choice, and the choice paralysis that happens for so many people, and so we went through that. We went through the promise in Isaiah 41.10 that God is always with us, He is by our side, and what that all means in the midst of all our choices. Today, the question we're asking, like I said, I might be way off base, and the rest of you are going, like, this guy's weird, okay? But this is the question that I thought I would like the answer to, right? Why do some people seem to feel your presence, God, while I don't? Am I a spiritual misfit? Okay? Now, maybe that's happened to you. Maybe, like this morning, you're seeing everybody's really into this worship service, but I'm not feeling anything in particular about it. It's okay. It's cool. I'm glad I'm here, but, wow. Or, I've had the experience of being invited by these really spiritual people. At least I thought they were, because they're very expressive about their faith, and you get to this prayer meeting that they ask you to join in, and they are just emoting everywhere, and they are praising God, and they are extroverting all over the place, and they are thanking Jesus. Some people are crying, and other people are on the floor, and maybe you haven't been at one of those, okay? And you're going, like, your mind starts to wander, and you start thinking things like, are they all faking it? Or am I just, God just passed me over, and I am not, do you understand what I mean? Have you ever felt that? Okay, at least there's a few people here that might feel that way. Or you come Sunday after Sunday and Sunday to church, and you keep faithfully coming to a worship service, wherever it is, and yeah, the preacher is a little boring, and the message, and some of the stuff is the same, and we sing the same songs and stuff, and somehow you're just, you're not feeling much about it. It's like you're hoping that you come away going like, wow, I really, wow, you know? But you just go like, oh, okay, you know? And you believe everything that's being preached. It's not like you don't believe the stuff, it's just that you're not, like, overwhelmed, okay? Now, you see, a lot of churches these days, I don't know if you realize this, they're geared toward people who are extroverts and feelers on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, and not to people who are more introverted or thinking. Brandt Hansen, who wrote the book, Unaffendable, that we're going to use for our next series, and by the way, it's an easy read, I think, okay? It is 24 little chapters, they're almost like devotions. I think he's got some real humor in it....