Thanksgiving In The Storm

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. I'm trying to take this ThanksGord thing and upgrade it. So I'm trying to come up with a new title for the message. And it's not hard to upgrade. Sorry there, Wyatt. But living somewhere between Pollyanna and punishment, I think is primarily the way that we view storms of life. Or I would offer to you a more professorial. I love listening to John preach because he's kind of got that professor thing going on. And he lines them all up in threes and they do that. I like to come up here and do everything the opposite. Just to get a new taste. But the non sequitur of life in the spirit. That if you're going to be controlled by the spirit of God, and if you're going to surrender your life to him, stuff you do isn't going to make sense. It's not going to follow. And that's our journey today. We'll see how these titles unfold. Let's go to God in prayer. Father, if we were to take a poll right now and take a moment to ask people around us, what's the storms in their life? Everybody would have one. Storms they've come through. Storms they're anticipating. The storms we're in right now. Some dragging on. Some acute. Some difficult. Some actual storms from the hurricanes that have come through this place. Let's say that all and ask that you would open up your word, open up people's hearts so that we might better understand our response and your presence in the storm. In Jesus' name. Amen. So let's first talk about non sequitur. As according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, in Latin, a non sequitur, by the way, before you let me know, I know. The first time I used non sequitur, I misspelled it. So it should be non sequitur. In Latin, non sequitur means it does not follow. The phrase was borrowed into the English in the 1500s by people who made a formal study of logic. For them, it meant a conclusion that does not follow from the statements that lead to it. But now we use non sequitur for any kind of statement that seems to come out of the blue. That's what I'm saying to you is going to kind of be the overarching theme of learning to be thankful in the storm is that it is a non sequitur to life. If it were to have an emoji, because emojis are so important to our lives now, if it were to have an emoji, it would look like this. This is what you'd attach to your email if you're going to do a non sequitur. It's like, wait, what? So before we go on, I want to kind of give to you a little summary of our text, sort of a pretext before the text. Paul has just spent one and a half in his missionary journey. He's just spent one and a half years in Ephesus. He is just loving the people of Ephesus and they're loving him. But God tells him enough at Ephesus. We know that you're doing well there. I need you to come to Jerusalem because in Jerusalem there's all kind of trouble. There's persecution. There's starvation. There's issues. So Paul takes up an offering and goes to Jerusalem and the people of Ephesus are going, Oh, don't go. Don't go, Paul. We love you. We want you to stay here. Don't go. It would seem normal when you are in ministry and the church of Ephesus is growing. It would seem normal and reasonable that, yep, you would want to stay on and continue to grow it there and not head toward a church in a place of time of trouble. So one of the first non sequiturs is the fact that Paul is sent from a bunch of people who love him to a bunch of people who don't. A bunch of people who are after him, who have been looking for him, who are ready to persecute him, who have in certain ways done so already. What he does is he goes to Jerusalem and he gets arrested and he gets run up the pole by the Pharisees and he gets beaten and put in prison. The trouble that he anticipated he found just as it was noted. So while this is all going on with the Pharisees, the Pharisees, just like they did with Jesus, were going to turn Paul over to the Romans. Paul gets a visit from Christ that says, I want you to go to Rome and bear witness to me. So Paul, who is about to be acquitted, this is key, who is about to be acquitted for the crimes by the Romans, appeals to Caesar. What this means is that because he was a Roman citizen, he can appeal to Caesar as sort of an appellate process and a very public rendition of his message. So he could have gotten off the hook, his second non-sequitur. He could have been let go. He could have been a free man. But he said, no, I'm going to stand on my Roman citizenship and say, I want to bring this to Caesar. Why did he do that? It's a non-sequitur. It doesn't follow. This is the second time that life could have been much different, much easier, much smoother, because he just beat the Pharisees. He can grow the church in Jerusalem, but he appeals to Caesar. And at that time, a guy named Felix goes, Paul, you are a troublemaker. And he kind of, in my own imagination, went, I k...