Never Give Up Series

You know I love that video but my favorite moment of all is when she stops, out of breath, the path is too hard, the journey is too tough, it’s time to just throw in the towel and quit. But just in that moment she lifts her head and you can see the determination in her eyes as she pushes forward, refusing to quit, no matter how tough it gets she’s not going to give up. There’s something to that, something that we should talk about today as we wrap up this series.

But before we jump into this and begin to do that good morning, welcome to DCC, and thanks for being here. We want to give a special thanks and welcome to you today if you are brand new and of course to all of online friends out there right now too and make sure that you know that all of your story is safe here regardless of how it reads, you belong with us regardless of what you believe, and you are hanging out with people today that are just like you. Hope you have already felt and experienced that in your time with us today and have already decided that you want to come back and do this again with us in the future, hopefully even next week.

ILLUST> So one of my favorite books ever is “Leading at the Edge”. It is a book on leadership based on the story of an explorer back at the beginning of the 1900’s named Ernest Shackleton. After leading three British expeditions by sea to the Antarctic, Shackleton began to make preparations for what would become known as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, a crossing of Antarctica from sea to sea via the South Pole. There were two major obstacles in the way of the expedition cold and ice. Despite that, Shackleton began to plan for it to recruit a crew. The advertisement that he placed in the London Papers read as follows. “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in the case of success.” After gathering his crew he set sail on August 8, 1914. Shackleton thought that the trip could be completed in 4 months…120 days. After 45 days at sea the ice in the sea closed around the ship like a vise. Let me show you a photo. Temperatures reached down to minus 120 degrees. Get this now…282 days later…the ice crushed the ship. Here’s another photo. So now, your ship has been crushed, you and your crew are stranded on the frozen sea and the nearest food depot is 346 miles away. You have lifeboats and sleds but they weigh almost 1000 pounds…now what? Feels pretty hopeless. Safe return doubtful, no doubt about that, it looks like there is no way that any of them will ever overcome where life has them at this moment.

Now here’s the thing about that moment and that story. We may not be stranded on the frozen sea. We may be in a warm building this morning, but most if not all of us have things in our lives and stories that we feel pretty hopeless about, things that we hope to, want to, and need to overcome. That’s why we have spent the past 4 weeks talking about how we can begin to do that. So, today as we wrap this up I want to talk about one last thing that is a non-negotiable if we really want to overcome, specifically five very important words…I will never give up. A lot of us have been working hard to overcome, trying hard to overcome, even praying a lot that God will help us overcome the challenges that we are facing in our lives without much change or improvement. Some of us have been doing that for a long long time. After a while it begins to like God is either not there or really doesn’t care. We find ourselves tempted to throw in the towel, give up, and conclude that overcoming is not an option. We find ourselves losing hope and losing heart. So, what do we do with that? Great question. Let’s jump into this together today and see…

If you brought a Bible we are going to be in 2 Corinthians chapter 12. If you don’t have a Bible they are back on the back tables that you can grab right now if you would like if you close or on you can always grab one on your way out. As always you can hit our app or the You Version app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So here we go 2 Corinthians 12 starting with verse 6…