Relentless Rescue Series

ILLUST> So, this past Thursday while I was actually in the middle of trying to write this message and to get it to all make sense I received a text from my youngest daughter Stella. Now, if you know Stella you know that it’s always a crap shoot as to what you are going to get when she texts you, her boyfriend was having surgery that morning so I just thought she was just probably giving me an update on that. When I looked down it said this. 3 years today since Craig left us. I love you dad! I had been in my office writing since about 630 in the morning and hadn’t connected the dots yet. When I read her message I began to cry. Craig McConnell was a part of the Ransomed Heart Team and my mentor for about 8 years. He was an extremely special man to a bunch of people, Stella included. When Leukemia took his life 3 years ago she was devastated. I was too. No other man has had such a profound impact on my life. His legacy is huge and it lives on in this place. He helped me learn how to listen to God, he helped me to see myself as God sees me. He taught what a deep loving relationship as a beloved son of God could really be and that who I am and who I am becoming is more important than anything that I will ever learn, know, or do. He helped me understand that this story, told in the 66 books of the Bible, is about God as my father, wanting to have a personal, deep, close, conversational relationship with me as his son. It is what it has always been about. If you think about it though, it’s hard if not impossible to have a close relationship with someone that you don’t really know and struggle to understand. That’s why we are doing this series.

So, as usual, but in this series particularly, we have a whole lot of ground to cover today. But before we jump back into it as always we want to pause and let you know how excited we are to have you here with us. That’s always true but especially true if you are brand new. Thanks for taking a chance on us with your weekend time this weekend. It means a lot to us that you are here. We really hope that you walk away from here today feeling like you were safe and welcome here regardless of what you believe or how your story and wanting to come back and do this all over again with us real soon. So a special welcome to you if you are new (to all of our online friends too) it is so good to have you with us.

So, as we jump back into this journey down Route 66 through the larger story contained in the 66 books of the Bible together today the part of the story that we are walking through, roughly 1000 years, is unpacked or addressed in one way or another in parts of 22 different books of the Old Testament. That can be confusing. So as we continue to work on clearing up the confusion let’s remember that we are not doing this for the sake of knowing more cool Bible information. If that happens great, but what we are after is the same thing we are looking for with every other series we do in this place. What we are after is transformation, this life change thing that we all come in here looking for every single week. As we jump back in what does what we are reading saying about God and about us? How does this story intersect with and apply to each of our stories as we sit here today? Hold on to those questions as we walk through this together.

If you brought a Bible today we are going to pick up where we left off in the story and start in 1 Samuel chapter 8 today. 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 YouVersion app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So here we go, 1 Samuel 8 verse 4...

4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, ‘You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.’ 6 But when they said, ‘Give us a king to lead us,’ this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: ‘Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.