ASL | A Series on Joseph: Navigating the Detours of Life | Purpose | Ashley Wooldridge

[Music] let's stand and worship together today here we go [Music] [Music] within i don't need to know what the future says [Music] is [Music] through the highs and lows and in between says is is we worship you i don't tonight to know what the future says cause if the past could talk it would tell me this my god isn't finished yet if he did it before he can do it again so i trust him with what comes next i says is [Music] lord you're faithful [Music] miracles when you move such an easy thing for you to do your head is moving right now you were still showing up at the tomb of every lazarus and your voice is calling me out right now i [Music] [Music] [Applause] our testimony you can do all things but fail cause you never lost the battle no you never lost the battle i know we [Music] breaking my heart of stone taking over like it's jericho and my walls are all crashing down right now i [Applause] we know i know [Music] still leading your people in victory we declare today with faith [Music] never lost undefeated [Applause] and i is is slow god you're faithful [Music] [Applause] [Music] cause i love you lord [Music] oh your mercy never fails me [Music] all my days [Music] of the goodness of god [Music] and i love your voice [Music] [Music] oh [Music] the goodness of god [Music] is [Music] this is is how did it is foreign is [Music] [Music] amen amen ccb thank you so much for singing with us our god is good go ahead and grab your seeds [Music] in just a couple minutes ashley's going to come and kick off this new series on the life of joseph it's it's an incredible story out of the book of genesis and if you've never heard it before you're gonna love it it has everything you want in a story it's got betrayal and intrigue and twists and plots and sex and salvation this great story but i want you to put your ear to the ground through this whole series to listen for how joseph life reflects jesus life joseph and jesus both had a detour that took him through the land of egypt both of them were betrayed by their brothers both of them found themselves in a pit for joseph it was literally a hole in the ground for jesus it was hell itself and both of them came out of the pit to a throne joseph was the throne of egypt jesus was the throne of heaven and here's where it gets good because joseph and jesus forgave their brothers both of them brought salvation to their people we want joseph's story to be your story and it can be your pit can become a platform if you stand in the shadow of jesus he can use the pain of your life for a platform not just for you to be saved but to bring salvation to others so before we dip into this series we just want to create some space for you to spend some time with jesus to sit in his shadow by taking a little piece of bread and a little cup of juice to remember the sacrifice he made and if he can forgive you then we can forgive those who hurt us and that will bring salvation to others let's pray holy father we're so grateful for what you did in the life of joseph and how that's just a shadow of the light that we see in jesus would you allow all of us to use the pain of our past for a platform not just for us to be saved but for others to find hope and peace and salvation in you we pray this in jesus name amen [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Music] [Music] they say this mountain [Music] but they don't know you like we do there is power in your name [Music] [Music] [Music] there is power [Music] [Music] we'll see a miracle god we believe god we believe [Music] no matter what there is me is say can we believe yes we do [Music] it's not just power in his name but this power when we gather together to sing to him thank you so much for singing you can be seated well what's up ccd my name is travis brown i'm the campus pastor here in peoria and whether you're gathered here physically or maybe you're tuning in online we just want to say welcome thank you so much for joining us at some point this weekend uh you know this is my favorite time of year not just because football season's starting but really around here there's so many things that are getting back in full swing whether whether it's groups that are meeting together now or our stars youth sports program that's that's almost in full swing now i wanted to let you guys know though so that you can celebrate with us some of the things that god has been doing around here specifically here at our peoria campus did you know that just in the month of august here in peoria we had 227 people commit their lives to jesus and get baptized pretty amazing we saw hundreds more people sign up to serve and get plugged into groups where they can find community but here's one thing that we believe is that no matter who you are there's always a next step to take in your walk of faith whether you've been walking with jesus for years and years or maybe you're here for the first time and you're still asking questions and you know you don't know what's going on we're so glad you're here there is a next step for you to take no matter who you are so today if you're here physically you can either sign on to our mobile app or go talk to somebody in our courtyard at our tent right there we would love to have a conversation to help you find out what your next step is or if you're online and leave a comment in the chat section somebody will follow up so that we can help you take your next step but as you mentioned as you heard earlier we're excited because today we're kicking off a brand new series and our senior pastor ashley woodridge is getting ready to come out here as we dive into the life of joseph [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] well i i am literally fired up to start this new series on joseph you know when when joseph's story starts up in the book of genesis he's 17 years old so i thought i'd start the service today by showing you a picture of me at 17. all right as long as you promise not to laugh too hard you ready here's a picture of me at 17 all right um i look at this and i'm like is that a like was i trying to take glamour photos or something like what is this you know and it's like this is the picture that showed up in the yearbook or something like that my tie is super super lame but um anyways that was me at 17 and as i started thinking about me at 17 this week i started thinking through the lens of when i was 17 years old and i looked back and i was thinking about how my life would go now that i'm the age i am now how many things turned out how i thought they would when i was 17 years old and you know what the conclusion i came to was almost nothing turned out the way i thought it was when i was 17 years old i mean i could just go down the list i went to a different school than i thought i would ever go to i had a different major than i thought i would ever major in i changed my major i played a different collegiate sport than i could have ever even imagined it was kind of odd uh at 17 years old that picture right there i was dating a girl that i had i thought i had this really bright future with literally like right after i took that picture like within weeks that future went down the drain i mean it's just gone i got married to jamie and right out of school college and i thought marriage is going to be pretty easy took me about one week to realize that's a pipe dream you know i mean it's like marriage is hard and then you know we had started having kids and and when when i was 17 years old literally a couple of years before that i'd written in a journal i'm going to have all boys i have three girls you know i mean pray for me pray for me please you know no i love my girls to death um i could have never ever pictured in my wildest imagination when i was 17 year old years old that i would have been a pastor never thought it would have never thought i would have lived in phoenix i could have never projected what would happen with the levels of pain that i would experience on some of the paths that i've been on in life my summary is that that i've really been down more detours in my life than i could have ever pictured at at age 17. i want you to think about your life for just a minute and i know not everyone's 17 here but for those of you that are kind of past the age of 17 i want you to take yourself back to the age of 17. and if you're not 17 yet just take yourself back a couple years how many of you when you were 17 years old or a little while back how many of you your life has turned out right now the way you thought it would i mean your life just looks like this it looks like up and to the right you know just perfect smooth path everything turned out anybody else out there anybody's life turned out that way yeah me neither how many of your life is it looks a little bit more like this i mean it's just a squiggly line if i see hands going up on the campus i'm at it's just a squiggly line of ups and downs and here there there wow i think all of us have something in common all of us have experienced detours in our life that we never saw coming and the big idea from this series is we're gonna we're gonna look at detours and we're gonna talk about them but i just want to acknowledge uh right up front that some of you are in are in the middle of a detour right now i mean a detour by definition in the dictionary is just a long a roundabout route that you never intended on taking but some of you are in a detour right now that is that is really really hard some of you are here and you're single and you never thought this road of singleness would have lasted this long and you're just wondering when the path is going to change some of you are here and you're struggling with anxiety or depression or mental health issues and and it's just debilitating and the road is just long for you right now some of you are experiencing infertility as a couple and it's like the months are just up and down and the emotions you feel you want to have a child but it's not happening some of you just experienced the end of a relationship you went through divorce and it's it's just been a path that you didn't see coming some of you are in a marriage right now that that the path didn't turn out exactly the way you thought it would and you're wondering whether it'll change some of you just had a career change or you just moved to phoenix and everything's new you never thought that would happen some of you are in a lot of trouble whether that's financial or legal or spiritually spiritually you feel dry you feel lost spiritually and you're just wondering when is that going to change for some of you your detour is with your family you never pictured that one of your kids would be going down the path they're going right now or a family member is going down a path that you didn't think they'd ever go all of us all of us all of us have experienced detours i think when you really honestly look at your life you will find this you're either approaching a detour you're in the middle of a detour or you've just gotten out of a detour and what we're going to talk about during this series is that biblically there isn't a person in scripture that god used to do great things that didn't have to experience detours and so the big idea for this series is we're going to look at a different definition of a detour and here's the definition we're going to use throughout the series a detour is a change in our plans that god uses or he can use if we'll allow him uses to develop our character and competency so we can arrive at a better destination and in my opinion there isn't a better person that we can study in scripture to look at the idea of detours than the life of joseph um joseph's story uh actually uh picks up in the book of genesis so we're we're not talking about joseph from mary and joseph that's jesus's dad this is a joseph from the old testament and his story is found in chapters 37 through 50 of genesis the very first book in the bible and what's amazing to me is joseph's story he gets more airplay in the book of genesis than anyone more than abraham adam and eve noah more than the whole entire creation account and i think that may be because god wants us to learn from his life how to navigate the detours that we all go through so we're going to look at his first detour today chapter 37 and it picks up in a verse two we we learned something about joseph it says joseph a young man of 17 was tending the flocks with his brothers he's doing some work out with you know the flocks that they would manage and it says his brothers the sons of billah and the sons of zilpah his father's wives anybody else come from a pretty messy family joseph can relate right up front we know he this is a messy family his dad jacob um he has 12 sons joseph's one of the sons but the sons come from four different wives and two of the wives are sisters this is like a story from the backwoods of kentucky you know it's like sorry dave stone we love you dave stone you know psycho but it's just it's this messy blended family and nobody gets along if you really look at the story so the very first thing we're told about joseph specifically is it says this it says and and joseph he brought their father a bad report about them that's his brothers they're out doing work and joseph comes and what do we learn about joseph he's a tattletail anybody grow up with a sibling he's a tattletail i some of you don't believe this i was a terrible kid in elementary school like the worst my my mom would tell you this is true i'll give you an example um one day i took my sister and we were playing in the like this backfield behind our house and i was playing with matches and i just lit the whole entire field on fire up in flames the fire department had to come pulled out the hose put the whole fire out then they came to our house and they asked does anybody know who did this and i looked and i was like no idea you know my sister's there she's like he did it he did it i was like you did it you know my god just tattletail this is joseph's is a tattletale on his brother's he's like dad they're not doing their work well but he's not just a tattletail it it gets even worse because we learn next it says now israel that's jacob his dad loved joseph more than any of his other sons because he had been born to him in his old age in other words what that's really saying is he was born to him from the wife that jacob had always wanted to marry a girl named rachel that he couldn't and so older old later in age he finally married rachel and joseph was the son of jacob and rachel and and and jacob had this really special place in his heart for joseph and so what did he do he made an ornate robe for him made him a special robe and all the brothers knew that joseph was the favorite because while dad took them shopping at goodwill joseph got to go to gucci right this is literally i mean when it says that he made him an ornate robe if you grew up in church we were kind of taught that that meant it was a really colorful robe and it may have been but it may not have been now ornate what the word ornate means in the hebrew literally here's what it means it means just needle work that goes down to your wrists and ankles think about how they made coats in ancient days this is how it happened there was a piece of one piece of cloth a single piece of cloth that was about 10 feet long you'd cut a hole in the middle put the the hole over your head half the clasp would fall down on your on your front half would fall down on your back it'll be open on the side so you could either stitch that up or just tie it around yourself and that was your coat the coats did not go down to your you know to cover your arms that was kind of too expensive to to do that but an ornate robe and ornate robe was one that covered your arms an extra piece of cloth that they would sew on that would have been expensive and it would have been longer and gone down to your ankles and that's the kind of robe joseph had i mean he was he was gq he was a hipster okay he got to walk around with an ornate robe and maybe it had color on it too you put color on it he was the favorite and his brothers are looking at this and what the robe would have represented is potentially also that joseph was going to get a larger share of the estate which typically would have gone not to you know one of the younger brothers where joseph was it would have gone to one of the older brothers and so the i mean just think about how the brothers would have felt with joseph being showered on all this attention and he gets all the special clothes and they're looking like junk we don't have to guess how they felt because it tells us it goes on and says when his brother saw that their father loved him more than any of them they hated him and they couldn't speak a kind word to him i mean they literally hated their brother now a smart person in joseph's shoes would look at this very sensitive situation with his brothers and use some relational intelligence use a little emotional intelligence kind of you know delicately handle this situation with the brothers not joseph see some scholars when they talk about the life of joseph they make joseph look like he's a saint he's perfect some people say joseph never done anything wrong in his whole entire life i don't believe that and you'll see it in just a minute i i believe joseph was an entitled prideful boastful young man how do we know that because even in the midst of his brothers not even speaking a kind word to him what do we learn next about joseph verse 5 says joseph had a dream and when he told it to his brothers they hated him all the more why would they hate him because he told him a dream because the dream was about his brothers bowing down to him now this is just free advice today okay for everybody here if you have a dream about your siblings bowing down to you just keep it to yourself right that's what everybody knows but joseph he's so he lacks self-awareness he's so prideful he just he just tells us to his brothers and then he doesn't have just one dream he has two dreams just go read it for yourself this week in chapter 37 he has second dream not only do his brothers bow down he says mom and dad you bow down to me too well now dad's ticked off dad chastises joseph and he's like what are you talking about and joseph just doesn't get it he doesn't get it at all then joseph goes on a big detour joseph's self-awareness is staggering because he's dad's favorite he has all the all the nicest stuff all the nicest clothes he doesn't even have to work hard because what we learned next is dad sends the other brothers off in the fields to work the flocks again but he doesn't make joseph go he lets him stay at home he's spoiled brat but then dad has an idea he's like well what if the what if the brothers are not doing a good job i'll send mr tattletail to go look on him again so he sends joseph and and we see this detour develop in joseph's life watch this so joseph went after his brothers and found them near dothan that's 64 miles away from where his home would have been he would walk there on foot but they his brother saw him in the distance and before he reached them they plotted to kill him that's how bad it had gotten with joseph reuben the oldest brother pipes up and says guys maybe we should just chuck him in a in a well right now instead of killing him everyone agrees everyone agrees so what they do next is it says they they threw him in a cistern and it says when when joseph came to his brothers they stripped him of his robe this ornate robe that he was wearing and they took him and they threw him into a cistern the cistern was empty there was no water in it there was there was a water and so so what do we see this word stripped right here is the exact same word used for skinning an animal in other words when joseph approached that his brother's hatred for him was so great that they ran after him and like a pack of dogs they ripped the clothes off him probably beating him as he's fighting for his life and naked because they probably put him naked they throw him to the bottom of a deep well where there's no water which means there's rocks at the bottom and thud joseph hits out of nowhere his life goes from the palace to a pit i wonder if any of you can relate with that your life's going well and then in a minute you find yourself all alone at the at the bottom of a deep pit you ever been there before joseph begins to cry out for his life we learn later on and he's crying out from the bottom of this cistern and you know what his brothers do go read it for yourself they go have lunch they let him cry and during lunch one of joseph's brothers judah pipes up and says guys guys guys let's not kill him and you're kind of like whew finally like voice of reason let's not kill him jesus says let's not kill him let's sell them sell them yeah let's make some money off this guy it's like the first example of human trafficking in scripture you know it's like a bad episode of some bad show and that's exactly what his brothers do these midianite traitors slave traders are are passing by and they see these slave traders and they sell their brother to these midianite slave traders for 20 pieces of silver and then they take joseph's road that they have stripped off of him they kill an animal splash some blood on the robe take it back to their dad jacob and say does this happen to be joseph's robe it is and they convince him that he's likely been killed by wild animals at the very end of chapter 37 here's what we learn the brothers go back to dad they're comfortable because brother's gone now dad's weeping and it says meanwhile meanwhile the midianites sold joseph in egypt to potiphar one of pharaoh's officials the captain of the guard i mean you talk about a detour let me just show it to you on a map joseph is just going down to visit his his brothers in this region and there's a detour he's taken 300 miles away and sold as a slave into an egyptian pagan household it's a detour that comes out of nowhere what i want to do today and this is again this is just an introductory week we're going to talk about detours throughout this whole entire series but i want to take chapter 37 i want to look at joseph's life and i want us to just look at four patterns that typically happen in detours that are going to help you as you navigate the detours of your life and here's here's pattern number one um detours are really caused by three things when you think about it number one a detour can be caused by our own bad choices i mean there's times that we do something simple or bad and and we we detoured ourselves secondly you know a detour can be caused by other people's sin affecting affecting us you know maybe your parents got divorced and you had to move or something happened or someone cheated on you and it's other people's sin that affected you and put you on a detour the last one this is the hard one to accept is sometimes a detour is really god's divine hand directing us now when i look at my own life i would tell you that i i think i've had detours that have involved each of these things i really have and you may say the same when we look at joseph's life which one of these caused his detour now it's easy to jump right to number two right because his brothers were the one that sold joseph into slavery i mean ultimately it rests on their shoulders it's their fault their sin but if we got really honest today couldn't couldn't we have some small argument that joseph himself and his arrogance and his pride and his boastfulness did he contribute to the hate that was coming his way and the hard one the hard one is to think about that god actually wanted we find out later he wanted joseph to be in egypt god wanted him there in fact i'm just going to fast forward i'll give you a sneak peek to the very end of the the book of genesis chapter 50. this isn't 17 year old joseph this is joseph way later on in life at the end of his life he's looking back on this incident that just happened him being sold into slavery and here's what he says to his brothers genesis chapter 50 verse 20 you intended to harm me but god intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done the saving of many lives you intended this to be evil and god took that detour and he used it for good we know that joseph would go on to save millions of lives even his family what if that was our lens we looked at our detours through that what many or others or even ourselves our own foolish actions what it was intended for evil god used it for good it's pretty hard to do isn't it i mean it's it's really hard to sometimes look at our detours and see them through the lens of maybe god can do something good through this and if you're in the midst of a detour right now the natural inclination that we all have is to look at these three things and to begin putting the blame on someone else even putting the blame on ourselves we shame ourselves sometimes and live in our shame we blame other people or we get angry at god and what i want to challenge all of us today with is simply this it is okay to be hurt and wounded and to seek why something's happening for a period but if you live in the blame game for too long you become a victim and i believe in our pop culture today in what's happening in our culture our culture is encouraging all of us to be a victim victimhood is in right now i mean it's easy i'm a victim blame everybody else blame the system blame everything and listen if you're hurt today and you've been victimized in your life i want to say i'm i'm literally please hear me i'm so sorry my heart breaks for you but if you've been a victim here's my question to you and let this sink in how long are you going to stay a victim how long are you going to play the victim like how long are you going to do it because i want you to know this as long as you are a victim you will not be able to move forward to the preferred future god has for you victimhood does not allow you to do that and you can hurt for a season but all of us have to ask how long am i going to stay a victim here one of the most incredible things about joseph's entire story go read it for yourself he never once blames anybody else he never plays the victim card not one time and that should be challenging for some of us some of us have played that too too long and it's holding us back and what i want you to hear today is from romans chapter 8 paul is talking about these detours that we go through in life and how it causes suffering sometimes and listen to what paul says he says what then shall we say in response to these things all the detours and all the pain he says if god is for us who can be against us and then he goes on to say this you are more than a conqueror you are not a victim you are designed to be a victor so stop playing the victim card why because i'm convinced of this paul says neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor present or future nor powers neither height nor death nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of god can we can we get someone to stop being a victim and be a victor can we do that hey i don't know who you are i don't know who you are but god brought you here to say it's time to move from victim to victor with god's power inside of you not you on your own god living inside you and godly people around you you have to do that why because of the second pattern we see in detours god uses our detours for our development if we let them what did joseph need to develop i mean go down the list i mean he's an entitled prideful spoiled boastful young man now if if you want god to do something great in your life can god do that if you are a prideful entitled boastful man or woman the answer is no is joseph going to be able to get out of that trap of who he is right now living at home with the cush life as daddy spoils him to death no and yet god takes him to egypt to get him out of this environment to be able to develop into who he wants him to be here's what we know about life and leadership if you ever want to be a leader you can have growth or you can have comfort you can have growth or you can have comfort but you will rarely grow while you're comfortable almost everything you want in life right now is outside your comfort zone why if it was inside your comfort zone you'd already have it and so god often times takes us to uncomfortable situations to grow us to who he wants us to be i've looked at my own life i've tried to be super honest and i would just tell you this the greatest seasons of growth i've ever had in my life are when i'm really uncomfortable sometimes it's painful i would tell you the last 18 months of my life and you could probably say the same thing have been really uncomfortable haven't they personally i think i've grown in the last 18 months as much as any other season in my life and some of you may already be on the other side of the season to be able to say the same thing some of you not yet it's still really really painful in my marriage the greatest growth i've had in my marriage has always happened when jamie and i have not been comfortable and i wish it wasn't true but it is true when jamie and i stop playing victim cards with each other and we come together we can move forward to a better place and sometimes that took us being a little bit uncomfortable to deal with that detours are for our development but here's the third pattern we see not only are detours for our development but detours often re-route us to a destination god wanted but we would have never arrived at on our own would joseph have ever gone to egypt on his own no he wouldn't he would have gone down to a pagan land he wouldn't have would he have worked for a pagan government like potiphar or pharaoh no would he even left daddy's little cuddly arms probably not and look what look what god did god took joseph to a destination he wanted him in why because joseph's life he developed into the number two leader in all of egypt joseph did number two just below pharaoh and because of that joseph saved millions of people's lives including his family and it would have never happened unless god took him to a destination he would have never gone on his own i wonder when you look at your life how god's done the same thing some of you met a spouse because of a really horrific event in your life who you're sitting to right next to right now you would not be sitting next to if you didn't go through a really tough detour some of you started a business only because your other job fell apart some of you moved here to phoenix you found ccv and it's transformed your life all because of a detour some of you that that lonely season of singleness you started seeking god like never before and it's transformed your life maybe we need to see detours as seasons where god is developing us so he can take us somewhere better why do we not have that view in the midst of a detour it's very simple fourth pattern of detours detours are all almost never come pain-free they just don't i mean when's the last time you've been driving in your car along on the freeway you're all happy and it's all nice and sweet and smooth and then you see a sign that says uh detour ahead and you're thinking yes yes i love detours you never said that why we avoid detours with everything inside of us i do i mean i will get out of a detour any way i can and yet we know that god uses them when god is ready to move you to the next level things will often get worse before they get better and you may not like that statement but it doesn't make it any less true john maxwell said people have uphill hopes and downhill habits to get through this uphill season this detour that you never saw coming you have to embrace that it will sometimes be painful but god will use it for a purpose what if god is using it to develop you into who he wants you to be this weekend marks the 20th anniversary of 9 11. something we will never forget never forget when cowardly terrorists attacked our nation and thousands of lives were taken and thousands of people were detoured from a place in the direction they thought they were going one of those people was a man named danny jacobson danny now lives in phoenix he attends ccv but on 9 11 danny was working for morgan stanley and he was in the south tower on the 61st floor when the second plane hit you talk about a detour i want you to see danny's story and how god used this watch this [Music] well it was 20 years ago and i do remember it like it was yesterday i was in the south tower the 61st floor i saw [Music] a few of my classmates running down the hall and one of our instructors says let's go we've been hit [Music] some people had mentioned that they saw an explosion some people said it blew out the side of the building but i heard some people say a plane hit the north tower and so i just went downstairs with everyone else at times we were side by side and sometimes we had three rows of people going down the stairwell so i remember as we were counting down the floors we got to 47 46. here's the plate here is the tape you see we were somewhere between 44 and 45. and then i heard it it's just this loud rumble above us and then the next thing you know the building begins to rock to the side people were falling to their knees on their butts i remember hanging on to the railing but i it felt like the building was going to continue to go all the way i remember it was at that moment i knew i was gonna die [Applause] i was in such shock at the time all i could think of was to begin the lord's prayer our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done and it was at that moment a warmth came over my body and it was this feeling like i was gonna be okay so after this was over and i was home it was a big change in my life i became a kinder gentler version of myself i used to take life really seriously and here i was feeling why me why why did you spare me that day but that became very apparent to me why i was spared that day less than 10 years later my wife was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer [Music] and i remember i remember having such courage that moment and telling her she was going to be fine i knew the outcome i knew what was going to happen i knew i was going to lose her [Music] but i didn't know where that courage came from until i had looked back at the events of my life and i thought for a second well wait a minute that's why god spared you so you could have the courage to walk through this next hurdle so you could have the strength so you could be built up in your faith so much to know that god has it handled my current life is um i could go back and laugh at myself on this one because again here i am after all this never wanted to be married never wanting to have kids i have now remarried i have two kids um we go to baseball and football and and soccer and volleyball practices life is very different now uh for me it took me that long to to figure it out but it was never me figuring it out it was god leading me down that path no matter what roadblock i faced he says look yo you're gonna learn sooner or later you're gonna hit this roadblock you're gonna ask for me you're gonna hit that roadblock you're gonna ask for me again but you're gonna realize i've always been there all you needed to do was just ask and um and so it's it's crazy now to uh to have a wife two kids you know to to to have a successful career and to um you know to be that that person who i always should have been but uh but now god has taken me down that direction just uh an incredibly powerful story and and we want to honor all the lives that were lost and impacted by 9 11 and we thank you danny for sharing your story with us i love what he said is that i i became a kinder gentler version of myself i hear that i wonder would danny have become that version of himself without this detour would he become the man that had the courage to walk with a wife dealing with a terminal illness without his detour if you're here today and you're in the middle of a detour and you feel the pain from it i'm going to challenge you today not to give up hope hope is one word that you cannot give up on because god is wants to lead you he wants to take you to a better place he wants to use this to develop you and you might be here today to simply hear the words of the writer of hebrews in chapter 10 verse 23 the writer says let us hold unswervingly don't let go of hope why because he who promised that hope that's god is faithful and today no matter if you're in the midst of a detour or still pondering a detour or you're getting ready to hit one i want to ask you a few questions and i really want you to to discuss these questions either with a spouse or a friend or someone you're dating here with or with maybe with your ccv group i want you to have a conversation over lunch or dinner because i think these are great questions for god to move in your life here's question number one what is god teaching you from your current or past detours god doesn't waste detours ever and here's a deeper question it's peeling the onion back a little bit more how would you think and act differently if you leveraged your detour for good versus constantly fighting it what would you do how would you act differently and think differently i don't know what god's going to reveal to you but i believe god has something to say to you we're just getting started in this series but this is a great start god can use detours to develop you re-route you but remember they don't come pain-free let's pray father i want to thank you for using detours when we don't even see it you know i think about danny's story and i think when when that plane hit and the aftermath of that i just can't imagine the emotion he felt and now for him to look back now and reflect and see how you've used that god many of us need that hope in our lives for what we're going through i think about a single mom here today that just wants to give up i think about a teacher that is so tired i think about a nurse a doctor someone serving in some capacity in our city that that is on a detour and they just don't know what to do what today would you give them if anything else give them hope to keep taking steps forward and to remember that you are there for them and that you're going to teach us throughout this series how to deal with detours in a way where we can see the good and you can develop us to be who you want us to be father thanks for what you're doing in our church and in our lives we pray this in jesus name amen amen hey as we continue this series detours um i think it's a great series to invite a friend with you um remember ccv we're for you we're for this valley go out and be for someone around you too have a great weekend [Applause]

Channel: CCV (Christ's Church of the Valley)

Views: 1,888

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: christianity, faith, spirituality, church online, purpose, meaning of life, Jesus, Christ, God, church, asl, american sign language, ccv, ccvonline, ccv online

Id: oz9ftGMlOnM

Length: 62min 48sec (3768 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021