Hope Is In Our DNA | Lisa Harper | Elevation Church

i just love how god speaks to me every single time the word is preached on this stage and today is going to be no exception my dear friend lisa harper will be bringing the word and this woman this woman can preach and i'm not gonna lie i love a good girl preacher and lisa is one of my favorites lisa and her daughter missy live in nashville tennessee they drove down here to be with us this weekend so get ready because this woman knows the word of god and every time i'm around her i want to read my bible more and i want to be a better christian so i'm going to stop talking i hope you're having a great weekend it's a great weekend here in charlotte would you help me welcome lisa harper to the stage [Applause] [Music] yeah we're trying we're trying so hard to hug responsibly um i was thinking driving here we drove here yesterday from nashville tennessee and i was just thinking about the the breath y'all can sit down you're so darling at home i know you're already sitting down half y'all are like vegged out in stretchy pants on the couch um but i was thinking about the breadth of elevation what god has done in a really short season to take the gospel all around the world and i thought that kind of trajectory i think is almost unprecedented it's obviously miraculous god has authored the favor that he's given elevation but i thought you don't get that broad without having really really deep roots and i love that woman right there because she's got really really deep roots and you may only see her in a stream you may only see holly on a screen but i've been through a couple of valleys in the last 10 years and holly furtick was one of the first person to text prayers to speak life to me so i am delighted to be back in this house i always come here with just a little bit of trepidation because i too watch steven furtick every weekend and so now some of you are like oh you've got to be kidding me i mean holly made me sound good but i am no steven furrik this is going to be like a mule at the kentucky derby but hang with me because i think god has something for us if nothing else he has something for me because chris i have been waiting with bated breath i don't know what that means but i've been so excited about being led in worship live by y'all i know what pastor stephen said last week is true that as christ followers we carry the church in our hearts and minds and so the church is open as long as you and i are open to the working person the holy spirit but i i've just got to be honest with y'all and tell you that my heart has been in a really stinker prodigal season lately and every time it sees the zoom logo it just kind of crosses its arms and refuses to listen i i miss corporate worship as soon as chris y'all started i just thought i just i just feel like i want to sink into this i want to marinate in this it's it's been incredible to be here with y'all this has been a less than lovely season i don't have to remind y'all of the reasons why but i'll start with home school i i love my kid for those of you who don't know my story i became a mom the same year i went through menopause at 50 through the miracle of adoption and my kid is the most amazing child in the world except for yours of course that's a tie but um but homeschooling full-time once coveted caused schools in tennessee to close that was that was um that was a faith opportunity and um i i do have to confess that once i watched tiger king and counted it as biology for her but um but i brought i brought a two-minute video that i want to show y'all just as proof in case there's any truancy officers um in efam all over the world i bought proof that we actually did have classes this was an al fresco class we had on etiquette just a little short two minute video that will show you what went on during school at our house during covet 19. hey mom how did you make that trashy noise again oh the that noise yes ma'am you put your you put your teeth your top teeth over your bottom lip and then you like force air out of one side like blow a little more air in just out of the side like honey i think you're too sweet to make trashy noises maybe we should sing a song like a worship song [Laughter] maybe we should sing a worship song which one do you want to sing probably jesus uh attention good grace oh i love that one okay you start it jesus heart attention as salvation that's a good one and this is a good one i love it how does the course go with that one i actually think that is the course jesus our salvation our redemption what comes after is in his blood um jesus light of pets that's right friends forever this came down come that's what comes out to them i love that tater i do too that's better than making those bad trashy noises isn't it it is do you think you're sweeter than me i think so that's youtube most of y'all are probably sweeter than me and have not been tutoring your children and breaking wind noises um it's been a long three months and and i just my hats are is off to you if you have been singing worship tunes like my kid instead of making trashy noises like me but to be really honest i'd like to kick you in the shins if you haven't suffered at all over the last three months because it has just been a rough go of it and again i don't have to remind you of why it's been rough i know we've all been dealing with our own kind of rough in our little corner of the world we had an especially intimate uh difficult thing happen recently someone in in my immediate family committed suicide nine weeks ago and his death uh just ripped the fabric of our lives and over the last two months i just feel like some of my hope has been leaking out of those holes i just have had a harder time than normal hanging on to hope it's been almost like wet soap i'm just having a hard time hanging on to it and my hope my prayer is that none of you are having to grieve the loss of a loved one on top of everything else that we're slogging through for those of you who have i'm so sorry um if you're dealing with the loss of a loved one please please please put some of those details in the chat because we would love to pray with you and for you but regardless of what's been shoplifting your hope lately i think all of us can agree that that at least some measure of our hope has been threatened in the last couple of months and so i thought it would be so appropriate so prudent maybe not for you but certainly for me to do a deep dive in scripture and try to recover some of the hope that these circumstances have have shoplifted and so um i want to talk before we dive into scripture if you're on the couch and you've got a bible at your house get up off the couch and grab that puppy and come back because we're going to be in the bible if you have kids in the room i want to reiterate what chad said about sending them over to kids youtube because it's going to get a little hot in here pretty soon so i want you to be careful to not have anybody under 13 in your living room just send them off for youtube don't let them watch tiger king like i did with my child because now i'm going to be paying for therapy later but um but anyway before we dive into the text our first text is going to be at the very beginning of the book i want to remind us all that we get our new testament originally from greek and the greek concept of hope the greeks pronounced hope it's transliterated e-l-p-i-s but it's pronounced l-peace which i think that's cool that peace is kind of in the greek idea of hope but the greek concept of hope was um was not an objective assessment they didn't look around at their circumstances and go oh here's what justifies my hope this season it was actually a subjective experience they looked back over their lives and if there was proof of hope in their backstory then they said i will be expectant about future hope if they could look back to tangible hope they said then i know there will be proof of hope uh there there will definitely hope in the future let me explain it like this um covet 19 has effectively swaggered into my house like dennis the rock johnson and evidently the keto boy in my mind was was a much winnier crop pants wearing whey fish guy because the rock just killed keto up in our house and as a result i have had an extreme uptick in in carb consumption and uh as a result of that i definitely am up about 19 due to covid and so there is a very real probability that i'm going to faint up in this elevation house this morning because these spanx are cutting off my circulation i shouldn't have done that because if i did that harder you could lose an eye but here's the deal here is the the positive thing about my expansive tragedy i save pictures from last fall and last fall i was really doing good on a low carb life plan and so i saved pictures of when i was actually wearing pants with zippers so i have a witness i have a tangible testimony that it is possible for me to wear pants that do not have an elastic waistband can i get a witness are you with me there is tangible proof in my past that i could go there again hope is not based on now not for christ's followers i loved pastor seaman stephen sermon last week on plot twist i loved that one it's probably in my top 10 too holly i will never again look at the geographical phrase samaria in the new testament without thinking of his word play his application some area there will be some areas we'll be reluctant to go through i love that but the thing that i resonated with most of all was when he talked about generational wells when he talked about generational wells because what was implied was that we will not have to worry about dying of thirst in the now because there was ample provision in our history and that's where we're going to go this morning we're going to start at the beginning of the book so if you brought the book turn to genesis chapter 3. now before we get there john michael will you throw me my glasses out of my purse they're in a blue case before we go there we'll be in genesis chapter 3 beginning with verse 21 i want to give you just a quick review you probably know this but at this point at the very beginning of redemptive history the creator redeemer father god has already breathed the universe into existence out of nothing and after he looked at the sea in the sky and the stars all the creepy crawlies anteaters and elephants he said something's missing and so they got together and that's not a misspeak genesis 1 26 and 27 explains to us that our god is an us he's a trinitarian god god the father god the son got the holy spirit it says god as in us augustine saint augustine i'll have huge crushes on all the dead guys i don't have to be platonic about them because they're dead and gone i only have platonic crushes about living theologians but anyway saint augustine says that only the christian god is a perfect community unto himself genesis 1 26 and 27 then let us make man in our image we were hard wired for relationship that's why when some of y'all miss getting together with your epham you go i just didn't have a great week we were hard wired for relationship that's a whole nother story but we'll go there soon sorry i'm tinkling and not just because of spanx so so god then breathes man into existence and then god takes a nap i think it is so stinking cool that our father god created rest modeled rest in genesis chapter 2. y'all that's before the fall the fall happens in genesis chapter 3. that means rest was not some divine accommodation for human weakness wet rest was part of his perfect gift test isn't that good that's a whole another sermon so anyway he he's created the heavens and the earth he's created man he's taken a nap wakes up really refreshed from his nap looks around and goes something is missing something beautiful is missing and he creates woman and that's where the story starts getting sticky because a lot of people then put hierarchy in the story now i'm not going to labor here too long because i don't want to take the heat i want stephen to take the heat but the hebrew word used for woman is easer it's translated helper in our bibles man and woman and that was never intended to be a hierarchical relationship with with suppression and with oppression i was always intended to be a mutual helpful relationship not gonna go there because eve does drop the ball because soon after she's created she gets deceived by this really rotten slithery fruit salesman named satan and she takes a bite out of some of his rotten fruit and the trajectory of mankind has been downhill ever since we're joining the story right after she has rebelled against god and hooked up with a fruit salesman genesis 3 chapter 21 and the lord god made for adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothe them then the lord god said behold the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil now lest he reach out his hand and take also over the tree of life and eat and live forever therefore the lord god sent him out from the garden of eden to work the ground from which he was taken he drove out the man and at the east of the garden of eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every which way to guard the weight of the tree of life now i don't know if y'all get mental pictures when you read the bible my mom was baptist dad was pentecostal so i'm baptistal which means i love to wiggle and worship but i have no rhythm and so i've heard all these stories since i was teeny i've seen most of them flannel graphed and when i used to hear that story as a kid i immediately got a mental picture of adam and eve i pictured adam as being very lean and this is way before payload when it was cool for guys to be lean he he was just kind of a lean weak looking man stringy hair extensions and and kind of threw his own wife under the bus you know i didn't need the fruit she did and oh cover my junk i mean he just he just he adam does nothing for me he doesn't blow my skirt up and then eve i think of her as the woman i don't want to be because she's i mean let's just face it she's trashy you know she does exactly what god tells her not to do and that's after she's paraded around nude i mean she is trashy so i picture her like the trashy girls that hung out at the skating rink and the town i grew up in in central florida so i picture her with kind of an ac dc tube top and daisy dukes and and like you know really bad hair and she's got tats and she's only oh i don't know 15. i mean she's just you know this girl is rough bad news so when it says god drove them out of the garden of eden my first response used to be good riddance you know he's a and she's trashy good riddance and i kind of pictured him just booting them out of glory yeah that's not at all the context of genesis 3. that word drove out comes from the hebrew word garage i can't pronounce it well because i don't get enough guttural in my throat but it's garage and it's used redemptively in exodus twice for the the moment the season when god drove his people the theocracy of israel out of captivity toward the promise like us they were about as smart as sheep so they had gotten really comfortable in captivity god had to rock them out of a rut to get them from captivity to the promise the word is used in excess twice totally redemptive context they're not being hurt they're not being ushered toward their own death they're actually being ushered toward their own freedom and life but it says they were driven out toward freedom away from egypt redemptive context and then in first samuel chapter 21 that's after david he's running away from saul remember saul was the first king of israel he was a narcissistic nut job was really jealous of david because david had more followers than him and so he was trying to kill him and so david flees for his life and he ends up fleeing into enemy territory remember who their arch enemy was young talk back he was still social distance inspect that's cool philistines so he finds himself in philistine territory he finds himself standing before the king of the philistines the king of goth this is first samuel 19 if you want to check me and when he stands before the king of gath he realizes oh goodness gracious i'm wearing goliath sword do you remember who goliath was i mean he was like the big dog daddy of the philistines remember he's this probably eight-foot man when david before he had even started using you know claritin or anything for his skin is that for girls or is that for acne is it for acne oh allergies that's right i was trying to do an acne medication and i couldn't pull one fast enough so anyway before david's even gone through puberty he ends up killing goliath if you remember the story with a slingstone and slingshot stone whatever and so he kills the giant well from that day forward david is enemy number one to the philistines he utterly humiliated them now here it is years later and he's up in the middle of philistine standing in front of the king of the philistines wearing goliath's sword i mean you talk about waving a red flag in front of a bull i mean surely he is about to get his own head cut off and that's why david starts to feign madness and he did what no other israelite man would do he drooled in his beard and by feigning madness and dribbling in his beard which was a huge no-no for orthodox jewish men in that era of history gath the men of gath the soldiers of the king of gath say we we need to let this guy go otherwise an innocent crazy man's blood is going to be on your hands and it says and thus david was drove out you see god's merciful sovereignty there he's about to get killed and god drives him out for his own good for survival it's immediately after god rescues him from the king of gath that david writes psalm 34 one of my favorite psalms where he says those who look to the lord their faces are radiant they'll never be covered with shame he's just totally shamed himself by drooling in his beard pretending to be a bad madman god uses that drives him out from certain death and immediately after that he says my face will never be covered with shame because of how you drove me out to victory god it's in that same psalm that we get god is close to the brokenhearted he's near us when our lives feel crushed which is just a theme verse for this season in our world in the world at large so now when i think of genesis 3 i don't think of a girl on a tube top i think of our gracious god taking his kids by the arms and redemptively ushering them out of eden not because he's a unibrow librarian and is about to smack them over the head with the bible but because he knows what they don't and he knows if they come back and they eat from the tree of life they will be forever frozen in eden forever separated from the intimacy with him that they were created for so he begins to drive them out herd them toward recreating the intimacy that he had fashioned them for it's such a redemptive passage y'all there is so much hope in scripture when people tell me the bible's boring i'm like no you may have sat under a boring bible teacher the bible itself is not boring nor is it punitive this is a divine love story it's filled with hope okay head to the right and if you can prove to me that you've actually been spending your quiet time in numbers specifically numbers chapter 27 i will send you 20 bucks not that we advocate betting here at elevation but i want to take you to another passage and this one is just stunning it's just one that we usually skip over because it sounds like it's one of those boring old testament passages isn't it funny how so many of us think of the god of the old testament as like this angry autocrat and the god of the new testament as jesus with bright girl hair extensions like all warm and fuzzy you know if that is true then genesis 1 26 and 27 isn't if that's true then god is bipolar it's not true drives me nuts when people say well jesus said in the red letters i'm like he didn't say the black letters because last i knew it's god's father god says and got the holy spirit but let me stop stepping on anybody's toes okay numbers 27 then drew near the daughters of zelophehad the son of hefer the son of gilead son of maker and a lot of other hard words the names of his daughters were mala noah hogla now i need to stop there for just a minute because i know a lot of you especially you younger mamas really want to name your kids biblical names to impress your small group don't don't be working with hogla hogla that's just hard that's not a good name it's in the bible but it's not a good name don't replicate that name hagla milka and tirzah and they stood before moses and before eliezer the priest and before chiefs and all the congregation at the entrance of the ten of meetings saying our father died in the wilderness he was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the lord and the company of quran but died for his own sin and he had no sons why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son give to us a possession among our fathers brothers now you better bet at this point in ancient history everybody who's watching this take place started whipping out their cell phones they're like i am going to insta story this because they are just about to be fried into a grease spot of oblivion because at this point in ancient history women had basically the same value as a good milk cow women were regarded as chattel something a man could own and the law of the land was primogeniture primogeniture if you remember from high school or college history meant that the firstborn son inherited all of his father's estate upon his father's death that's what reigns during this period of israel's history and so these daughters of zelophehad they have the hutzpah to go against the law of culture come before moses and the high priest and go we think we should get daddy's land you can just imagine all of israel is like they just assume a lightning bolt is just about to come out and fry these cheeky chicks but that's not what happens y'all this is stunning i so want to read this to my militant friends who are burning their bras and tell them that floppiness is not necessary moses brought their case before the lord verse 5 and the lord said to moses the daughters of zelophehad are right you shall give them possession of an inheritance among their fathers brothers and transfer the inheritance of their father to them and you shall speak to the people of israel saying if a man dies and has no son then you shall transfer his inheritance to his daughter y'all what that passage that we tend to skip over says is that our creator redeemer is not some autocrat or a misogynist to enjoy is punishing his people but instead he has always been actively redeeming culture he's always been actively restoring the dignity that others have stolen from his image bears this book is filled with generational wells of hope y'all just over and over and over again guys if you'll stay with me for just one more second i've got one more estrogen passage but i'll be fast deuteronomy chapter 22 verse 28 if if a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and they are found then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman woman 50 shekels of silver and she shall be his wife because she he has not violated her he may not divorce her all his days now i don't know if you really heard what i was saying in the esv there but that is nasty town i mean that is just awful if you read it at first glance without the socio-historical context because what that is saying is a young woman who has been violated by a man that sounds like that young young man bribes her daddy and then she has to marry her violator so it sure sounds like god is advocating that insult be added to injury you have to understand the context y'all any text in this love story can be used as a proof text that is not true if you take it out of context in the context god's people have just come out of egyptian captivity where they have been under what we could call the first iteration of sharia law and the culture that they had been in for 400 years said that any young woman 12 and over who was not married or betrothed was vulnerable to be violated by any man who so chose and the consequence of the man who violated her is guess what not a nothing not a slap on the wrist not a traffic violation and so one of my professors at denver seminary i love this he puts it like this he said so god steps over the fence of ancient culture and he says you're not going to violate my baby girls anymore have you ever wondered why girls in this area of history got married at 12 this is why you ever wonder why women don't go alone to the well this is why he says from now on any of you idiots who are even thinking about violating one of my daughters here's the deal if you do so you will set up a 401k for her through her daddy y'all this is unheard of women were not even allowed to hold property at this time in history he says you'll set up an account so she'll be financially independent then you will give her your name not to re-violate her but to begin to restore some of the dignity you stole and then if you do not take care of her and provide for her for the rest of her life you're liable to get stoned by the rest of the community big boy i heard this passage quoted about a year ago in a blog by a woman who was trying to prove that god is a misogynist and i thought you've missed the whole thing the whole point of this is that god has always been in the process of redeeming culture of restoring the value that other people have stolen from us this is the book of hope y'all there is hope on every page we don't always mine it correctly because we read the bible lazy we want something we can tweet instead of something that we can chew on but the bible is filled with hope i'm close to landing just two more passages head to the right to matthew's gospel to matthew chapter 18. and some of you how many of y'all are eight eights on the enneagram eights on the enneagram okay my guess would be some of you eights are very familiar with this passage if you're female 8 you've probably cross stitched it it might be hanging on your wall matthew 18 beginning in verse 15 if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone if he listens to you you have gained your brother but if he does not listen take one or two others along with you that every change may be that every charge excuse me may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses if he refuses to listen to them tell it to the church tell it to everybody go ahead and get on epham and just just blow the news everywhere in church and if he refuses to listen even to the church let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector when i was in high school we had a youth pastor for a season who was really really passionate and he used to wave his bible around like this when i was in my 20s i tried to imitate it and i hit a woman upside the head with genesis but just went out of my bible and hit this woman in the head i was like i'm sorry i'm so sorry they never invited me back but he would swing his bible around quote from matthew 18 and he would tell all of us in the youth ministry that we were supposed to go and verbally confront better yet assault our friends who were partying after football games or smoking pot or were still engaged in heavy petting now i know i'm older than the median of elevation but can i get a witness did any of y'all have a pastor who used the phraseology heavy petty do you remember holly and it confused me i mean it confused me a lot i remember being at this this kind of fire and brimstone revival this was the late 70s i was in middle school in central florida and a pastor got up and started swinging his bible around veins were popping out and he said any of you who've been involved in heavy petting wants you to come to the altar and repent you know and i'd come there on the van with our little first baptist church and and i was nervous because i was afraid the van would leave me because i didn't really always believe billy graham when he said they'd stay um but i sat there and i thought have i have i i mean i love our beagle we have the sweetest beagle named smokey and i thought have i have i just inadvertently like like rubbed her fur the wrong way or maybe pet her with a little bit too much weight have i caused my dog canine injury i don't know this verse has been used y'all to shame teenagers who've struggled with you know frisky feelings i think since the beginning of baptist time anyway it's also been used to justify ecclesiastical expulsion in other words this passage matthew 18 has been used as the soul passage to justify kicking people out of church do you hear me now i want to take just a second here because i'm not advocating for anarchy in church i'm really not for for church to be a healthy thriving community there have to be paranorm parameters this is not just crazy town and so we need spiritual leaders we need people holding us accountable but i really think that when we take this verse as the proof text to kick people out of fellowship i think we're missing the main point jesus was making it's right there in front of us and i've missed it my whole life i am 56 years old i have a master's in theology i'm two years away god willing from having a doctorate in redemptive hermeneutics i have studied my behind off because i'm single and it's the only way i get any kind of endorphins and so i've got scads of books on exegesis and ex catology and redemptive hermeneutics and socio-historical context but it wasn't until this last summer i was sitting in a class listening to a professor unpack the redemptive thread in matthew 18 that i went jesus it's jesus speaking and jesus says treat them as tax collectors and gentiles how did jesus always treat tax collectors and gentiles i mean matthew's writing at matthew was a tax collector before he encountered jesus and jesus said come be a fisher of men with me matt change your facebook status you're going to be an evangelist but you were a tax collector do you remember luke 19. if you don't remember it right off hand about you you sang luke 19 there was we little man and a wee little man was he remember zacchaeus climbed up in a sycamore tree to meet jesus y'all he was the ceo of the irs division in jericho it was implied by dr luke that that zacchaeus got filthy rich by padding to what he was assessing his jewish countrymen and then skimming off the top before wiring those funds to rome i mean this was not just a tax collector this was a tax collector without scruples and yet when jesus meets zach do you think he calls him out for his duplicity no he invites himself over to dinner and after zach and jesus hang out do you remember zach's response i'll give half of what i own to the poor half of what i own to prison ministry and to orphans in uganda and to feed the homeless here in charlotte i'll give half of what i own i'm so happy to trade in my bentley for a smart car and anyone whom i'm defrauded i'll repay them four times what i initially stole treat them as tax collectors and gentiles remember genesis 12 when god says to our great great granddaddy abraham through you all of the nations of the earth will be blessed they'll all meet jesus the promise goes all the way back to the beginning it's fulfilled in the working person of jesus christ paul said my whole ministry is so that gentiles will come to know jesus two-thirds of the new testament is about outsiders being drawn into the unconditional love of our creator redeemer treat them as gentiles and tax collectors do you really think he intended that to be punitive yeah we used the bible as a club and it was never meant to be used as a club it's true it's authoritative there are parameters for abundant life in here this isn't a joke but it's not punitive we're going to land in hebrews hebrews chapter 4 verse 12. any of you who grew up in church holly i know that you could quote this one backwards because it's one of the first verses that we learned we were growing up if you've listened to pastor stephen for any length of time you've heard this verse you've heard this whole book preached hebrews chapter 4 verse 12 for the word of god is living an active sharper than any two-edged sword piercing to the division of the soul and the spirit of joints and of marrow and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart again this is one of those passages i used to swing my bible around in the 20s in my 20s not the 20s i'm not that old but i would use that passage basically to guilt people into being in a bible study and it wasn't until recently that i started really looking at that verse and i thought oh my goodness now y'all let me qualify this because i'm probably going to step on some toes i am a bible banger through and through i believe in the veracity and the authority of that text from cover to cover god willing i will spend the rest of my life talking about what's between those leather-bound pages i love this book it's not just a book to me it's life to me everything i've ever needed for life and godliness i find on these pages it's not a textbook it's not a rule book it's not a collection of benign morality tales this is life to us but i took that verse out of context in hebrews i thought it was all about the bible do you remember when hebrews was written colleen you'll know between 60 and 70 a.d between 60 and 78 days she's like do you also remember a d a lot of people think that's after death it's actually latin anno domini the year of our lord bc is before christ you know they've changed the history books now and bc is now bce before the common era and instead of it being a d a n o dominating here of our lord it's c e common era just a little a little side note um interesting how everybody's trying to throw jesus out of history and yet jesus is the foundation of the history of hope anyway written between 60 and 70 a.d between 60 and 70 a.d there were very few other epistles new testament epistles we would now call books being circulated the very first collection loose collection of most of the new testament books was in 200 the very first formal collection of all 27 new testament books is in 367 i think a.d that was by um and an af and i think something anathemous or anaphasia or something some mix of those terms and then it was formally canonized into the very first new testament the council of hippo in 393. a.d what do all those boring historical facts mean means that right here when this pastor is encouraging his sheep because his sheep like us were really tired and his sheep like us were running out of hope and he said i want you to remember that jesus logos greek jesus that word is used in john 1 in the beginning was the word the word was god the word was with god this is before we had unscriptureated text he's saying jesus is sharper than a two-edged short sword jesus knows the motive of your heart and jesus knows you're running out of hope jesus it's all about jesus y'all when we segregate the god who loves us from inscripturated text it becomes punitive when we realize this is all about jesus this is the generational well from which we can draw hope in the driest season you look back and go our creator redeemer has always been in the process of restoring the dignity that has been stolen from us of redeeming the mistakes that you and i have made oftentimes against each other i can't even mention hebrews without thinking of something that happened recently i was speaking at a conference for people who were in addiction it's a recovery from addiction conference and i have never struggled with with alcohol or drugs or opioids but i identify as a recovering addict because one of my favorite theologians a guy named dr ed t welch wrote a book called a banquet in the grave and in that book he said that all addictions are ultimately a disorder of worship in other words if you don't put jesus in the biggest hole in your soul you'll run to the wrong things of the wrong people so i thought i'm at home with these recovering addicts and it was on a friday night then it went through saturday friday night there's this woman during worship who came up front and this church wasn't quite as wiggly as we are here at elevation it was a little more just a little less demonstrative and so she was the only woman up front only person up front and she was completely oblivious to anybody else about six seven hundred of us at this conference she was just dancing and dipping and twirling and i found myself distracted by her as we were singing i thought i'd love to hear her story because in my experience people who are able to kind of step outside from that world most of us live in where we're afraid of what anybody else thinks people who operate independent of other people's approval usually have these incredible back stories and i thought man i'd love to to know her story and so i was excited the next morning i went to the sanctuary early because i was teaching that morning and i went in early just to pray and prepare and she was in there with the only two people in the sanctuary she was up front so i walked up and i introduced myself to her and she said her name was joyce and i said joyce i just want to thank you because i was trying to focus on jesus but i got distracted a few times by you last night i was just really undone by how unrestricted you were during worship i mean it was just you and jesus and i'm not quite that free yet so i really loved the model that you set before me and i said it also made me wonder what your back story is because that kind of praise usually comes from someone who's been delivered from a lot and she said oh yes ma'am i've been delivered and she launched into this story that could have come from cable i mean just horrible backstory of abuse and she was a hardcore addict and alcoholic for about 13 years and then she met jesus and jesus just invaded every dark corner of her life and she became just a passionate follower of jesus christ was involved in addiction ministries and celebrate recovery had really impacted her community and i thought wouldn't you know it i mean that's why she dances like that well later on just maybe 20 minutes later i'm standing up on stage starting my message and i looked down and joyce is just sitting right there and i thought oh my goodness she's got such a great voice because as soon as she introduced herself i thought she is like a three pack a day smoker and shout out real gravely awesome voice and i thought i'm gonna get joyce to read from the passage i'm reading i happen to be in hebrews and so normally i will warn people if i'm gonna ask them to read something that i'm doing you know i'll tell them ahead of time even in our bible study i'm like is it cool if i ask you to pray today i don't like to you know shock people and so um normally i would have asked joyce but at this point i hadn't just i was so overwhelmed by how much i loved her story and she's sitting right there and i thought we've got to use that voice so i jump off stage and i go y'all this is my new friend joyce and i just love her heart and i love her voice so she's going to read the text for us today and joyce kind of looked a little flustered and then she took the mic and she read the passage tripped over a few of the words in the beginning but then you know got in a groove and read the passage and everybody clapped politely and i was like thanks joyce i go up and i finish well maybe four hours later the conference is over i'm in the back of the room and joyce comes up and just kind of sheepishly says miss lisa i need to tell you how you having me read that passage impacted me and i was like oh man you know i'm sure sure i've somehow stepped on a bruise where she's afraid of reading in public or something i so should have asked her and i said oh joyce i'm so sorry if i wounded you and she says no no i need to tell you a little more my story she said i i told you that god had healed me of alcoholism and then i've been clean for a long long time been so sober for a long long time she goes what i didn't tell you was that nine months ago i fell off the wagon she said nine months ago i was engaged to be married only guy i ever trusted and she said two weeks for the wedding i found out he'd been stepping out with my best friend and she said i was just devastated and so she said i turned back to jack daniels to drown my sorrows and she said i spent the weekend after i found out he stepped out on me she said i was just drunk as a skunk all weekend and she said when i sobered up on monday i came into church where she had been on staff and she said i told the leaders i said yo i fell off the wagon i told them why and she said they were really really gracious but then they were also very very um sober in how they followed through and they said we can no longer have you on staff because of you having that mistake especially since you work with addicts and so they they asked for her letter of resignation she left staff and she ended up leaving that particular church because she said even though i wanted to stay there i wanted to walk it out she said lisa every time i walked in the sanctuary i felt like i had a scarlet letter a for alcoholic on my chest and she said i just couldn't do it so after a couple of months i moved my membership to another church across town she said i didn't tell you this morning that this is the church that i was asked to to resign from and she said and last night was the very first time i've stepped foot in the sanctuary again and i said oh joyce i'm so sorry because i thought here i've ruined what god had shaped to be this precious homecoming and she said oh no no you didn't ruin anything she said lisa you couldn't possibly have known that when i was a little girl i was illiterate my mom didn't send me to kindergarten and on the first day of the first grade i walked into a little school in appalachia and the teacher was a new teacher didn't know my story and she called on me to read and she said i stood up and she said i can still remember how bad my legs were shaking because i didn't know any of my abn cs much less how to string them together so she said i just looked at those letters on the page they were like hieroglyphics and i just recited something i had heard from one of mom's soap operas hoping that somehow the line i spoke was close to what was in this book little jack and jane primer and she said all the kids started dying laughing and they all started calling me stupid and she said that name stuck all the way through high school graduation so she said i learned if i was ever going to speak out loud say anything in public in school or at work she said i would obsessively go over every single word that i was going to read or i was going to speak because i was so nervous about ever speaking publicly she said but when you called me out of 700 people you called me by name and you said i want joyce to read she said it's like the heavens rolled back and god himself said that's my girl listen to her and she said today this place of shame has become a place of honor to me don't y'all want to be a little more like joyce don't you want to be so undone by the redemption in our story by the redemption and the stories behind us that we can't help but express some of that hope to the world around us a hope that's desperate world is desperate for hope y'all can you imagine not knowing jesus in this season can you imagine how hopeless some of the precious image bears that you rub shoulders with not really now but you rub shoulders six feet away from now our people are dying for real hope and we have it if you walk with jesus we have it you may have forgotten it you may have misplaced it but the reservoir of hope for christ followers it's bottomless we can always reach into generational wells there are millions in here and draw up living hope peter says living hope not stagnant hope living hope shall just close your eyes and bow your heads and when you sit for just a second wherever you are i know so many of you are in your cars you're maybe at work watching a laptop you're at home on the couch still a little bit grumpy that it was me and not stephen would you just sit for a minute and ask god to open your eyes to the hope that is already yours [Music] ask him to give you the grace to lean back into the generations of hope that we've been forged from the eternal hope we're walking toward jesus we confess to you this morning as your sons and daughters that all too often we look like that passage in proverbs that says hope deferred hope delayed makes a heart sick and jesus some of us feel just flat heart sick this season because it's been harder than usual to hang on to hope and so we need you king jesus we need your holy spirit to quicken our minds and our hearts to remind us of our history redemptive history the history that you have woven us into the history that you have always been actively a part of redeeming restoring setting captives free oh lord jesus remind us that there's no room for dry bones in our hearts no room for dry bones thank you thank you thank you for this reminder that you see us you've always seen us you've always loved us you've always been actively in the process of calling us home teach us what it is to rest in your hope we will be so careful jesus to give you and you alone the honor and the glory and the praise for what you do this day in june 2020. thank you for watching the elevation church youtube channel don't stop here join the e-fam our online extended family and join us live every sunday subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a single video or live stream and share this with a friend you can also support the ministry by clicking the give now button to help us continue to reach people around the world for jesus christ thank you again for watching god bless you

Channel: Elevation Church

Views: 208,026

Rating: 4.8966107 out of 5

Keywords: elevation church, pastor steven furtick, hope is in our dna Lisa harper, hope is in our dna, elevation church sermons, elevation church guest sermons, steven furtick sermons, steven furtick, 2020 sermons, lisa harper elevation church, Lisa harper sermons, hope, restoration, redemption, living hope, elpis, tax collectors, feeling hopeless, sermons about hope, hopelessness, how to have hope, holding on to hope, lisa harper 2020, god gives us hope, lisa harper

Id: X1li83yoc5Q

Length: 53min 53sec (3233 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020