Address—Michael Anderson
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Good evening.
My name is Michael Anderson.
And I hail from the Pella Assembly in Iowa. And tonight I thought we would, uh, spend some time talking about seasons of our life. And, umm, I'd like to start out by uh, suggesting we saying #209 Our times are in thy hand, Father. We wish them there. Our life, our soul are all we live entirely to thy care.
That's thing #209 can someone start that please?
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Let's ask for his help.
Our God and our Father, this evening we come before Thee to spend a short period of time in Thy word, considering.
Find plan for us.
We know that Thou art with us every step of the way, and yet, as feeble humans that we are, we forget.
And we start thinking wrongly, we ask without will give the speaker the words this evening to give some encouragement and some *** assistance to those in this room that are in need of that, including Speaker himself. We know that thou has all the strength to take us through everything we ask for that assistance this evening. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
Well, as I was considering.
Umm, having a talk this evening.
Umm, I was thinking about the, uh, beginning to my year, uh, that I've just gone through the first five months of my year.
First five months we're pretty busy, a lot of travel and a lot of work.
Umm, some of you may do enough flying that you recognize what it takes to get status, as some in the room might call it with an airline. And, uh, in the first five months of this year, I did enough flying to get status with United and Delta and almost, I'm almost there with American, umm, 630 flight segments each airline to get there.
Also in that first period of time.
Some of you know that I I do coaching and consulting with business owners and executives and I therefore have kind of my own business and I build out enough during that first five months that equaled the amount that I've done the entire previous year.
And since that relates to how much hours you spent working for clients, it was a pretty harrowing time.
The combination of a lot of things, the projects coming to an end and projects that I've had for six years kind of coming to an end, as I knew that they would. Right now I'm a lot less busy than that and I'm working on some other things, but I feel like I'm not doing anything.
And they just kind of recognized that there was a season that the Lord had me very busy and there must have been a reason. And now there's a season that I'm not as busy and there must have been a reason.
Recently I was up at the visitation for a brother, some of you might know, umm, the last name of Reno, uh, Ed Reno, umm, and umm, at that funeral, I was uh, uh, one of the, one of his sons, Steve is uh, pretty, pretty good friend of mine. And so I was, uh, visiting obviously their family as well, but I was uh, especially wanting to say hi to him. I had him especially in my, in my mind and.
As I walked up to him and kind of in the somber time of.
The fact that his father had passed away and he had been called back from Canada, he was fishing and that sort of thing. And thinking about that effect on him, I, uh, saw his daughter Ashley with her new baby that she just had, umm, just a few days old at that point. And so I thought about the season of your father passing away and.
The coincidence of that with the season of a new grandson coming in.
And how those two things can really create a different perspective in a person's mind. And it just kind of occurred to me that God gives us different seasons in our life and gives us different times where we are allowed to go through circumstances and He's there for us through those seasons, but He gives us those seasons for a reason.
I don't know about you all, maybe you all are beyond this point, but for me I sometimes struggle with those things.
Struggle with the different seasons that he gives me sometimes I struggle and think that I'm you know, I'm too busy and, and I don't know why I'm having to do all these things or maybe I'm frustrated that I don't have enough going on or that things aren't going the way that that that I had hoped and I started with those things maybe some of you do here too. I would say that I've learned as a professor and and as someone who's done some teaching in my life but.
Most of the time that I do teaching.
It, it, it actually ends up being more of a lesson for myself than it was a lesson for anyone else. And so I'll just tell you that I'm going to share a number of different personal experiences with you, umm, as we talk. And, uh, some of these were some of the things that went through my mind as I was putting some of these things together. And, umm, I stand here as somebody who feels very exercised by the things I'm gonna talk with you about.
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And uh, really feel that there's others here that would benefit from the same thing as well.
So UMM wanted to talk with you about that. You know, when we talk about seasons, the first thing that comes to our mind is weather. And it's interesting that the Earth is tilted 27° and 27 minutes. If the Earth wasn't tilted that way, we wouldn't experience the changing of the seasons, right? It'd be like the same season all the time. Because that tilt is what puts us closer and further away from the sun and changes our temperatures and gives us those seasons that we have. God did that for a reason.
Because he wanted to give us an example of seasons so that we would have something that we could relate to as we understand the seasons in our life. Averse. Uh, that comes to mind when you think of seasons. Probably one of the first verses that comes to mind is an Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes chapter 3.
And starting and and verse one.
To everything there is a season.
And a time to every purpose under the heaven.
Everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. If we went on and read additional verses after that, we'd see that there's a long list of things that there's, uh, a time for. There's a time for this and a time for that time for things that you wouldn't think there should be a time for, right? And, uh, yes, there is. And I think as, uh, as, as is being pointed out there, God super intends.
Every season.
God superintendents every season.
He overseas them and he is in charge of that season, not only overall in this world, but for you individually in your life.
Please skip down to verse 11. It says He hath made everything beautiful.
In his time, everything is beautiful in his time and seasons are the way that we experience time.
Another verse I would mention, and as I jump around with verses, you're certainly welcome to turn to them, uh, if you want, but you're also welcome to just listen Ephesians chapter one, verses 9 and 10. Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purpose in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one.
All things in Christ.
Both which are in heaven, which are on earth, even in Him. You see, God's purpose is to bring everything under Christ, to bring everything together with Him as the center point.
When you think about your life and you look over whatever length of life that you've had, some here longer than others.
You have to understand that.
There was a purpose to your life, and that purpose was was built in in eternity in in God's mind.
You see, God schedules everything in your life. He just doesn't post the schedule.
And.
You experience that purpose that He set forth, an eternity past you. You experience that.
In seasons.
You know, despite knowing that our purpose is to grow in our likeness to Christ and that God's purpose in total is centered on Christ.
And knowing that all things are made beautiful in his time. And knowing that he has control of the seasons despite all of that.
I found some shortcomings that I've had as it relates to, uh, uh, working with and responding to those seasons in my life.
I've listed out four of them. Let's see if any of those are ones that you might.
Relate to.
One is I think sometimes we try, we desire other people's seasons.
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We see other people in a season and we wish we were in that season.
Two, we focus sometimes on the negative in our own season, what's going on that's bad right now, And we make that the focus. We make that the center of what our brain is considering.
3rd, Sometimes we miss his hand in the season. We're in the season and his hand is there to take us and to and to and to give us the strength to do something and we completely miss it.
And 4th, I think we get impatient with our seasons. We think, I think we've been here long enough. Can't we move on?
Shouldn't we be on the next season?
And so I want to take each of those four and I want to open those up a little bit tonight and just talk a little bit about those.
That's all right. Let's start with the one that says we desire other people's season.
You know, umm, recently I've, I've, uh, I've got a, a, a daughter in my house who got a driver's license and in the state of Iowa, when I got my driver's license, we didn't have what we call graduated, uh, licensing. When I got my license, I was free to kill.
Fortunately I didn't, but umm, I had a full license and now I've graduated licenses, right. And so, you know, when you think about it, you, you, you're in the, you're, you're in that season perhaps where you don't have, you don't have a license yet. And you think, oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if I was able to get one? Then you have a graduated license and there's some stipulations about who can be in your car. Oh, won't it be neat when I don't have those stipulations anymore and I don't have to go home at a certain time or go certain ways and then we move on to.
You know, maybe skip over a little here. And we think, uh, won't it be nice when I go to college and I have all that, you know, freedom and be able to, you know, not have to study the stuff that I have to study at the, at the, at the high school level and I can start studying the stuff I want to, and won't that be neat? And then we start saying, well, wouldn't it be neat when I get married and I, I, I'm able to have my own home and, and, and things like that. And then we move on to from there.
Wouldn't it be neat to have kids?
Where I'm right now, where I am right now, I, I really would like to have kids. You see, we keep thinking we want to be in another season. And then once you have the kids, then you kind of wonder when are the kids going to go?
Right. And finally, when am I gonna get to retire? So the point is we're always, at least I and maybe some others here, we're always kind of thinking we wanna be in someone else's season. I've always wanted to get to the next season. I remember thinking when, uh, or my oldest was first born and I had this little baby, I remember thinking how much better it would be when my baby could talk with me.
When we could have a real conversation and like share back and forth with each other or each other's thoughts.
I thought this was gonna be so neat.
Well, and then my kids grew up and started arguing with me.
It always seems so much better.
I thought a number of years ago some of you may have heard or understood that I'm not, uh, the, uh, most, uh, excited camper and umm.
Our assembly had a camp out once a year had been going on for a long time and I knew I wasn't going to get around that. And I thought, well, I, I would like to participate in the camp out and stop going home at night. So I thought, you know, this would be really cool people who have, you know, a camper or something that that's really neat. I had to get a camper. And so my solution to the one day a week, one night a week or one night a month, one night a year. Excuse me, uh.
Camp out, oh there seemed like one day a week and stuff. All that was was to go out and buy a 34 foot Winnebago.
The first time we used it, it was pretty cool. You know, it had air conditioning, it had a shower and all this kind of good stuff.
But then we mothballed it for 30 hundred 364 days, right, because it only comes around once a year. And we go out to the camper and what do you think? You're scurrying around in the camper and what's flying around has a Stinger on the back of it. And so we had to clean it. And now I I say we in a very.
Interesting way.
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When you get married, you're one, right? So we had to clean it and all that. But the point is, I thought it was gonna be so great to have, you know, this, this camper. But it didn't turn out like that because we had all this, you know, a day 2 worth of cleaning in order to just use it for the one day. We always think things are gonna be better than they really are when we are looking across the fence. What I discovered.
Was I've been thinking about this is every season has its struggles.
And often you can't see those struggles from the outside looking in.
There's a part of you that looks at other people in the season that they're in and says I want to be there.
But you see, when we look at other people's seasons, we only see the fruit.
We don't see what they went through to get there.
I looked up, I looked up, umm, the average amount of debt that somebody has when they come out of medical school as a doctor in the United States, and I was astounded to find that it's $175,000 of debt. The average amount.
Being a doctor seems on the surface to be a pretty cool thing. You know, it seems like a, a, a respectable and, and very, uh, you know, helping type of profession. And at the same time, look at what had to be gone through in order to get there. I sat next to someone on an airplane who was some sort of a brain surgeon and they've been going to school for 13 or 14 years and we're just getting to the point where they were gonna be able to start their real career.
And I'm talking after high school.
We don't sometimes see what was what was put in, in order to get to that person's season and the fruit of it.
When you think about it, just a summer example.
Living in Saint Thomas, I learned at the dinner table there's, I knew this, but I didn't recognize it at the moment. There's two St. Thomas thinking of the Saint Thomas that's really hot, uh, down in the Caribbean. Umm, you know, it seems really cool. You know, a lot of people go on a cruise or go on a vacation down at Saint Thomas, but how would you like to live in that sweltering humid heat?
All the time. For example, anybody like to like to look at leaves?
You know, out on the east, some of you are from the East Coast, especially the northeast, and there's some beautiful leaves in the fall out there.
MMM, do you wanna rake them?
Winter. I'm from Iowa. We get plenty of snow. When you look first look at snow, it looks pretty, doesn't it?
That's pretty, especially if you're from down South where you don't get snow.
But you know what we We have to shovel it to get to work.
There's all this thing, all these things that we don't see about other people's seasons In Ecclesiastes chapters one through 7, you know, Solomon kind of goes through and he says, you know, I've tried wisdom, tried materialism, busy pursuits, artistic expression, wealth, but it was all vanity.
You know, back to the doctor again. What's interesting is after putting themselves in debt that much.
Uh, according to a survey in 2012, they spent approximately 25% of their time on paperwork.
They work an average of 55 hours a week.
And only one third of them would choose the same career over again if they could.
You can't live in my season and I can't live in yours.
There is some logic to that 10th commandment. There is the 10th commandment. Something about having a life vest.
No, the sense command, the camp commandment is something about a life vest, but the 10th commandment?
Is saying we, we can't be coveting each other's situations. You know, in the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, verses 11 Through 14, I'll read that. And he said, a certain man had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that follows to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after, the younger son gathered altogether and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riots of living.
And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land, and he began to be in want.
In the story in the beginning here we see the younger son basically demanding his inheritance immediately.
He doesn't want to live in the season he's in. He wants to advance to another season. He wants to get that money and he wants to advance his his season. He wants to go live a ride his life. He wanted to experience life now, not winning. Inheritance was due.
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He's kind of like that. I'm tired of waiting for you to die. Give it to me now.
Because he wanted to advance his season and he wanted to go and experience something now.
Instead of living through the season that his father had appointed to him.
This is kind of like us, isn't it?
We see something that we want and we don't see what comes with it and we desire it, we covet it and we want to see how we can get to that next season.
But I'm going to say to you.
Are you praying for something that God does not want you to have in this season?
Choose to enjoy the season that you're in. There's no such thing as a struggle free season.
Where I stand right now.
Is where God intended for me to be.
I don't need your season.
That can be your thought too. Where I stand now is where God intended for me to be. I don't need that other season.
I'm where God wants me to be today.
Let's move on to the second one. We focus on the negative in our season. Most of the time, you can't control how long you're gonna remain in your current season. Most of the time, that's not something that's, uh, a variable that God put in your hands. Now, there are times when we can lengthen the season we're in. Just talk to the, uh, children of Israel in the, uh, in the wilderness for UH-40 years on that one, right? Sometimes we can lengthen our season by what we do, right, But.
We really aren't able to control the length of the season.
That's in God's hands. But you can control how you feel about your season, how you think about it. How are you thinking about your current season? What you think about it changes the way you experience your season. If you choose to view your season as beautiful, it will become beautiful. Why? Because you created it in your mind? No, because you'll see God's handiwork in the activities in your season.
Philippians 48 through nine. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. Brethren, whatsoever things are true, what sort of things are honest, What sort of things are just, what sort of things are pure, What sort of things are lovely, What sort of things are a good report? If there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things, those things which she both, which she have both learned and received and heard and seen in me do. And the God of peace shall be with you.
We're encouraged not to dwell on oh, woe is me, but instead to think on these things.
You know, practically.
Umm, a number Several years ago, my mother went through a couple of years of, uh, very painful cancer at the end of her life, and my father showed A level of patience that is beyond anything I have ever seen.
She necessitated being given medicine every two hours, 24 hours a day, and she would about 1/3 of the time argue about whether that medicine was the right medicine, and so he'd have to wake up and start it all over an hour and a half later.
Yeah, when I went over there one time, went to his apartment after about a year and a half of him living like that.
I didn't realize quite exactly how things were. I knocked on the door and he came to the door and he had a big smile on his face. He says, oh, Michael, I'm so glad you're here.
Not really, just yes, I wanted to go take a shower.
I said, what do you mean? Well, your mother woke up one time when I was in the shower and she panicked and called 911. And so I really don't have the ability to take a shower unless somebody's here to sit with her.
You see, he wasn't dwelling on the negative. He was happy. He had a happy response. When I was there. He was like, oh, this is wonderful. If he was sitting around, oh, woe is me. Look at what I have to put up with. Look at God, you know, through me for two years of my life in my first two years of retirement.
I think it would have had a different outcome.
Start speaking opportunistically about your season. This will open your eyes to experience it. Will you look at the season for what it can be for you or by what struggles it might be?
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There are times in our life where we're going through something, maybe we're going through a tough time, where we're going through a tough class. Are we going to look at it for the struggles that it is or the opportunity that it is? You can't always control your season, but you can control the attitude you have instead of saying how stressful your day was, Sam. So, uh, say I can I instead? I can recognize his strength that pulled me through the day.
Instead of saying how frustrating my brethren are.
I can say I'm blessed to have been given the fellowship.
You know, it's really inspiring when you run into people who have really taken this in and think this way. I must admit that this is something I'm working on, but you run into people who think this way. I was at meeting.
Year or two ago and for whatever reason something happened and the power went out and it was in the middle of the winter and it was cold. It was chatting your teeth cold. And we decided to have meeting anyway. So we all bundle up on our coats and everything and we got done and I turned around and spoke to somebody that sat behind me and I said, man, that was really cold today, wasn't it?
And the person's comment to me was, oh, but it was so warming to the heart.
Have to admit.
I was very happy that we had remembered the Lord, but I still realized how cold it was and this person that was behind me, this older person.
Was just focused on the warming of their heart where they focused on what was.
Lovely, good report. Pure. A virtue of praise, yes. Was I not to the same extent?
You know, there's a talk show host some of you might have heard of named Dave Ramsey. He talks a lot about financial things. He's a nice Christian man, and umm, when people ask him how he is, his answer is better than I deserve.
He always answers that way. I think that's a interesting, uh, thought for us to, uh, to have people that have brought this in and have made this the focus. They don't wait for the season to become beautiful. They say it's beautiful because they recognize God in the season.
The next one is, uh, that I mentioned was that we missed his hand in the season.
First Psalm, uh, the first Psalm of the book. First three verses read like this. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the council of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
That bringeth forth his fruit in his season His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
God's strength.
Is available for you in this season.
It's available for you to help you bear fruit for him if you will accept it.
If you will be open to it.
If you're so busy trying to figure out what other season you wanna be in. If you're so busy thinking about all woe is me for this season that I'm in.
You may miss it.
Some of us have been to a restaurant where you go in and there's a big long line.
And they have buzzers.
Little blinky buzzer things that they give you and umm.
They give it to you and they say this will go off and some of them blink and some of them say stuff to you and things like that when your table is ready, right?
Has anybody ever had the experience of taking that buzzer and maybe thinking, well, you know, if they said it's going to be 45 minutes to an hour, maybe I could go over to the mall or, you know, maybe we could go for a big long walk around several blocks, uh, and come back. And then you get back and you, and you say, huh, it's been like an hour and they said 45 minutes and I still haven't been called yet. So you go up front and you say.
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What's what's up with this and they say we've been calling for you, we called for you about 2025 minutes ago. We buzzed your phone several times. We or buzzed the the device several times and you didn't come, we moved faster. Why was that?
Because you got out of range of their little radio system, right? It's kind of like, uh, pretty easy to get out of range of the Wi-Fi on this camp, right? OK, you get out of range and what happens? Nothing comes through, right? I was, uh, at home. I was trying to get with my wife and I wasn't able to get to get to her because she didn't have any signal.
What happens when we get too far away from the Lord for our buzzer to go off?
You need to stay close to him so you're ready to accept that next step that He has for you. You need to stay close to him. You need to stay focused on Lord, what do you have for me in this season? Because if you go to wandering too far away when He says here it is, you may miss it.
You know, my travels, I was, uh, in the Miami airport.
At one time, and I think I had one of the more interesting, uh, uh, fall aparts of, of a flight ended up being delayed like six hours or more. But in the process it was just, it was like one thing after another. And they kept telling us, oh, we're going to get you on the plane and then the next thing would happen. So it was there were they, they got us all ready to get on the plane and then, and then they decided that there was, uh, you know, some small mechanical issue.
They had to fix and umm, I usually assume it's the toilet won't flush, but umm, so they had some small mechanical issue they had to, they had to fix. And so they sat us all back down again. So then they had to wait to have that handled and umm, by the time they got that done, they said, OK, we're about done with that. So we're, we're going to get you on. And then they, and then I, I don't know what was going on, but they, they, they then figured out that the plane was too warm.
Because it was Miami and they needed to put air conditioning on it and cool it back down again.
And so then after they got that done, they said, well, we're going to be putting you on here. It's getting cooled down. We're going to put you on here in just a few minutes. And I don't know, 15 minutes, 20 minutes goes by and I watch us in uniformed people, a whole bunch of uniformed people with bags behind them like this come walking off the airplane. I said that's going to be a can't be a good, a good sign. It was our pilot and everybody else getting off the airplane because they'd run out of time. They couldn't fly anymore.
So then they had to go find new crew and everything else. And so this this thing really kind of fell apart on.
American Airlines.
Now I've watched, I've watched many, many travelers in the airports and I've seen them and usually what you can tell is the ones that travel a lot from the ones that don't travel. Because the ones that travel a lot, they tend to make fists and they tend to pound them and they tend to get loud and they tend to huff and puff and, and things.
I just kinda gotten used to it.
I, I'm not gonna tell you that I'm not antsy about stuff because I am. I, I, I have that feeling. But when it comes to airplane mode, I just, you know, it's just like my phone. I go into airplane mode.
Oh, I'm supposed to sit here. I it's just, that's how I go into because if you do anything other than that, you're just going to get yourself frustrated. But here's the thing. Here's the thing.
I was sitting next to somebody in that airport.
And I got to have an interesting conversation.
It started with a little bit of political discussion because they were, umm, wanting to. There was a news article on the TV and they were mentioning something to me about that. And so I engaged them a little bit about it, but I ended, come to find out they're an atheist.
And so we were able to have a very interesting conversation that lasted almost two hours about why it is that they don't believe that there's a God when so much around them is so clear that there is.
And had a really, really interesting conversation with that gentleman about what was going on. Now, I will tell you that God doesn't always give us the opportunity to see the outcomes of the things that we do.
Sometimes he does, and that's a wonderful thing. I have no idea what happened there, but I know that there's an atheist who was going to get on that plane who's had the gospel presented to him. And it's because I had to sit for six hours in the Miami airport and watch people walk off the plane and fiddle diddle with heat.
And that's why.
And so we have to be ready to see the strength of the season, the thing that God has put in our place, something that's available to us that we are.
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Are required. We're bound if we want to follow him to do.
In that season.
Some people.
Umm, say they wanna be older.
But when you're older, you don't have as much energy as you have right now. You can't live in the season of what was or wish for the season of what might be. You can instead recognize and use the strength that God has given you in this season.
What is it that he's given you now?
Some want, some want to be older, like I said, but you won't have as much energy as you have now. Some of you might think, well, I wanna be with somebody, but then you won't have as much time as you do now.
Some wanna be younger.
But then you wouldn't have the wisdom that you do now.
There's strength that God has given you in every season, regardless of where you're, where you're put. And the the question is when he calls, when he buzzes, when he says here's how to use that strength, here's the strength I've given you and here's how to use it, will you be there? You know, God makes all things beautiful in its time. If you look around you, there's probably an opportunity to serve him now with whatever strengths he's provided you with in your season.
You know, let's pick up again with that parable of the prodigal son. Let's pick up with the other son.
We'll skip over a few verses and skip down to verse 25 through 31, and I'll read those.
Now it's in Luke 15. Now his elder son was in the field, and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, Thy brother is calm, and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.
And he was angry and would not go in therefore came his father out and entreated him. And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee. Neither transgressed I at any time by commandment. And yet thou never gave us me a kid that I make make make merry with my friends. But as soon as I as this, thy son was come, which has devoured thy living with harlots.
That was killed a fatted calf.
Father said. And he said unto him, Son.
Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is dying.
See, the older son comes back and he's displeased by this celebration.
You know, he saw what was going on. He's like, this isn't fair. I put all this in, I've worked all this and I'm not. Why is he getting something that's not fair?
The father went out to plead and the older son says, hey, I've served you for all these years and I never got a celebration. He compares his struggles that he had of serving his father and working hard. Probably there's enough work for two sons, but there was only one son there and he did all this stuff. And he compares that to this riotous living in celebration that the other son had.
And he says, But I never got my celebration.
He wants to be in the other Sun season. He wants to have this celebration. You know what? Comparison kills contentment.
When we compare our situation to other people's situations, that kills contentment.
But the father pointed out what's interesting to my point here.
You are always with me and everything I have is yours.
One son didn't have the patience to trust his father's timing.
The other son doesn't even recognize that his father's provisions for him are in his current season and available to him now.
Everything his father has is his.
He wakes up every day, this older son thinking maybe my father will throw me a party today.
Maybe he'll recognize all this work, and maybe he'll see me for who I am and he'll throw me a party. He'll kill the cat. He'll kill the kid.
But when he's waking up that way, thinking that way, in fact.
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The the the the father says any time is your time.
Just decide to recognize what I've provided you.
Be here when I called. Recognize the strength that I'm giving you. Recognize the capabilities and the power and the strength that you have right now. You didn't have to wait for something. You just needed to recognize that I'm here for you and everything I have is here for you. And God our Father is that way too.
In the season you're in right now, he is there for you and the strength that you need.
Is there? But are you listening for it? Are you looking for it? Are you earnest?
I think it might even be worse to sleep under your father's roof, waiting to get something that's already yours.
Don't get so far from God's house that when your pager goes off, you miss the call. Be earnestly looking and praying for His guidance, Jeremiah 33, three says.
Call into me, and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things.
Which thou knowest not.
Now is the season to rejoice in the Lord.
This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice.
All you gotta do is speak to him. He's available to answer your phone call 24/7.
The last one that I wanted to talk about was that we get impatient with the season.
If you remember back in the verse we talked about at the beginning, Ecclesiastes 311 Said God makes everything beautiful in its time.
You know, we don't tend to like the time part of that formula, do we?
We wanna see the results of our work immediately. If we do something, we wanna see how it turned out now. We don't wanna wait for some later date when something else might go on. You know, when I was in 3rd grade.
I guess I'm no exception. I not, I guess I know I'm not. When I was in 3rd grade I started my first company. In case you were wondering, it's a light bulb insurance company. When I was in 9th grade I started teaching teacher in service classes at my school and several other school districts.
I started, uh, and then I graduated college before I was 21. I'm not up here trying to say, oh, wonderful me. I'm saying look at what I did. I always was trying to Fast forward to being patient with where I was at and move on to the next thing. Patience, honestly.
Is a lesson that I have a lot to learn about.
But it doesn't mean that we can't talk about it today. You know, patience is a fruit of the Spirit.
But we have to experience it in order to grow in it. It's not something really that I can stand up here and teach you. Patience equals this out of the dictionary you got. It doesn't work right. Patience is something we have to learn through experience. Umm, a number of years ago, in fact, the last time that I did golf as a professional thing, umm, I was asked by a executive of a major dairy that I was doing some consulting for to, oh, you do have to do golf. And I had been out.
The balls around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't realize I wasn't thinking, you know, I, I mean, yes, I would go, you know, I wasn't lying or anything, but I wasn't thinking. I, I probably should have said not much. And he said, oh, why don't you throw your golf clubs in and bring them up? Well, they flew me up on their air for their private airplane up to their place. And I threw in my golf clubs. Well, but but they said, why don't you throw them in? Because why don't we go out golfing? So I, I like made several trips to the driving range and got blisters all over my hands and all that kind of stuff, thinking, oh, goodness, this is, this is gonna really be something else.
Anyway, uh, bottom line is I, umm, I, I knew I was in trouble when I went with the the executive to the golf course and they hit a button in their car and a garage door started going up on the golf course and it was their golf carts.
The next morning I was doing a a keynote speech for all the.
Executives and there was a lot of laughter going on at the breakfast table. I was actually up on a, on a umm, sage kinda like this and they were down sitting down there eating breakfast. All this laughter going on and finally I just stopped and said, hey, would you fill me? What's what's so funny? And I don't remember the guy's name. What's going Doug? Doug was just explained to us how he almost ran out of his golf car out of gas going after your ball last night.
Well.
You see, golf is not something you can go read about, It's something you have to experience in order to learn it. And patience is the same way. Galatians 522 But the fruit of the Spirit is Lovejoy, peace, long-suffering, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith.
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The fruit of the Spirit.
James, 14, says But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect an entire wanting nothing. What's the output of having developed good patience? What's the output of building up this fruit of the spirit wanting nothing?
You see when you're patient.
The thing that's happening in your brain is that you're patient.
You're not sitting there wanting the next thing.
Some people from a financial perspective need to think the same way. If you stop dreaming about what you would get if you had more money.
Then you've established contentment, right? I sometimes ask people when I'm helping with interviewing for executive positions, I say, if you were to be given $50,000 right now, I handed it over to you. What would you have that spent on before you even arrived home?
You'd be surprised the answer's like that.
There are people who thought it through. When you do those things, when you think those things through and you have those in your mind, that's a lack of contentment, and patience is about being content with the time that you're in.
As we develop patients, we finally feel completely satisfied because we don't see anything that we're lacking.
My wife and I went on our honeymoon to Maui and, umm, when we were there, we uh, went into a, uh, an art gallery, uh, by a man by the name of Peter Lick LIK. And, uh, Peter Lick is an extremely accomplished, uh, photographer. In fact, I, uh, was uh, looking some things up about him and, uh, and found that, uh, the last year he sold.
For a world record, uh, for the most money, a single photo, uh, original photo, it was, uh, it was in, uh, an A Canyon that looks absolutely amazing called the Antelope Canyon.
In Arizona, it's like this really narrow thing that's like, you know, about the size of a person, but is go straight up, you know, UH50, whatever, 100 feet. OK, so you're walking, you know, imagine yourself down in this little ravine of, of, uh, you know, with, with straight up walls and kind of curvy and stuff. Anyway, he'd taken a picture where there was a little dust storm and, and a ray, a single ray of light that was coming down. It was called Phantom because the dust storm and the.
Ray of Light makes it look like some sort of a ghostly figure. Anyway, he sold this for six and a half $1,000,000 and it was a world record. Here's the thing about Peter Lick. Everyone of his pictures, if you look at them, he's waited for exactly the right second when the sun came through a little hole in something in Arizona, or the sun came up peeking over the top of one of the mountains over in, uh, in, uh, in Asia or whatever it is. He's gotten exactly the right set up or, or, or.
Uh, you know, waiting for a bear to have a have a fish jump up out of, out of a waterfall and be right there out of his teeth. It's about patience. You have to learn patience by experiencing it.
When I, uh, was on vacation in California, we went on, uh, we went to some uh, uh.
Uh, different, uh, amusement parks and I, I thought of uh, uh, Disney, uh, World, this is over in Florida, but I think about the long lines that sometimes form.
And that can really test your patience, especially because they do stuff like they build these different things where you can't even see where the end of the line is. So, you know, you're like here and you think, oh, that's the end of the line. And then you get there and you turn and there's like a, a whole sea of people and, you know, turnstiles and stuff. And, and so it can be really frustrating even for the most patient person until you can actually see the end of line when you can see where you're getting to.
Then all of a sudden things feel better, right?
We can be patient even though we can't see the end, even though we don't know exactly where God is taking this. We can be patient because we know that God is ordering life and He will bring about the change for us to the next season in life at the right time. We don't need to worry.
You know, when you don't know how long the line is and you think, oh, it might be two or three hours, you're like, huh, I don't know if I want that. But we don't have to worry about that because if two or three hours in a line is what we're supposed to have God, the, the God that can see everything and knows everything and has our best interest at heart, He's ordering that for us. He's determining how much of A length of time it should be. So we don't need to worry about where that end is because we know it's in his hands.
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Hebrews UH23 uh, I'm sorry. Habakkuk 2/3.
For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak and not lie, though it tarry. Wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry. Think of Joseph, think of how many times would have been reasonably thought by him that he was on the wrong path, and certainly the end of his unpleasant season should have come.
But we have the ability of stepping back and looking and seeing the entire history of it and seeing God's hand in everything that He was doing to Him, don't we? We can see how those seasons were bringing about preparation for not only Him, but for an entire people.
God has a master plan.
That can that that could hardly have been known or anticipated by anyone in that circumstance.
Proverbs 2024 says man's goings are of the Lord.
How can a man then understand his own way?
Our patience is a virtue that we only develop by exercising it. How do we know to be able to do that? How can we look past, oh, how long is this going to be? By seeing that the order of it is all in the hand of the of the of of the the most wonderful God who loves us and who knows all and has everything in his control.
By knowing that we can.
Release that, if we will, to him and be patient and let him bring us to the end of the season when he will.
You see, it's not about seeing the end or understanding the past, but having the faith in God, the.
Patiently follow him.
So as we discussed this evening.
We started out with the verse to everything there is a season and a time, to every purpose under the heaven.
And he hath made everything beautiful in his time. His purpose is to is to is to bring us to a point of being more like Christ. And that purpose has twists and turns and seasons that we may not understand or appreciate. At this point. We may feel like we wanna be in someone else's season.
But we need to recognize his hand in our current season.
We need not to focus on the negative in our current season so that we can be patient for his direction and his proper end to our season.
Let's close in prayer.
Our God and our Father, we thank Thee for this message. We thank Thee that Thou art all knowing, all powerful, and most of all, all loving.
That has our best interest in mind. Thou knowest what is right. Thou knowest better for us than we know for ourselves, and we can trust thee.
But our feeble minds put us in a position where we question it.
And we ask that for each of us, we thou knowest what struggle each of us are going through and what season.
And what part?
In what request thou hast of us, thou wouldest help us to see thy mind, see thy hand move past our vision of what is here and now.
And to appreciate by hand in our seasons, and to be brought and conformed more to thy son.
We thank Thee for this time and ask for thy blessing for the rest of the evening. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.