You Are With Me | Ps Sue Irwin

Welcome to the Greenery Church podcast. We're happy you could join us. For more information on the Greenery Church, head to greenery.org.au. I follow our socials at the Greenery Church. I was walking along yesterday and I heard a mother and two teenage daughters and the mother said, "Look, did you see people in Roosters' jerseys?" And she said, "I couldn't care less mum." People conserved who could follow wherever they want. I thought, "So you might be sitting here today, and what looking at people in their nights, jerseys and things, I couldn't care less." But you have to admit, something extraordinary has happened around our city. It's pulling people together, and even people who don't follow football are following the nights. And because there's something about winning that makes a difference. Now, if you have been sort of living in a cave for a while, you may not know that there is a match today, who did say, a couple of weeks ago, it's gradually because a couple, not less than a Sunday night before, when the nights were playing the Warriors, I arrived for the 5pm service at about 4.30, and I said to the young adults who were getting ready to be on the welcoming team, we may be down a little bit in numbers tonight, and they said, "Why is that?" I said, "Because the nights were playing the Warriors in Auckland." They go, "Oh, are they?" So they didn't know them. They were not new castle boys. I have to say to that little disclaimer, but I think nearly everyone knows now, and I guess everyone knows that last year, the nights got the wooden smear, which means they were last, absolutely last, and isn't it amazing when you watch someone coming from last to win? Now, if the nights win tonight, a guarantee that all of us sitting here will say, "We won." And some of us couldn't even run the length of the football field, but we'll say, "We won." And we'll feel really good about ourselves because we won. It will change our identity because we won. We're like, "When you castle people, there's something about winning that is really exciting, and it does something for your identity." And we follow a god who sent his only son into the world to win the battle of battles. He won the most extraordinary battle, and sometimes, when I look at the early church, when you read about in the book of Acts, you see, they gathered together every day, but not because someone was saying, "You're not a good Christian if you don't gather together every day, and you go along to prove your superstition." No, because they won, and they were loving the identity of being winners, and no one had to make them come. They wanted to come. This is my prayer for us and for our city that we would so grasp what has been won for us. That we'll never wake up thinking, "Oh, do I feel like going to church today?" Or do I feel like going to my small group of things? "I'm a winner. This is my whole identity. I'm the winner, and I just can't get enough of this win." And when we don't feel like that, it means that we don't understand what the win is all about. So when you enjoy watching the Knights today, or tonight, that would sound more poetic, when you enjoy watching that tonight, just think there's something in us, deep within us, the way God created us that needs to win, that loves to win, and He knows that, and therefore He has won, and we can live in that, because when the Knights win, you had nothing to do with it. Okay? Just want to know that you had nothing to do. You encouraged them, you encouraged them, but you actually had nothing to do with it, but you bask in the glory of the win. And when Jesus wins, you had nothing to do with it, but you bask in the glory of it, and it's the most amazing thing that you have. So today, I'm quite excited about this, because I want to teach you how to win every day, and we're currently talking about speaking life. I want to give four words that you can practice saying every day, that I promise you will change your life if you continue to practice them. And the four words are this, you are with me. We've just been seeing that, actually. You may not have noticed, I noticed it, because I'm excited about this message. You are with me. Lord, you are with me. What does this actually mean to do life with God? Because He says, I am with you. I am with you. Now, you can actually choose, and all of us do, this choose to do life with God, or choose to do life without God. And you may be the under the illusion that, because you're sitting here today, you always do life with God. And I want to break that illusion for a moment, because I can tell you that there are times when I believe in God. I believe in Jesus. I believe that He rose from the dead. I believe that He conquered sin and death, but I'm actually not doing life with Him. I'm not totally aligned with everything He's saying, because sometimes He says to me, don't worry, and I worry. Therefore, I'm not with Him. And sometimes He says, forgive, and I don't want to, or I want to, and I can't. Or sometimes I'm jealous, or angry, or envious, or depressed, or all those things. And whenever you have those things going on in your life at that point, you're not totally with Him, because He's taking you in a different direction. And you don't want to go. There's something, and it says, I don't want to do that. I don't want to feel hopeful. I feel discouraged. And I can't imagine feeling hopeful. So we want to do life with God. And the reason you want to do life with God is that He has an extraordinary destination to get to. And He's trying to help you get there. He's trying to pull you along. And sometimes I say, I don't want to do that. You know, it's like children, like, can you go and do this now? And I don't want to. And they actually don't want to. And so there's the difference, life with God, life without God. When He says, I am with you, this is what you get. You get direction. You get refuge. You get wisdom. You get insight. You get purpose. You get power. You get inner strength. You get confidence. It's just a few things that I came up with that you get when you do life with God. I didn't come up with it. It's in the scriptures. I extracted them from the scriptures for your sake. Without God, you choose to do it your way. You choose to operate in the unseen and the unknown. Because with Him, He sees beyond things. You can't. So you choose to do that. You choose to live with uncertainty. You choose to do it alone. Because when you're with Him, you have His presence with you all the time, talking to you, encouraging you, giving you strength. You have a purpose to, you find purpose to bring fulfillment into your life rather than having fulfillment in your life, which leads to purpose. They're very, very different. Everyone has a purpose, but when you need that purpose to find fulfillment, as soon as that purpose finishes, you've lost your fulfillment. But when you have your fulfillment from Him first, it always leads to purpose in so many different areas and never changes. And so you choose which one, because everyone's called to something. And it's actually right before you, what you're called to. It could be your profession and it could be how you serve in the church. But it will be that. But it's also the people around you. You're called to people, essentially. You're called to your family. You're called to your friends, to your neighbors, to the people you work with. You're essentially called to people. So you may think your job has very little to do with people, but I guarantee there are people involved somehow in your job. And you are called to them. And so if you look at the story of Moses, there's an incredibly powerful analogies as to how God is calling us. And what we're called to do. Now with Moses, he was born. He was an Israelite baby. His mother rescued him. And I won't go into the whole story. I have to go and read it just because of time. But he ends up being rescued when all the other babies were being killed by the Pharaoh of Egypt because the Israelites were living in Egypt as slaves. And he was raised in the Pharaoh's palace, raised by a princess in the Pharaoh's palace. And so even though he was raised in the palace, he still knew who his people were, the Israelite people. And he had this calling to rescue them. But he decided to do it without God first. And doing it without God meant when he saw it to Israelite slaves being treated harshly by an Egyptian, he murdered the Egyptian. That was a good idea. Then he realized it was on a good idea. And people said, that's the guy who murdered that Egyptian. And he fled into the wilderness for 40 years. And he could at that point said, I've blown it all. I'm just going to hide in the wilderness. But he has an encounter with God. And when it's this encounter with God, we read, the Lord said, I've indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I've heard them crying out because of their slave drivers. And I'm concerned about the suffering. So I've come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. But Moses says to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring these relics out of Egypt? And something profound happens here. You see how Moses sees himself. He sees what he's done wrong. He sees how he's messed things up. And he says, well, who am I? How am I going to do that? I had this one attempt and I felt miserably, and now I've been hiding in the wilderness for 40 years, who am I? And God says, "I will be with you." Now the interesting thing, God doesn't say, "Look, Moses, you're a really great guy, actually. I just want to build you up a little bit here. I know you've messed up before, but I still think you're a really great guy." He doesn't actually talk about Moses. He talks about himself and he says, "I'll be with you." Who am I to go and do this? Why are you talking about yourself? I'll be with you, but I have done, I will be with you. And I just want to say that there'll be many of us sitting here today who've looked at ourselves and messed things up and we think, "God will never be able to fix this up, because I mess things up." I just want to say that if you're still saying, "It can't happen because I am not good enough, I messed up, I've done the wrong thing," you are still doing life without God to a certain extent. And I'm saying, "You don't know Jesus, I'm not saying you're going to have anything like that." I'm just saying, "You're not totally aligned with God." Because once you say, "I can't do that because I failed, I can't do that because I'm hopeless," God is saying to you, "Hang on, I'm with you, I'm with you." It's not dependent upon you. He has won the battle. The good news is what he's already done. He is already won. You are just aligning yourself with the winner. And whenever you say, "Well, honestly, if I said saying, "The Knights will not win this afternoon, because there's no way I could convert a try." It doesn't make any sense. We're not relying on you to convert a try, which is a very good thing. So I wouldn't be able to do it. I've tried playing with one of my grandsons down in the park, trying to kick that ball. It's not easy. You might be good at it, but it's not easy. I promise you. But they're not relying on me, which is a really, really good thing. And you're really glad about that as well. But sometimes we think God is relying on us. And so God says to him, "I will be with you." And Moses starts, God speaks life into Moses when he says this. And once Moses receives this, he has the ability to speak life into others. So if you're not receiving from God, "I am with you," you won't have the ability to speak life into others. You'll still be going from your own negative self-talk. But once you start to say, "Back to God, you are with me," and once you start to say to yourself, "He is with me." I guarantee, when you practice this during the week, when you face a difficult situation, and you say, "But my father is with me, and I'm with him." You know that just like Moses did, he's taking them to a place of rest, the promised land. And that is what he's doing for YouTube. The only way you are going to get there is if you are with him. And to understand what it means to be with him. Because you can say, "I got a church, but in your heart and your mind, you are not with him." And it's great to understand what this really means to be with him. So God says, "I will be with you." Now, the next mistake we make is when we think, "Oh, God is with us, so it's going to work out." It is going to work out, but doesn't mean it's going to be easy. So he goes off, "Okay, God's with me." Off I go, and it says Moses reported this to the Israelites, thinking they were going, "Yeah, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and harsh labor." Now, I have to admit that many times I have been like those people. Well, life has been really hard. You may be the same. Life has been really, really hard. And someone, EG, your husband sitting here, says to you, "Don't worry, God's got it." And you say, "Really?" Has he real that is a true conversation that's happened? It doesn't feel like it at the moment. He says, "He does have it." Because sometimes it doesn't feel like it. Because sometimes you've had so much discouragement and feels like harsh labor, that it doesn't feel like it. Therefore, you have to come back to speaking the truth over your life. God is with me, and God is good, and God is taking us somewhere good. And so it wasn't easy for Moses. It didn't just happen that he went in and said, "Guess what everyone God's going to get us out of here." And tomorrow we're all going. It's all going to be great. It didn't happen like that. And the problem is for all of us, when we trust God, we then create our own timeline for how it's going to happen. And then we think God let us down because he didn't live up to our timeline. But he says, "I never gave you that timeline." And you just fabricated it yourself, then said, "I let you down because I didn't follow your timeline." And so the Lord is showing is with Moses, and he's showing his power in Moses' weakness. And the best thing to do life with God is to come to him and tell him your weakness. Because then we read, then the Lord said to Moses, "Go until Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to let these relights go out of his country." Moses said to the Lord, "If these relights will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me since I speak with faltering lips?" In other words, he has a starter. He's not a very good speaker. So the thing God is giving him to do is play out of his comfort zone. The thing is he's coming to God with his fears and his worries, and this is actually doing life with God. Sometimes we think doing life with God is pretending to God that we're not afraid. We're not worried. We're not feeling condemned. We're not ashamed. And we try to pretend to God that we don't have any of these weaknesses because we think that is being with God. And then we try to pretend to others that we're not afraid. We're not worried. We're not ashamed. Because we think that will make God really happy that we are lying about who we really are for some reason, because it'll make God look good. God doesn't actually need you to protect him. He looks good already. He just wants you to align with him in your heart and in your mind. And so you can, like Moses did, come and tell God what he was afraid of. He's saying, "Look, it didn't work very well when I spoke to the Israelites, and I've got a starter. So how's it going to go any better with Pharaoh?" And God listens to him, and God gives him courage, and God gives him strength. And we need to learn how to do that too, to be real with God, to say, "You know, I really want to trust in you, but I'm finding it really hard at the moment because I see myself and I see how weak I am." And he says, "Thanks for telling me. This is great. Now we're working together." Because when you come until God the truth about yourself, you start to work with him. When you pretend to God, you're really only pretending to yourself, and when you pretend to others, you're really only pretending to yourself. You're trying to create image that you have it all together. That is not going with God. So when the King of Egypt was told that the people had fled, sorry, I've got a little bit of the story. So he does go to Pharaoh, a long story, very, very short. I won't go into this one at the moment. Pharaoh eventually let's them go after a huge lot of trouble. He let's them go. But when the King of Egypt was told that the people had fled Pharaoh, and his officials changed their minds about them and then said, "What have we done? We let the Israelites go and have lost their services because they are their slaves." So once they let them all go, they've actually got to do their own work, and they didn't think about that. So he had his chariot made ready and took his army with him, and he took 600 of the best chariots along with all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them. Now this point, Moses could say, "I really got this wrong. If the Lord is with me, why have we been chased by all the chariots of Egypt with all their soldiers?" Is this the end of the story? And it feels like the end of the story because you have, I'm one behind you, all the armies of Egypt coming against you, and in front of you, you have the Red Sea, and you can't swim. You've got a big problem, and it just feels like there is actually no way out of here. It's actually impossible. And that's when you wish that you'd never done this, and you start to think, "I honestly, I didn't hear God." But some of us are sitting here today, and just like those Israelite people, we're writing the last chapter of our book, not realizing that you just got to the climax. It's not the last chapter. And some of us write the chapter and close the book way, way too early. Graham went down to see that match that Josh missed out on, and he took on Silas, Josh's son, our grandson, last Sunday, down to Sydney, to see the night's win. But it took four hours to get there because 50,000 other people decided to get on the freeway at the same time and drove it about 20 ks an hour, and missed the first half because you had to find a park at home bush as well. And as they walked in, two people were leaving, two so-called night supporters were leaving, and they said, "Don't worry, don't even go in, we're going home." Crossland's been sent off, and they're down to 12 men, and they're losing, and it's disastrous. And they left. How silly was that? And then they got in their car, and they probably, they would have missed the entire second half sitting in their car. They might have heard it on the radio, but they missed watching it. Because in that second half, if you like watching Rugby League, there was some amazing things that happened that were incredibly exciting, and they missed out. And we can do exactly the same. I think not too hard, I'm out of here. Those Christians that I've met at that church, they're not very nice. And honestly, if I left my faith because of not nice Christians, I would have left a long time ago. Someone said to me, "I bumped into someone who would I bump into, who would cause you a lot of stress, I'm thinking a long list of people, I can think of something." Because we are not always perfect people, but as Paul said to the church in current, some people say they follow Paul and some people say they follow a Paulist, but I follow Jesus. If your faith rests on the perfection of another believer, you are sunk. Your faith needs to rest in Christ alone, and you have other believers to love in all our weaknesses. God gives you these people who mess up, so that you can love them. You can forgive them, you can practice just like Moses is doing here. And so don't dip out before the end of the story. And if it's not great, it's not the end of the story, and many of us dip out when it's not great, and we write our Shakespearean tragedies rather than our victories. And so Moses was listening to the Lord, and he answered the people, "Do not be afraid, stand firm, and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today." The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still. You have to change him, Moses. He's learning to listen to God. He's not saying this is hopeless, let's get out of here. He's saying, "The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still." And this is what I am with you actually means. It actually, Jesus talked about you'll find rest for your soul. It doesn't mean in your life there won't be Egyptian armies coming against you, not literally, but metaphorically. It will feel like that. That there will not be a red sea in front of you, that will happen. That there will be a stillness in your soul when you can say confidently, "You are with me." And even when you say it falteringly, "You are with me," gradually, as you see with Moses, it's gradually building up into confidence. You are with me. You are with me. You will fight for me. You will deliver me, and your soul becomes still. And Moses is becoming now aware of the presence of God with him. And as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians much after them, they were terrified, and they cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn't we say to you in Egypt, "Leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians." It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert. They're ready to give up, and they're ready to go back to slavery. And sometimes we can be like this as well. We give up, and we think that what we had before was better, because we can't remember exactly what it was like. But Moses is clearly listening now, and he speaks to the Lord, and the Lord speaks to him differently now. The Lord says to Moses, "Why are you crying out to me?" No, he's not saying it in a mad way. He's saying, "You're getting better at this now, Moses. You're learning. I am with you." And so you now can bring blessing to these people. And that's what he's saying to you. When you, in your circumstances, learn to say, "In the midst of your trouble," which is refining your faith, "I am with you," and you start to say, "You are with me." When you can hear that, you start to be someone who can speak life into other people. But until you're speaking life into yourself, saying, "You are with me, Lord. You are with me." You will not have the ability to do that. This is what's happening to Moses. And since the Lord says to Moses, "Why are you crying out to me?" Tell the Israelites to move on, raise your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground. And he does it, and they do. They go through the sea on dry ground. A miracle has happened because a man learnt to say, "You are with me. You are with me." Now his own might, his own strength, he's been trembling in the wilderness for 40 years. He's afraid of his stutter, but he's learnt to get over his own weaknesses and see the beauty and the power of the God who loves him, and is taking him somewhere. And many of us, alike those Egyptians, we're sitting in that point where we see an army on one side, a sea on the other side, and we're saying, "I just want to get out of here. I don't like this," and we need to hear the voice of God saying, "I am with you. I am with you." And so they come out on the other side, and they sing, as you can read in Exodus 15, in a whole song of praise and victory, because they were just so, so glad that they had won. They had won, or God had won it for them. And they sing this, "The Lord is my strength and my song He has given me victory. This is my God, and I will praise Him, my Father's God, and I will exalt Him." And we gather on Sundays, and we sing songs like that to remind ourselves of the victory. We need it. We need to come together all the time and remind ourselves of the victory, because we can so easily fall down, because they sang that day. They had seen something that had never seen before, the Red Sea part, and they went through, and they were protected, and they were safe, but they forgot that. They needed to keep singing that song, and it's the same for you and me. Something else will happen, and if you don't keep singing your song of victory, you will go back. Because this is what happened. Not hungry, didn't know where they were going to get food from. And they said, "If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt, they moaned. They moaned. There we sat around pots filled with meat, and ate all the bread we wanted. But now you have brought us into this wilderness to starve us all to death." So when you find in your life language of accusation and grumbling and moaning coming in, you know that you've moved aside again, and you're not doing it with God. You needed to go back and sing, "The Lord is my strength, and my song is given me victory. This is my God, and I will praise Him, my Father's God, and I will exalt Him." But Moses, who you are called to be like, was listening to the Lord, the Lord was with Moses. He didn't know he was going to find food for everyone. How is he going to find that food for everyone in this desert? But the Lord says to Moses, "Because they're in conversation, I've heard these relics complaints." Tell them in the evening, "You'll have meat to eat, and the morning you'll have all the bread you want." Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, and the Lord did that. And the Israelites called the food manner. It was white, like coriander seed, and it tasted like honeywafers. Now you would think, at this point, they go, "Oh, we gave it. The Lord is with us, and we never have to grumble and complain again." And we can look at them and think, "Wow, they're so silly, but have you ever had God do something good in your life?" And then before long, you were grumbling and complaining again. If you haven't, I have very easily. And you can even think, someone could even say to you, "But remember, God did this and this and this." Yeah, but this is different. This is different. This is worse. This is worse. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. And once you say, "I can't imagine how God could get us through that." You have now moved into doing things by yourself, because you're imagining it. You are not walking with him. Because when you walk with him, you get his divine imagination. And so Moses said to them, "No one is to keep in it until morning, because now they're learning to trust him for each day. Can you eat it today and not save it to rely on him the next day?" Because he's taking us on a journey where we rely on him every day to know he's with us every day. Once you have to save it for the next day, you're no longer aligned with him. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of it into a morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. Despite that, the people of Israel ate manna for 40 years until they arrived at the land where they would settle. They ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. God still loved them and God still blessed them, but many of them missed out on going to the promised land. Because when you get into the promised land, which is the land of rest, they're actually giants in that land. It doesn't mean it's not talking about heaven, we haven't got to heaven yet. It's talking about living in rest when there are forces against you, but you're able to defeat them because of your conscious awareness of the Lord is with me, and I'm relying totally on him. And so some of them were, it's missed out on going in, and that's the story for many of us. It doesn't mean that he doesn't love us. He doesn't bless us. He doesn't provide for us, but we miss out on the fulfillment of what he had planned for us. And when it says God was upset because they disobeyed him, he's not upset in a way that he dislikes them. He's so upset because he had something good planned for them, and they missed out, because they couldn't walk with him. They couldn't say daily the Lord is with me. And so we read about this in Hebrews, referring to this story, which is a beautiful analogy for our life. If we can hear what God is saying, it says God's promise of entering his rest still stands today. So we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it, but this good news that God has prepared this rest, this good news that God has done all the work, this good news that God has already won the victory, has been announced to us just as it was to them, but it did them no good because they didn't share the faith of those who listened to God. Only we who believe can enter his rest. So God's rest is there for people to enter. But those who first heard this good news felt to enter because they disobeyed God, and this disobedience to God. like we might think, I can certain acts, it's this not saying you are with me. It's as simple as that. So God said another time for entering His rest and that time is today, God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted today when you hear His voice, don't harden your hearts. Now, hardening your hearts, you might think, oh, the hardened heart people, they're the people who reject God, they're the people who never go to church, they're the people who never read the Bible, they're the people who never pray and you have kind of a picture of hard heart people. But that's not what Jesus is talking about here. I believe God has shown me so many times where my heart is hard towards Him, but I don't think it is. And I suggest that you could be the same as me, because this is a story when I, after Jesus fed the 5,000, He asked the disciples to get into a boat to get to the other side. Now, He sent them on this boat. And when they got in the boat, this massive storm came up. And Jesus knew that when they got in the boat, the massive storm was about to come and they were afraid for their lives. And Jesus walks upon the water and they see Him. And it says, He said to them, take courage, it's I don't be afraid. And climbed into the boat with them and the wind died down and they were completely amazed. And this is what it says, for they had not understood about the loaves, their hearts were hardened. And here we're talking about the faithful disciples of Jesus, the one who began the first church, but at this point, they've seen these miracles, but once again, they were afraid, because their hearts were hard, doesn't mean that they were wicked, mean, horrible people. It meant they were people like you and I, who were still learning to have the eyes of our hearts open that we might see Him. So a hard and a heart, if you think it's just like the bad people of the world, which isn't you and me, that's what we think. It's people whose spiritual inner being cannot perceive Him and the victory is one. They can't understand His love. We can't see what it's done and we don't remember, we don't sing that song of victory over and over and over again. That is the hard heart. It's so good to know this because I've seen so many times, very often, that my heart is hardened towards Him because I don't believe that He could get me through a situation. And it goes on in Hebrews to say, "Now if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest," just to say why Joshua is there, because Joshua ends up taking them across into the promised land, the land of rest, but they're saying, "This is an analogy for the real rest." If Joshua had succeeded in giving this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest or to come. So if there's a special rest still waiting for the people of God, that's you and me. All who have entered into God's rest have rested from their labors just as God did after creating the world. So let us do our best to enter this rest, but if we disobey God as the people of Israel did, we will fail. Fall, sorry, we'll fall. Sisper, go back to where it says, "Today, if you hear His voice, don't harden your hearts. Today, if you hear His voice, don't harden your hearts." And I think that word today is incredibly important with this. Jesus says, "Don't worry about tomorrow because today we'll have enough troubles of its own." He doesn't seem very encouraging, but what he's saying is this. It's actually his encouraging. He's saying, "Say today, you are with me. You're taking me somewhere really good. It's going to turn out really, really well. You are with me." And say, "On Monday, today, you are with me." And so on Tuesday, today, you are with me. Because sometimes we tend to think that, "Oh, I gave my life to Christ, and it's all done and dusted, but every day is a new day." It says in the scriptures that His mercy is in you every morning. He's saying, "Jesus is saying to you, just focus on today. Keep your heart aligned with me just for today. That's bad all you can cope with." But what if you say to him, "Say now to me." Now you're saying, "I've got to try harder to believe." And as soon as you use those words, as soon as you hear yourself saying, "Try harder. You are doing it by yourself." It says, "I'm trying harder to believe. I'm trying harder not to be feeling condemned. I'm trying hard not to feel guilty. I'm trying hard not to forgive. I'm trying hard not to be hopeless." As soon as you say, "I'm trying harder. You are doing it by yourself. You're not doing it with God." Because He will do everything for you. Everything. Just like the nights will play for you this afternoon, and you will do nothing. You might be sipping on a cool drink because you watch it. And they will do everything for you. Jesus does everything for you. All you have to do is to trust. And even that, He gives you the ability to do. Because then it goes on to say, "Since so then, since we have a great high priest who has entered heaven, Jesus is the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe." This high priest of ours understands our weaknesses. "How good is that? You don't have to pretend that you don't have them." He understands. He is with you in your weaknesses. You say to Him, "I'm really weak in this area because I get it. I understand you. That's another with you. I get you. I get you weaknesses." Free-faced all of the same testings we do, yet He did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive His mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. To be with Him means to go and say, "I feel weak and hopeless. I can't even say it. You are with me." I don't even have the ability to say it and really mean it. He says, "I will help you with that. I feel condemned. I will help you with that. I feel weary. Maybe go and lie down for a little bit. When you wake up, we'll talk further. I feel hopeless. I can't imagine how you're going to get me through this. I can help you with that. He will just bring as soon as you feel striving inside yourself to do anything. As soon as yourself being weighed down or condemned by yourself or by others, go to Him and say, "I need help." He will say, "I am with you." I defeated the power of darkness, of sin, of death. I am with you. You will find rest for your souls. As soon as you find rest for your souls, you know you are with Him, and it is a daily journey. Don't condemn yourself because suddenly you don't have rest for your soul. Don't condemn yourself for anything. We tend to do that. We tend to condemn our souls most of all. As soon as you feel it, that's a sign to you to say, "I need to go to my Heavenly Father." This whole idea of "I am with you" is all through the Scriptures. Let me read you. I'm going to read you a whole lot of Scriptures to finish up so you can see He is with you, and those four words you can declare over yourself every day. You are with me. You are with me. Here we go. Have I not commanded you? Be strung and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them. For the Lord your God goes with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil. For you are with me. You are right on your staff. They comfort me. God is our refuge and strength and ever-present hope in trouble. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. So do not fear. For I am with you. Do not be dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous hand. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze. The Lord your God is with you. The mighty warrior who saves, he will take great delight in you, in his love. He will no longer rebuk you, but rejoice if you are singing. The Virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emanuel, which means God with us. Surely I am with you always to the very end of the age, says Jesus. And Jesus says, and I will ask the Father, He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The will cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor demons, neither the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. So let's just close our eyes for a moment. And for some of us today, there's an Egyptian army chasing us on one side and a red sea on the other. And things seem hopeless, and you cannot imagine how you're going to get through, and you don't feel that the Lord is with you. And as you tell him that, you don't even know how to feel that, how to believe that, but you can say to him, "Lord, I want to believe that. Can you help me to believe that you are with me? Can you help me say every day, you are with me?" And enable me to believe that you are telling taking me to that land of rest and promise and hope where each one of us learns how to walk in the victory that he has won for us, not in our own strength, not in our own spiritual pride, but humbly dependent upon the one who has already won the victory. We bring everything to you, Lord, honestly, honestly, and I invite you to honestly bring before him anything that you think disqualifies you from him being with you. And he will take it and he will wash it away. Give to him anything that you condemn yourself for and he will wash it away. Give to him anything that you condemn or blame someone else for and he will wash it away. Give to him the hurts that have been inflicted upon you by the people and let him wash them away. Give to him the hopelessness that you feel and he will wash it away. He will fool you with grace and forgiveness and kindness. He will restore you and he will build you up and he will enable you to have a soft heart that sees his love and enables you to have confidence that he is with you, not because you are great, but because he is great and has won the battle. In Jesus' name, I mean. [Music]