(This transcript was generated by AI. Apologies for any inacuracies)

This week I wanted to talk about trust.

The last time we talked, we talked about how much God loves us.

And this week I wanna talk about how we might love Him, how we might.

And it's funny, cause I got a three-year-old.

Anybody got small children?

My life has been filled with children.

I got four younger sisters, I have three kids, and I have this kamikaze psychotic three-year-old.

He is bananas.

And we have a rule in our house, and we have, cause we had two small toddlers before him, and we don't negotiate with terrorists.

This is exactly what he is.

If you don't believe me, take his juice box.

You finna find out.

But he's crazy.

He'll get up on top of the couch, and he'll do this dive and leap into my lap.

And he has way more trust in me than I'm comfortable with.

And I learned something in it, and it was just that.

It was this little dude really, really, really believes that I'm gonna catch him.

I believe it about 30% of the time.

And thank God he makes him out of rubber.

He knows what he's doing, cause he kinda bounced a little bit.

But it's amazing to me how much he trusts me.

And it's funny, cause Jesus, and these are some things, if those of y'all don't know who I am, my name is Jared Walls.

I'm the youth pastor here at Students.

And it's amazing to me, because all of these verses stick out to me.

Like when Jesus said, unless you become like one of these little ones, you won't enter the kingdom of God.

And the one that freaks me out the most is, anyone who leads one of these little ones astray, it'd be something about a millstone and an ocean, and it stresses me out a lot.

But faith like children, faith like children, trust like children.

And the reason he flips out when I don't give him a juice box is because when he asks for one, he positively believes he's getting one.

I wonder what would happen if we trusted and believed like that.

If you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to Matthew 22, verses 37 and 40.

We spend a lot of time complicating things.

Am I the only one?

Anybody else in here overthink stuff?

And just complicate things that don't really need to be that complicated?

But my wife, God love her, she's sitting right here in the front row.

She is the master at it.

She will take anything and make it incredibly complicated.

I mean, anything.

I'm not hating, don't come at me like that.

Hold up.

I'm kind of the opposite.

I tend to take things and kind of oversimplify them.

But Jesus made it simple.

Everybody say simple.

Simple.

It just ain't easy.

So when the man asked Jesus in here, he said, what is the greatest commandment of all?

And Jesus replied to him and summed up the entirety of the Bible in a phrase.

Jesus replied, love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your minds.

This is the first and greatest commandment.

And the second is like it.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

That's where it's really not easy.

All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments. 66 love letters, 613 laws in the Mosaic law.

Everything throughout this entire book hangs on these two things.

What's the first one?

Love the Lord, your God.

So to do that, we kind of have to figure out what his love language is.

Anybody else ever read that book about the love languages?

It's tough.

Like I've been trying to figure out Tasha's for 17 years and I still ain't got it.

It keeps changing.

She's like a Rubik's cube.

Somebody keeps moving the stickers on.

Yeah.

But with God, his love language is pretty simple.

It's trust.

You wanna show him you love him?

Trust him.

And I mean, trust him.

I don't mean trust him when it's convenient.

I don't mean trust him when it feels good or trust him when on the horizon, it looks like a sunny day is coming.

I mean, trust him in the belly of the beast.

Trust him all the time.

And only ever put all of your trust here.

They used to say, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

I'm gonna tell you right now, as I stand here at 36 years old, all my eggs are in the Jesus basket.

All of them.

Everything I got is right there.

Where else would it be?

How else could it be?

But how do we do this?

And I really believe that learning to trust him is the hardest part of the Christian walk because of the process.

Everybody say process.

The process by which we learn trust.

You know, the old folks used to say, don't pray for patience.

Oh, what's going on?

Hold on.

Did I do it?

Okay.

You see, I've been fighting this all week long because I knew that I was gonna come up here and I was gonna preach about trust and I was gonna do my best.

And so God's got a sense of humor.

And in that process, he stripped every part of me that was confident about it away and trying to take everything out of it so that the only thing I could do is stand up here and just trust him.

Just shut up and let him do it.

And no matter what.

And I'm gonna tell you, after the last time I've been so encouraged and because I have a hard time with that too.

I have a hard time with recognition.

I'm not good at when people tell me good job and stuff.

I don't really know what to do with it.

I get weird.

I don't know what to do with my hands right now.

But it's been so encouraging and God taught me something through that too.

He said, you know, it's a gift.

They've packaged it.

They wrapped it up in some good wrapping paper and they handed it to you.

Just say thank you.

Just say thank you.

And the hardest part of the process of learning to trust him is me getting my butt out of his way.

Does anybody else ever feel like, man, I'm just all types of up in the way.

And if I could just get out of my own way and out of his way, some things would probably be different.

Now I do simplify things, but another thing I do is worry.

Hey, warriors in the house, I'm not the only one.

You can raise your hand, shake your head.

You can lie if you want to.

It's okay.

Worry.

Worry is hard.

See, I'm the sole breadwinner for five people.

If I don't get it right, they're gonna be hungry.

At least that's kind of the way it works in my head.

My wife reminds me, the baby, it really isn't you, it's him.

It's gonna work out.

And it's funny because the process by which I've learned to stop worrying hasn't been fun.

No part of it has.

But in Matthew six, Jesus says it really simply, don't do it.

Which of you could add a single hour to your life by worrying?

What else he breaks down is how unbelievably unnatural it is.

We're the only one of God's creation that does it.

We're the only one of God's creation that think he's not big enough, he's not strong enough, and he doesn't have my best interests at heart.

The trees know, the birds of the air know, the lilies of the field, they all know.

But we worry, but it's unnatural.

It's unnatural.

Every day is gonna have enough trouble of its own.

We worry about money.

Anybody worry about money?

We worry about relationships.

We worry about worrying for the sake of worrying because we're worried that we might be worried if we worry about that too long.

That is somebody.

So I'm gonna tell you a story.

When I asked my wife, I said, I'm gonna tell you a story.

So I'm gonna tell you a story.

When I asked you if I could be real, I wanted to tell you a story.

I worked for a long time for a big vacation company, and I made a lot of money.

Neurosurgeon money is what they called it.

And so when I got my calling, I was fresh out of hell.

I remember I was in the fourth row at the old church, six seats in, I'll never forget it.

He said, feed my sheep.

And I thought it wasn't for me.

I'm not joking.

Like I thought that was for the guy beside me and I had just intercepted it.

I'm like, what do you mean, feed my sheep?

It started coming up everywhere.

And so I kept asking, what does it mean?

And he kept saying, you know exactly what I mean.

You know exactly what I mean.

Stop playing stupid.

God's not gentle with me.

He might be gentle with you.

He meets us right where we are.

With my wife, he's gentle and loving, but with me, he's like, boy, you better get up.

And so I said, God, if you don't want me to do this job and you want me to follow this, make it clear.

I had never sucked at my job so much as I did for the next 30 days.

I blanked for 30 days.

In the sales world, you just jump out the window.

So what I left for it, what he was gonna teach me in trust is I was gonna leave a place where I hadn't looked at a paycheck in probably five or six years.

I couldn't have told you what I had in the bank because I didn't pay attention to it.

To a place where there was absolutely nothing.

No guarantee.

I was gonna step into a new job and in that first year, I wasn't gonna make 50% of what I'd been making.

Not 70%.

I wasn't gonna make 10% of it.

But still had these faces.

They needed to eat.

He said, you'll trust me.

And I can't tell you how many times in that first year, I spent in my truck with tears rolling down my face, screaming out to him, where are you?

You said to do this.

You called me to it.

You told me you would do this.

Until finally, I get this resounding, boy, why are you walking around like you're all alone?

Why are you walking around like I don't see you?

Like I haven't been walking with you this entire time.

Why are you pretending like you're alone and this is all on you?

Trust.

Trust.

Start trusting.

It's so hard though.

It's so hard because I'm so little.

And I'm not saying this to convict you and make you feel condemned because you have a problem with worrying.

I'm still learning it.

And that's the funny thing about preaching is a lot of times when we preach, we're preaching stuff that we're learning while we're preaching it.

I can't tell you how many times I've been preaching something.

I'm like, huh, that's what that means?

I ain't been living by that, but I am now.

I'm still working on it.

I'm still trying to step into that place.

That place where I'm not relying on me and I'm not relying on the people around me.

I'm not leaning on anybody else other than him, but I promised that along this journey, I've learned a few things.

And I wanted to share a couple of them with you.

Don't quit.

Touch your neighbors, say, don't quit.

We as a society are the most stressed out people on the planet.

We have some interesting verbiage in our country.

Going postal, Dean, you remember this?

The road rage.

We're mad at the guy for not putting a blinker on.

We got some funny things that are all brought on by an immense amount of stress, but we also, we quit.

When it gets really, really hard, if you don't believe me, right around January, get a gym membership.

Every year.

See, I work out every morning.

It's kind of a head thing and I have no metabolism, so I work out like a triathlete to remain chubby.

But January, those first two weeks of January, every week, it's like, every year, it's like, man.

But it's only those two weeks, because it's going to get hard.

First two weeks, you're all on cloud nine.

And God gives us that moment with him when we first step into our salvation and we first pray that prayer.

We get this honeymoon phase and it's wonderful.

And baby, you need it.

Don't shut anybody's down when they're in it.

Don't tell them, oh, that ain't going to last.

Let them have it.

They need it.

They need that time when the worship music hits a little bit different and I can't keep my feet from moving and I got a little fire inside like Jeremiah.

They need it.

Because after that, strengthening is coming.

That's what we do in the gym.

If it doesn't hurt, it probably isn't going to make me stronger.

That's the process.

Worry, here's the definition of worry per Webster.

Mental distress, agitation, resulting from concern, usually for something impending or anticipated.

Worry is a condition where we feel like we have a lot more control than we actually have.

A lot more control than we actually have.

And I'm going to tell you this, because I've had good days and I've had some bad days.

I've had some days that worked out.

And I love that part of that song where it says, I may not know what the day may bring, but baby, I know who brings the day.

I know who the author of this day is.

And I know that if he's brought me to this place of hardship, if he's brought me to this place of struggle, he must have a good reason because he's a lot smarter than I am.

He knows what I need a whole lot better than I do.

And you know what?

I don't want to be a weakest water Christian.

I don't want to be a fence straddling weak Christian.

I want to be as strong as I can.

I want him to show me, I want him to build it in me.

And I want it to hurt a little bit when it happens so that I know that it's real.

And I want to be able to get there to a place where I can step into it so that when I see another person hurting, I can say, baby, come on, it's all right.

On the other side of this is something.

And some of us, I know I've been here anyway, I get tired of hearing, stop worrying.

Man, you don't know what I'm going through.

You don't know what I'm struggling with.

And maybe I don't.

Maybe you lost a child.

Maybe you lost a spouse.

Maybe you have a spouse or a child that's drug addicted.

And the only thing you can do is lay up at night, all night worrying about it.

Maybe your marriage is falling apart and you just don't know what to do.

You don't even know where to start to start to pull things back together.

Maybe your relationship with your children has deteriorated to a point where you don't feel like it can ever be reconciled.

I want to tell you what to do.

Turn to your Bibles, Proverbs chapter three, verse five and six.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Lean not on your own understanding.

In all your ways, submit to him.

Submit, that's a tough word.

We don't like that one that much in this country, submit.

Here's the promise.

And he will make your paths straight.

The thing is, is to trust him, I've got to give it to him.

And when I give it to him, I got to leave it with him.

I can't keep going and picking it back up.

I've got to put it at the foot of the cross and I've got to leave it right there and trust and believe that he's going to do something.

Because belief seems to be the catalyst for the way that he moves.

And it makes me think about, you remember when Jesus went back to his hometown and he said that a prophet is not without honor other than in his hometown, in his own home.

And the Bible says this really weird thing that hits a little different for me.

It says, and he could not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.

He could not.

And I'm in my head, I'm like, that's like a misprint or something.

This is God.

For any of us that are unclear, Jesus is God incarnate.

Put flesh, this big theological word, you put flesh and bone on, step down from his throne.

And it says he could not do many miracles.

But then there was that other guy where he made the spit and put it on his eyes to make him unblind.

And he had to do it twice.

Sometimes we're missing out on the blessing that God wants to give us because our belief is not there.

Because our belief is somewhere over here because we'll trust in anything else.

Because we'll trust in money.

I learned the hard way not to do it.

We'll trust in a relationship.

We'll trust in a doctor.

We'll trust in a medicine.

We will trust in anything but him.

When he says do it, even if it doesn't make sense.

And here's the crazy thing.

God doesn't much care about being logical.

When you go back to the doctor and the cancer that was stage four has disappeared, baby, that's not logical.

When the sickness that they said you would never get better from just simply goes away, that's not logical.

The fact that all of you, and I wanna be so intentional about this, the fact that any of you are sitting here right now sucking air after being through all the things that you've been through is not logical.

It's because there's still a God that sits on high and looks low at his people and he's working all things for our good.

Thank you.

I don't want you to miss that.

I wanna make sure you caught it in the back.

I didn't say that he was gonna work some of the things for our good.

The Bible didn't say he'd work most of the things for our good.

That's Romans 8, 28.

He said, I will work all things for the good of those who love me and are called according to my purpose.

If you doubt in any way that that's you right now, you're sitting here.

He's working some things out for you.

It just won't be easy.

And you're gonna have to do this over and over and over again.

This is one thing that I've learned is when God tells me something, it's redundant.

And I'm pretty sure it's just because I'm stupid.

I'm really, really hardheaded.

Like I never make the same mistake twice.

It's normally like 12 or 13 times just to make sure it was a mistake.

You know, I'm that guy.

But he's redundant.

He keeps on saying it.

But it's crazy because this whole don't worry thing and don't be afraid and don't be dismayed thing, God's redundant with that.

You know how many times he says in the Bible, don't be afraid, don't worry.

Throughout all of that Bible, 365 times he says it.

Which must mean that for every single day of the year, I'm gonna need to hear it.

That I don't need to be worried, that I need to put my trust in him and let him do it.

Like when you wake up in the morning and you didn't sleep that much last night because preaching stresses you out, but that's what God called you to do.

And you gotta just get out of the way and let him do it.

When your wife is like, you're not allowed to go to the bathroom before it starts because she's afraid you won't come back.

I gotta trust in him.

It's about surrender.

That's what I wanna encourage you to today.

Whatever's aching, whatever's ailing you, whatever hurts, whatever tough place that you're in, will you surrender it?

Will you give it to him and leave it be?

The money worries, the job that you lost or the job that you hate, the job that maybe you wanna get, the relationship you're looking for, the husband, the wife that you're looking for, the husband or wife that you have that maybe isn't the one that you're looking for, but you're really hoping that God will turn them into it.

Would you leave it with him?

Because I'm gonna tell you, there's nothing more powerful, and I'm saying this on my own volition, in my mind, than a praying wife.

Yeah, I was all the way down, but she brought me out.

But when we start trusting him, we start putting those things into it, it's crazy what he'll do, he'll take it deeper, he'll make it harder.

He will start to strip away all of the things that you might put trust in other than him, and we want him to just give us what we want.

Like I've been praying, like God, you're a wishing well, God, just give it to me.

If you just give me the money, then I can do it.

If you just give me the relationship, then I can do it.

If you just give me the baby, then we can do it.

But God doesn't wanna give you what you need, he wants you to know that he is what you need.

He is.

And sometimes when you're in the middle of all that struggle and you're trying to chase your calling, you get a phone call from Anne Black.

Yeah, y'all are laughing right now, I wasn't laughing, they're stressing me out.

I was part of students ministry and she called me like, hey, I need to talk to you about students.

And I'm trying to think, like, did I say something off color or something that somebody's mad about?

And it's funny, it's funny, he's one of our volunteers, he was like, yeah, probably.

It's funny though, because in the middle of this place that I was in, where I was struggling just to find my calling I'm trying to get school done, I'm working a couple jobs and the business is slow right then and I'm building a shower with Titus outside because Titus helped me get through that moment right there because I just need a couple hundred dollars for groceries that week.

I get this phone call and it's, hey, I'll make you a pastor.

I want you to take over students.

And I'm like, what?

God, I can't pay the power, but you want me to take this on?

And he's like, yep, you learned some stuff last week, now it's time.

He'll keep on taking you deeper because he wants your walk to get stronger with every one of the steps.

And every one of them that you do, don't look for anything to be easy.

The thing about that process is you have to go through some stuff.

So if you pray for trust, put on your muck boots.

I'm gonna start to wrap up because I know it's cold.

But when we become fully dependent and fully submitted, we get to meet him.

I mean, really meet him.

And man, it's awesome.

It's the best thing in the whole world to really meet him and get to know him.

But we also get to know the real us.

I heard a pastor say it like this one time, the head of the forest isn't the tree, the whole forest was in the seed.

Yeah.

See, when he knits you together in your mother's womb and he thought of you and loved you long before he laid the foundations of the world, inside of you, he placed everything that he was gonna need from you already there.

And I look at this three-year-old little nut job and everything he's gonna be and all the wonderful things he'll do have already been laid out for him.

All he's gotta learn to do is surrender it.

He's gotta learn to submit to him.

And here's the promise in it.

His trust in sounds great, but man, what's in it for me?

Those are a couple of things.

But in 1 Corinthians 2, verses nine through 10, Paul's writing to the church in Corinth.

Here's what he said.

However, as it is written, what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived, the things God has prepared for those who love him.

This is a promise.

And if we fully trust him, we fully put all of our eggs in the God basket, we'll see powerful things.

We'll see things that make us question our logic.

And if you'll turn to John 14, verse 23, here's what it looks like to really love him and trust him.

This is Jesus right before he ascends.

Resurrected Jesus, he's talking to his disciples, giving them this last kind of pep talk.

This is the second time in this set that he's told them this, so it must be important.

Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching.

Obey.

I know Pastor Richard preached on obedience.

I tell you what, it stepped all over my toes.

I'm grateful for him because he challenges me.

He'll obey my teachings.

My father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

See, this trust and this love that we get to experience, it comes with a burden.

It comes with responsibility.

He'll show you who you are.

He'll show you who he is.

But he doesn't just do it so that you can experience that.

He does it, and in his mercy, he hasn't come back yet because you got some people to tell.

We got a lot of preachers in this country, and I think the one thing we might be lacking is evangelists, people that'll go out to this place, that'll go out into a broken, hurting world and tell people that they have a choice, that they don't have to stay where they are, they don't have to stay in this place of fear and struggle and pain and anguish, that there's a hope that transcends understanding.

There's a peace that transcends understanding because this is my greatest fear.

In all of my worry, my greatest fear is that Jesus comes back tomorrow, and I'm walking with him to glory, and it's beautiful.

Everything that I ever dreamed it would be and all of that, but I'm looking to my left, and I'm looking to my right, and I see people that I know.

I see a coworker, an old friend, or I see my babies, and they say, Daddy, why didn't you tell us about it?

Why didn't you tell us it would end like this?

Why didn't you tell us that he'd be coming back soon and that we needed to get our ducks in a row, that we needed to put our faith and our trust into him so that we could experience that with you?

It ain't about me, and it ain't about what I offer God.

I just wanna show up with a whole gang of people.

I just wanna show up with a whole bunch of people, and I wanna show up with nothing left in my hands but hope.

And I gave it all.

I ran my race.

It's all I had.

But look at them.

They all believe too.

And look at all the people they brought too.

So this week, as we start to gear up for Christmas time, I hope you'll invite somebody.

And listen, it stresses me out.

God made me do it at Walmart last year.

I was so uncomfortable.

I invite some people.

You don't know what they're going through, and they just might not know.

What I tell our students all the time is it's kind of like the building's on fire, but a bunch of people are inside and they're asleep.

I can't just keep on walking by.

I gotta go in and wake them up.

Won't you wake somebody up this week?

Won't you say, hey, let me save you a seat at church on Sunday.

Just come on down and get you a download.

Bernard's gonna sing some good music.

Miss Pat's gonna serve some good food.

Most folks will be nice to you, unless you're not nice to Miss Pat.

Let me pray for you.

Father, thank you so much for this place.

Thank you so much for this amazing group of people, Lord.

I just ask that you would bless their week, that you would show yourself to them in a powerful way.

I ask that you would glorify yourself and let them know that you're still the God that sits on high on a throne and looks low at his children.

God, I pray for every sickness, every burden, every pain and relationship in this room.

I just ask that you would move in it, Lord.

We love you, we praise you, we give you the glory and all God's children say, amen.