Cast Your Bread on the Water
From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: December 27, 2009
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Transcript
Well, I’m not sure where they heard it, but I was told this week that Washington D.C. is the number one city that people leave over the Christmas holiday. Did anybody else hear that? I don’t know where that came from, but what are you doing here? It’s so good to be together this weekend, the last weekend of this year, and if wikipedia is right, the last weekend of this decade. There is a little bit of controversy swirling around that. But I’m banking on this is a new decade that we are starting in a week, so what a joy to be able to be together.
Did you get everything you wanted for Christmas? No? You know what? It doesn’t matter! We were sitting around the table talking about our most memorable Christmas gifts, and I kid you not, I could not remember a memorable gift. The truth is, you are going to forget what you got or didn’t get. In fact, we got Josiah a little helicopter and he took it outside, the first flight, the neighbor’s roof. By the way, I played MacGyver, I put a broom and shovel together and linked them and did a little search and rescue and his helicopter is back in flight.
I was thinking about how we’re going to forget everything we got or didn’t get, the truth is, every toy you got is going to break eventually anyway, but aren’t you grateful for the gift of salvation! We celebrate the birth of Christ at Christmas and what that means to us is that that’s something that has eternal consequence, and I’m so grateful for that.
This weekend, I want to talk and share some thoughts as we prepare to go into a new year, a new decade. So, if you have a Bible, turn over to Ecclesiastes Chapter 11. A few decades ago, a pair of psychologists named William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser discovered a phenomenon they dubbed the ‘status quo bias.’ Simply put, most of us have a tendency to keep doing what we’ve been doing without giving it much thought. We are creatures of habit. Now, if it is a good habit, good thing! But if it’s a bad habit, that’s a bad thing. But one way or the other, we have a tendency to maintain the status quo. Have you ever been offered a free subscription to a magazine? Or you’re offered a free gift if you sign up for credit cards? Really it is not their generosity at work. It is that they know the status quo bias, that if you sign up for that subscription, you are probably not going to cancel it at the end of the year. You are going forget to do it, or you won’t forget, it’s just too much effort to make the phone call or write the letter, right? Because it is the status quo. Here’s the thing, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you are going to keep getting what you’ve always gotten. I think the new year, whether you are a resolution personality or not, that’s not what this message is about, I think the new year is a wonderful time to step back, maybe you have some time off, I’m thinking new year is a wonderful opportunity to step back and just evaluate our lives. Are we living our lives the way God wants us to? Or is it possible that there are some changes that we need to make? I dare say there is not a single person who doesn’t need to make a change somewhere in their life. When you survey your life, by the way, it helps to think in categories, like, financially, what are some goals and what are some habits or some choices? Relationally, as I think about my wife Laura and our three children, how can I as a husband and as a father make some changes that would help our relationships grow deeper? Intellectually, as I think about strategizing for the coming year, for me it usually means a reading list, but it is about establishing some new routines in my life. Then, of course, spiritually, what does God want to do in my life? I want to give you some good news up front because I think sometimes, we start talking about a new year and changes we need to make and you may feel a little overwhelmed, like you have no idea how many changes I need to make. Listen, everybody take a deep breath and let it back out. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed. Here’s the good news, 1% of what you do makes 99% of the difference. I don’t think you need to make massive changes. Some of you, it wouldn’t hurt, but the truth is, it is amazing how one small change can change your life in a dramatic way.
It was a year ago that I felt like the Lord convicted me. I wasn’t reading my Bible as consistently as I should or could. I’d become this mechanism whereby to prepare Sunday morning messages. I know you’re all in shock right now that a pastor would struggle with that, and I made one resolution last year, I said I’m going to focus on one thing, and I picked up a one-year Bible and I started reading through it. Now, did I read it every day? No. Does that mean it was a complete failure? No. What it did was that change established a new routine in my life and it was the best decision I made last year because it helped me move in a direction. I love the Word of God. I believe in it’s power and when I open that Bible, God begins to speak into my life. So that one change had dramatic impact on my life last year. So don’t feel like you have to do 17 things, the truth is, one small change, a choice, a goal, a decision, a habit could radically change your life. It is all about challenging the status quo in our lives. So I want to challenge you to challenge the status quo.
Ecclesiastes 11, we are going to walk through this passage together and I think it will help us challenge the status quo. Starting with verse 1:
1 Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.
2 Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land.
3 If clouds are full of water, they pour rain upon the earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie.
This is a passage of Scripture that is going to require some contemplation. I’ve said this before but let me say it again, the Bible wasn’t meant to be read, it was meant to be meditated. Reading without meditating is like feeding without digesting. This is going to be a passage that you are going to have to spend some time meditating on for the full absorption of this nutrient. This is kind of confusing language but I like it. Cast your bread upon the waters. I love that. I’m not entirely sure what it means, I say that half kidding, I don’t know that I’ve plummeted the depths of exactly what that means but I think the gist of it is this, and here’s a question – is there a risk that you need to take? Is there a step of faith that you need to take? Is there something that you need to let go of or you need to put out there that maybe God is calling you to do? You’ve been playing it safe, but I wonder if there is a risk that God wants us to take this coming year.
Maybe it is floating your resume, or maybe applying for a program or stepping out in financial faith and beginning to tithe or maybe it is just making a phone call and asking someone out on a date. I don’t know what it is for you, but is there a risk you need to take? You better pray about it and you better make sure that you hear what the Lord is speaking to you. I wonder if we don’t have the wrong approach to life. I wonder if our approach to life is better safe than sorry. I think a lot of us approach life that way and I wonder if Scripture doesn’t teach a very different approach to life.
We have a core value – playing it safe is risky. The greatest risk is taking no risk. God calls us to live by faith and faith is often spelled r-i-s-k. You need to be willing to step out in faith. I want to challenge you to look at your life, are you playing it safe? Are you playing not to loose or are you really stepping out in faith and doing what God is calling you to do?
I want to share a few experiences from this year because as we go into a new year, I look back on the past year and ask what are some of the things the Lord taught me. I hope it’s ok for me to share a few of these. One of them, I was so inspired by my oldest son Parker. This year, he decided to run for class President. The truth is, there aren’t a whole lot of kids in his class, 13, so the odds were pretty good in his favor. But I was so proud that it wasn’t at our instigation, we didn’t tell him he should do this. He didn’t win. And it was a wonderful opportunity for him to learn a very important lesson. Winning is not ‘winning,’ it is not winning that makes you a winner. I was so proud of him when he just ran. I said, “Parker, running is winning, it’s you putting your hat in the wing, it’s you trying, it’s you being willing to step out.” He learned a valuable lesson this year. It’s a lesson I’ve been learning for years. The truth is, I’ve learned that if you allow one failure to be the thing that determines your life, you’re going to quit.
Long before we landed in Washington D.C. when I was in seminary, we tried to plant a church in the Chicago area and it was a complete failure, it was a bust. We had a name, we had a bank account, we had a core group, but we never had our first service. It imploded before we could get off the ground and it was so embarrassing and so disillusioning, but I’m so grateful for it looking back and I’ll tell you why. The cure for the fear of failure is not success, the cure for the fear of failure is failure in small enough doses that you build up an immunity to it and you realize that if you fall flat on your face that God is still there to pick you back up. I think some of us are so afraid, we won’t apply, we won’t put our resume out there, we won’t ask. Then you are never going to experience what it is that God wants to do in your life because you are not willing to cast your bread on the water. You’ve got to be willing to put it out there and take that risk that God is going you to take.
So I challenge you, is there a risk that you need to take this coming year?
The New Living Translation translates this little phrase ‘cast your bread upon the water’ this way, ‘give generously.’ So there is certainly a financial undertone to this principle in this passage. Let me touch on it for a minute. This week, I was reading a book by Bruce Wilkinson, You Were Born For This. A wonderful book, the premise is that many of us approach life as if we had experienced one or two miracles in our life, life would be amazing. Like, that would be so incredible if we experienced one or two miracles in our life, and the author’s point is that God wants you to experience miracles every day. It’s a very interesting paradigm shift because I think many of us pray for miracles. We want to be on the receiving end of a miracle, but the book does a paradigm shift. You may be the miracle in someone else’s life and how can I be a vessel that God can use in someone else’s life. One of the chapters talks specifically in this area of finances. It so inspired me that our family talked about it the other night and we are going to do some things as a result of it. He talks about how he has a God pocket. There is a pocket in his wallet with cash. It doesn’t belong to him, it is not a flush fund, he never uses it for anything else, but when he fills the Spirit of God prompting him and he senses a need in someone’s life, he reaches into that God pocket and he blesses them. He shares some stories in the book that are really inspiring. He is at a restaurant and the waitress, there is something about her demeanor and he can tell and he has this wad of money and he felt like God was prompting him to give it to her and he gives it to her and the rest of the story – it’s the exact amount of money that she needed to make her rent, and she had prayed that morning asking God to provide for her. And he shared stories about how just because he has this God pocket and he is ready and willing to cast his bread on the water and give generously, how it put him in a place where he can be a miracle in someone else’s life. I love that! That inspires me. He shares a verse in I Timothy 6, I think this is huge: Let them do good they that be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share.
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Last weekend, we had a huge snow storm and not a lot of people made it to church, but one couple made it to church, they are missionaries and the service they were supposed to speak at got cancelled and they knew of National Community Church and decided to come visit. I felt prompted that the Lord wanted us to do something for them. I leaned over to Laura and told her I felt like we should give them something. This rarely happens but neither one of us had the checkbook with us. I remember the rest of the day kicking myself feeling like the Lord wanted us to do something for them. I remember what it was like when we were itinerating as home missionaries trying to raise budget and if you missed a service, you missed a paycheck and you might miss a meal, and I remember that it so impacted me that I’m going to approach this coming year and I’m going to say, ‘Lord how can I be ready to give? How can I be ready and in a position to make a difference in other people’s lives?’ Are you all still with me?
I want to challenge you to think about that. What if all of us put that into practice? Can you imagine the kingdom of God if everybody was looking for needs that they could meet, the miracle that they could become in someone else’s life? I want to challenge you to be the blessing. Don’t focus on God blessing you, focus on being the blessing in someone else’s life.
Verse 4
4 Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
5 As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.
6 Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.
The New Living Translation says if you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done. So, the question is – is there a risk that you need to take? Is there something that God is calling you to do? When I ask that question, immediately many of us go into this mode where we begin to make excuses as to why we are not ready to take that risk, but what I want to suggest is that you will never be ready. I was not ready to pastor this church. I had nothing on my resume, I had no experience. I had never been on a church staff. I had done one summer internship and I had a failed church plant on my resume. I was not ready to jump into this thing and pastor a church. I wasn’t ready to get married. Laura may have been, but I was not ready. We were not ready to have children! Parents, were you ready to have kids? You were not ready to have kids, you are never ready to have children! It is such an awesome responsibility, and that’s why I’m so grateful for a heavenly Father who helps us as earthly parents to parent our children. We weren’t ready to become a multi-site church, we weren’t ready to begin giving commissions, we weren’t ready for any of that. You will never be ready, and the reason is simple – if you were ready, if you could do it in your own strength and power and wisdom, then you wouldn’t need God to be part of the equation. So many of us have this false definition of success as being in a place where we don’t need anything. What a terrible place to be. It probably means that you aren’t dreaming dreams that require divine intervention in your life. But listen, we need to constantly be in a place where ‘I’m not ready, I can’t do this, this is way beyond me,’ because it puts you in a place where you have to learn to rely upon God, where you have to be on your knees constantly asking God for help. You’ll never be ready.
I had a paradigm shift this year and as I go back at the end of every year, I go back and read my blog, every blog entry for the past year, which is a lot of blog entries, but I do it because I don’t want to forget the lessons that the Lord is teaching me. By the way, I went back and re-read and I had totally forgotten about stuff, cute experiences with my kids and things they said or lessons that I feel like the Lord impressed on me. Here was a big one, there is this old saying, ‘ready, set, go’ and I remember it was the day we met with a missionary from Berlin, before we did our reconnaissance trip over there to begin exploring the possibility of launching a location there. By the way, if you weren’t here, I announced two weeks ago that we will launch a location in Berlin, Germany. It’s about a year off because it takes a lot of groundwork and preparation to make that happen, but we feel like the Lord is leading us to do it. I’ll never forget, it was that day that I felt like the Spirit of God said, ‘Go, set, ready.’ If you wait until you are ready or if you wait until you are all set, then you are never going to go, you will never step out in faith. In Scripture, typically, signs follow. You’ve got to take a step of faith and then God follows that to confirm that He is working and moving in your life.
So, is there an area where you need to step out? You will not be ready, you will not be set. I remember as we were getting ready to launch our second location and become a multi-site church, I remember feeling so overwhelmed. Like, this is so scary, what are we doing, we barely have one location and to go to a second one seemed like such a stretch. I remember I read something that was so freeing to me and I hope this is a gift to you. This impacted me in a profound way. I happened to be reading a book by Andy Stanley, Next Generation Leader, and I read one sentence that I felt was written exactly for me. It said: You will never be more than 80% certain. It set me free, because I felt like, in some many areas of my life, I wanted 100% certainty, thereby taking faith out of the equation so that in my own common sense, I could move forward. But it just doesn’t work that way. You will never be ready, you will never be certain, but there comes a moment as you pray and as the Lord leads you, that you need to step out and take the risk that God is calling you to take.
It says: Sow your seed in the morning and at evening let not your hands be idle. The Winter Olympics are right around the corner. Every four years, some of the greatest athletes in the world compete in a variety of sports, and the thing I love about the Olympics is that I don’t think they are doing it for the money, ya know what I’m saying? It’s just the love of sports, competition, representing their country and it’s this pure form of athletics. What’s amazing is how hard they work at their sport. I read this week that the average Olympian trains four hours a day, 310 days a year for 6 years to be able to get to the place where they can compete at on Olympic level, which explains why many of us are not Olympic athletes! It’s hard to imagine putting in that kind of effort, but it’s funny because none of us would say, ‘How did you become an Olympic athlete? Did it just happen? Was talent just there?’ No one assumes that. Everybody knows that at the highest levels of competition, all of them are incredibly talented, but the truth is, it’s whoever is going to put in the most time and effort and energy, practicing day in and day out for years and years and years to achieve that level. If you don’t put in the effort, you are not going to get back the result you want.
Yet, spiritually, sometimes we don’t think that way. But there is a universal law at work, and I love the way the Bible used agricultural metaphors. Sow your seed in the morning. There is no mystery here, what you plant in your life is going to reap a harvest that will determine who you become. If you sow in your life, it is going to reap a harvest of a lot of weeds that will choke out what God wants to do in your life. There is no mystery there! But if, by the grace of God, you begin to sow seeds of faith and love and you begin to get into the Word of God and you begin to cultivate a prayer life with God, then those seeds will begin to reap a harvest in your life and you’ll become the person He wants you to be, which is ultimately the big issue here. This is not about just setting goals and what you want to do and where you want to go, because those things are far less significant that who are you becoming. God is far more concerned with who you are becoming than where you are going or what you are doing. It is about who are you becoming as a person. What I want to suggest is that it is not going to be one massive change that you make that turns you into the person you want to be. Success, more times than not, is just small efforts repeated day in and day out. You do the right things over and over and over again. You obey the Word of God and you do it day in and day out and God honors that and blesses that. It is going to take sacrifice to make it happen.
On Christmas Eve, Summer and I went out for a little last minute shopping, not her, me. I had a few more gifts I needed to pick up, so we went to the mall and we popped into Barnes & Noble because I had a book that released this past week but I hadn’t seen it yet. This seems weird but until you see it on the shelf, I wonder if it’s really out there. So we went into Barnes & Noble and it was a fun father-daughter moment, because sure enough, there was my book. We had to look very hard to find it, but we found it and it was a cool moment. I don’t want to overplay this but it is hard writing a book, it is incredibly hard, and it was a cool moment to go in and see it on the shelf. When I saw it, and then I started studying this passage this week and this passage was getting into my heart, I thought this is a pretty good definition of writing, sow your seed in the morning, because I think one of things I’ve discovered is that good things don’t just materialize out of thin air. We have a core value – pray like it depends on God and work like it depends on you. When I’m in a writing season, I get started about 5:30 in the morning and that gives me about three hours to write before my regular day begins, then I do everything I do during my regular day, and then sometimes, if I have a little energy left over, and it is evening, I let not my hands be idle. What I’m trying to say is that I think some of you have dreamed some of the things that you believe God has put in your heart, but what seeds are you sowing? Let me flip the coin. It is so easy to get into routines and then not analyze them, then your life just fades away until one day you get home from work and you’re tired and you want to unwind and you turn on the TV and before you know it, you’ve spent two hours watching a couple of shows. Then it becomes a routine and you’re doing that seven days a week. By the way, nothing wrong with watching football on Sunday, I’m talking about other kinds of shows! Listen, two hours a day, fourteen hours a week, is more than seven hundred hours in a year. Do you realize what you can do with seven hundred hours? I’m not here saying you shouldn’t do this or that. In fact, the truth is, I’ve learned that sometimes you need to multi-task, like if I’m going to watch TV, I might as well spend some time on the elliptical while I do. I might as well get some physical exercise in while I’m watching TV. So there is a way to redeem everything, but the bottom line is this, look at your life and what seeds are you sowing in your life?
Ok, let’s finish up this passage.
7 Light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun.
8 However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all. But let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything to come is meaningless.
9 Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment.
10 So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless.
I don’t know exactly where I read it this week but I read that the opposite of depression is gratitude. I don’t know where that came from but it really resonated with me and got me thinking that many of us are depressed and I think one of the primary reasons is that we haven’t cultivated a heart of gratitude for the things that the Lord is doing in our lives. If you take your eyes off the things that you are grateful for, even the day after Christmas, it can be easy to get focused on the things that you don’t like. What happens then is that you become depressed with your life as it is. I love this idea – enjoy the days of your youth, in however many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all. I don’t know if you ever thought about it this way, but it is your spiritual responsibility to enjoy every day as much as you possibly can. What?! Are you serious? This is not just some feel good thing, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. You’ve not going to enjoy every day unless you put God at the center of your life and seek Him first and all these things will be added unto you. It’s about getting your life in the right perspective and the right place, where you are pursuing a relationship with Christ first and foremost. If you are doing that, then it begins to redeem every day becomes a journey that you can enjoy.
I want to challenge you at the end of this year, what is there that you need to celebrate and thank the Lord for? Every New Year’s Eve, our family goes to Tony Chang’s over in Chinatown. Once a year, we treat ourselves, I love their food! So, we go there, but it’s not just the food, we have a little tradition, we go around in our family and we share the things that we are grateful for. And it is amazing, even the kids get engaged and we begin t reflect on this past year and the way the Lord has blessed us and the things we are grateful for. Certainly there were tough days and things that we wouldn’t want to go back there and there were days of darkness, but we find a way to celebrate the different things the Lord has done in our lives. This is special to me in part because our family has four core values and one of them is gratitude, so we are always trying to find a way to cultivate gratitude in our hearts. So one of the things we did for Christmas is we got everybody in our family a little daily calendar with enough room to be able to write down, every day, something that we are grateful for. I know, sometimes, it’s like, are we going to be able to do this for a whole year, and it’s going to be challenging, but we felt like, as a family, with great intentionality, to cultivate gratitude in our hearts. Let’s do something that helps us enjoy every day.
So I don’t know what that is for you, but I want to encourage you and challenge you to enjoy every day.
Finally, banish anxiety from your heart. Easier said than done. Here we are, a few days away from a new year and new decade and some of you are so focused on things from the past and what’s happened this past year that it is very difficult to have the emotional energy to think about moving forward into the coming year, but here’s my challenge for you. If you are going to challenge the status quo, if you are going to take some risks, if you are going to identify some changes that you need to make in your life, if you are going to evaluate your life, then what you need to do over the next couple days is to find a couple of hours and just spend some time looking at your life. What are you grateful for? Think about those things that you need to celebrate. What changes do you need to make? Don’t over-complicate it, allow the Spirit of God to speak into your heart. Do it in the context of prayer. Don’t just come up with this or that, pray about it, and the Holy Spirit is going to reveal to you what He wants you to do, and as you do that, then begin to think about this coming year and you begin to commit 2010 to the Lord. How do you banish anxiety from your heart? You just put it in God’s hands. Do not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Present 2010 as a gift to the Lord, give it to Him and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus, and you’ll begin to experience the peace of the Lord as you go into this new year. I promise you, I have no idea what your circumstances are, but if you begin to pray and seek the Lord, tell God you want to glorify Him with your life, that you want to be the person He wants you to be, God will begin to work in your heart and work in your life. It may not be instant, it is not going to happen overnight, but you being to make some of those small changes and the Lord is going to honor those and bless those and it is going to begin to change your life.
Let me invite you to stand, at all of our locations, and I want to lead us in a prayer, it’s a prayer that we pray around here every once in a while, the Quakers used to pray this way with body posture, with their hands face down symbolizing the things they needed to let go of, they would pray and then they would turn their hands over in the posture of receptivity and say, ‘God anything You want to do in my life, I’m ready for it.’ I think, what a wonderful way to end one year and begin a new year. If you feel comfortable doing that, I want to invite you to pray this way, with your hands face down.
Lord, we come to You right now, and God there are things we need to let go of, there are situations that are eating us alive. God I pray right now that any bitterness in our hearts, Lord any guilt that we feel, over sin, confessed or unconfessed, that right now we’d just repent anything in our past. God we want to be right with You, it’s the deepest desire of our heart and we let go of that thing right now. Lord, any anxiety that we walk in, pressing down on our shoulders, creating a tightness in our chest, creating a confusion in our mind, Lord, those things we let go of. Lord, anything that your Spirit would say shouldn’t be in our heart or in our mind that shouldn’t be in our lives, maybe it is some of the habits we’ve acquired over the last year that we need to let go of, Lord maybe it is a bad decision we made and we’ve been beating ourselves up and we need to let go. Lord whatever that thing is, I pray that right now, your Spirit would speak into our hearts and lives and we would have the courage right now to let it go. Now we turn our hands over, and Lord we confess that anything we need needs to come from You. God we profess our profound dependence upon You. It is in You that we live and move and have our being, and Lord right now, we come to You humbly, not because we deserve anything but because we know that You are the heavenly Father who loves us and cares for us and always has our best interest at heart and wants to love us and bless us and fill us with joy unspeakable and peace that passes understanding. It is who You are. Lord, with hands in this posture, Lord we want to receive whatever it is that You want to do in our hearts. Lord, as we think about this next year, we certainly don’t want to be any good thing to just be the result of human effort, that is not good enough. We need your favor, God we need your hand of blessing, we need You to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. So, in a posture of receptivity right now, we simply receive from You what it is that You want to do in our hearts and lives and we pray these things in faith in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
