Podcast appearances and mentions of Bethel Church

In this episode of Cultural Catalysts, Kris Vallotton sits down with his wife, Kathy, for an honest and humorous conversation about the lessons they've learned through 51 years of marriage. They talk about how dating has changed, why love has to become more than a feeling, and how commitment carries a relationship through difficult seasons. Kris and Kathy also open up about losing nearly everything financially, navigating conflict without turning against each other, and what they learned raising their children along the way. Whether you're single, dating, married, or raising a family, this conversation is full of practical wisdom on communication, commitment, forgiveness, and building relationships that last. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ X: https://x.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

In this message from September 13th, 2026, Kris Vallotton challenges the Church to think bigger, live with a royal identity, and embrace Jesus' commission to disciple nations. What would change if we stopped building only for our lifetime and started laying foundations for generations we may never meet? What if God is calling us to build something that will still be transforming the world hundreds of years from now? Through the stories of Moses, Abraham, the early Church, and the builders of historic cathedrals, Kris explores what it means to become a “master builder.” Someone willing to lay a foundation that others will build upon. Discover why thinking like royalty, embracing legacy, and letting go of what worked in a previous season may be essential for where God is taking us next. We aren't just building for today—we're building for generations to come. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Bethel Church Stratford | Sunday Service | September 27th by mybethel.ca

Bethel Church St. Marys | Sunday Service | September 27th by mybethel.ca

Bethel Church St. Marys | Sunday Service | September 20th by mybethel.ca

In this episode, Aaron Smith sits down with Aaron Tedeschi and Hayley Braun from Bethel Church in Redding California to talk about wonder!Handlebar Volume 1: Heart and Soul, A Practical Guide To Help You Open Your Heart And Clear Out Your Soul is now available everywhere. Order here:https://upperroom.store/products/handlebars-heart-soul?fbclid=PAdGRleATLcN1wZG9mAmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDzEyNDAyNDU3NDI4NzQxNAABp2Y1_QgaZE-_A05-8hfAS3ShjEr5-4AfnhWxEMS5WaZUvNdu1IgAqP3MHLrK_aem_-4kQgXGwNJwDRnrtStjC7QOrder from Amazon:https://us.amazon.com/Handlebars-Heart-Aaron-W-Smith/dp/B0G36GNRPXCheck out our website, Thehandlebarpodcast.com for more information, merch, how to partner with us and more. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@thehandlebarpodcast

Steve DeWitt The Joy of Opposition - Part B Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Scripture Reference: Nehemiah 4:1-23 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Sermon Series: Spiritual ExilesMessage: The Joy of OppositionAirdate: 9/18-9/21/26Programs: 2360 and 2361Morning, Bethel Church, and this is our challenging weekend with Daylight Savings. I said, or I just was thinking about our first service people today, that those are the really early risers to show up at the 815 on the spring ahead weekend of Daylight Savings. You're sort of more the hoi polloi, the sort of the normal folks, and we'll see who comes to the next service. I stand before you as a tired man. My daughter was up throughout most of the night, and I'm running on fumes today. So I say that to you in some way to mitigate my guilt for something stupid that I might say, because my eyes are like rolling in my head, I feel like today. So we'll get through the morning and go home and take a really good nap. And you parents who've been there, you know how I'm feeling today. I do want to greet our Cedar Lake campus this morning, and thank you so much for joining with us. Our Hobart Portage campus, which is not in this service with us, but are next week celebrating their... grand opening. I can say our grand opening. We're just one church. Really excited about that.So if you happen to just remember that in prayer, we've got a lot of work that's gone into kind of kicking that off, and I've seen the plans, and it's really going to be a great weekend next weekend over there. And how often do you, you know, grand open a new campus? You know, like, well, we've done it twice in the last six months, but we don't know how many more ever in the future, so we want to celebrate that, and we're going to next week. Today, we're going to stay in the stream of our teaching in 1 Peter without being exactly in 1 Peter. We've seen in 1 Peter this focus on trials. That trials are meant by God to reveal and to refine us. We look at them often as being bad things. God looks at them as being good things because of the effect that they have. And 1 Peter is written to people that are in exile, that are experiencing opposition.They're experiencing... ostracization, and Peter encourages them to see even those things as being part of God's refining fire, that work that he works in us, and to embrace them, not as being bad things, but in the end ultimately good things. So today I want to take a little break from 1 Peter and to look at one particular kind of trial that we so often run into as individuals and as a church. And that is just the trials of opposition, the trials of opposition. And my title is The Joy of Opposition, which sounds oxymoronic, right? Who looks at opposition and goes, yay, we don't naturally do that. There is from Scripture and from the teaching of Scripture every reason for us to even look at opposition as being something that we can rejoice in. James, of course, says, “count it all joy when you fall into various trials and temptations”, and that includes the trials of opposition. We all face opposition, don't we? Maybe as I say that, names come to mind. Perhaps that person is sitting next to you today. and try not to be poking them throughout the sermon, especially if you're married.But we all face opposition, and we have to know how to respond to it if we're ever going to make it through these trials that God brings our way and these people that God puts in our path. How should we respond to opposition? And Nehemiah is just a fantastic... book and a fantastic story about a man who suffered great opposition and who not only endured it, but who goes down in history as a great example of somebody going through it in a way that honors the Lord. And so... is that Nehemiah hears that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down and remained in that condition. He was serving King Artaxerxes in Susa, the capital of Persia, and he hears that Jerusalem is still in ruins, the wall is still in ruins, and he has a burden for that. He offers a prayer, and God blesses that prayer, and King Artaxerxes says, Nehemiah, you can go, and I'm going to... the thing. I'm going to provide what you need for this thing. I'm given a letter that ought to get you all the way there. And he was the most powerful man in the world at the time. And so that was like a huge endorsement.And so Nehemiah, he goes to Jerusalem and he inspects the walls and he gathers the Jews and he says, listen, my friends, let's rise and let us rebuild this wall. And Nehemiah is this amazing story of how a people that, you know, they weren't naturally masons and builders, but they come together and they accomplish this amazing feat of rebuilding the walls of the city of Jerusalem. And in the midst of all of this success, there is chapter 4 where there is trouble. There's trouble. Even in the midst of a great success, there's trouble. And it seems to me, my observation would be, and even my own experience, that whenever God is really doing something, whether that be in somebody's life, a new Christian, or maybe some victories that you've had spiritually in your life, or maybe it's your small group, or even a church or a mission work, wherever God is really moving, so often when there is a lot of momentum, something will happen or somebody will come or there'll be some sort of criticism that steps into that moment and can so easily derail the entire thing. And that's what Nehemiah faced.And I'd like to begin in our little study here of chapter four by looking at the strategies that the opponents of Nehemiah employed against him. So let me introduce you to the bad guys, okay? These are the bad guys. And their names are notorious, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. These were three kings of small kingdoms that surrounded Jerusalem. And they represent the opposition to the Jews rebuilding this. wall. We're introduced to them in chapter 2 verse 10 where they first hear that Nehemiah has come to rebuild the wall and the text tells us that they are displeased greatly. And they begin then to wage a kind of psychological war against Nehemiah. That continues throughout the story. Even after chapter 4, it's not the end of it, because as the story unfolds, they write an open letter, you know, a kind of assassination of Nehemiah's character. They post it on Facebook for everybody to see what this guy was really all about and what his motives were and questioning those. Later, they want to meet him in the fields of Ono. And when your enemies want to meet you in the fields of Ono, you say to them, Oh, no, I am not going to go there.They wanted to kill him. And so these guys were serious about this. And Sanballat is the ringleader. Tobiah is kind of... his sidekick, and Geshem was the schemer behind the scenes that was doing his scheming. This might help a little bit. Sanballat was the Sith Lord, Tobiah was Darth Vader, and Geshem was General Grievous, just to give some communication to some of you. Now, these guys surrounded Jerusalem. Their kingdoms surrounded Jerusalem. Maybe you're in a situation like that right now as I talk about opposition. You feel like you've got it on all sides. I got nowhere to go. There's no safe zone for me. There's no green zone for me. Everywhere I look, it seems like I've got opposition against me. That's what Nehemiah was facing. Everybody around them wanted them out of there. Now, these men couldn't attack Nehemiah directly because, remember, Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, the king of really the world at that time, had endorsed the project. So to come out overtly and to say, we're going to take you on, we're going to take you down, would have been in opposition to Artaxerxes. And even these guys didn't want to mess with Artaxerxes.So their strategy really is one more of cloak and dagger. All right, this is espionage. This is insinuation. It's the psychological guerrilla warfare that they employ against God's people in the rebuilding of this wall. So what are the strategies that they employ? Well, notice, first of all, that they begin where every schoolyard begins, and that is with taunting and with ridicule. Look at verse 1. “Now, when Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, He was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, what are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish and burn ones at that? Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, yes, what they're building, if a fox goes up on it, he will break down their stone wall.” Emphasis added for effect, okay? So here you have Sanballat now. He's the ringleader. He's the spokesperson. He's the Sith Lord. And he begins by ridiculing the effort that these Jews are doing in rebuilding the wall.And the text literally says this. It says that he became very angry. Literally, his nose became hot. This is a Hebrew idiom for when somebody is really mad. It's like the blood. They get red in the face all the way to the end of their nose. Like if you see a guy who's red all the way to the end of their nose, he's mad, right? And that's Sanballat. He's mad to the end of his nose, mad. And so he begins by taunting them. And visualize this with me. He gathers his cronies, he gathers the army of Samaria, and he begins to jeer the Jews in a way that he knows they're going to hear what he is saying, and he begins to mock them. And this sounds like, you know, the local elementary schoolyard, or maybe an IU-Purdue football game, because he begins by saying this. He says, these feeble Jews. Okay, what's that? Name-calling, right? They're wimpy. They've got nothing. He derides their ambition. Will they restore the wall? In other words, this project's a joke. Come on. Putting this whole thing together. He ridicules their optimism. He says, what are they going to do? Pray the wall up? They can't build this wall.All they have is their prayers. He mocks their enthusiasm. He says, well, they finish in a day. Word had gotten out that they were busy little beavers working so hard on the wall. All of their enthusiasm. Do they really think they can do this thing? I mean, come on. He undermines their confidence. Can they bring the stones back to life? In other words, they can't do it. They can't. Do it. And if you can visualize this, here's all these people, and they hate the Jews. They're not for this wall going back up. And every one of these that he says, all the guys, you know, they've been drinking. Think of a sort of a drunken sort of mob scene where they're all, wow, no Jews, and they can't do it. And so it kind of is building a Sanballat, kind of does this and does that. And I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where somebody tells a really good joke and somebody else thinks it's a great time to pile on. Or jump on the bandwagon. There's not a lot of humor in the Bible, but this is one of them, actually.Sanballat very effectively rolls out these ridicules, and there's Tobiah. He thinks it's a great time to jump in, and he goes, yeah, if a fox ran on the wall, it would fall down. I hear everyone going, oh, Tobiah, that's so stupid. Why would you say something like that? And we know from history and archaeology that it is stupid. They've done studies of the wall that Nehemiah built. It was nine feet thick. That would be a big fox. Knock that wall down. The point here is that he wasn't saying this for the armies, and he wasn't saying this for his cronies. He was saying this hoping the Jews would hear it, hoping they'd hear the mockery and the laughter. You know, the old adage in the schoolyard is, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. You've heard that before. You've probably said that. And the fact that you have to resort on the schoolyard to poetry ought to say that words are effective at discouraging us, aren't they? And even as adults, a little contrary word, a little criticism, a little taunt, a little mockery, and inside we can suddenly become so fleshly, we can be discouraged.And that is always the case. Words are effective. Now, why do you suppose Sanballat began with ridicule? Why not just march the armies out there and just take them all on? Because what is Satan? He's known as the father of what? Lies. Satan is the master of the subtlety. He's the master of the insinuation. We see that with Adam and Eve, or with Eve specifically in the garden, as he just twists the words and he plays with the mind. Those that Satan controls and follow his path, they do the same thing. Satan knows that he doesn't have to get a good Christian to deny the virgin birth or the fact that Jesus is coming back. All he has to do is discourage him a little bit. And with that discouragement, the good work that God's doing in them or the good work that God's doing through them, all of a sudden, it can come to a halt. Why? I'm so discouraged. And maybe you're there right now. You're rejoicing in what God's done in the past, but right now you're discouraged and somebody said something. Something's going on.This person's in my life. I got a Sanballat. I got a Tobiah. And you're just thinking, oh, that's the way the enemy operates. How should we respond? Notice how Nehemiah responds in verse 4 and verse 6. I won't read them, but in both cases, he prays. Now, I never saw anybody in the schoolyard do that. I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray over these words that you've said. It's not our natural response, is it? have an example here from Nehemiah, I'll come back to this later, in how to respond to criticism and opposition. Go to God in prayer. And notice what he adds after verse 6. He says that the response of the people was that they worked even harder. And the text says they worked because they had a heart to work. I love that little phrase there. And as I read that, you know what I think about? I honestly think about Bethel Church.One of the qualities of this church that I love so much is that this is a church that has a heart to work. And I've seen that over the years. I can think of just even recent examples of moments where it just comes pouring out. A year ago right now, we said, hey, we bought this building in Gary. We got a clean 30 or 40,000 square feet. Y'all come out now. And I know a terrible cold, I mean, I-65 was a sheet of ice. I know because I drove down it. You know, we had 400 people, volunteers that showed up and we scrubbed every inch of that building. And I saw the way that people were working and laboring and sweating and all of that. No pay for God, you know, that kind of a thing. And I just admire that so much. And like the, you know, a month ago we said, hey. somebody's given us two gym floors, come pull planks. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, I think I'm going to pull planks today.But we had all these people that showed up and they pulled planks all day and they got blisters and sore backs, but they did it to the glory of God. Why? Because they had a heart to work. And I just think about our church and even the day-to-day kind of week-to-week ministries, I think it's a wonderful quality of our congregation. We're good at building walls. and projects, and just having a heart to work for the Lord, and I commend you for it. So look at that verse and go, that's us right there. We're just like them. Encouraged? I want to be encouraging. The second thing that we find the enemy doing is, and you see how these escalate, okay? Escalates. Ridicule doesn't work, the people just work harder. So they amp it up now in verse 7 and 8, and they just seek to make trouble. But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. Now before they were greatly disturbed, greatly upset, now they are really mad. And what do they do?And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. The second thing that opposition will do when the ridicule doesn't work is they will just seek to do mischief. They will seek to do something that can frustrate the plans. They'll plot. They'll come together and strategize against the work of God. They will gossip. They will slander. They'll do whatever they can to create trouble. It's a kind of verbal terrorism that takes place. And of course, again, God's enemies do this because their Sith Lord Again, notice Nehemiah's response in verse 9. But we prayed and we posted a guard. That little verse I find to be one of the most helpful and insightful with a common problem amongst God's people. When opposition comes or trouble comes or some conflict comes, whatever it might be, there are really, it seems, two kinds of Christians. There are the kinds of Christians who say, we're just going to pray about it. We are going to pray about it. And indeed, they do pray about it. And then you have another group of people. They say, you know what? We're going to post a guard, right? We're weaponizing. We're getting the guns out.They want to do battle. Bring it on, okay? We are going to take practical steps. to take them out. They're more of the sort of practitioner type. So you have the kind of praying types, and you have the kind of post-a-guard types. And what I've seen pastorally, this plays out this way, where you have some people say they're just going to pray about it. I have seen in my ministry, I've seen people, they'll get like, I have cancer. And their response is, I am simply going to pray about this. And I have urged them, I'll say, pray about it, but why not get some medical help and do whatever you can medically as well as praying in order to take care of this problem? And I've seen people who have refused to seek medical advice because in their minds, I think, they think it's more faithful to simply... pray about it. At the other side of this, I have seen often, and I have done this myself, a problem arises and I skip the praying and I go to the posting of the guard stuff. Well, let's just think about how to make this happen.And we're going to do this and we're going to do that and we're going to take care of this and we're going to take care of that. And there's no regard for seeking God. It's like Israel when the Gibeonites faked him out and Joshua said, eh, we won't go to war with you. And then they find out they're the next country over. Why? Because they did not seek the Lord in the matter. And so it seems like there are those two kinds of Christians. And Nehemiah shows the beautiful balance of embracing both of those. What ought we do when we come to some trouble or trial in our life? First thing to do is to pray about it. And we see Nehemiah over and over again. He prays. His instinct is prayer. And for us as Christians, that ought to be our first thing. Hey, let's pray about that right now. Let's seek the Lord about this right now. But when we say amen, it doesn't mean now I don't have to think about anything else. There are all kinds of wisdom and prudent matters that the Bible also talks about.Read through the wisdom literature of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, and it's filled with practical advice for faithful living in the real world. We live in a real world where real things have to be taken care of. And the wise Christian and the wise church We'll do both of those. So maybe ask yourself, am I a I'm going to pray about it and then sort of take my hands off kind of person? Or am I a forget about praying about it, get right down to fixing it kind of person? And maybe Nehemiah could inspire us to be both of those. Okay, both of those. An example of both of those would be a dear woman in our church a few weeks ago had a very, very difficult surgery. According to James 5, she asked if the elders would pray over her, and we did. We anointed her with oil, we prayed over her, we prayed over that surgery. And then she went and she had the best medical care that she could possibly find. And to me, that is Nehemiah. Praying about it, posting a guard. A great example, I think, for prudent and prayerful living.The third thing we find happened now, again, an escalation, okay? Taunting, troublemaking, and now we see threats. Look at verse 11. “Also, our enemy said, before they know it or see us, we will be right there among them and we'll kill them and put an end to the work.” Then the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times over, wherever you turn, they will attack us. Wherever you turn, they will attack us. Wherever you turn, they will attack us. Over. The language here in the Hebrew means over and over and over again. They were saying, they're going to get you. They're going to get you. They're going to kill you. Now, how fun would that be? Right? There you are. You're building a wall. You're hewing out stones. You're piling them up. You're making a wall. And at the same time, you've got some of your own people, cronies of your enemies, who are saying to you, you're going to die. Now, these people realize they didn't know they were Bible characters. Right? They're not in there, oh, this is a Bible story. We're going to be fine. They have no idea. They're living life like you and I live our lives.Would that be an effective, fearful tactic? I mean, what if, as you came in, there's all these people outside of the church going, you walk in there, they're going to kill you. How many of us would go, oh, no problem? No, it would have its effect, wouldn't it? And indeed, it did in that day. It had an effect of discouragement. Word gets out, they're going to kill us. In fact, let's look at that effect. What is the effect of the taunting? And what is the effect of the ridicule? And what is the effect of the troublemaking and the threats? of opposition in this story at this point is discouragement. Look at verse 10 of chapter 4. “In Judah it was said, the strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to rebuild the wall.” What Nehemiah is recording there is what is the word on the street. What were people saying as they were building the wall? They're looking at all the rubble now and they're saying there's so much rubble. This is weeks after, or days after, Nehemiah said, let's rise and build.Was there more rubble now than there was before? No. But when we are discouraged, everywhere we look, there's rubble, right? Oh, yeah. I'm a little discouraged right now. My whole life stinks. There's rubble everywhere. When we're encouraged, there's no rubble. When we're discouraged, everything's rubble. Are you with me? Remember, I didn't have a good night of sleep, so I have no idea what I'm saying right now. I just hope it's connecting somehow. These words were having their effect in spite of the amazing progress that was being made. This goes down as one of the greatest and most unified team efforts that God's people have ever done. And in spite of this amazing accomplishment, and in the midst of it, You have all of this turmoil and opposition and drama and people actually saying, we're never going to make it. We can't do it. There's too much rubble and too much trouble. The danger, I think, in verbal attacks is we begin to believe what's being said, even when it's not true, right?Do you think, how likely is it that Geshem and Tobiah and Sanballat are going to take their armies against people that the most powerful man in the world said had permission to build this wall? Not very likely that they would do it. But if you hear something enough, you believe it to be true, don't you? If somebody tells you that you're nothing enough or somebody tells you that you can't do it enough or somebody tells you that, you know, your faith is a bunch of hooey because I know the kind of person that you are enough, you begin to believe it and discouragement kind of creeps in and now the progress that you were making, it slows down or stops, right? And you're like, oh, there's so much rubble. Why are we even trying this? We're never going to make it. I wonder if you've lived. In verse 10, have you had your face flush as your nose gotten red all the way to the tip as a colleague or a family member or a neighbor or a former friend or a former spouse tells you what a terrible person you are and questions every character quality in your life?Have you been, in verse 10, discouraged? As a pastor, you know, as a leader of any kind, if you take on any responsibility, expect that you're going to deal with this. I can tell you, I've been a pastor for 22 years. I can think of names that come to my mind of Sanballats of Tobias and Geshams over the years that have said this or that and questioned this or that and on and on and la la la. It's just, it's part of what it means to be a leader. But I know well that sense of discouragement, that deep down thought that I'm a failure or my faith isn't real because this person says they don't think I'm a good Christian, etc. I don't want to ruin the ending here again, but they rebuilt the wall in 52 days. They're halfway done. They're only like three weeks away from the time that Nehemiah said, let's begin rebuilding the wall. This is one of the greatest projects and team efforts in history, yet it was criticized. It was mocked. And this is the danger, I think, of criticism is that it can sap the energy from the most spiritual and noble of efforts.These people were rebuilding the wall to the glory of God. They heard from Nehemiah earlier all the things that Artaxerxes, all the things really that God had done. I mean, what are the chances that the most powerful man in the world is going to come to the aid of the Jews in rebuilding the wall of a city that had rebelled against his predecessor? Why would a king do that? And yet that king came to Nehemiah and the Jews' aid and provided the resources and gave the letter and made all the provisions. I mean, you look at all of that and what can you say? This is a God thing, right? This is a God thing. And yet, in spite of it being a God thing, a little bit of criticism just takes the wind out of the sails. This was tough for Nehemiah. opposition outside, discouragement within. Maybe you're in verse 10 right now, and you can relate to this. It's like, man, you're describing my life here, where I am today on this Sunday. I'm discouraged.And here's where Nehemiah, I think, provides an inspiring and helpful example of how to respond when life brings opposition. to what God is doing and what God wants to do in our life. And I've got four things, four responses that Nehemiah has here and four ways that we can actually experience these oppositions and turn them into actually a kind of joy. And I share these with you not because I do this perfectly or even 75%. This is as much for me as it is for anybody. And we have to be reminded of this because it happens so often in our life. But how do we respond when opposition comes to us? First of all, I think it is so critical that we expect it, that we expect opposition to come. There are some people that think mistakenly that to be a Christian or to be a part of a church, I mean, it's like... where it never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. I mean, that's every local church, isn't it? To go there would be just a blissful experience of happy Christians all the time.I'll never have anybody tell me anything but something that's uplifting and encouraging to me. Nothing will ever happen in the church that I don't walk out of there going, I'm so glad I'm a part of that church. I mean, it's just gonna be, it's like heaven on earth. Well, nobody amen'd that. And that's because you all have been in churches and in this church. The reality is, no matter what God is doing, there is always going to be negative opposition, criticism, a discouraging person, a Sanballat, a Tobias, somebody like that. J. Oswald Sanders, great Christian man, wrote a classic book on leadership, said this, “no leader is exempt from criticism, and his humility will nowhere be seen more clearly than in the manner in which he accepts it and reacts to it.” Do you think that Nehemiah thought to himself as he was on his camel or donkey or walking or however he got from Susa to Jerusalem, you know what, I'm just going to show up there. I'm going to give an inspiring speech. And not only are the Jews going to rally to the cause, but everybody around Jerusalem, they're all going to be happy about this. It's going to be fantastic.My speech will do it. No. He knew what was coming. He knew there would be trouble. Chuck Swindoll, many of you know Chuck Swindoll, says this, “there will always, always be opposition from those who are by nature negative and critical, but the work must go on. Progress should not stop because of a few who were critical of the plan.” I think it's a falsely idealistic perspective on the Christian life to think that it's going to somehow be easy. that I'm going to skate along and everyone's going to be happy with what God is doing in my life. It won't happen. And we can look at examples in the scripture, not just Nehemiah, but Jeremiah certainly faced that. Paul faced that. Well, how about Jesus? I mean, if there was ever a leader who was such an awesome leader that, I mean, everybody would have loved everything that he did and just rallied to him. I mean, everybody would just applaud him and be like, you know, be like Palm Sunday every day of his life, right? No. What happened to our perfect leader, Jesus?Not only were there many people that opposed him, famous now, men like Caiaphas and Pilate and the Pharisees, but even within his own circle. Judas betraying him. The greatest leader who's ever walked this earth, beginning the greatest organization that has ever been begun, the church, faced trouble, didn't he? And opposition. So who are we to think that in our... smaller context and in our own lives that we are going to be able to follow the Lord, fulfill his will for us, and somehow think everybody's going to love it and everybody's going to applaud it. It simply won't happen. In fact, I think if there is a key truth here, it is this one, is that God's will didn't allow the wall to be built without opposition. I mean, could God have rebuilt this wall without Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem? You bet he could have. Could he have rebuilt this wall in some way where everybody thought it was great? You bet that he could have. But it was God's will that there be a Sanballat. It's God's will that there was Tobiah and all the rest. God included that in the plan for Nehemiah and the plan for the rebuilding of the walls.It included the conflict. It included the slander. It included the threats that were made. And I wonder today if you might have a Sanballat in your life. Even as I've been talking about this, there's been somebody coming to mind. And in your heart, you're like, you know, God, if you love me, you will destroy them, right? Because you're not the author of evil, and you don't like evil people, and yet this evil person is in my life. And it seems to me that... this whole thing to work the way that, in my opinion, it ought to work, that person needs to be eliminated. And we try to pray the Sanballats out of our life because we think something's wrong, that they are in our life. And too often we think that with even criticism, right? We think, I must be out of God's will because somebody said something negative. Mrs. So-and-so said something. And so we look at and we listen to so-and-so who says such-and-such about this or that, and we think, well, I must not be a good Christian, or maybe this faith thing isn't true, or maybe I'm out of the will of God.Joe Stowell III, his dad was the first pastor of our church, and he was longtime president of Moody Bible Institute, once said, “in every church I have pastored, God has placed difficult people around me to keep me dependent on him.” Now, I have no idea what he's talking about there in my own personal experience. But there is truth there, isn't it? That opposition is not out of God's will, but it is a part of God's will. And that indeed, God gains greater victory when his people trust him in the midst of trouble and overcome in spite of opposition. that there's a greater glory that comes from that why do you think God created Satan? Did God know when He made him the highest archangel? Did He know the whole story? Indeed, did He purpose the whole story, that Satan was going to rebel against Him and take a third of the demons, or the angels, with him, and that all of this would ensue? Why? Why does God do that? As Luther said, even the devil is God's devil, right?That God uses The taunts and the ridicule and the criticism and all the rest to gain a greater victory and a greater glory. God thought it best that there be a Satan. And we have to look at these kind of situations and realize that apparently God thinks it's best that there's a Sanballat in our life. Now that's a hard thing, isn't it? Because we want them out of there. But God has them and sovereignly places them. in our life. Now, if I might make a very quick tangent here, you may be here and in an honest evaluation, you're not Nehemiah in the story. You're Sanballat. And maybe you're like, you know what? This vindicates my role in this church. Somebody's got to do it. And that somebody is me. We have to realize that while it is God's will for there to be Sanballats, it is never God's will for us to be a Sanballat. And I would call you to change. In fact, you could ask the question, why was Sanballat so upset about this? And this is where conflict reveals the opportunity. of our hearts, doesn't it? Was it about the wall for Sanballat? No, it wasn't about the wall.It was about influence. It was about economy and money. It was about power. And Nehemiah and that wall being reconstituted represented a threat to Sanballat. And that's why he wanted them out. So don't be a Tobiah. Don't be a Geshem. Don't be a Sanballat. We need to expect there to be opposition. And maybe next week, one of you will come up to me and say, I didn't think that sermon was very relevant, but boy, the week I had. And I'll say, good. I don't know if I should say it that way, but hey, you're applying God's word. That's a good thing. Second thing we see here is that Nehemiah provides this wonderful example of prayer, of prayer. Look at verse 4. Look at the first thing that Nehemiah does. It says, Nehemiah prays this, “Hear, O God, for we are despised. Turn back their taunt on their own heads and give them up to be plundered in a land where they are captives.” Now that doesn't sound like a very loving prayer.And if you read through the Psalms, there are Psalms that are known as imprecatory Psalms where David writes psalms that sound sort of like that, you know, where he is praying God's justice and wrath down upon his enemies. I'm not into the content of the prayer as much as I am in the fact that he prayed. And we see that pattern. Verses 6 through 8, there's troublemaking and scheming. What is Nehemiah's response? Verse 9, but we prayed to our God. When we face opposition, that has been sovereignly brought into our life by God, why would prayer be an effective strategy? Because if this person or this opposition is in my life by the sovereign hand of God, when I pray, I'm talking to the right person about the issue. I'm talking to the person who has the power to mediate the situation and to mitigate it and to take it away if he wants or to do whatever, but I'm praying to the right person. I'm praying to God. I wonder, the Sanballat in your life that I referred to earlier, have you prayed about this person? Have you prayed about this situation? Have you gone to the Lord in prayer?The example of Nehemiah throughout the whole story is that trouble comes, trouble comes, trouble comes. Nehemiah's response, he prays, he prays, he prays, he prays. It's a book on prayer. And that prayer in response to trouble. And we don't, I think, naturally do that. Naturally, we want to post the guard, right? We want to man up. We want to soldier up. We want to go take care of business. We want to take care of this person. We want to fight back. We want to sort of Mike Tyson in his prime. But Nehemiah begins with prayer. I would call you to pray. You say, ah, it's just Nehemiah. What did Jesus do? What did Jesus do the week of his passion when he knew what was coming? You say, well, he knew it was coming. Why pray about it, right? I mean, if you know it's coming, you can ask God all you want, but it's coming anyway, so what's the point? And yet he prayed. He prayed in Gethsemane. He prayed even on the cross. His last words were prayers.And if that doesn't eloquently show us the importance of prayer, especially when we are in trouble, and we have people in our church who are in trouble. Life has brought trouble. Life has brought pain. And prayer sometimes is like, oh yeah, we prayed. No, this is a key part of how Christians respond to trouble. We go to God. We open our hearts to him. We ask for his help. We pray about the Sanballat. We pray that that good work that God wants, may that refining work be done. I want to be that goal that is purified. I don't want to waste this trial. I don't want to waste my cancer. I don't want to waste this. unemployment. I don't want to waste this conflict with a fellow Christian. I want it to have its good effect and to embrace that and to tell God that. I wonder, do you do that, friend? One thing I've noticed when I've been dealing with a kind of Sanballat situation, you know, my natural instinct is to pray that God would take them out, right?But I find that when I pray for that person, especially if they're a fellow believer, When I pray for that person, I find a little impulse of charity towards them. Have you noticed this? It's hard to pray for somebody and hate them at the same time. I find that when I pray for that person, it's a little step towards the command to love your enemies and to do good to those who despitefully use you, Romans 12. Give that a try. You're like, I don't want to pray for this person. Try it. Pray that God's will would be done in their life. Pray that even their taunts and their ridicule and their criticism, whatever 1% gain that your spiritual life could have from it, say, God, I want that 1% gain. What they're saying is evil and their motives, I believe, to be bad. But whatever good can come from it in my life, I want that. And I find that when I get my heart around to praying that way, it has a way of restoring some encouragement. And when you're discouraged, what do you need? You need encouragement. Pray. Keep praying. The third thing is to prepare for it.And I've said this before, but notice that even in this chapter, Nehemiah, he doesn't simply pray, but he takes actions to meet the opposition. Back to the text again a second, verse 9. But we prayed and posted a guard. In verse 13, it says that Nehemiah armed the workers so they could respond to an attack. Now, there might have been someone going, you're not a man of faith. Why are you giving us swords? And he's like, I prayed and I'm giving you swords. In verses 16 through 18, he had workers work with a chisel in one hand and a sword in the other. Does that mean he wasn't a man of faith? He brought a trumpeter with him. And the idea was that if there was attack anywhere on the wall, they would blow the trumpet and everyone would rush to that place in order to engage the fight. He had people work in the low spots in the wall in verses 12 through 15. Now, why do you think Nehemiah would have people working in the low spots? Where do you think an attack would most likely happen? In the high spots or in the low spots?It seems to me it'd be the low spots, and that's what Nehemiah thought as well. And he had people in verse 22. He said, everyone stays in the city until the wall is done. What do we see there? Practical wisdom, okay? He got prepared for the opposition. I think we ought to expect it. We ought to pray for those who oppose it. Oppose us, but we also must be prudent and wise in responding to it. And the fourth thing here, and this is really, I would say, the most helpful, is that after we've prayed about it, after we have prepared for it, we've expected it, we know it's coming, here's the final point. Look at verses 19 and 20, what Nehemiah says. “I said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, the work is great and widely spread and we are separated on the wall for far from one another. In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there.” Here's the key phrase. “Our God will fight for us.” Nehemiah was a practical man. Nehemiah was a prayerful man.But Nehemiah was also a man who understood that in the end, the battle is the Lord's. And that bottom line for us has to be our bottom line, because all of our praying and all of our prudency, and I don't know if that's a word, but all of our, you know, sort of strategizing, in the end will feel superficial to us if our anchor and if our sort of our bottom line is not the God who has made promises to us. that he will fight for us, that he will come to our aid. And of course, as Christians, what do we know? We know the end of the story, don't we? You can read Revelation. At the end of the story, there is no opposition, there is no authority, there is no power that stands against the king of kings and lord of lords who comes riding out in that white horse. And he is going to return, and every enemy, Satan, included is going to go under his feet and in the end, Philippians 2, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.We know the end of this story is that God wins, and because we are God's children, we win with Him. And our walls may build or not, our troubles may come or go, our critics may say or not, but in the end, we know that with the Lord, we win. Our God will fight for us, and faith is the victory that overcomes the world. But we are living now in this time where we have to We have the tension between what we know to be true by the promise of God and the realization of that. And the Bible says that in this world, you're going to have trouble, right? You are going to have trouble. New Christian, it is going to be hard. Do not be discouraged by the trouble that comes and the critics that come and the opposition that comes. You're going to have people that are going to say things to you. You might even have people in this church that are going to discourage you in some manner. But we cannot have our hope in the people of this church or in the critic changing his mind or coming around and saying, you know what, I was mistaken.You really are a wonderful person. Can I hug you? It's not likely to happen. Our hope is in the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. “Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord.” Psalm 121. And as God's people, when we face these temporary trials, which are achieving for us a glory that far outweighs them all, we look at that trial and we look even at that person, that Sanballat, and we see them as temporary in light of the big picture. And “though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.” Martin Luther. A mighty fortress is our God. And on and on. I mean, there's songs and verses. This is where real life is lived. It's in the trenches and in the troubles. And this is how God refines us. And when I can see that this is how God does it, then I can even embrace the tough times and to see that there is good that comes from it. You say, oh, that's not true. Let's look to the cross of Christ. I've got one behind me.If there is one great example of how God uses the taunts, the ridicule, the betrayals, the enemies of God and all of their schemings to do an ultimate good, it is the cross of Christ, the perfect person, the perfect leader, the perfect sacrifice, killed at the hands of Satan and all his minions, and yet the greatest wrong producing the greatest good and glory. And our lives are little microcosms of that grand narrative. And you might not have a Caiaphas, you might not have a Pilate, it may not even be a, it's not the Sith Lord you're dealing with, it's General Grievous, or some lesser situation. But all of them are a part of a temporary trouble, but an ultimate victory. I heard somebody one time say, You know, for unbelievers, this life is the best that they'll ever experience. But for Christians, this is the worst that we will ever experience. The future is bright. The future is glorious. And we live in light of that in the troubles and the trials of today. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” That wasn't in the Bible when Nehemiah lived, but I think it might be today his favorite verse.And he lived it out very well. And I hope that we will as well as a church. And those are just some words from a tired pastor. I don't know if they connected at all. And when I get up from my nap, I'll wonder what I said this morning. But maybe God will use them, and I hope that he does. Let's stand together. I'd like to pray and give a final benediction.This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.

Bethel Church Stratford | Sunday Service | September 20th by mybethel.ca

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On August 30th, Kris shared a powerful message challenging believers to stop reducing God to the size of their own experiences and to begin living with a greater revelation of His power, majesty, and authority. What if the resistance you're facing isn't evidence that something has gone wrong? What if it's actually a sign that you're stepping into the territory God has called you to possess? Kris shares stories from the early days of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry and unpacks what it looks like to live with an expectation for signs, wonders, miracles, and the supernatural power of God. Discover what it means to serve the God of the universe, refuse to allow fear to define your future, recognize spiritual resistance without becoming consumed by it, and trust that the God who calls you is also the God who protects you. You were never created to build your life around your fears, you were created to walk by faith, confront the giants in your promised land, and experience the power of God in your life. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Steve DeWitt The Joy of Opposition - Part A Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Scripture Reference: Nehemiah 4:1-23 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, Nehemiah 4:1-23 Sermon Series: Spiritual ExilesMessage: The Joy of OppositionAirdate: 9/18-9/21/26Programs: 2360 and 2361Morning, Bethel Church, and this is our challenging weekend with Daylight Savings. I said, or I just was thinking about our first service people today, that those are the really early risers to show up at the 815 on the spring ahead weekend of Daylight Savings. You're sort of more the hoi polloi, the sort of the normal folks, and we'll see who comes to the next service. I stand before you as a tired man. My daughter was up throughout most of the night, and I'm running on fumes today. So I say that to you in some way to mitigate my guilt for something stupid that I might say, because my eyes are like rolling in my head, I feel like today. So we'll get through the morning and go home and take a really good nap. And you parents who've been there, you know how I'm feeling today. I do want to greet our Cedar Lake campus this morning, and thank you so much for joining with us. Our Hobart Portage campus, which is not in this service with us, but are next week celebrating their... grand opening. I can say our grand opening. We're just one church. Really excited about that.So if you happen to just remember that in prayer, we've got a lot of work that's gone into kind of kicking that off, and I've seen the plans, and it's really going to be a great weekend next weekend over there. And how often do you, you know, grand open a new campus? You know, like, well, we've done it twice in the last six months, but we don't know how many more ever in the future, so we want to celebrate that, and we're going to next week. Today, we're going to stay in the stream of our teaching in 1 Peter without being exactly in 1 Peter. We've seen in 1 Peter this focus on trials. That trials are meant by God to reveal and to refine us. We look at them often as being bad things. God looks at them as being good things because of the effect that they have. And 1 Peter is written to people that are in exile, that are experiencing opposition.They're experiencing... ostracization, and Peter encourages them to see even those things as being part of God's refining fire, that work that he works in us, and to embrace them, not as being bad things, but in the end ultimately good things. So today I want to take a little break from 1 Peter and to look at one particular kind of trial that we so often run into as individuals and as a church. And that is just the trials of opposition, the trials of opposition. And my title is The Joy of Opposition, which sounds oxymoronic, right? Who looks at opposition and goes, yay, we don't naturally do that. There is from Scripture and from the teaching of Scripture every reason for us to even look at opposition as being something that we can rejoice in. James, of course, says, “count it all joy when you fall into various trials and temptations”, and that includes the trials of opposition. We all face opposition, don't we? Maybe as I say that, names come to mind. Perhaps that person is sitting next to you today. and try not to be poking them throughout the sermon, especially if you're married.But we all face opposition, and we have to know how to respond to it if we're ever going to make it through these trials that God brings our way and these people that God puts in our path. How should we respond to opposition? And Nehemiah is just a fantastic... book and a fantastic story about a man who suffered great opposition and who not only endured it, but who goes down in history as a great example of somebody going through it in a way that honors the Lord. And so... is that Nehemiah hears that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down and remained in that condition. He was serving King Artaxerxes in Susa, the capital of Persia, and he hears that Jerusalem is still in ruins, the wall is still in ruins, and he has a burden for that. He offers a prayer, and God blesses that prayer, and King Artaxerxes says, Nehemiah, you can go, and I'm going to... the thing. I'm going to provide what you need for this thing. I'm given a letter that ought to get you all the way there. And he was the most powerful man in the world at the time. And so that was like a huge endorsement.And so Nehemiah, he goes to Jerusalem and he inspects the walls and he gathers the Jews and he says, listen, my friends, let's rise and let us rebuild this wall. And Nehemiah is this amazing story of how a people that, you know, they weren't naturally masons and builders, but they come together and they accomplish this amazing feat of rebuilding the walls of the city of Jerusalem. And in the midst of all of this success, there is chapter 4 where there is trouble. There's trouble. Even in the midst of a great success, there's trouble. And it seems to me, my observation would be, and even my own experience, that whenever God is really doing something, whether that be in somebody's life, a new Christian, or maybe some victories that you've had spiritually in your life, or maybe it's your small group, or even a church or a mission work, wherever God is really moving, so often when there is a lot of momentum, something will happen or somebody will come or there'll be some sort of criticism that steps into that moment and can so easily derail the entire thing. And that's what Nehemiah faced.And I'd like to begin in our little study here of chapter four by looking at the strategies that the opponents of Nehemiah employed against him. So let me introduce you to the bad guys, okay? These are the bad guys. And their names are notorious, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. These were three kings of small kingdoms that surrounded Jerusalem. And they represent the opposition to the Jews rebuilding this. wall. We're introduced to them in chapter 2 verse 10 where they first hear that Nehemiah has come to rebuild the wall and the text tells us that they are displeased greatly. And they begin then to wage a kind of psychological war against Nehemiah. That continues throughout the story. Even after chapter 4, it's not the end of it, because as the story unfolds, they write an open letter, you know, a kind of assassination of Nehemiah's character. They post it on Facebook for everybody to see what this guy was really all about and what his motives were and questioning those. Later, they want to meet him in the fields of Ono. And when your enemies want to meet you in the fields of Ono, you say to them, Oh, no, I am not going to go there.They wanted to kill him. And so these guys were serious about this. And Sanballat is the ringleader. Tobiah is kind of... his sidekick, and Geshem was the schemer behind the scenes that was doing his scheming. This might help a little bit. Sanballat was the Sith Lord, Tobiah was Darth Vader, and Geshem was General Grievous, just to give some communication to some of you. Now, these guys surrounded Jerusalem. Their kingdoms surrounded Jerusalem. Maybe you're in a situation like that right now as I talk about opposition. You feel like you've got it on all sides. I got nowhere to go. There's no safe zone for me. There's no green zone for me. Everywhere I look, it seems like I've got opposition against me. That's what Nehemiah was facing. Everybody around them wanted them out of there. Now, these men couldn't attack Nehemiah directly because, remember, Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, the king of really the world at that time, had endorsed the project. So to come out overtly and to say, we're going to take you on, we're going to take you down, would have been in opposition to Artaxerxes. And even these guys didn't want to mess with Artaxerxes.So their strategy really is one more of cloak and dagger. All right, this is espionage. This is insinuation. It's the psychological guerrilla warfare that they employ against God's people in the rebuilding of this wall. So what are the strategies that they employ? Well, notice, first of all, that they begin where every schoolyard begins, and that is with taunting and with ridicule. Look at verse 1. “Now, when Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, He was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, what are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish and burn ones at that? Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, yes, what they're building, if a fox goes up on it, he will break down their stone wall.” Emphasis added for effect, okay? So here you have Sanballat now. He's the ringleader. He's the spokesperson. He's the Sith Lord. And he begins by ridiculing the effort that these Jews are doing in rebuilding the wall.And the text literally says this. It says that he became very angry. Literally, his nose became hot. This is a Hebrew idiom for when somebody is really mad. It's like the blood. They get red in the face all the way to the end of their nose. Like if you see a guy who's red all the way to the end of their nose, he's mad, right? And that's Sanballat. He's mad to the end of his nose, mad. And so he begins by taunting them. And visualize this with me. He gathers his cronies, he gathers the army of Samaria, and he begins to jeer the Jews in a way that he knows they're going to hear what he is saying, and he begins to mock them. And this sounds like, you know, the local elementary schoolyard, or maybe an IU-Purdue football game, because he begins by saying this. He says, these feeble Jews. Okay, what's that? Name-calling, right? They're wimpy. They've got nothing. He derides their ambition. Will they restore the wall? In other words, this project's a joke. Come on. Putting this whole thing together. He ridicules their optimism. He says, what are they going to do? Pray the wall up? They can't build this wall.All they have is their prayers. He mocks their enthusiasm. He says, well, they finish in a day. Word had gotten out that they were busy little beavers working so hard on the wall. All of their enthusiasm. Do they really think they can do this thing? I mean, come on. He undermines their confidence. Can they bring the stones back to life? In other words, they can't do it. They can't. Do it. And if you can visualize this, here's all these people, and they hate the Jews. They're not for this wall going back up. And every one of these that he says, all the guys, you know, they've been drinking. Think of a sort of a drunken sort of mob scene where they're all, wow, no Jews, and they can't do it. And so it kind of is building a Sanballat, kind of does this and does that. And I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where somebody tells a really good joke and somebody else thinks it's a great time to pile on. Or jump on the bandwagon. There's not a lot of humor in the Bible, but this is one of them, actually.Sanballat very effectively rolls out these ridicules, and there's Tobiah. He thinks it's a great time to jump in, and he goes, yeah, if a fox ran on the wall, it would fall down. I hear everyone going, oh, Tobiah, that's so stupid. Why would you say something like that? And we know from history and archaeology that it is stupid. They've done studies of the wall that Nehemiah built. It was nine feet thick. That would be a big fox. Knock that wall down. The point here is that he wasn't saying this for the armies, and he wasn't saying this for his cronies. He was saying this hoping the Jews would hear it, hoping they'd hear the mockery and the laughter. You know, the old adage in the schoolyard is, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. You've heard that before. You've probably said that. And the fact that you have to resort on the schoolyard to poetry ought to say that words are effective at discouraging us, aren't they? And even as adults, a little contrary word, a little criticism, a little taunt, a little mockery, and inside we can suddenly become so fleshly, we can be discouraged.And that is always the case. Words are effective. Now, why do you suppose Sanballat began with ridicule? Why not just march the armies out there and just take them all on? Because what is Satan? He's known as the father of what? Lies. Satan is the master of the subtlety. He's the master of the insinuation. We see that with Adam and Eve, or with Eve specifically in the garden, as he just twists the words and he plays with the mind. Those that Satan controls and follow his path, they do the same thing. Satan knows that he doesn't have to get a good Christian to deny the virgin birth or the fact that Jesus is coming back. All he has to do is discourage him a little bit. And with that discouragement, the good work that God's doing in them or the good work that God's doing through them, all of a sudden, it can come to a halt. Why? I'm so discouraged. And maybe you're there right now. You're rejoicing in what God's done in the past, but right now you're discouraged and somebody said something. Something's going on.This person's in my life. I got a Sanballat. I got a Tobiah. And you're just thinking, oh, that's the way the enemy operates. How should we respond? Notice how Nehemiah responds in verse 4 and verse 6. I won't read them, but in both cases, he prays. Now, I never saw anybody in the schoolyard do that. I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray over these words that you've said. It's not our natural response, is it? have an example here from Nehemiah, I'll come back to this later, in how to respond to criticism and opposition. Go to God in prayer. And notice what he adds after verse 6. He says that the response of the people was that they worked even harder. And the text says they worked because they had a heart to work. I love that little phrase there. And as I read that, you know what I think about? I honestly think about Bethel Church.One of the qualities of this church that I love so much is that this is a church that has a heart to work. And I've seen that over the years. I can think of just even recent examples of moments where it just comes pouring out. A year ago right now, we said, hey, we bought this building in Gary. We got a clean 30 or 40,000 square feet. Y'all come out now. And I know a terrible cold, I mean, I-65 was a sheet of ice. I know because I drove down it. You know, we had 400 people, volunteers that showed up and we scrubbed every inch of that building. And I saw the way that people were working and laboring and sweating and all of that. No pay for God, you know, that kind of a thing. And I just admire that so much. And like the, you know, a month ago we said, hey. somebody's given us two gym floors, come pull planks. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, I think I'm going to pull planks today.But we had all these people that showed up and they pulled planks all day and they got blisters and sore backs, but they did it to the glory of God. Why? Because they had a heart to work. And I just think about our church and even the day-to-day kind of week-to-week ministries, I think it's a wonderful quality of our congregation. We're good at building walls. and projects, and just having a heart to work for the Lord, and I commend you for it. So look at that verse and go, that's us right there. We're just like them. Encouraged? I want to be encouraging. The second thing that we find the enemy doing is, and you see how these escalate, okay? Escalates. Ridicule doesn't work, the people just work harder. So they amp it up now in verse 7 and 8, and they just seek to make trouble. But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. Now before they were greatly disturbed, greatly upset, now they are really mad. And what do they do?And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. The second thing that opposition will do when the ridicule doesn't work is they will just seek to do mischief. They will seek to do something that can frustrate the plans. They'll plot. They'll come together and strategize against the work of God. They will gossip. They will slander. They'll do whatever they can to create trouble. It's a kind of verbal terrorism that takes place. And of course, again, God's enemies do this because their Sith Lord Again, notice Nehemiah's response in verse 9. But we prayed and we posted a guard. That little verse I find to be one of the most helpful and insightful with a common problem amongst God's people. When opposition comes or trouble comes or some conflict comes, whatever it might be, there are really, it seems, two kinds of Christians. There are the kinds of Christians who say, we're just going to pray about it. We are going to pray about it. And indeed, they do pray about it. And then you have another group of people. They say, you know what? We're going to post a guard, right? We're weaponizing. We're getting the guns out.They want to do battle. Bring it on, okay? We are going to take practical steps. to take them out. They're more of the sort of practitioner type. So you have the kind of praying types, and you have the kind of post-a-guard types. And what I've seen pastorally, this plays out this way, where you have some people say they're just going to pray about it. I have seen in my ministry, I've seen people, they'll get like, I have cancer. And their response is, I am simply going to pray about this. And I have urged them, I'll say, pray about it, but why not get some medical help and do whatever you can medically as well as praying in order to take care of this problem? And I've seen people who have refused to seek medical advice because in their minds, I think, they think it's more faithful to simply... pray about it. At the other side of this, I have seen often, and I have done this myself, a problem arises and I skip the praying and I go to the posting of the guard stuff. Well, let's just think about how to make this happen.And we're going to do this and we're going to do that and we're going to take care of this and we're going to take care of that. And there's no regard for seeking God. It's like Israel when the Gibeonites faked him out and Joshua said, eh, we won't go to war with you. And then they find out they're the next country over. Why? Because they did not seek the Lord in the matter. And so it seems like there are those two kinds of Christians. And Nehemiah shows the beautiful balance of embracing both of those. What ought we do when we come to some trouble or trial in our life? First thing to do is to pray about it. And we see Nehemiah over and over again. He prays. His instinct is prayer. And for us as Christians, that ought to be our first thing. Hey, let's pray about that right now. Let's seek the Lord about this right now. But when we say amen, it doesn't mean now I don't have to think about anything else. There are all kinds of wisdom and prudent matters that the Bible also talks about.Read through the wisdom literature of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, and it's filled with practical advice for faithful living in the real world. We live in a real world where real things have to be taken care of. And the wise Christian and the wise church We'll do both of those. So maybe ask yourself, am I a I'm going to pray about it and then sort of take my hands off kind of person? Or am I a forget about praying about it, get right down to fixing it kind of person? And maybe Nehemiah could inspire us to be both of those. Okay, both of those. An example of both of those would be a dear woman in our church a few weeks ago had a very, very difficult surgery. According to James 5, she asked if the elders would pray over her, and we did. We anointed her with oil, we prayed over her, we prayed over that surgery. And then she went and she had the best medical care that she could possibly find. And to me, that is Nehemiah. Praying about it, posting a guard. A great example, I think, for prudent and prayerful living.The third thing we find happened now, again, an escalation, okay? Taunting, troublemaking, and now we see threats. Look at verse 11. “Also, our enemy said, before they know it or see us, we will be right there among them and we'll kill them and put an end to the work.” Then the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times over, wherever you turn, they will attack us. Wherever you turn, they will attack us. Wherever you turn, they will attack us. Over. The language here in the Hebrew means over and over and over again. They were saying, they're going to get you. They're going to get you. They're going to kill you. Now, how fun would that be? Right? There you are. You're building a wall. You're hewing out stones. You're piling them up. You're making a wall. And at the same time, you've got some of your own people, cronies of your enemies, who are saying to you, you're going to die. Now, these people realize they didn't know they were Bible characters. Right? They're not in there, oh, this is a Bible story. We're going to be fine. They have no idea. They're living life like you and I live our lives.Would that be an effective, fearful tactic? I mean, what if, as you came in, there's all these people outside of the church going, you walk in there, they're going to kill you. How many of us would go, oh, no problem? No, it would have its effect, wouldn't it? And indeed, it did in that day. It had an effect of discouragement. Word gets out, they're going to kill us. In fact, let's look at that effect. What is the effect of the taunting? And what is the effect of the ridicule? And what is the effect of the troublemaking and the threats? of opposition in this story at this point is discouragement. Look at verse 10 of chapter 4. “In Judah it was said, the strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to rebuild the wall.” What Nehemiah is recording there is what is the word on the street. What were people saying as they were building the wall? They're looking at all the rubble now and they're saying there's so much rubble. This is weeks after, or days after, Nehemiah said, let's rise and build.Was there more rubble now than there was before? No. But when we are discouraged, everywhere we look, there's rubble, right? Oh, yeah. I'm a little discouraged right now. My whole life stinks. There's rubble everywhere. When we're encouraged, there's no rubble. When we're discouraged, everything's rubble. Are you with me? Remember, I didn't have a good night of sleep, so I have no idea what I'm saying right now. I just hope it's connecting somehow. These words were having their effect in spite of the amazing progress that was being made. This goes down as one of the greatest and most unified team efforts that God's people have ever done. And in spite of this amazing accomplishment, and in the midst of it, You have all of this turmoil and opposition and drama and people actually saying, we're never going to make it. We can't do it. There's too much rubble and too much trouble. The danger, I think, in verbal attacks is we begin to believe what's being said, even when it's not true, right?Do you think, how likely is it that Geshem and Tobiah and Sanballat are going to take their armies against people that the most powerful man in the world said had permission to build this wall? Not very likely that they would do it. But if you hear something enough, you believe it to be true, don't you? If somebody tells you that you're nothing enough or somebody tells you that you can't do it enough or somebody tells you that, you know, your faith is a bunch of hooey because I know the kind of person that you are enough, you begin to believe it and discouragement kind of creeps in and now the progress that you were making, it slows down or stops, right? And you're like, oh, there's so much rubble. Why are we even trying this? We're never going to make it. I wonder if you've lived. In verse 10, have you had your face flush as your nose gotten red all the way to the tip as a colleague or a family member or a neighbor or a former friend or a former spouse tells you what a terrible person you are and questions every character quality in your life?Have you been, in verse 10, discouraged? As a pastor, you know, as a leader of any kind, if you take on any responsibility, expect that you're going to deal with this. I can tell you, I've been a pastor for 22 years. I can think of names that come to my mind of Sanballats of Tobias and Geshams over the years that have said this or that and questioned this or that and on and on and la la la. It's just, it's part of what it means to be a leader. But I know well that sense of discouragement, that deep down thought that I'm a failure or my faith isn't real because this person says they don't think I'm a good Christian, etc. I don't want to ruin the ending here again, but they rebuilt the wall in 52 days. They're halfway done. They're only like three weeks away from the time that Nehemiah said, let's begin rebuilding the wall. This is one of the greatest projects and team efforts in history, yet it was criticized. It was mocked. And this is the danger, I think, of criticism is that it can sap the energy from the most spiritual and noble of efforts.These people were rebuilding the wall to the glory of God. They heard from Nehemiah earlier all the things that Artaxerxes, all the things really that God had done. I mean, what are the chances that the most powerful man in the world is going to come to the aid of the Jews in rebuilding the wall of a city that had rebelled against his predecessor? Why would a king do that? And yet that king came to Nehemiah and the Jews' aid and provided the resources and gave the letter and made all the provisions. I mean, you look at all of that and what can you say? This is a God thing, right? This is a God thing. And yet, in spite of it being a God thing, a little bit of criticism just takes the wind out of the sails. This was tough for Nehemiah. opposition outside, discouragement within. Maybe you're in verse 10 right now, and you can relate to this. It's like, man, you're describing my life here, where I am today on this Sunday. I'm discouraged.And here's where Nehemiah, I think, provides an inspiring and helpful example of how to respond when life brings opposition. to what God is doing and what God wants to do in our life. And I've got four things, four responses that Nehemiah has here and four ways that we can actually experience these oppositions and turn them into actually a kind of joy. And I share these with you not because I do this perfectly or even 75%. This is as much for me as it is for anybody. And we have to be reminded of this because it happens so often in our life. But how do we respond when opposition comes to us? First of all, I think it is so critical that we expect it, that we expect opposition to come. There are some people that think mistakenly that to be a Christian or to be a part of a church, I mean, it's like... where it never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. I mean, that's every local church, isn't it? To go there would be just a blissful experience of happy Christians all the time.I'll never have anybody tell me anything but something that's uplifting and encouraging to me. Nothing will ever happen in the church that I don't walk out of there going, I'm so glad I'm a part of that church. I mean, it's just gonna be, it's like heaven on earth. Well, nobody amen'd that. And that's because you all have been in churches and in this church. The reality is, no matter what God is doing, there is always going to be negative opposition, criticism, a discouraging person, a Sanballat, a Tobias, somebody like that. J. Oswald Sanders, great Christian man, wrote a classic book on leadership, said this, “no leader is exempt from criticism, and his humility will nowhere be seen more clearly than in the manner in which he accepts it and reacts to it.” Do you think that Nehemiah thought to himself as he was on his camel or donkey or walking or however he got from Susa to Jerusalem, you know what, I'm just going to show up there. I'm going to give an inspiring speech. And not only are the Jews going to rally to the cause, but everybody around Jerusalem, they're all going to be happy about this. It's going to be fantastic.My speech will do it. No. He knew what was coming. He knew there would be trouble. Chuck Swindoll, many of you know Chuck Swindoll, says this, “there will always, always be opposition from those who are by nature negative and critical, but the work must go on. Progress should not stop because of a few who were critical of the plan.” I think it's a falsely idealistic perspective on the Christian life to think that it's going to somehow be easy. that I'm going to skate along and everyone's going to be happy with what God is doing in my life. It won't happen. And we can look at examples in the scripture, not just Nehemiah, but Jeremiah certainly faced that. Paul faced that. Well, how about Jesus? I mean, if there was ever a leader who was such an awesome leader that, I mean, everybody would have loved everything that he did and just rallied to him. I mean, everybody would just applaud him and be like, you know, be like Palm Sunday every day of his life, right? No. What happened to our perfect leader, Jesus?Not only were there many people that opposed him, famous now, men like Caiaphas and Pilate and the Pharisees, but even within his own circle. Judas betraying him. The greatest leader who's ever walked this earth, beginning the greatest organization that has ever been begun, the church, faced trouble, didn't he? And opposition. So who are we to think that in our... smaller context and in our own lives that we are going to be able to follow the Lord, fulfill his will for us, and somehow think everybody's going to love it and everybody's going to applaud it. It simply won't happen. In fact, I think if there is a key truth here, it is this one, is that God's will didn't allow the wall to be built without opposition. I mean, could God have rebuilt this wall without Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem? You bet he could have. Could he have rebuilt this wall in some way where everybody thought it was great? You bet that he could have. But it was God's will that there be a Sanballat. It's God's will that there was Tobiah and all the rest. God included that in the plan for Nehemiah and the plan for the rebuilding of the walls.It included the conflict. It included the slander. It included the threats that were made. And I wonder today if you might have a Sanballat in your life. Even as I've been talking about this, there's been somebody coming to mind. And in your heart, you're like, you know, God, if you love me, you will destroy them, right? Because you're not the author of evil, and you don't like evil people, and yet this evil person is in my life. And it seems to me that... this whole thing to work the way that, in my opinion, it ought to work, that person needs to be eliminated. And we try to pray the Sanballats out of our life because we think something's wrong, that they are in our life. And too often we think that with even criticism, right? We think, I must be out of God's will because somebody said something negative. Mrs. So-and-so said something. And so we look at and we listen to so-and-so who says such-and-such about this or that, and we think, well, I must not be a good Christian, or maybe this faith thing isn't true, or maybe I'm out of the will of God.Joe Stowell III, his dad was the first pastor of our church, and he was longtime president of Moody Bible Institute, once said, “in every church I have pastored, God has placed difficult people around me to keep me dependent on him.” Now, I have no idea what he's talking about there in my own personal experience. But there is truth there, isn't it? That opposition is not out of God's will, but it is a part of God's will. And that indeed, God gains greater victory when his people trust him in the midst of trouble and overcome in spite of opposition. that there's a greater glory that comes from that why do you think God created Satan? Did God know when He made him the highest archangel? Did He know the whole story? Indeed, did He purpose the whole story, that Satan was going to rebel against Him and take a third of the demons, or the angels, with him, and that all of this would ensue? Why? Why does God do that? As Luther said, even the devil is God's devil, right?That God uses The taunts and the ridicule and the criticism and all the rest to gain a greater victory and a greater glory. God thought it best that there be a Satan. And we have to look at these kind of situations and realize that apparently God thinks it's best that there's a Sanballat in our life. Now that's a hard thing, isn't it? Because we want them out of there. But God has them and sovereignly places them. in our life. Now, if I might make a very quick tangent here, you may be here and in an honest evaluation, you're not Nehemiah in the story. You're Sanballat. And maybe you're like, you know what? This vindicates my role in this church. Somebody's got to do it. And that somebody is me. We have to realize that while it is God's will for there to be Sanballats, it is never God's will for us to be a Sanballat. And I would call you to change. In fact, you could ask the question, why was Sanballat so upset about this? And this is where conflict reveals the opportunity. of our hearts, doesn't it? Was it about the wall for Sanballat? No, it wasn't about the wall.It was about influence. It was about economy and money. It was about power. And Nehemiah and that wall being reconstituted represented a threat to Sanballat. And that's why he wanted them out. So don't be a Tobiah. Don't be a Geshem. Don't be a Sanballat. We need to expect there to be opposition. And maybe next week, one of you will come up to me and say, I didn't think that sermon was very relevant, but boy, the week I had. And I'll say, good. I don't know if I should say it that way, but hey, you're applying God's word. That's a good thing. Second thing we see here is that Nehemiah provides this wonderful example of prayer, of prayer. Look at verse 4. Look at the first thing that Nehemiah does. It says, Nehemiah prays this, “Hear, O God, for we are despised. Turn back their taunt on their own heads and give them up to be plundered in a land where they are captives.” Now that doesn't sound like a very loving prayer.And if you read through the Psalms, there are Psalms that are known as imprecatory Psalms where David writes psalms that sound sort of like that, you know, where he is praying God's justice and wrath down upon his enemies. I'm not into the content of the prayer as much as I am in the fact that he prayed. And we see that pattern. Verses 6 through 8, there's troublemaking and scheming. What is Nehemiah's response? Verse 9, but we prayed to our God. When we face opposition, that has been sovereignly brought into our life by God, why would prayer be an effective strategy? Because if this person or this opposition is in my life by the sovereign hand of God, when I pray, I'm talking to the right person about the issue. I'm talking to the person who has the power to mediate the situation and to mitigate it and to take it away if he wants or to do whatever, but I'm praying to the right person. I'm praying to God. I wonder, the Sanballat in your life that I referred to earlier, have you prayed about this person? Have you prayed about this situation? Have you gone to the Lord in prayer?The example of Nehemiah throughout the whole story is that trouble comes, trouble comes, trouble comes. Nehemiah's response, he prays, he prays, he prays, he prays. It's a book on prayer. And that prayer in response to trouble. And we don't, I think, naturally do that. Naturally, we want to post the guard, right? We want to man up. We want to soldier up. We want to go take care of business. We want to take care of this person. We want to fight back. We want to sort of Mike Tyson in his prime. But Nehemiah begins with prayer. I would call you to pray. You say, ah, it's just Nehemiah. What did Jesus do? What did Jesus do the week of his passion when he knew what was coming? You say, well, he knew it was coming. Why pray about it, right? I mean, if you know it's coming, you can ask God all you want, but it's coming anyway, so what's the point? And yet he prayed. He prayed in Gethsemane. He prayed even on the cross. His last words were prayers.And if that doesn't eloquently show us the importance of prayer, especially when we are in trouble, and we have people in our church who are in trouble. Life has brought trouble. Life has brought pain. And prayer sometimes is like, oh yeah, we prayed. No, this is a key part of how Christians respond to trouble. We go to God. We open our hearts to him. We ask for his help. We pray about the Sanballat. We pray that that good work that God wants, may that refining work be done. I want to be that goal that is purified. I don't want to waste this trial. I don't want to waste my cancer. I don't want to waste this. unemployment. I don't want to waste this conflict with a fellow Christian. I want it to have its good effect and to embrace that and to tell God that. I wonder, do you do that, friend? One thing I've noticed when I've been dealing with a kind of Sanballat situation, you know, my natural instinct is to pray that God would take them out, right?But I find that when I pray for that person, especially if they're a fellow believer, When I pray for that person, I find a little impulse of charity towards them. Have you noticed this? It's hard to pray for somebody and hate them at the same time. I find that when I pray for that person, it's a little step towards the command to love your enemies and to do good to those who despitefully use you, Romans 12. Give that a try. You're like, I don't want to pray for this person. Try it. Pray that God's will would be done in their life. Pray that even their taunts and their ridicule and their criticism, whatever 1% gain that your spiritual life could have from it, say, God, I want that 1% gain. What they're saying is evil and their motives, I believe, to be bad. But whatever good can come from it in my life, I want that. And I find that when I get my heart around to praying that way, it has a way of restoring some encouragement. And when you're discouraged, what do you need? You need encouragement. Pray. Keep praying. The third thing is to prepare for it.And I've said this before, but notice that even in this chapter, Nehemiah, he doesn't simply pray, but he takes actions to meet the opposition. Back to the text again a second, verse 9. But we prayed and posted a guard. In verse 13, it says that Nehemiah armed the workers so they could respond to an attack. Now, there might have been someone going, you're not a man of faith. Why are you giving us swords? And he's like, I prayed and I'm giving you swords. In verses 16 through 18, he had workers work with a chisel in one hand and a sword in the other. Does that mean he wasn't a man of faith? He brought a trumpeter with him. And the idea was that if there was attack anywhere on the wall, they would blow the trumpet and everyone would rush to that place in order to engage the fight. He had people work in the low spots in the wall in verses 12 through 15. Now, why do you think Nehemiah would have people working in the low spots? Where do you think an attack would most likely happen? In the high spots or in the low spots?It seems to me it'd be the low spots, and that's what Nehemiah thought as well. And he had people in verse 22. He said, everyone stays in the city until the wall is done. What do we see there? Practical wisdom, okay? He got prepared for the opposition. I think we ought to expect it. We ought to pray for those who oppose it. Oppose us, but we also must be prudent and wise in responding to it. And the fourth thing here, and this is really, I would say, the most helpful, is that after we've prayed about it, after we have prepared for it, we've expected it, we know it's coming, here's the final point. Look at verses 19 and 20, what Nehemiah says. “I said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, the work is great and widely spread and we are separated on the wall for far from one another. In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there.” Here's the key phrase. “Our God will fight for us.” Nehemiah was a practical man. Nehemiah was a prayerful man.But Nehemiah was also a man who understood that in the end, the battle is the Lord's. And that bottom line for us has to be our bottom line, because all of our praying and all of our prudency, and I don't know if that's a word, but all of our, you know, sort of strategizing, in the end will feel superficial to us if our anchor and if our sort of our bottom line is not the God who has made promises to us. that he will fight for us, that he will come to our aid. And of course, as Christians, what do we know? We know the end of the story, don't we? You can read Revelation. At the end of the story, there is no opposition, there is no authority, there is no power that stands against the king of kings and lord of lords who comes riding out in that white horse. And he is going to return, and every enemy, Satan, included is going to go under his feet and in the end, Philippians 2, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.We know the end of this story is that God wins, and because we are God's children, we win with Him. And our walls may build or not, our troubles may come or go, our critics may say or not, but in the end, we know that with the Lord, we win. Our God will fight for us, and faith is the victory that overcomes the world. But we are living now in this time where we have to We have the tension between what we know to be true by the promise of God and the realization of that. And the Bible says that in this world, you're going to have trouble, right? You are going to have trouble. New Christian, it is going to be hard. Do not be discouraged by the trouble that comes and the critics that come and the opposition that comes. You're going to have people that are going to say things to you. You might even have people in this church that are going to discourage you in some manner. But we cannot have our hope in the people of this church or in the critic changing his mind or coming around and saying, you know what, I was mistaken.You really are a wonderful person. Can I hug you? It's not likely to happen. Our hope is in the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. “Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord.” Psalm 121. And as God's people, when we face these temporary trials, which are achieving for us a glory that far outweighs them all, we look at that trial and we look even at that person, that Sanballat, and we see them as temporary in light of the big picture. And “though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.” Martin Luther. A mighty fortress is our God. And on and on. I mean, there's songs and verses. This is where real life is lived. It's in the trenches and in the troubles. And this is how God refines us. And when I can see that this is how God does it, then I can even embrace the tough times and to see that there is good that comes from it. You say, oh, that's not true. Let's look to the cross of Christ. I've got one behind me.If there is one great example of how God uses the taunts, the ridicule, the betrayals, the enemies of God and all of their schemings to do an ultimate good, it is the cross of Christ, the perfect person, the perfect leader, the perfect sacrifice, killed at the hands of Satan and all his minions, and yet the greatest wrong producing the greatest good and glory. And our lives are little microcosms of that grand narrative. And you might not have a Caiaphas, you might not have a Pilate, it may not even be a, it's not the Sith Lord you're dealing with, it's General Grievous, or some lesser situation. But all of them are a part of a temporary trouble, but an ultimate victory. I heard somebody one time say, You know, for unbelievers, this life is the best that they'll ever experience. But for Christians, this is the worst that we will ever experience. The future is bright. The future is glorious. And we live in light of that in the troubles and the trials of today. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” That wasn't in the Bible when Nehemiah lived, but I think it might be today his favorite verse.And he lived it out very well. And I hope that we will as well as a church. And those are just some words from a tired pastor. I don't know if they connected at all. And when I get up from my nap, I'll wonder what I said this morning. But maybe God will use them, and I hope that he does. Let's stand together. I'd like to pray and give a final benediction.This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.

Bethel Church St. Marys | Sunday Service | September 13th by mybethel.ca

On August 2nd, 2026, Kris continued his series on Bethel Family Distinctions with a powerful message on what it means to be a prophetic people who hear the voice of God. What if God is speaking more than we realize? And what if learning to hear Him isn't just about receiving information, but growing in relationship, obedience, and trust? In this message, Kris unpacks the purpose of New Covenant prophecy, the difference between prophecy and words of knowledge, and why God often speaks through mysteries that invite us to seek Him. Discover how God can use prophecy, community, and even the story of your own life to reveal what He is doing, deepen your relationship with Him, and give you a greater perspective on where He is leading you. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Steve DeWitt God, Why Am I Hurting? - Part B Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 1:6-8 Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 1:6-8 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 1:6-8 Sermon Series: Spiritual ExilesMessage: God Why Am I Hurting? Airdate: 9/10-9/11/26Programs: 2354 23552014, what a year around this place. I mean, it was something else. And just on the surface to go from two campuses to four campuses all in one year, a remarkable, remarkable, thing that God has done. We give him glory for it, and, we want 2015 to be another year of, faithful ministry here, and thank you for your part in that. I really mean that.This is our weekend of the annual meeting, and that's partly why we made this video. It's a it's a year or it's a a weekend where our members, we have our annual meeting, and so it's kind of a year to look back, a time to look back on the on the past year. It also means that, because our meeting is between this service and the next, I know this is gonna be disappointing. The sermon's a little shorter. Little shorter.So appropriate, that I'm speaking on trials in this sermon. And I'm gonna get right into it because our time is fleeting. First Peter one verses six through seven, I've entitled this message, God, why am I hurting? That resonate resonate here today? Are you in a time in your life maybe where you are hurting, where there is a trial maybe that is a pain in your life right now, you might say, no.Not really. Just wait. K? Just wait. It's coming.Life in a broken world brings sorrows to us in all kinds of directions and in ways that we cannot anticipate. That day is most certainly coming. And Peter is writing this letter to a group of geographical exiles in the first century sent from Rome, living in Asia Minor, but they are they are spiritual exiles as well. They are suffering in a community that looks at their Christian faith, looks at their rejection of the immorality around them. They look down at them, and they are feeling alienated.They are feeling ostracized, and they are suffering in many different ways. And so Peter writes this letter to them to encourage them, and it is perhaps more than the only one maybe competing with the book would be the book of Job of, delivering to us, giving to us a theology of Christian suffering. How do I handle it? How should I look at it when God sovereignly brings pain into my life? First Peter is a very honest letter.It looks pain in the face and gives an answer. Did you know Christianity has an answer to suffering that the other religions of the world, the other philosophies struggle to provide in ways that we'll get into? So maybe you're here today and you're in pain, and you're thinking this is the sermon for me. Maybe you're here today and you're not in pain, but that day is coming. I want to prepare all of us to suffer so that when we are the ones experiencing that pain, we have a kind of grid.We have a kind of understanding that is ready to embrace the trials that come. I also wanna note that Christianity is based on suffering. I mean, our entire faith is built upon the suffering savior who came into this world, God steps into our pain in the person of Jesus, incarnates into this world, lives amongst us, experiences all of the weaknesses, all of the sufferings that we experience, and then suffered himself dying on the cross bearing the guilt and shame for all of our sins. Our savior was a suffering savior. We can say it that Christianity is is built on suffering.Now that doesn't sound so good. It doesn't look great on a billboard. You know, we're not gonna put up a billboard that says, Bethel Church, come suffer with us. Right? Because many people, they don't wanna hear that, and they want a faith that doesn't include any suffering, and yet it inevitably comes.Are we ready for that? Are you ready for that in your life? So our text is verses, six and seven, First Peter one. Please listen as I read. “In this, you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”This passage is Peter's first salvo of teaching on suffering. It's gonna continue through the letter. So this isn't everything that he has to say about it. There's much more to come. Notice that he begins with the the little phrase there, in this, you rejoice.You wouldn't expect a passage on suffering to have a and to begin with a word of joy, and he's referring there to what he's just talked about regarding our living hope. Our hope is living because our hope is in a living savior. And so because of that, we are we rejoice in this salvation, this new birth that God has given to us. Notice that joy and pain can coexist. We typically think, you know, when I am in pain, then I'm not joyous.Right? Or when I'm in joyous, I don't have any pain. And yet these two come together, indeed, they have to come together in a Christian theology of suffering because there is going to be ongoing problems and pain in life. There are gonna be ups and downs, and yet our Christian joy is not based upon our circumstances. It is grounded and based upon something that is enduring.Even Jesus himself, Hebrews, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross and despised its shame.” So don't see the these as enemies. These actually can be friends, joy, and pain. We'll get into more of that later. But in this passage, Peter gives four certainties in the midst of suffering.Four certainties that a Christian can hold on to, trust, and believe in even when life is hurting. So let's get into these now. Notice the first one is that our trials as Christians are temporary. They are temporary. The text now, “though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials.”Peter's first point here is chronological. He is pointing something out that is obviously true. Now it doesn't seem that way to us when we are in the midst of pain. When we are hurting, what do we often think about the pain that we're feeling? We say things like this.This is never going to change. This is never gonna be fixed. I will always feel this way. This pain will never go away. That's how it seems to us.Right? Peter says, yes. It will. Yes. It will.Chronologically speaking, our sufferings and our trials and our pains are very small in duration when compared to the future that the Christian confidently expects, this eternal life that we have. Our lives are fleeting. Our days are numbered. They're short. Eternity is long.Peter points that out. He says, you know what now? For a little while, it's just a little while. It's temporary. You're not always going to feel this way.It's not always going to be this way. A day of change is coming. Chapter five verse 10, he writes, and after you have suffered a little while, there he says it again, “the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” Peter's wanting us to realize that that this trial that I am in is finite. Eternity is unending.My trial is temporary. Eternity is forever. And when I look at things from that grand perspective, it helps me put it into proper perspective. When I obsess about my trials, I think it's always going to be this way. Do you ever get sort of melodramatic about things?Right? Oh, it's never gonna be better. My life is over. You know, teenage girl says that when who knows what happened to her. Right?And she's, oh, you know. And we look at her and we say that is so immature. Peter says when we look at our trials like it's always going to be that way, we're looking immaturely. We're not seeing things from the grand perspective. Our trials are temporary.Someday, the present pain of our life will be over. Someday, Jesus himself is going to confirm, establish, comfort, minister. Someday, we are going to look back at our trials, and we are going to agree with God regarding them. Can you believe that? Now you might be in a trial right now going, I will never say that this was okay.I will never agree with this. Someday, God, I believe, is going to give us understanding regarding why this happened and why that happened and why that happened. I talked with a man after first service today. He's losing his job. He has thirty days.He was talking to somebody about this and that person said to him, I haven't been to church since Vietnam. But in light of the way you're responding to this, I might give it another chance. He always had tears in his eyes after first service to this point that I'm making. He goes, oh, these three years have been so hard, but maybe I see why God's doing it. Don't Don't you think heaven is going to be that kind of an experience where God goes, see when that happened right there?I did this with that with that person's life, and then this was the fruit of it. And we're gonna be going, I had no idea. And when we see it in the big picture, don't you think we will go, you know, God, you are infinitely wise. I now agree with that. And if I was you, I would have brought that into my life.Praise be to God. Okay? Heaven will be that I think. For a Christian, realize friends, for a Christian, this life that we're in right now, this is as bad as it gets. Our lives right now are the worst experience that we are ever going to have.Why? Because eternity is going to be bliss, heaven, and joy. So this is as bad as it gets for the Christian. For the unbeliever, it's the opposite. This is as good as it gets.Life in this broken world with all of its pain and all of its uncertainty is far better than what lies ahead for the unbeliever. But for us, this is as bad as it gets. This is temporary pain. That helps, doesn't it? Indeed, it does.Secondly, Peter points out that trials are painful. Trials are painful. Though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials. That's a pretty good word to describe what pain feels like. Right?It's grievous to us. And do I really need a lot of proof text on this one? Just to prove to you that trials are painful, that we feel within us when we are in a trial. And by trial here, I it's it's all of it, the various trials that he talks about. It can be physical.It can be emotional. It can be relational. It can be marital. It can be financial. It can be political.It can be injustice. It can be emotional worry, fear, misery, depression, and I mean, the things that the things that can create pain in us are incredibly varied, aren't they? All of them, we feel very personally when we experience them. I also find over time in my life that not only are the trials varied, but my ability to handle them is varied. There are things that when I was younger wouldn't have bothered me, now they bother me, like birthdays.There are things that when I was young bothered me, but now from a perspective of maturity doesn't bother me anymore. Right? It's so varied. It's so changing. But over all of that, we certainly can say the trials are painful.We would rather not be in them. Amen? Okay. That'd be my preference. A trouble free life.No more trials. I mean, that'd be like heaven, wouldn't it? Oh, wait. It is heaven. Are you with me?Okay. Alright. Third, reality and certainty with trials. And this now gets into kind of the nub of what Peter is wanting us to see is that trials are revealing and trials are refining. Again, the text, “so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”What is one of the biggest things that we wanna know when we are in the midst of a trial? We search for why. Right? Why is this happening? Why am I feeling this?Why am I sorrowing like I am? Why am I so depressed about this? And atheism comes along and gives what answer? Nothing. Secular humanism comes along and gives what answer?Nothing. Agnosticism comes along and gives what answer? E. Evolutionary theory comes along and gives what answer to our pain? Nothing.Christianity comes along, and it's got a purpose statement. Right there, you see it. So that. Why do I go through the troubles that I do? Why do I go through these things?Is there some reason behind it? And indeed, there is. In fact, you see, previously, he says, if necessary about our trials. If necessary what do you mean if necessary? That seems to indicate somebody is determining whether I ought to go through this or not.Is there a sovereign somebody that is sovereignly guiding and directing in the details of my life and determining whether this is good or not, necessary or not. Indeed, that is Christianity, that there is a sovereign God who doesn't simply, like the agnostics teach, live out there in the extended world and hope the best for us, but rather he is sovereignly over every single detail of our life. There's nothing that will ever happen to the Christian that we that that God did not sovereignly bring to us. Now by that, it doesn't mean that God endorses evil. And someday, we will never endorse evil either.We'll never look at the Holocaust and say, yeah. Great. But God uses evil, and God uses these things to accomplish his purposes. That's what Joseph said in Genesis, right, to his brothers. “You intended it for evil.God intended it for good.” That's the the the wonder of the mystery of God that he can, in the complexities of the universe, use even evil for his divine good and sovereign purposes. And so we see then that in Christian in a Christian theology of suffering, there is a purpose to it. And I think that alone is one of the great certainties that we have to cling to, that this is not random. This is not chaos.This is not Satan winning. Rather, this is something that God is sovereignly guiding and directing. There is a purpose behind it. Sometimes that doesn't make sense to us when the kind and godly young man dies or when the righteous suffer and the unrighteous prosper. Do you ever feel that way?Maybe you feel about that way about yourself. I'm I'm busting my butt. I'm trying to be a good employee, student, wife, husband, parent, whatever. And here I am. I'm dying on the vine, and you look at your neighbor who they're immoral, they profane God's name, and they just smile all the time.And you're like, that doesn't seem fair to me. As the hymn says, it is our God who does each day what he deems best. We trust that pain has a purpose and that God is behind it. The same faith that can believe in Jesus and trust my entire eternity to the truthfulness that Jesus did bear my guilt as he died on the cross is the same faith that now as a Christian in the midst of my suffering appropriates the promises of God and believes that this trial is as well under the sovereign hand of God and that he is doing something with it. We say, well, what is that something?Pastor Steve, could you please help? Notice what Peter says. What purpose do they serve? “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire.” What Peter does here is he anticipates maybe people sort of getting lost in his theology, and he gives a very clear illustration that they could all understand and we can all understand here as well.He brings up gold. Now ancient people were interested in gold. Why? It was the most precious commodity that they had. I mean, today, if you listen to the radio and different things, you see these advertisements.The stock market's uncertain. Buy gold. Right? And they show gold bars and people smiling because they have gold bars, and they encourage you to buy gold. It's the only lasting value in the world.That's the way that they viewed it in the first century. It was their most precious commodity. It was the most long lasting thing that they had, gold. So if you've ever seen, King Tut's tomb or pictures of the jewelry and the gold at King Tut's tomb, then you know that the ancient world, they were really good with gold. I mean, they had figured out how to take gold out of the mountain and turn it into something very beautiful, incredibly beautiful, and intricate.So how do they do it? Well, like today, what they would do is they would mine the gold, and then they would heat it. Right? They would heat up that gold with fires in a furnace. They would heat it up and heat it up and heat it up.And gold reaches a point where it melts. And as it gets hotter, the hotter it gets, the more the impurities of the gold rise to the surface. And so the ancients would heat up that gold and they would heat up that gold and the impurities. In other words, everything that was not gold would rise to the top, and then they would just skim off the top. And by doing that, the gold then, the karat of the gold, and by that, I mean k a r a t.Not to confuse some of you that are thinking about lunch right now. Carat, the the purity of the gold, and the value then would would increase. Okay? And they all got how that worked, and I hope that maybe, you get how that works as well. Because Peter is drawing an analogy here.Do you see it? The analogy is that fire reveals the gold and fire refines the gold. It reveals what is actually gold and separates the impurities and by doing that it refines it. And what he's saying here is that our faith is like gold and our trials are like fire. Fire reveals the genuine gold, and trials reveal the genuine faith.Should I say that again? Fire reveals the genuine gold. Trials reveal the genuine faith within us. Now you don't have to be around the church very long to see this in action. If you're around a church, some family or some individual is gonna suddenly find themselves in a trial, a fiery trial, as Peter calls it elsewhere.And you can watch how this works. And sometimes it's beautiful. Right? Because here you have sort of generic family a, and you didn't know them that well. You didn't know that much about them, but you hear about the trial.And out of that trial, you see a family that is turning to God in ways that you had never seen before. They're wanting the church to be in prayer for them. They're seeking spiritual, counsel and help. They're turning to God in the midst of their trial. They're trusting in things that they they don't know how it's gonna work out, but our trust is in God.And please, won't you pray for us? And you see in that trial a faith that you had never seen before. And it's a beautiful thing to see that. The genuineness of their faith is being revealed by the trial. In a sense, they didn't know what was in them.They didn't realize what they had, that saving faith in them, now showing its true color, its true karat in the midst of a fiery trial. At the same time, you don't have to be around the church very long to have generic family b in the church who comes under a similar trial. And they are unprepared for it. Their faith is has no, bandwidth for it. In that trial, all of a sudden, they are overwhelmed.Or they feel like, wait. This is not what I signed up for. They're like kinda like bandwagon Christians. They sort of join the church. They get on the Christianity bandwagon, and then paint then life hurts.And they're like, I need a different bandwagon. And off they go in a 100 different directions forsaking what they profess to be true in their life. What has the trial done for them? The trial has revealed that their faith was not genuine. The heat of the trial has done that.It is our response to trials that says so much. And by the way, this doesn't mean that we're like super Christians. And like from now on here at Bethel Church, if you ever have a trial, you must be like, my faith is being revealed and I love it. You know, it's not like that at all. There is room in this for normal human concern and worry and fear and the battling of fear and faith and all of that.So it's not like we're all walking around on some great spiritual plane somehow. But in the essence of it, there is an endurance that faith, genuine faith has that comes through the trial different, better, refined, revealed in ways that previously had been unknown. Trials are also great purifiers. Great purifiers. I read a little bit this week in preparation for this that modern gold refining, they heat up the gold to 3,000 degrees.That's hot, isn't it? And I got thinking to myself, what if you could interview the gold while it's being heated up, while it's coming under this kind of temperature? What might the gold be saying as it's getting hot? I see statements like this: “This is hot! This hurts! This stinks! Get me out of here! Why is this happening? Why do I get this and silver gets off easy? Please stop this right now. The guy in charge of this doesn't love me.” But what does the goldsmith know? The goldsmith knows that the only way for that gold to be purified is by heat. Now I stand before you a man who wished that wasn't true.I mean, wouldn't it be great if if the way that our faith could be built and we could grow spiritually would be for God to lavish us with every desire of our hearts? And for there never to be a single problem the rest of our life that we would just be rich and happy and fat and, you know, healthy and eat what we want and have all these. I mean, wouldn't it be great if that was the way that our faith was built? Amen. You're not sure if you want to amen that or not.I think that would be fantastic. That's not the way that it works, is it? In fact, what happens to people who get everything they want? What do we call children like that? Brats.That's what we call them. The surest way to raise a brat is to give that kid everything he wants all the time. And spiritually, there's a lot of immature Christians running around wanting that same kind of an experience. That's immaturity. How do we grow friends?It's through pain. And you'd better be ready for it. And again, this doesn't look great on the church billboards. Come to Bethel Church and suffer along with us. But that's the Bible.And that's the experience of Jesus who, by the way, we're told to do what? Take up our cross and follow him. Is there room in your understanding of your Christian faith that when trials come into your life, it doesn't mean that God doesn't love you? Now that's easy to say when you're not in a trial. But Thursday of this week, you might be.Are you ready to embrace that trial? Does your faith in God have a bandwidth that can bear that? Peter says your faith is more valuable than gold. Gold was the most valuable thing that they had in that day. Peter says your faith trumps it.Why? Because gold perishes. Gold perishes. But our faith will last forever. Not because of us, but because of that persevering, preserving work of God in our life.When the heat is turned up on us, we wanna say stop. God's answer is this. You may not realize it, but your faith is far more valuable than your comfort. I am going to reveal it and refine it. This will be a short term pain, but it will be a long term gain.Are you ready? You know, as a pastor, our elders, our pastors, we often are called into those moments of pain. I did two funerals yesterday morning. Two very wonderful godly men in our church, Peter Hammer and Merle McCluskey, both families suffering loss. Dear, dear brothers in the Lord, these kinds of things happen.They heard me preach sermons like this all the time, and now they're dead. They their sojourn is over. Are you ready? Are you ready, or are just hoping it doesn't happen or that Jesus comes back before it happens? Now with that said, I don't think we should intentionally bring trouble to ourselves.So don't leave the service today and be like, you know what? Trials refine my faith. I want trials in my life and run your car into a guardrail or a light pole or something like that. K? There's enough pain in this world we don't need to add to it.It also doesn't mean that we should be trying to refine our other people's faith and say, you know what? He needs to grow. Especially you married couples. I don't want you thinking that way. Life has enough fiery trials all by itself.So what should we be thinking when we're in a trial? I've got some questions. When the heat is up, when the heat in life is coming up, what should I ask? Here's a few. Am I looking at this from a temporal or eternal perspective?Obsess over the problem, and it will be overwhelming. Pull back from it and see it from the grand perspective of the gospel and the story of God, now I have it in perspective. Do I do I realize that trials are necessary at times and are for my good? This is one of the things that I, in my difficult times in my life, I try to bring to bear the thought in my heart, this is good for me. And that's hard at times.Right? Because I got this other part of me going, no, it isn't. And then I've got my faith part going, yes. It is. No.It isn't. Yes. It is. No. It is.Yes. You lay in bed at night. You can't sleep because this is going on. Right? But faith refuses to give up the belief that there is a sovereign God and that these light and momentary trials are achieving for us a glory that far outweighs them all.Romans eight. I'm sorry. Second Corinthians four. Is my perspective shaped by confidence in God's sovereign and good plan for my life? Do you think God loves you or only when things are good and going the way you want?Do you believe he loves you? Friend, he does. He sent Jesus. Right? That is Romans eight.“If God didn't spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will we not also along with him graciously give us all things?” How can we doubt the love of God for us? He sent his son for us. Do I want to grow spiritually more than I want to live comfortably? How many people could honestly say, yes, I want to grow spiritually more than to have a comfortable life?Is faith refinement a personal goal? Do I aspire to a high karat content? I think those are all very helpful, and maybe we'll get those up on the web in case you would like those. They come right from the text. Now look at the end result here, and we have our fourth certainty in the text.Let me read it again. “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” The fourth certainty is that purified faith has a goal in mind. If my goal is to grow spiritually, I have another goal in that, and it's an eternal perspective where I believe that this trial that I am going through is going to bring honor to God and also is going to bring commendation and honor to me. And this was my aha moment in my studies here because whenever you see it may result in praise and glory and honor, you just assume that this is talking about God.Right? Because there's so many passages in the Bible that say that. Philippians two, for example, “every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” And so you can look at that and say, well, who is the honor going to? It must be going to God.And indeed, in the end, all honor does go to God. But the text doesn't say that the honor here goes to God. It just says when it comes. It comes when Jesus is revealed. It comes at the end of time.And I think what Peter is doing here is he is including both. There is in my trouble and in my pain. Why do I want to respond in a God honoring way? Because I want God to be honored in this trial. And that is a very good motive for the Christian enduring suffering that Jesus may be honored in my life. I want him to be glorified in all things.Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen? Alright.So that we got down, especially at a church that is an all about him church. We got that down. But notice also that there is this reward that is also taught in Scripture that I receive. This commentation that I receive from Jesus in honor as he commends, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”Or a cup of cold water extended my name shall not be forgotten. And a host of other passages that teach us that as we honor the Lord in the ups and the downs of life, that we are putting our treasure in heaven as another example and that Jesus will reward us. Can that be motivating? I think so. I think so.In fact, to illustrate this, I'd like to return to the illustration that Peter is using, how both honors can happen, God and us. Let's go back to gold a second and to talk about gold used in in artwork. You know, back in the first century, they were doing what man has done for centuries, millennia, and that is use gold in art. Beautiful gold in, for example, jewelry. If you've, been to the museums in Chicago, there are displays there of ancient gold jewelry.And to this day, people pay to have tickets, and they go and they stand in front of the display, and they marvel at the intricate, jewelry and the and the craftsmanship of that those beautiful pieces of art. They stand there, and they're like, wow. And the wife's like, you ought to get me one of those. And, you know, these you just kinda stand there, and you admire the craftsmanship. You admire the artistic ability.You you admire the the art and the worth of that. Wow. That is just so absolutely beautiful. And so gold has itself a kind of I'm sorry. Art has its own kind of praise as we admire the art itself.But there is this other kind of honor that art produces, and that is honor for the maker of the art. So that it's not just the Messiah, it is Handel's Messiah. And it's just not the Fifth, it is Beethoven's fifth. And with great pieces of art, the art is valued and treasured, but then the real honor is for the amazing ability of the person who crafted it in the first place. And so how does that apply to what God is doing in the midst of my pain and my sorrow?As I realize that everything that comes into my life is from the sovereign hand of God, as I appropriate that faith, the same faith that trusted in Jesus for my eternity, I now trust him for this trial that I'm experiencing. And I remain faithful to the Lord. I try with the the strength that God provides to obey or to be steadfast or whatever I need to do in that trial. As I do that, God is shaping and forming in me in the story of my life a kind of artistic beauty. And the people around you see that, and they admire it.And they're like, isn't it beautiful and wonderful what that family is doing in response to that trial in their life? Isn't it great and wonderful what that man is doing as he prepares to lose his job by faith in Jesus, believing God is sovereign over it? And a host of other things as we admire and see that we are we're like the gallery of God. Our lives are a kind of masterpiece, a kind of artistic expression of the amazing power of God, but for our own honor as well. We hang in the gallery of God and people and angels and God himself admiring the beauty of what our lives live by faith in times of trouble, what that is, so that we as the art and God is the maker of the art, both receive honor and praise.And one motivating factor when I am in a time of trouble is I don't want to lose that reward. I don't want to lose that commendation from God. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I don't wanna lose the opportunity to bring honor to him. By the way, I live by faith even when life hurts.So that at the end then of all of our troubles and all of our pains, there is God and there is us. His artwork, his masterpieces, honored and honored. Little h honor to us, big h honor to God. Paintings and painters, symphonies and composers, sinners and savior may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Much more on suffering in First Peter.We're just getting going. I'm gonna ask you, just to join me for a word of prayer. Would you stand with me, please, as we conclude our service together?* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.

Steve DeWitt God, Why Am I Hurting? - Part A Study Guide for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 1:6-8 Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 1:6-8 Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter Donate to Support The Journey Sermon Transcript for Spiritual Exiles, 1 Peter 1:6-8 Sermon Series: Spiritual ExilesMessage: God Why Am I Hurting? Airdate: 9/10-9/11/26Programs: 2354 23552014, what a year around this place. I mean, it was something else. And just on the surface to go from two campuses to four campuses all in one year, a remarkable, remarkable, thing that God has done. We give him glory for it, and, we want 2015 to be another year of, faithful ministry here, and thank you for your part in that. I really mean that.This is our weekend of the annual meeting, and that's partly why we made this video. It's a it's a year or it's a a weekend where our members, we have our annual meeting, and so it's kind of a year to look back, a time to look back on the on the past year. It also means that, because our meeting is between this service and the next, I know this is gonna be disappointing. The sermon's a little shorter. Little shorter.So appropriate, that I'm speaking on trials in this sermon. And I'm gonna get right into it because our time is fleeting. First Peter one verses six through seven, I've entitled this message, God, why am I hurting? That resonate resonate here today? Are you in a time in your life maybe where you are hurting, where there is a trial maybe that is a pain in your life right now, you might say, no.Not really. Just wait. K? Just wait. It's coming.Life in a broken world brings sorrows to us in all kinds of directions and in ways that we cannot anticipate. That day is most certainly coming. And Peter is writing this letter to a group of geographical exiles in the first century sent from Rome, living in Asia Minor, but they are they are spiritual exiles as well. They are suffering in a community that looks at their Christian faith, looks at their rejection of the immorality around them. They look down at them, and they are feeling alienated.They are feeling ostracized, and they are suffering in many different ways. And so Peter writes this letter to them to encourage them, and it is perhaps more than the only one maybe competing with the book would be the book of Job of, delivering to us, giving to us a theology of Christian suffering. How do I handle it? How should I look at it when God sovereignly brings pain into my life? First Peter is a very honest letter.It looks pain in the face and gives an answer. Did you know Christianity has an answer to suffering that the other religions of the world, the other philosophies struggle to provide in ways that we'll get into? So maybe you're here today and you're in pain, and you're thinking this is the sermon for me. Maybe you're here today and you're not in pain, but that day is coming. I want to prepare all of us to suffer so that when we are the ones experiencing that pain, we have a kind of grid.We have a kind of understanding that is ready to embrace the trials that come. I also wanna note that Christianity is based on suffering. I mean, our entire faith is built upon the suffering savior who came into this world, God steps into our pain in the person of Jesus, incarnates into this world, lives amongst us, experiences all of the weaknesses, all of the sufferings that we experience, and then suffered himself dying on the cross bearing the guilt and shame for all of our sins. Our savior was a suffering savior. We can say it that Christianity is is built on suffering.Now that doesn't sound so good. It doesn't look great on a billboard. You know, we're not gonna put up a billboard that says, Bethel Church, come suffer with us. Right? Because many people, they don't wanna hear that, and they want a faith that doesn't include any suffering, and yet it inevitably comes.Are we ready for that? Are you ready for that in your life? So our text is verses, six and seven, First Peter one. Please listen as I read. “In this, you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”This passage is Peter's first salvo of teaching on suffering. It's gonna continue through the letter. So this isn't everything that he has to say about it. There's much more to come. Notice that he begins with the the little phrase there, in this, you rejoice.You wouldn't expect a passage on suffering to have a and to begin with a word of joy, and he's referring there to what he's just talked about regarding our living hope. Our hope is living because our hope is in a living savior. And so because of that, we are we rejoice in this salvation, this new birth that God has given to us. Notice that joy and pain can coexist. We typically think, you know, when I am in pain, then I'm not joyous.Right? Or when I'm in joyous, I don't have any pain. And yet these two come together, indeed, they have to come together in a Christian theology of suffering because there is going to be ongoing problems and pain in life. There are gonna be ups and downs, and yet our Christian joy is not based upon our circumstances. It is grounded and based upon something that is enduring.Even Jesus himself, Hebrews, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross and despised its shame.” So don't see the these as enemies. These actually can be friends, joy, and pain. We'll get into more of that later. But in this passage, Peter gives four certainties in the midst of suffering.Four certainties that a Christian can hold on to, trust, and believe in even when life is hurting. So let's get into these now. Notice the first one is that our trials as Christians are temporary. They are temporary. The text now, “though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials.”Peter's first point here is chronological. He is pointing something out that is obviously true. Now it doesn't seem that way to us when we are in the midst of pain. When we are hurting, what do we often think about the pain that we're feeling? We say things like this.This is never going to change. This is never gonna be fixed. I will always feel this way. This pain will never go away. That's how it seems to us.Right? Peter says, yes. It will. Yes. It will.Chronologically speaking, our sufferings and our trials and our pains are very small in duration when compared to the future that the Christian confidently expects, this eternal life that we have. Our lives are fleeting. Our days are numbered. They're short. Eternity is long.Peter points that out. He says, you know what now? For a little while, it's just a little while. It's temporary. You're not always going to feel this way.It's not always going to be this way. A day of change is coming. Chapter five verse 10, he writes, and after you have suffered a little while, there he says it again, “the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” Peter's wanting us to realize that that this trial that I am in is finite. Eternity is unending.My trial is temporary. Eternity is forever. And when I look at things from that grand perspective, it helps me put it into proper perspective. When I obsess about my trials, I think it's always going to be this way. Do you ever get sort of melodramatic about things?Right? Oh, it's never gonna be better. My life is over. You know, teenage girl says that when who knows what happened to her. Right?And she's, oh, you know. And we look at her and we say that is so immature. Peter says when we look at our trials like it's always going to be that way, we're looking immaturely. We're not seeing things from the grand perspective. Our trials are temporary.Someday, the present pain of our life will be over. Someday, Jesus himself is going to confirm, establish, comfort, minister. Someday, we are going to look back at our trials, and we are going to agree with God regarding them. Can you believe that? Now you might be in a trial right now going, I will never say that this was okay.I will never agree with this. Someday, God, I believe, is going to give us understanding regarding why this happened and why that happened and why that happened. I talked with a man after first service today. He's losing his job. He has thirty days.He was talking to somebody about this and that person said to him, I haven't been to church since Vietnam. But in light of the way you're responding to this, I might give it another chance. He always had tears in his eyes after first service to this point that I'm making. He goes, oh, these three years have been so hard, but maybe I see why God's doing it. Don't Don't you think heaven is going to be that kind of an experience where God goes, see when that happened right there?I did this with that with that person's life, and then this was the fruit of it. And we're gonna be going, I had no idea. And when we see it in the big picture, don't you think we will go, you know, God, you are infinitely wise. I now agree with that. And if I was you, I would have brought that into my life.Praise be to God. Okay? Heaven will be that I think. For a Christian, realize friends, for a Christian, this life that we're in right now, this is as bad as it gets. Our lives right now are the worst experience that we are ever going to have.Why? Because eternity is going to be bliss, heaven, and joy. So this is as bad as it gets for the Christian. For the unbeliever, it's the opposite. This is as good as it gets.Life in this broken world with all of its pain and all of its uncertainty is far better than what lies ahead for the unbeliever. But for us, this is as bad as it gets. This is temporary pain. That helps, doesn't it? Indeed, it does.Secondly, Peter points out that trials are painful. Trials are painful. Though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials. That's a pretty good word to describe what pain feels like. Right?It's grievous to us. And do I really need a lot of proof text on this one? Just to prove to you that trials are painful, that we feel within us when we are in a trial. And by trial here, I it's it's all of it, the various trials that he talks about. It can be physical.It can be emotional. It can be relational. It can be marital. It can be financial. It can be political.It can be injustice. It can be emotional worry, fear, misery, depression, and I mean, the things that the things that can create pain in us are incredibly varied, aren't they? All of them, we feel very personally when we experience them. I also find over time in my life that not only are the trials varied, but my ability to handle them is varied. There are things that when I was younger wouldn't have bothered me, now they bother me, like birthdays.There are things that when I was young bothered me, but now from a perspective of maturity doesn't bother me anymore. Right? It's so varied. It's so changing. But over all of that, we certainly can say the trials are painful.We would rather not be in them. Amen? Okay. That'd be my preference. A trouble free life.No more trials. I mean, that'd be like heaven, wouldn't it? Oh, wait. It is heaven. Are you with me?Okay. Alright. Third, reality and certainty with trials. And this now gets into kind of the nub of what Peter is wanting us to see is that trials are revealing and trials are refining. Again, the text, “so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”What is one of the biggest things that we wanna know when we are in the midst of a trial? We search for why. Right? Why is this happening? Why am I feeling this?Why am I sorrowing like I am? Why am I so depressed about this? And atheism comes along and gives what answer? Nothing. Secular humanism comes along and gives what answer?Nothing. Agnosticism comes along and gives what answer? E. Evolutionary theory comes along and gives what answer to our pain? Nothing.Christianity comes along, and it's got a purpose statement. Right there, you see it. So that. Why do I go through the troubles that I do? Why do I go through these things?Is there some reason behind it? And indeed, there is. In fact, you see, previously, he says, if necessary about our trials. If necessary what do you mean if necessary? That seems to indicate somebody is determining whether I ought to go through this or not.Is there a sovereign somebody that is sovereignly guiding and directing in the details of my life and determining whether this is good or not, necessary or not. Indeed, that is Christianity, that there is a sovereign God who doesn't simply, like the agnostics teach, live out there in the extended world and hope the best for us, but rather he is sovereignly over every single detail of our life. There's nothing that will ever happen to the Christian that we that that God did not sovereignly bring to us. Now by that, it doesn't mean that God endorses evil. And someday, we will never endorse evil either.We'll never look at the Holocaust and say, yeah. Great. But God uses evil, and God uses these things to accomplish his purposes. That's what Joseph said in Genesis, right, to his brothers. “You intended it for evil.God intended it for good.” That's the the the wonder of the mystery of God that he can, in the complexities of the universe, use even evil for his divine good and sovereign purposes. And so we see then that in Christian in a Christian theology of suffering, there is a purpose to it. And I think that alone is one of the great certainties that we have to cling to, that this is not random. This is not chaos.This is not Satan winning. Rather, this is something that God is sovereignly guiding and directing. There is a purpose behind it. Sometimes that doesn't make sense to us when the kind and godly young man dies or when the righteous suffer and the unrighteous prosper. Do you ever feel that way?Maybe you feel about that way about yourself. I'm I'm busting my butt. I'm trying to be a good employee, student, wife, husband, parent, whatever. And here I am. I'm dying on the vine, and you look at your neighbor who they're immoral, they profane God's name, and they just smile all the time.And you're like, that doesn't seem fair to me. As the hymn says, it is our God who does each day what he deems best. We trust that pain has a purpose and that God is behind it. The same faith that can believe in Jesus and trust my entire eternity to the truthfulness that Jesus did bear my guilt as he died on the cross is the same faith that now as a Christian in the midst of my suffering appropriates the promises of God and believes that this trial is as well under the sovereign hand of God and that he is doing something with it. We say, well, what is that something?Pastor Steve, could you please help? Notice what Peter says. What purpose do they serve? “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire.” What Peter does here is he anticipates maybe people sort of getting lost in his theology, and he gives a very clear illustration that they could all understand and we can all understand here as well.He brings up gold. Now ancient people were interested in gold. Why? It was the most precious commodity that they had. I mean, today, if you listen to the radio and different things, you see these advertisements.The stock market's uncertain. Buy gold. Right? And they show gold bars and people smiling because they have gold bars, and they encourage you to buy gold. It's the only lasting value in the world.That's the way that they viewed it in the first century. It was their most precious commodity. It was the most long lasting thing that they had, gold. So if you've ever seen, King Tut's tomb or pictures of the jewelry and the gold at King Tut's tomb, then you know that the ancient world, they were really good with gold. I mean, they had figured out how to take gold out of the mountain and turn it into something very beautiful, incredibly beautiful, and intricate.So how do they do it? Well, like today, what they would do is they would mine the gold, and then they would heat it. Right? They would heat up that gold with fires in a furnace. They would heat it up and heat it up and heat it up.And gold reaches a point where it melts. And as it gets hotter, the hotter it gets, the more the impurities of the gold rise to the surface. And so the ancients would heat up that gold and they would heat up that gold and the impurities. In other words, everything that was not gold would rise to the top, and then they would just skim off the top. And by doing that, the gold then, the karat of the gold, and by that, I mean k a r a t.Not to confuse some of you that are thinking about lunch right now. Carat, the the purity of the gold, and the value then would would increase. Okay? And they all got how that worked, and I hope that maybe, you get how that works as well. Because Peter is drawing an analogy here.Do you see it? The analogy is that fire reveals the gold and fire refines the gold. It reveals what is actually gold and separates the impurities and by doing that it refines it. And what he's saying here is that our faith is like gold and our trials are like fire. Fire reveals the genuine gold, and trials reveal the genuine faith.Should I say that again? Fire reveals the genuine gold. Trials reveal the genuine faith within us. Now you don't have to be around the church very long to see this in action. If you're around a church, some family or some individual is gonna suddenly find themselves in a trial, a fiery trial, as Peter calls it elsewhere.And you can watch how this works. And sometimes it's beautiful. Right? Because here you have sort of generic family a, and you didn't know them that well. You didn't know that much about them, but you hear about the trial.And out of that trial, you see a family that is turning to God in ways that you had never seen before. They're wanting the church to be in prayer for them. They're seeking spiritual, counsel and help. They're turning to God in the midst of their trial. They're trusting in things that they they don't know how it's gonna work out, but our trust is in God.And please, won't you pray for us? And you see in that trial a faith that you had never seen before. And it's a beautiful thing to see that. The genuineness of their faith is being revealed by the trial. In a sense, they didn't know what was in them.They didn't realize what they had, that saving faith in them, now showing its true color, its true karat in the midst of a fiery trial. At the same time, you don't have to be around the church very long to have generic family b in the church who comes under a similar trial. And they are unprepared for it. Their faith is has no, bandwidth for it. In that trial, all of a sudden, they are overwhelmed.Or they feel like, wait. This is not what I signed up for. They're like kinda like bandwagon Christians. They sort of join the church. They get on the Christianity bandwagon, and then paint then life hurts.And they're like, I need a different bandwagon. And off they go in a 100 different directions forsaking what they profess to be true in their life. What has the trial done for them? The trial has revealed that their faith was not genuine. The heat of the trial has done that.It is our response to trials that says so much. And by the way, this doesn't mean that we're like super Christians. And like from now on here at Bethel Church, if you ever have a trial, you must be like, my faith is being revealed and I love it. You know, it's not like that at all. There is room in this for normal human concern and worry and fear and the battling of fear and faith and all of that.So it's not like we're all walking around on some great spiritual plane somehow. But in the essence of it, there is an endurance that faith, genuine faith has that comes through the trial different, better, refined, revealed in ways that previously had been unknown. Trials are also great purifiers. Great purifiers. I read a little bit this week in preparation for this that modern gold refining, they heat up the gold to 3,000 degrees.That's hot, isn't it? And I got thinking to myself, what if you could interview the gold while it's being heated up, while it's coming under this kind of temperature? What might the gold be saying as it's getting hot? I see statements like this: “This is hot! This hurts! This stinks! Get me out of here! Why is this happening? Why do I get this and silver gets off easy? Please stop this right now. The guy in charge of this doesn't love me.” But what does the goldsmith know? The goldsmith knows that the only way for that gold to be purified is by heat. Now I stand before you a man who wished that wasn't true.I mean, wouldn't it be great if if the way that our faith could be built and we could grow spiritually would be for God to lavish us with every desire of our hearts? And for there never to be a single problem the rest of our life that we would just be rich and happy and fat and, you know, healthy and eat what we want and have all these. I mean, wouldn't it be great if that was the way that our faith was built? Amen. You're not sure if you want to amen that or not.I think that would be fantastic. That's not the way that it works, is it? In fact, what happens to people who get everything they want? What do we call children like that? Brats.That's what we call them. The surest way to raise a brat is to give that kid everything he wants all the time. And spiritually, there's a lot of immature Christians running around wanting that same kind of an experience. That's immaturity. How do we grow friends?It's through pain. And you'd better be ready for it. And again, this doesn't look great on the church billboards. Come to Bethel Church and suffer along with us. But that's the Bible.And that's the experience of Jesus who, by the way, we're told to do what? Take up our cross and follow him. Is there room in your understanding of your Christian faith that when trials come into your life, it doesn't mean that God doesn't love you? Now that's easy to say when you're not in a trial. But Thursday of this week, you might be.Are you ready to embrace that trial? Does your faith in God have a bandwidth that can bear that? Peter says your faith is more valuable than gold. Gold was the most valuable thing that they had in that day. Peter says your faith trumps it.Why? Because gold perishes. Gold perishes. But our faith will last forever. Not because of us, but because of that persevering, preserving work of God in our life.When the heat is turned up on us, we wanna say stop. God's answer is this. You may not realize it, but your faith is far more valuable than your comfort. I am going to reveal it and refine it. This will be a short term pain, but it will be a long term gain.Are you ready? You know, as a pastor, our elders, our pastors, we often are called into those moments of pain. I did two funerals yesterday morning. Two very wonderful godly men in our church, Peter Hammer and Merle McCluskey, both families suffering loss. Dear, dear brothers in the Lord, these kinds of things happen.They heard me preach sermons like this all the time, and now they're dead. They their sojourn is over. Are you ready? Are you ready, or are just hoping it doesn't happen or that Jesus comes back before it happens? Now with that said, I don't think we should intentionally bring trouble to ourselves.So don't leave the service today and be like, you know what? Trials refine my faith. I want trials in my life and run your car into a guardrail or a light pole or something like that. K? There's enough pain in this world we don't need to add to it.It also doesn't mean that we should be trying to refine our other people's faith and say, you know what? He needs to grow. Especially you married couples. I don't want you thinking that way. Life has enough fiery trials all by itself.So what should we be thinking when we're in a trial? I've got some questions. When the heat is up, when the heat in life is coming up, what should I ask? Here's a few. Am I looking at this from a temporal or eternal perspective?Obsess over the problem, and it will be overwhelming. Pull back from it and see it from the grand perspective of the gospel and the story of God, now I have it in perspective. Do I do I realize that trials are necessary at times and are for my good? This is one of the things that I, in my difficult times in my life, I try to bring to bear the thought in my heart, this is good for me. And that's hard at times.Right? Because I got this other part of me going, no, it isn't. And then I've got my faith part going, yes. It is. No.It isn't. Yes. It is. No. It is.Yes. You lay in bed at night. You can't sleep because this is going on. Right? But faith refuses to give up the belief that there is a sovereign God and that these light and momentary trials are achieving for us a glory that far outweighs them all.Romans eight. I'm sorry. Second Corinthians four. Is my perspective shaped by confidence in God's sovereign and good plan for my life? Do you think God loves you or only when things are good and going the way you want?Do you believe he loves you? Friend, he does. He sent Jesus. Right? That is Romans eight.“If God didn't spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will we not also along with him graciously give us all things?” How can we doubt the love of God for us? He sent his son for us. Do I want to grow spiritually more than I want to live comfortably? How many people could honestly say, yes, I want to grow spiritually more than to have a comfortable life?Is faith refinement a personal goal? Do I aspire to a high karat content? I think those are all very helpful, and maybe we'll get those up on the web in case you would like those. They come right from the text. Now look at the end result here, and we have our fourth certainty in the text.Let me read it again. “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” The fourth certainty is that purified faith has a goal in mind. If my goal is to grow spiritually, I have another goal in that, and it's an eternal perspective where I believe that this trial that I am going through is going to bring honor to God and also is going to bring commendation and honor to me. And this was my aha moment in my studies here because whenever you see it may result in praise and glory and honor, you just assume that this is talking about God.Right? Because there's so many passages in the Bible that say that. Philippians two, for example, “every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” And so you can look at that and say, well, who is the honor going to? It must be going to God.And indeed, in the end, all honor does go to God. But the text doesn't say that the honor here goes to God. It just says when it comes. It comes when Jesus is revealed. It comes at the end of time.And I think what Peter is doing here is he is including both. There is in my trouble and in my pain. Why do I want to respond in a God honoring way? Because I want God to be honored in this trial. And that is a very good motive for the Christian enduring suffering that Jesus may be honored in my life. I want him to be glorified in all things.Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen? Alright.So that we got down, especially at a church that is an all about him church. We got that down. But notice also that there is this reward that is also taught in Scripture that I receive. This commentation that I receive from Jesus in honor as he commends, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”Or a cup of cold water extended my name shall not be forgotten. And a host of other passages that teach us that as we honor the Lord in the ups and the downs of life, that we are putting our treasure in heaven as another example and that Jesus will reward us. Can that be motivating? I think so. I think so.In fact, to illustrate this, I'd like to return to the illustration that Peter is using, how both honors can happen, God and us. Let's go back to gold a second and to talk about gold used in in artwork. You know, back in the first century, they were doing what man has done for centuries, millennia, and that is use gold in art. Beautiful gold in, for example, jewelry. If you've, been to the museums in Chicago, there are displays there of ancient gold jewelry.And to this day, people pay to have tickets, and they go and they stand in front of the display, and they marvel at the intricate, jewelry and the and the craftsmanship of that those beautiful pieces of art. They stand there, and they're like, wow. And the wife's like, you ought to get me one of those. And, you know, these you just kinda stand there, and you admire the craftsmanship. You admire the artistic ability.You you admire the the art and the worth of that. Wow. That is just so absolutely beautiful. And so gold has itself a kind of I'm sorry. Art has its own kind of praise as we admire the art itself.But there is this other kind of honor that art produces, and that is honor for the maker of the art. So that it's not just the Messiah, it is Handel's Messiah. And it's just not the Fifth, it is Beethoven's fifth. And with great pieces of art, the art is valued and treasured, but then the real honor is for the amazing ability of the person who crafted it in the first place. And so how does that apply to what God is doing in the midst of my pain and my sorrow?As I realize that everything that comes into my life is from the sovereign hand of God, as I appropriate that faith, the same faith that trusted in Jesus for my eternity, I now trust him for this trial that I'm experiencing. And I remain faithful to the Lord. I try with the the strength that God provides to obey or to be steadfast or whatever I need to do in that trial. As I do that, God is shaping and forming in me in the story of my life a kind of artistic beauty. And the people around you see that, and they admire it.And they're like, isn't it beautiful and wonderful what that family is doing in response to that trial in their life? Isn't it great and wonderful what that man is doing as he prepares to lose his job by faith in Jesus, believing God is sovereign over it? And a host of other things as we admire and see that we are we're like the gallery of God. Our lives are a kind of masterpiece, a kind of artistic expression of the amazing power of God, but for our own honor as well. We hang in the gallery of God and people and angels and God himself admiring the beauty of what our lives live by faith in times of trouble, what that is, so that we as the art and God is the maker of the art, both receive honor and praise.And one motivating factor when I am in a time of trouble is I don't want to lose that reward. I don't want to lose that commendation from God. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I don't wanna lose the opportunity to bring honor to him. By the way, I live by faith even when life hurts.So that at the end then of all of our troubles and all of our pains, there is God and there is us. His artwork, his masterpieces, honored and honored. Little h honor to us, big h honor to God. Paintings and painters, symphonies and composers, sinners and savior may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Much more on suffering in First Peter.We're just getting going. I'm gonna ask you, just to join me for a word of prayer. Would you stand with me, please, as we conclude our service together?* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.

Kate fills in for Frank this week, joining Dan for a conversation about neurodivergence, religious belief, and why some brains may process spiritual experiences differently than others. They compare religion to imagination, play, and believing in Santa, and wonder whether neurodivergent people may be less inclined to attach supernatural meaning to powerful emotional experiences. But first: A Texas evangelical takes matters into his own hands when the flag is lowered to honor Dolly Parton. Samaritan's Purse turns down $300 million from the Trump administration—and nobody seems quite sure why. Bethel Church racks up scandals, failed prophecies, and some remarkably durable forgiveness for badly behaved men. A Maine court rules that a father can restrict his daughter's exposure to a church whose teachings were causing her severe anxiety. Christian evangelists get kicked out of Burning Man and, naturally, call it persecution. Catholic televangelist Fulton Sheen is headed for beatification, complete with a miracle, a mysterious relic, and possibly a piece of the man himself.

Bethel Church St. Marys | Sunday Service |` September 6th by mybethel.ca

Bethel Church Stratford | Sunday Service | September 6th by mybethel.ca

Dating has changed dramatically. With social media, dating apps, pornography, hookup culture, and endless options at our fingertips, finding meaningful connection can somehow feel harder than ever. In this episode of Cultural Catalysts, Kris Vallotton sits down with Elles and Daniel Maddry of Moral Revolution for a candid and hilarious conversation about dating, attraction, relationships, and the challenges facing singles today. They unpack how fear and unrealistic expectations can keep people from taking relational risks, why confidence and healthy pursuit matter, and what men and women are actually looking for in a potential spouse. They also explore the role of physical attraction, character, self-control, safety, community, and mentorship in building relationships that can actually last. If you're single, dating, or trying to navigate relationships in today's culture, this conversation will challenge you to stop overcomplicating dating, embrace courage, and become the kind of person capable of building a healthy, lasting relationship. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ X: https://x.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

*****************************************************************We experienced a few audio challenges while recording this episode, but the conversation was simply too valuable not to share—thank you for listening with a little extra grace.*****************************************************************The Way of the Ox: Endurance That Thrives in the StormHard seasons can make us question our calling, our strength, and even God's nearness. Dr. David Stine offers a different response: face the storm with honest faith, receive God's grace, and keep moving one step at a time. Through the vivid metaphor at the heart of his new book, "The Way of the Ox: Endurance to Thrive in the Storms of Life", David shows how pressure can develop spiritual strength rather than simply deplete it. His testimony of navigating cancer reveals what these principles look like when suffering becomes deeply personal. You'll gain practical insight for discerning whether to persevere, slow down, finish well, or let go of an assignment. This hope-filled conversation will equip you to walk through adversity without denying the pain or abandoning the purpose God is forming in you.About the GuestDr. David Stine is an author, leadership coach, strategist, consultant, and the president and founder of Advance Partners, where he helps churches and nonprofit organizations strengthen donor development, leadership, fundraising, and storytelling. He previously served as chief executive officer of Bethel Media, the media and business arm of Bethel Church in Redding, California, and was the founding pastor of Metro Church in Washington, D.C., which grew to approximately 6,000 people across three campuses during his leadership. Dr. Stine holds both master's and doctoral degrees in Practical Theology and Leadership. He is the author of The Way of the Ox, Hearing from God, and The Whole Life, bringing together pastoral experience, organizational strategy, and hard-won lessons about resilient faith.Reasons to Listen1. Strength for Hard Seasons: David offers a memorable biblical picture for facing winter instead of spending your life running from it.2. Grit and Grace: Learn how steady obedience and God's sustaining grace work together one step at a time.3. Wisdom for Leaders: Discover how to discern whether God is asking you to persevere, simplify, finish, or release something that once mattered.Big Takeaways1. Face the Winter: Difficulty is not always a detour. Ask what God may be forming in you as you move faithfully through it.2. Take the Next Step: You do not need the entire path today. Put one foot forward and trust God to restore your balance.3. Remember His Faithfulness: Build a record of what God has already done; yesterday's faithfulness strengthens tomorrow's courage.4. Grit Needs Grace: Endurance is not self-powered striving. Receive God's strength as you practice faithful obedience.5. Release the Old: Starting something new may require finishing or laying down an old assignment. Prayerfully simplify before adding more.Missional Challenges1. Name Your Winter: Identify the difficult season you have been avoiding and ask God what faithful movement looks like within it.2. Take One Step: Choose the smallest clear act of obedience available to you and complete it within 48 hours.3. Finish Before Starting: Review your commitments and prayerfully close, delegate, or release one thing before beginning another.Chapters00:12 — Welcome and The Way of the Ox03:00 — Why We Want Instant Deliverance07:00 — What the Musk Ox Teaches About Adversity10:00 — Qiviut: What Grows in the Cold14:00 — Faith Refined Like Gold17:00 — A Cancer Story and Faith Through Suffering23:00 — Finding God's Next Step27:00 — Remembering What God Has Done31:00 — Grit, Grace, and Moving Forward35:00 — The Trap of Endless Striving39:00 — When God Is Doing a New Thing44:00 — Finishing Well Before Starting Again49:00 — Slow Down, Scripture, and Final QuestionsGuest Website and Social MediaAdvance Partners: https://www.advancepartners.org/Author website: https://davidstine.com/The Way of the Ox: https://www.whitakerhouse.com/product/way-of-the-oxInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidistine/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidistine#themissionallife #themissionallifepodcast #Jesus #DavidStine #TheWayOfTheOx #ChristianLeadership #ResilientFaith #Purpose #FaithInHardTimes #ChristianPodcast

Bethel Church St. Marys | Sunday Service | August 30th by mybethel.ca

Bethel Church Stratford | Sunday Service | August 30th by mybethel.ca

In this sermon, Kris continues his series on Bethel's family distinctions by unpacking how what we believe about the end times shapes how we live today. Are we waiting for the world to fall apart, or are we called to help rebuild it? Are we preparing to escape, or are we taking responsibility for the cities and nations God has placed around us? Kris challenges us to rethink an end-times theology rooted in fear and instead embrace a Kingdom perspective filled with hope, responsibility, and purpose. From Abraham's call to father nations to Jesus' command to disciple nations, discover why believers are called to bring light into darkness, rebuild broken places, and carry the hope of Jesus into every sphere of society. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Top headlines for Friday, August 28, 2026SMU cancels a CAIR youth symposium after Texas labeled the group a terrorist organization. Christian doctors in Illinois win temporary protection from an assisted suicide referral mandate. Archaeologists in Turkey uncover a 1,500-year-old Christian amulet. Plus, Evangeline Lilly on leaving Hollywood for faith-driven storytelling.0:11 SMU cancels plan to host 'unapologetically Muslim' CAIR event1:16 Ryan Blackwell now president of Lifeway Christian Resources2:01 Christian doctors win temp. protection from assisted suicide law2:57 The Satanic Temple video depicts 'abortion ritual' at Hobby Lobby3:42 Evangeline Lilly embraces faith project 'Legend of Destruction'4:27 Bethel Church leader Bill Johnson remarries5:13 Ancient Christian amulet found in Turkey: reportSubscribe to this PodcastApple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle PodcastsOvercastFollow Us on Social Media@ChristianPost on TwitterChristian Post on Facebook@ChristianPostIntl on InstagramSubscribe on YouTubeGet the Edifi AppDownload for iPhoneDownload for AndroidSubscribe to Our NewsletterSubscribe to the Freedom Post, delivered every Monday and ThursdayClick here to get the top headlines delivered to your inbox every morning!Links to the NewsSMU cancels plan to host 'unapologetically Muslim' CAIR event | EducationRyan Blackwell now president of Lifeway Christian Resources | Church & MinistriesChristian doctors win temp. protection from assisted suicide law | U.S.The Satanic Temple video depicts 'abortion ritual' at Hobby Lobby | U.S.Evangeline Lilly embraces faith project 'Legend of Destruction' | EntertainmentBethel Church leader Bill Johnson remarries | Church & MinistriesAncient Christian amulet found in Turkey: report | World

What Happens East of Eden | Promises That Make Us Generous | Ethan BrickerWe all want God's promises—but what happens when the promise becomes more important to us than the God who made it?In Genesis 12–13, God gives Abram incredible promises of land, descendants, blessing, protection, and ultimately blessing for all the families of the earth. But when Abram and Lot face conflict over their possessions, we see two very different responses to God's blessing.Abraham lives open-handed because he trusts the God who made the promise. Lot chooses based on what he can see.In this message, we explore what happens east of Eden—and how the wilderness reveals what is really happening in our hearts.We'll ask:Have you been jealously guarding what God has given you?Do your possessions possess you?Who is the highest power in your life?The wilderness is where God stress-tests our hearts. It teaches us that the destination isn't ultimately the goal—the goal is walking with the God who designed the destination.Because when God Himself is our promise, we can finally hold His blessings with an open hand.“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” — Matthew 6:21

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on Karl and Crew, we continued our weekly theme, “5 Senses.” Brian Sanders, the author of “The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life,” explained how recognizing different seasons of calling can help us discern God’s purpose for where we are right now. Then Steve DeWitt, Pastor of Bethel Church and author of “Enjoying God in Everything,” shared how the beauty we experience through our senses can lead us from wonder to worship. We then turn to our listeners and pose the question, “How did your spiritual appetite change once you became new in Christ?” You can hear the highlights of today’s program on the Karl and Crew Showcast. If you're looking to hear a particular segment from the show, look at the following timestamps:Gospel Message [ 00:49 ]Call Segment [ 11:30 ]Steve DeWitt [ 13:10 ]Brian Sanders [ 23:49 ]Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn More about The Pastorate's Lead Pastor FellowshipAbbotsford Pentecostal AssemblyThe Pastorate ConferenceThe Pastorate's City MeetupsThe Pastorate Pastors RetreatEpisode NotesIn this conversation, Jordan sits down with Dave Funk, lead pastor of Abbotsford Pentecostal Assembly and a peer facilitator in The Pastorate's Lead Pastor Fellowship. Dave and Jordan connect about both being pastors' kids who went on to pastor under their fathers. Dave opens up about what it has been like raising his own three teenagers in the front row of church, while reflecting on his own upbringing in the church. From there, Dave traces his journey into pastoral ministry, including growing up assuming pastoring was "his dad's thing," a season of surrender to God's call on his life, five years serving as his father's assistant pastor, and then the decision to leave and pastor elsewhere rather than to succeed his dad. He and his wife, Rebecca, discerned that call together, first at Bethel Church in Penticton, a declining, aging congregation they helped bring back to life, and later in Abbotsford, where he arrived in the middle of COVID to a church recovering from a difficult leadership transition.In the back half of the conversation, Dave discusses his leadership philosophy, that compounding health in the life of the church has the power to build a consistent and healthy congregation over time. He reflects on his experience in The Pastorate's Lead Pastor Fellowship, first as a participant, now as a peer facilitator for its second intake.Jordan and Dave discuss:What it's like to raise pastor's kids in the front row, and the pressure Dave tries not to pass on to his own three teenagers,Growing up under his dad's leadership without ever sensing a gap between who his dad was on Sunday and who he was at home,Serving five years as his dad's assistant pastor, and the bullets his dad took for him that he didn't learn about until years later,Why he chose to leave rather than succeed his dad, Walking into a declining, aging church in Penticton and, later, a church in Abbotsford recovering from a difficult transition,and his return to The Pastorate's Lead Pastor Fellowship as a peer facilitator for its second cohort.PartnersWe couldn't do the work we do at The Pastorate without your generous support. We invite you to pray, share, and give towards seeding a hope-filled future for the Canadian church.Contact John Wright at Generis for help cultivating a culture of generosity in your church.

Pastor Steve DeWitt, author of Loneliness: Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It, joins Wayne Shepherd in conversation on this topic.  (click for more…)Websites:  www.moodypublishers.com/loneliness, www.bethelweb.org Steve DeWitt, longtime pastor of Bethel Church in Northwest Indiana, talks about his book Loneliness: Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It. DeWitt shares that he was a well-known "never married" megachurch pastor for over two decades before marrying his wife Jennifer (they connected after she read an article he'd written on loneliness), and he draws on that long stretch of singleness to reflect on loneliness biblically rather than as a book about marriage curing it. He distinguishes aloneness (neutral), loneliness (bad), and solitude (good), and outlines three ways people "waste" their loneliness — isolating themselves, becoming obsessed with unmet expectations, and distracting themselves through things like binge-watching or doomscrolling. He then turns to how to "redeem" loneliness: recognizing it as fundamentally a vertical longing for restored relationship with God (echoing Augustine and Chesterton), and then letting that drive people toward sacrificial, others-focused love modeled on Jesus rather than self-focused pursuit of companionship. The conversation closes with reflections on how social media and constant connectivity paradoxically deepen isolation, and DeWitt encourages listeners to examine their social media habits as part of a healthier response to loneliness.                                             NEXT WEEK:  Babbie MasonSend your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting CompanyP.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

On today's Bible Answer Man broadcast (07/28/26), Hank answers the following questions:My pastor quoted from Eugene Peterson's The Message Bible translation this Sunday, which bothered me. Can you share some wisdom on this? William - CA (0:48)What is your position on “Abraham's bosom”? Steve - UT (5:08)In John 3, what does Jesus mean by saying that one must be born of water and spirit to be born again? Danny - Modesto, CA (7:42)Where, in terms of what heaven is, is the physical body of Jesus? Eddie - Nashville, TN (9:55)Isaiah 40:22 says that God “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth.” What is the meaning of circle here? Ian - St. George, UT (15:11)What do you know about Sozo ministry from Bethel Church? Gale - Edmonds, WA (21:15)

As one piece of the Body of Christ, Bethel Church has specific apostolic and prophetic distinctions that we believe the Lord has called us to carry. In this sermon, Kris Vallotton teaches on the prophetic culture that Bethel cultivates to draw out the divine destiny that God has placed in His people. Because Jesus came to fulfill an old covenant and usher in a new covenant, we now are able to live under a new covenant of prophetic ministry. This prophetic ministry empowers, encourages, and gives people vision to something greater than themselves. Just as Saul was changed into another man and prophesied when he was among the prophets, we are reminded of the significance of community and those we surround ourselves with. When he was in the community he was supposed to be with, he was changed into the man he was supposed to be. The gift of prophecy calls out things in people that are dormant in them and causes a germination of the calling that God has placed inside of them. We pray that as you listen to this message that the Lord would speak to you and release revelation and grace to walk in all that He has called you to. , , , , xx, , , ,t, ,

There are still God-fearing, God-loving people attending Bethel Church. That's exactly what makes this episode hard to make. But in light of recent events, we have to ask: Have we reached the point of mark and avoid? This is a one-stop, 30-minute review of concerns with Bethel to see the patterns.ABOUT THIS EPISODE:Remnant Radio has kept an eye on Bethel for years - through the grave soaking scandal, through Bill Johnson's daughter-in-law describing the Holy Spirit as a "genie," through the New Age framework quietly baked into Physics of Heaven, through Culture of Honor, through Bob Jones and Kenneth Copeland getting platformed anyway, and now through Shawn Bolz. We have reviewed many of these practices and situations over the years, and our comments have grown firmer and sterner toward Bethel leadership.Now there's a new development, and it's not about doctrine. According to Mike Winger's sources, the people currently being let go at Bethel are the ones who kept asking the questions about transformation and change. If that's accurate, it isn't a staffing decision, but a pattern about the thinking and decision making of Bethel leadership.So Josh asks the question a lot of Bethel's own alumni have been asking quietly for months, and finally says out loud what he's suspected for a while: is this still a church working through its mistakes, or has leadership moved somewhere it can't recover from? Are we at mark and avoid?This isn't a pile-on. It's for the people who've genuinely loved this church and are trying to figure out what faithfulness looks like now that the pattern is this clear.0:00 – Introduction0:22 – Bethel Controversy Background3:55 – Grave Soaking & Genie Scandal5:34 – Michael Brown Interviews Bill Johnson6:20 – Winger's First Bethel Review7:21 – Physics Of Heaven Exposed8:32 – Kenneth Copeland Endorsement8:58 – Shawn Bolz Scandal Breaks10:03 – Winger Exposes Shawn Bolz13:56 – Bethel's Public Apology16:47 – Passion Translation Plagiarism17:23 – Layoffs And NDAs20:01 – NDA Rights And Scripture27:01 – PR Versus Real Repentance29:54 – Examine Your Own ChurchPLAYLIST ON POLICING THE CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMsjeViSScFHSZqA1Q85VKxRrkvEYXBecPREVIOUS RR EPISODES OF BETHEL CHURCH:2020 - https://youtu.be/sOTdC5LnrVA2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soFFhiYZY-E2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMkKILXkKWs2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvpVqmk5RU2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6k91pFZWVc2022 - https://youtu.be/w8b7y7mWIvg2022 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XlUPjWRqpc2022 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hseSRlFKzSM2022 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTcgjtvc91E2022 - https://youtu.be/9Bys8_ylGUk2026 - https://youtu.be/TN6UbN0Vq6E2026 - https://youtu.be/NSWzRCDTPNU2026 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U1-rugrYZM2026 - https://youtu.be/PEKIozi7Cjc2026 - https://youtu.be/z0PTDwlpQPo2026 - https://youtu.be/AcXNqe4vg6ESubscribe to The Remnant Radio newsletter and receive our FREE introduction to spiritual gifts eBook. Plus, get access to: discounts, news about upcoming shows, courses and conferences - and more. Subscribe now at TheRemnantRadio.com. Support the showABOUT THE REMNANT RADIO: The Remnant Radio exists to equip believers who are hungry for the radical middle of both Word and Spirit. Subscribe for twice-weekly content on theology, church history and the gifts of the Spirit.

On June 28th, 2026, Kris continued his series on Bethel's family distinctions, exploring what it means to be equipped, sent, and empowered to transform the world around us. Is church meant to simply gather believers, or is it meant to train and deploy them? Are we called to consume ministry, or to carry the Kingdom wherever we go? In this message, Kris unpacks the purpose of the fivefold ministry, the difference between a pastoral and apostolic culture, and why every believer is called to full-time ministry. Discover how God's heart has always been to equip His people to disciple nations, carry His presence beyond the church walls, and become a life-giving river that brings transformation wherever it flows. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Register for School of the Prophets 2026 In this week's episode of Cultural Catalysts, Lindsay Reiman sits down with author and prophetic leader Bethany Hicks for a conversation that's part interview, part activation. Have you ever felt exhausted—not because you're doing too much, but because you might be carrying something you're no longer meant to carry? Together they unpack one of the most important questions every believer must answer: What season am I in, and what is God asking me to do in it? Bethany shares practical keys for discerning your current season, recognizing the assignments God has given you, and letting go of the ones He never intended you to carry forever. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ X: https://x.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

As the global Body of Christ, the Lord has given different churches various functions that are unique to them. Bethel Church is simply one part of the global Church but it's important to realize that God has given us specific distinctions that we are called to. As this sermon is a continuation from the Kris Vallotton's previous messages in this series, he continues to expand upon the unique assignments we have as a house. As we believe that we are a royal priesthood, the posture in leading the congregation is to train them to release the kingdom everywhere they go. Because we believe that you become a priest in ministry as soon as you receive Christ, there is now no difference between what is sacred and secular in your life, everything becomes an expression of worship and ministry to the Lord. As our church is an apostolic and prophetic house, training and equipping the saints with deployment in mind is our emphasis. This looks like focusing on the five-fold ministry so that the body looks more like Christ by equipping the saints with discernment so that we are no longer deceived and sent out to reproduce the kingdom of God everywhere we go. We pray that as you listen to this sermon, you receive supernatural boldness and empowerment to equip and love the Body of Christ and to disciple nations until the whole earth looks like Heaven.

On June 14th, 2026, Kris shared a powerful message on Bethel's apostolic distinctions and the values that have shaped the culture of the church for decades. What happens when believers move beyond attending church and embrace their calling as a royal priesthood? Are we called to simply gather, or are we called to be equipped and sent? In this message, Kris unpacks key themes including worship as a lifestyle, living from your identity as a new creation, the role of the fivefold ministry, and the call to bring the Kingdom of God into every sphere of society. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Over the last several months, there have been difficult conversations surrounding the prophetic movement. Questions have been raised. Mistakes have been exposed. And for many people, disappointment, confusion, and even pain have followed. As leaders, we've spent countless hours praying, listening, seeking counsel, and asking ourselves some hard questions. In this week's Cultural Catalysts episode, I sat down with my longtime friend Dano McCollam to discuss where the prophetic has been, where it's going, and what healthy prophetic culture looks like moving forward. We share a little bit about our personal process and how we've been experiencing these things. Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ X: https://x.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

On May 31st, 2026 Kris shared a foundational message about Bethel's apostolic distinctions and what it means to live as a royal priesthood. In this sermon, he unpacks the core values that shape Bethel's culture and challenges us to move beyond simply attending church into embracing our God-given identity and purpose. Recounting lessons from the past season, Kris shares who we are as Bethel Church. Are you living as a sinner trying not to fail, or as a saint empowered to transform the world around you? Are you viewing ministry as something that happens inside the church, or recognizing that every believer is called to bring heaven into every sphere of society? Connect with Kris Vallotton: Website: https://www.krisvallotton.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kvministries/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kvministries/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvministries Additional Resources by Kris Vallotton: https://shop.bethel.com/collections/kris-vallotton-ministries/Book About Kris Vallotton: Kris Vallotton is the Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church, Redding, and is the Co-Founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) and Spiritual Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and President of Moral Revolution and a sought-after international conference speaker. Kris and his wife, Kathy, have trained, developed, and pastored prophetic teams and supernatural schools all over the world.

Segment 1 • Todd revisits a memorable conversation with John MacArthur and reveals the hymn he struggled to choose as his favorite. • Are pastors neglecting a surprisingly important communication skill that can make biblical preaching more effective? • What encouraging signs are emerging at Grace Community Church following MacArthur's passing? Segment 2 • One church's "What to Expect" page raises bigger questions about what churches are really trying to attract people with. • What happens when churches promise great coffee, entertained kids, and a better family life? • Todd contrasts seeker-sensitive strategies with a long-term vision of generational discipleship and spiritual legacy. Segment 3 • Why are some rapidly growing churches still embracing methods and messages that critics say are spiritually dangerous? • Todd examines recent controversies surrounding Bethel Church and asks whether reform efforts go far enough. • Has the prosperity gospel become far more mainstream than many Christians realize? Segment 4 • A surprising statistic suggests most professing Christians believe God wants them to be financially prosperous. • Would you rather have a larger bank account—or peace, joy, and a clear conscience? • Todd challenges popular assumptions about blessing, wealth, and what true prosperity actually looks like. ___ Thanks for listening! Wretched Radio would not be possible without the financial support of our Gospel Partners. If you would like to support Wretched Radio we would be extremely grateful. VISIT https://fortisinstitute.org/donate/ If you are already a Gospel Partner we couldn't be more thankful for you if we tried!

On today's program, Christian curriculum publisher Orange has released investigation findings after its founder was accused of sexual misconduct—and it's highlighting key lessons other ministries can learn. We'll take a look. Plus, the 2026 annual meeting for the Southern Baptist Convention was this week, putting some core tensions on display. From sexual abuse reforms to immigration and women preachers, Southern Baptists faced defining votes. We'll have details. And, two big ministry acquisitions to announce—Salem Media Group and Phoenix Seminary. But first, Bethel Church in Redding, California, is cutting ties with four big-name ministry leaders. Bethel says it will no longer platform Todd Bentley, Mike Bickle, Shawn Bolz, or Bob Hartley. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. We get database and other technical support from Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, and Casey Sudduth. Writers who contributed to today's program include Kim Roberts, Bob Smietana, Kathryn Post, Tony Mator, Makella Knowles, and Jessica Etturalde. Until next time, may God bless you.

What if communion was never meant to be a lifeless ritual, but a living encounter with the Person of Love Himself? In this episode, Dr. Catherine Toon invites you back into the early church’s lost revelation of communion as intimacy, union, and shared life with Christ and one another. As Catherine shares vulnerably from her own journey out of religious burnout, she unpacks how religion has toxified powerful spiritual practices, like communion, and how Jesus gently restores them as gifts to nourish your body, soul, and spirit. You’ll discover that communion is not about performing for God or “qualifying” yourself, but about receiving the finished work of Christ and remembering that you are already included in the circle of Love. In this episode, you’ll learn: - How the early church practiced communion as a joyful “love feast,” not a cold, symbolic exercise - Why communion is meant to be a living encounter with Christ’s presence, not a fear-based check-box - How to move from complacency and religious trauma into real intimacy and union with God - Why communion proclaims Jesus’ finished work over your shame, unworthiness, and exhaustion - How to begin reclaiming communion in your everyday life—slow, tender, and deeply personal with Jesus Whether you’ve been hurt by religion, feel disconnected from church, or simply hunger for a deeper experience of God’s love, this conversation will help you rediscover communion as a doorway into the heart of the Trinity. You’re not on the outside trying to get in—you’re already welcomed to the table. Links Mentioned How to Handle Scripture Rightly: https://catherinetoon.com/how-to-handle-scripture-rightly-part-one/ Jamie Englehart: https://www.youtube.com/@JamieEnglehart Laura C Worship: https://www.youtube.com/@LauraCWorship To support the ministry with tax-deductible donations: https://catherinetoon.com/support/ Marked by Love, Revised & Expanded Edition is here:
#1 Best Seller & #1 New Release in our category! Get your copy: https://amzn.to/3K2J9ZV God, Male & Female?: https://amzn.to/49hzCIM CONNECT WITH CATHERINE: ► Website: https://catherinetoon.com/ ► Facebook: @catherinetoonmd
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 Catherine has been in the business of changing lives for decades as an author, speaker, and prophetic coach. She is incredibly gifted at calling forth personal destiny and has helped thousands of individuals who are on that journey.

Bethel Church released a NEW statement via email addressing the controversies and scandals involving their organization and the people they've endorsed and promoted. We've been consistent on this: the charismatic movement needs internal voices willing to evaluate its most influential organizations with theological honesty. Tribal loyalty doesn't serve the people who've been hurt. And reflexive dismissal doesn't serve the people who are genuinely trying to find their way forward. Both are too easy.So we're reading the statement. We're weighing what's there. We'll do our best to call balls and strikes, and give you a framework for evaluating it yourself.Our hope is that this conversation helps you think through what genuine accountability and repentance look like in a public Christian context and what we should actually expect from leaders and organizations when things have gone wrong.0:00 – Introduction0:35 – Shawn Bolz Allegations Overview6:14 – Kris Vallotton's Response8:05 – Bethel's Statement 14:15 – Governance & Leadership Review25:39 – Accountability & Safety Update33:26 – Wider Culture Ministry Review42:49 – Platforming & Reinstatement Policy52:05 – California Privacy Law ConcernsPOLICING THE CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMsjeViSScFHSZqA1Q85VKxRrkvEYXBecABOUT THE REMNANT RADIO:The Remnant Radio exists to equip believers who are hungry for the radical middle of both Word and Spirit. Subscribe for twice-weekly content on theology, church history and the gifts of the Spirit.

Jason Vallotton is a pastor on staff at Bethel Church in Redding, California as well as a founder of BraveCo, a ministry dedicated to the healing and development of men as a means to healing and developing the world. Jason joins Ned Schaut for a deeply honest conversation about masculinity, healing, discipleship, and the kind of fatherhood that changes generations. This episode goes far beyond surface-level parenting advice. Jason shares openly about growing up with a father who created a home where confession was safe, truth mattered, and failure did not equal rejection. He talks candidly about struggling with pornography as a teenager, walking through divorce and betrayal, seasons of depression, and learning how to process pain instead of avoiding it. At the center of the conversation is one powerful idea: Most men are failing at the things they care about most because nobody showed them how to become men. Jason and Ned unpack why men often pour themselves into work, business, hobbies, or achievement while quietly feeling lost in marriage and family life. Business has clear targets. Family often doesn't. Most men were never discipled into emotional health, intentional fatherhood, or biblical masculinity. The conversation explores: why men need mentors and spiritual fathers, * how unresolved pain becomes bondage, why vulnerability and strength are not opposites, how fathers shape a child's understanding of God, and why no young man should have to stumble blindly into manhood. One of the standout moments comes when Jason describes his father in a way that we all strive to have our kids say about us: “My dad's not perfect. He's just the best man that I know.” This episode is for fathers, husbands, leaders and men who are tired of isolation, tired of pretending, and ready to intentionally become the kind of man their family can depend on.Mentioned in this episode:Rise Up Kings Genesis

Alan's Soap https://AlansSoaps.com/ToddHonor John's memory and the legacy he created for Ian and Alan with Alan's Artisan Soaps “John's Favorites” bundle.  Get one bar of each of his favorites for only $28.99. Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comBe confident in your portfolio with Bulwark! Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review. Go to KnowYourRiskPodcast.com today. Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com/ToddGet the new limited release, The Sisterhood, created to honor the extraordinary women behind the heroes. Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at:The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple PodcastsThe Todd Herman Show | Podcast on SpotifyWATCH and SUBSCRIBE at: Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeSpot non-Christians and wolves in sheep's clothing with this one weird trick!Episode links:Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft, who serves on the Clergy Advisory Board of Planned Parenthood, explains the bible is "problematic" for promoting white supremacy and capitalism, but is redeemable if viewed throught a 'womanist' lens.  "I am so sick of the patriarchy" 'I'm going to say this in the nicest way possible. I don't care what the bible says. I just don't care … at the end of the day Paul was wrong." Pastor Joe Smith of Meizon Church (Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) explains that he doesn't care what Paul says in the bible. Middle Church pastor says if you believe God appointed/ ordained/ instituted a "rapist, criminal, weasel from hell"  like Trump to be president, then you aren't a Christian. "I'm about to blow your mind. If Jesus walked the earth, and was not sick, and he lives inside of us, how are we sick? " 'Mary Jo' on the Shieldmaidens podcast, doing the opposite of blowing minds. Bethel Church's Kris Valloton says the reason you can raise the dead and heal the sick is because you're a god

Gary Dorrien is the Niebuhr Chair at Union, and nobody alive can walk you through the whole arc of Reinhold Niebuhr with his range — from the German-American pastor's kid at Elmhurst and Eden, to the Yale divinity student who felt like a country boy among thoroughbreds, to the Detroit preacher at Bethel Church writing articles in 1916 begging German Americans to prove their Americanism months before Wilson took the country into war, to the young professor at Union who felt like an imposter for a decade and overcompensated by ridiculing everyone in sight, to the author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), the bomb that ended the social gospel's fifty-year run and rerouted the entire field of American social ethics overnight. This is the second live Q&A for the Theology for Troublemakers class, and Gary, Aaron Stauffer, and I work through student questions covering the whole trajectory: why Niebuhr still towers over the field; what H. Richard's devastating private letter did to his brother's theology; how he metabolized Augustine into Christian realism in the Gifford Lectures that became Nature and Destiny; why Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) is the road not taken; and how Niebuhr drifted into establishment Democratic Party machinery with no emotional drama at all — the one transition he made smoothly, and arguably the one that cost the most. Plus the neocons who stole him, William Cavanaugh calling Gary a heretic at AAR in Montreal, Ron Stone tearing up when he says "saint," and the legendary Claremont nickname Five-Beer Barthian. Gary and Aaron are both coming to Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City in October. The class lives at homebrewedclasses.com. JOIN ⁠THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.