When Here Isn’t Where You Want to Be

0:11 It is so good to be with you tonight. I have really been looking forward to our time together. I hope that you brought a Bible with you. You can open up to Ezekiel chapter 1, one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture, and I think that you're going to see why. but I've mentioned it before. I've mentioned that I am a road trip guy. If given the chance, I love a good road trip. There's just something fun about the experience of a long car ride driving across state lines, but there's always invariably a time in a road trip and a longer road trip where you've been driving for a while, you are driving, you have a lot more driving ahead of you and where you're at on your trip is interminably boring. You guys can relate to that. One of my favorite road trips is driving from here in Albuquerque to San Diego. I love San Diego, but if you've driven that drive, you'll know that there's a specific stretch from Gila Bend to El Centro, which is maybe the most desolate place on God's green earth. And it goes for hours. Once you hit it, you know I have hours more of this. And so you're thinking about where you want to be, the beach in San Diego, but you're not there. You have hours and hours of some of the most boring, flat geography ahead of you. And it can be frustrating. And I think that probably all of us at some level can relate to feeling stuck or at least to feeling frustrated at where we are in our life and wanting to be somewhere other than where we are. So tonight, I want to call this message, when here isn't where you want to be. But that frustration of being here when you want to be there, I think it can be felt at a number of levels. I think on one hand, you can feel that vocationally, right? Maybe you believe that, hey, I should be at a different place in my career.

2:08 I should be making more money than I am based on other people who are my peers. Man, I really thought the business would have taken off by now, and it's not. Maybe it's relational. Maybe for you, you're thinking, man, I really thought that I'd be married by now. I really thought I'd have a family by now. Maybe you're recovering from divorce, and you're thinking, man, I really thought that I would have met the right person. I would have gotten remarried, but it just, it hasn't happened yet. It can be difficult to be in that place when you want to be somewhere else. It could be spiritual, maybe. Maybe for you, you feel like you should be past this sin, this habit in your life. You feel that you should be growing in your walk. You're doing all the right things, but you seem like you're treading water in your walk with the Lord and you're frustrated. Or like a friend I met this weekend at the story conference, which by the way, if you were there, I just want to celebrate all that God did at such an incredible event and the way he moved in the lives of the youth, the young adults, but I met one of my new friends and he just simply said, man, right now I just feel behind.

3:15 I look at everybody else and I feel behind. I think that the man that we're gonna study, the prophet Ezekiel, I think that he would probably feel very similar. And quite frankly, I know what that pain is as well. I know the pain of being in a season or a moment in your life where you wish desperately that God would take you out of it and put you somewhere else. And there's a level of frustration that God hasn't done that yet. That's a difficult place to be. I've been there before. And so my message tonight is very, very simple. It's for those of you in this room, you are weary, you are wounded, you are discouraged and disheartened. My hope is that you will leave tonight maybe with just some extra level of encouragement, that you will maybe have some level of fire stoked in you again, that God is still moving and working in your life because that is what I believe.

4:08 you may not want to be where you are right now. You may not want to be right here, but where you are right here is where God has you. And I believe that when we realize that, when we come to terms with that, there's actually a blessing for that if we're able to receive that. So Pastor Skip, housekeeping wise, Pastor Skip has been covering about three chapters a week on average as we've been going through Job. Tonight, I'm gonna cover about three verses, okay? So a little bit of a change of pace, but about three verses. And after I'm done tonight, I just felt led that we as a church needed to spend some extra time just sitting in God's presence and lingering. So after I'm done up here, once I'm all done, I'm out of the way. We're just going to have some more worship, some more time for prayer. So if you want to pray over somebody else, you need prayer. Our team is going to be up here.

5:00 So I just think that'll be good for us as a church. But like I said, we're looking at three verses, and I have about four observations that struck me, and frankly, they're in no particular order. But if you are taking notes, I'd encourage you to write them down. Number one, if you're ready, your yesterday deserves to be remembered. Your yesterday deserves to be remembered. Let's jump into our text. We're going to read it over and over. Ezekiel 1.1. In the 30th year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, while I was among the exiles by the Kabar Canal, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month, it was the fifth year of King Jehoiakim's exile. The word of the Lord came directly to the priest Ezekiel son of Buzi in the land of the Chaldeans by the Kabar Canal. The Lord's hand was on him there.

5:54 You might be thinking, okay, we're not going to get into the crazy stuff in Ezekiel. No, actually, because I actually think there's a lot that we need to unpack just in these three verses alone. Completely unrelated, last month I was in a car accident. Thankfully, it wasn't too bad. I was taking a left. I was making a late night run to Trader Joe's. I was in the intersection. Somebody blew the light. I kind of saw them coming, so I was able to slam on my brakes. It could have been worse. But still, nonetheless, cars made contact, hit and run. They kept going. But two days later, I was walking around. I was like, why am I, like, so stiff? Like, ah, like, it's like I haven't done anything. Like, I haven't worked out. Like, why am I so stiff? And it hit me. Oh, that's right. I was in a car accident two days ago. I had forgotten, even over the course of those 48 hours, oh, that's right. I was in a car that was hit by another car. And that was actually physically traumatizing. But I think it's interesting because life just moves fast like that.

6:50 My life certainly did. I kept going. I kept going to work, had stuff to do, wasn't at the top of my mind anymore. And I think that we live in a day and age where we forget very easily. In the social media, the doom scrolling algorithm world that we all live in, where it's onto the next post, the next idea, the next event, the next video, the next thing, our Netflix, the next episode auto plays, we never take time to linger. We never take time to reflect on what's happened to us. It's hard for us as a culture to really sit and wrestle with what's happened to us, especially when bad things have happened. We oftentimes don't really think about that. We're very quick to move on to the next thing. And we don't recognize the gravity of what we've been through. And I want to say this, because I think we do live in a culture where there is this kind of perpetual victimhood, where something bad happens to a person and that is their identity.

7:50 They live in it. That's all they do in their life now is they live in that place where something bad happened to them. And I think that that's really, really bad. I think that's very unhealthy. I know that that is not what the Lord has for you. He wants you to heal and move on. That's not what I'm really talking about. In fact, in the Christian community, I often find that people do the opposite. that rather than living as a victim, they actually don't think about the weight of their experiences enough. They don't process all the weightiness of the, especially the tough things that have happened. They just kind of move on. And so I'm just so focused on today that today you almost think happens in a vacuum, that what happened yesterday doesn't impact directly how I'm living today. It's all about just what I'm doing today. And I think that we as a Christian community, sometimes we actually need to think more about our past. The book of Ezekiel, as we've seen, is anchored around a couple dates.

8:50 If you're a student of the Bible, then you know that sometimes we don't know exactly when certain events happen in the Bible. We don't know exactly what day and what month, what year certain books of the Bible were written. What I love about Ezekiel is that's not a problem. We know exactly when Ezekiel was written. We know exactly what day of the month, what year this all happens. July 31st, 593 BC is when Ezekiel receives this vision. It's very helpful, very fun to study for that fact. But because there's a date, not only does it tell us when Ezekiel's story in this book starts, it reminds us about all the things that had happened to Ezekiel before then. Because just like our today does not happen in a vacuum, Ezekiel's July 31st did not happen in a vacuum. He was alive for the exile. And if you remember your biblical history, let's go back. Mini history lesson, if you'll bear with me. In 640 BC, about 47 years before this book starts, the King Josiah came to the throne. Josiah was the last good king in Israel's history. There was lots of reforms that happened. He rediscovered the law. Things were good. There was a revival of worship of Yahweh in Israel at this time because of King Josiah's leadership. So it was a good time to be in Israel under Josiah's reign in the southern kingdom. This is the reign that Ezekiel was born into. He was the son of Boozy the priest, which if you are, just side note, if you are considering naming your child after biblical name, May I suggest not Boozy?

10:27 If you do, fair warning, I'm probably gonna make fun of him for it. But Ezekiel, son of Boozy, Boozy's a priest. Great time to be a priest. God is moving in power. Ezekiel's born under the reign of Josiah. Things are great, but then Josiah dies suddenly and all his reforms stop. And things get worse on the international scale. Babylon and Egypt are fighting it out. They're duking it out for the remains of the Assyrian empire. Babylon is victorious, and then suddenly Nebuchadnezzar comes and says, okay, Judah, you belong to me now. To remind you, I'm going to take a few of your people and take them to Babylon with me. In 605 BC, that's when Daniel and his friends, they go to Babylon in 605 BC. Judah rebels. They think, no, it's okay. We're going to ally with the Egyptians. Nebuchadnezzar does not like that. Homie, don't play that. Nebuchadnezzar comes back and he takes between 8 and 10,000 people from the land and takes them into exile, including the king, including Ezekiel in 597 BC. That is what has happened. Ezekiel was in his mid-20s when his entire world fell apart.

11:40 His job, his vocation, his family, his circle of friends, his entire worldview, his identity was stripped away from him. And he was planted in this small town 3,000 miles away from his home. Termed generational trauma, a traumatic event that affects not just one person, but an entire generation of people. We just commemorated a moment of generational trauma, 9-11, 25 years since it happened. If you were old enough to remember the event, you remember what you were doing that day. I was a child and I remember clearly what I did on 9-11. Even people who weren't old enough to remember it or who weren't even born yet know 9-11 was an important day. Everything for the world changed on that day. Arguably, I would say no single day has changed world history recently more than 9-11. Generational trauma. Ezekiel and the exiles have endured generational trauma to a level that I don't think we can even comprehend.

12:43 But this isn't about generational trauma. This is about personal trauma, personal pain. Let's keep things personal. Look at verse one again. In the 30th year, in the 30th year, this is Ezekiel's 30th year. In the Old Testament, you could not become an ordained priest until you reached the age of 30. But everything up to your 30th birthday was filled with intense training, preparation, education, you're spending time, you're an intern at the temple. figuring out how to be a priest, how to run the temple, how to lead Israel in worship. Ezekiel's entire existence, being in the line of priests, was to be a priest. He had job security, but he loved it. He was so excited to be a priest.

13:32 But by the time he hits year 30, when he should be ordained for service in the temple, he's not anywhere near the temple. He's 3,000 miles away. He's by the Kabar Canal, a glorified drainage ditch in Babylon. That's where he is. He's a priest without a temple.

13:53 Everything he planned to do, imagine this, everything he wanted to do with his life was shattered. Every single dream he ever had for what his life was gonna look like was shattered. I know that there are those of you in this room, you know exactly what that's like. You know what it's like to have your dreams crushed. that divorce, when you spent years building your family, your spouse leaves. Your boss sits you down maybe this year and says, hey, I know that you've been doing this job for 20 years, but I'm so sorry, AI is replacing you. Have a good day. You've watched your dreams get crushed. I am not asking any of you to define yourself, to build your identity off of what's happened to you. But I hope that you understand that what happened to you was weightier than you might want to admit. That what happened to you has more of an impact on your life today than you might want to acknowledge.

14:49 Because like Ezekiel, the years of optimism and excitement and hope and revival gave way to years of depression, of discouragement, of grief. But all of those things shaped Ezekiel to be the man that he is on July 31st, 593 BC. All of that pain, all of the hardship shaped the man that Ezekiel is. In fact, God needed to use those years of pain and suffering to shape, to form Ezekiel into the man that he needed him to be.

15:20 That when God showed up on July 31st, Ezekiel had been prepared. And I'm sure that on that day, Ezekiel woke up, felt like a normal day. Maybe he went down to the Kabar Canal every single day. And every single day he'd sit there yearning to be back in Jerusalem, mourning for a temple that he's never going to get to serve in. But all of that, all of that pain and heartache culminates because it's been shaping and preparing and molding Ezekiel into the man that God wants to use. The beautiful truth that this tells us is that in God's kingdom, even if your past is filled with regret, is filled with broken dreams, that painful past can be a prelude to a beautiful future. Even a past filled with pain can just be a prelude to something far more beautiful, where you have purpose, you have direction, you have vision.

16:16 Don't be a victim of your past, please. But I would also encourage you, don't devalue your past by not learning lessons from it, by not acknowledging that it's shaped you into who you are today. Your yesterday deserves to be remembered. Second observation I have is that who you're with determines what you hear. Who you're with determines what you hear. Look at verse 1 again. While I was among the exiles by the Kibar Canal. While I was among the exiles. After experiencing hardship, how do we respond? How should we respond after we've been through, might not even be generational trauma, might just be personal trauma, personal pain. How do we respond? There's really only two ways. Either you run away from connection with people or you run towards it. You run away from connection with other people or you run towards connection.

17:13 And unfortunately, as a pastor, I see more commonly that Christians do the former not the latter. They run away from connection with other people. They run away. They push people away because the pain is too much and I can't do it. I just need to be alone. Get away from me. I see this a lot after funerals that after the groundswell of support that the family has after all the receptions are done the flowers stop showing up that some people, as they're processing their grief, what happens is they become shut-ins. They stay in their houses. They draw the blinds. All they do is they stay in their house. They never venture out anymore. They never connect. They don't do what they love. They isolate. They push everybody away. They stop answering calls. They push people away. Ezekiel has been ripped away from his home, his family, his profession, his calling, his worldview, his identity. All of it is gone.

18:11 because of the exile. And I came across this poem written by Tamara Eskenazi. She says this, Exile, it is not simply being homeless. Rather, it is knowing that you do have a home, but that your home has been taken over by enemies. Exile, it is not without roots. On the contrary, it is having deep roots, which have now been plucked up. And there you are with roots dangling, writhing in pain, exposed to a cold and jeering world longing to be restored to a native and nurturing soil. Exile is knowing precisely where you belong, but knowing you can't go back. Not yet. I don't think that any of us would really be upset with Ezekiel if his response to all of this was to become a hermit. My dreams, my visions for my life, my plan, my family, everything is gone. It would be understandable if he became a hermit, right? He goes through something painful and he just says, I'm just going to live on my own.

19:16 I don't want to have connection with anybody. I'm just going to be forgotten, right? That's the plot of like every Clint Eastwood movie over the last 40 years. Just like he's a tough man and he's done bad things and he feels bad about it. So he lives on his own and he has a gun probably and he points it at people and growls at them, but he makes a friend and then he discovers the goodness of humanity through that friendship, right? Great movie, great Western movie, great Eastwood movie. Bad way to live as a Christian. Really, really bad way to live as a Christian. That is thankfully not what Ezekiel did. Where was he? He's among the exiles. He's among the exiles, literally in the midst of the exiles. These people, he couldn't be their priest because he can't perform what a priest is supposed to do. He's 3,000 miles away from the temple that he should be at.

20:10 But he's thinking, you know what? I don't know what to do, but I can pray for people. I know the Bible really well. Maybe I can read scripture with them. Maybe I can pray for them. I can at least counsel them and talk to them. He didn't become a hermit. He didn't become a shut-in. He was still with the people. he knew he needed to serve. That's a good priest. He knew he needed to be with the people even though he couldn't be with them the way that he thought he should. And it's there when he's with the people that it says that the heavens are opened. It's when he's with the exiles that he says that he saw visions of God. There's a vast difference between solitude and isolation. Big difference between solitude and isolation. I think Christians, I think we tend to get those two things confused. Solitude is a temporary time with you when you basically step away from the normal rhythms of your life so that you can hear from God clearly.

21:11 You step away. Maybe you go on a prayer retreat or you simply just put your phone down and you spend several hours in solitude praying to the Lord, seeking him, fasting, studying his word, and you hear God's voice in those moments to you. Those are good things. They're temporary times of solitude. Jesus did that. Oftentimes before he would do some great miracle, he would go off by himself, even to the point that his disciples didn't know where he was because he needed to talk with his father. That's different than isolation, which is where you cut off everything and everybody because you don't want to be hurt again, and so you run away from everybody. Isolation is what Elijah did. Had this great ministry victory on Mount Carmel. Prophets of Baal were defeated, and yet one woman says, I'm going to kill you if I find you, and he runs for the hills. After all of Israel said, you know, we're going to recommit to the Lord, Elijah's thinking, I am the lone faithful Israelite.

22:10 Kill me, God. I can't live anymore. Isolation is what Elijah was doing. This was not good solitude. He was running from everything and everyone. I think that God does often speak to us in times of solitude, but I think in some ways that really should be the exception. The majority of the time, God speaks to us in the context of being grounded in community, when we are surrounded with other people, other spirit-filled believers. And I get this question a lot. How do I hear God's voice? And I think the pattern Scripture gives us is very simple. There's three primary ways that God talks to us. Through prayer, we talk to God. Even if he's not talking back, he's shaping our hearts. He's shaping our affections and our idea and our agenda. We're praying to him. We're reading about him in scripture. We're reading what he thinks, what he wants us to do. And guess what? I'm sorry. God also speaks through his people.

23:08 Other wise, spirit-filled believers that God places around you, God can talk to you through them. Could be through a message. Could be through a connect group. Could be through your ministry leader. Could just be meeting with the Christian brother or sister that you meet with every week and have coffee with. God could be speaking to you through them. God speaks just in prayer, in his word, and through his people. Does God speak in dreams and visions? I believe he does. The book of Ezekiel is filled with them. But those, again, those are the exceptions rather than the rule. If you are going to cut yourself off from God's people, you are going to cut yourself off from, really, your ability to hear him very well. Because God often does speak to us through other believers. And when you say, I don't need other believers, you're cutting one of the main ways that God wants to talk to you.

24:01 Despite his personal pain, Ezekiel stayed grounded and connected to the people that he knew that he'd been called to serve. So if you are tempted right now to isolate because of what you've experienced, look at Ezekiel, a man who has been through extreme pain, extreme trauma. And even he says, I'm going to stay with my people. I don't even know necessarily what I'm going to do for them, but I'm going to stay with my people. Hurt and pain convince you that nobody else could possibly understand what you're going through, that you are truly alone in this, that you have hurt like nobody else has hurt, so don't talk to anybody because they don't get it. That's a lie. It's a lie from the enemy meant to drive you to do the one thing that God says is not good for you to do, to be alone. It is not good that man should be alone, and yet that lie is what drives people into isolation. They just don't get me.

24:56 They don't understand it. You don't know what the person sitting next to you has been through. You don't know what they've been through. They don't know what you've been through, but you don't know what they've been through. Don't think that you have the market cornered on pain. You don't. We all have pain. And yes, it's different. But if Ezekiel can stay rooted in community, then so can you. So can you. Ezekiel hurt, but he says, I'm gonna be with other people who are hurting and I'm gonna try to tell them about God. Can't you do the same thing? Can't you do the same thing?

25:31 The best context for you to handle your disappointment, your hurt, your pain, your discouragement is not by yourself. It's in community. That is where God wants you to process those very real, very, very real human emotions in the context of community. Third observation, there's not more of God over there. There's not more of God over there. I'm sure you've heard the term, the grass is always greener, right? You're looking over the fence. The grass is always greener. I got two daughters, so Little Mermaid is on relatively regularly in my house. That's the whole point, right? Ariel, Princess Ariel, has it made under the water. But she's yearning for life up there. I know that it's great down here, but I want to be up there. I want legs, right?

26:23 I want to run around in the sun all day. She's thinking the grass is, metaphorically, because she's in the ocean, greener on the other side. And one of the most damaging attitudes Christians can get into is believing that God must want to use me, but not here, over there. God's best for me can't be here. It's got to be over there. And we use that as an excuse to say, well, I can't do what God's calling me to here because I think he's calling me over there. I just need to get, as soon as I get a job that has better hours, I'm going to come to church regularly. I'm going to read my Bible. I just can't though. I'm tired. I need a better job. I need better hours. And then I'll do that. Man, if only my spouse would be more encouraging, then I would focus on being the husband, the wife that God wants me to be. But it's just not happening yet. Once that happens, then I can be who God calls me. Man, if my kids would just put down their phones, then I would be present with them. But they don't want that, so I'm not going to do that. And over and over and over, the details might change. The story says the same. I don't believe that God can use me here. I think he wants to use me over there.

27:37 God's got to be over there. He surely cannot be here. I don't think God can work in my life until I'm somewhere else. I'm sure Ezekiel felt that way too. He's isolated from the one thing that he was called to do to be a priest. He's 3,000 miles away from it. He can't do the thing that God called him to do, or so it would seem. In a literal sense, Ezekiel can say this, you and I don't get to, that God's presence is in Jerusalem and I'm not. God's presence lived in the temple. I'm 3,000 miles away from it.

28:16 So therefore, man, I need to be there and I can't. I'm not allowed to be there. And yet, God wants to use this wannabe, not quite really a priest, not in Jerusalem, but in Babylon, of all places. Look at verse 3. The Lord's hand was on him there. The Lord's hand was on him there. In Hebrew, it's this very interesting little word, sham. Sham, there. What's fascinating, though, about this time is that it's not necessary in the context of this sentence. It doesn't need to say there. The idea is already grammatically, syntactically complete. Ezekiel added there for emphasis. Because like him, we might be thinking, God can't show up in Babylon. But Ezekiel says, no, it was there that God's hand was on me.

29:13 Not in Jerusalem, it was actually in Babylon. It's actually by the Kabar Canal that God's hand was on me there. God revealed himself in the most unexpected place to the most unexpected person. And no, God didn't open the heavens for Ezekiel in Jerusalem. Ezekiel did not get visions of God in Jerusalem. It was while he's sitting by a drainage ditch in Babylon that God opens the heavens and reveals himself to Ezekiel. Have you decided that God can't use you where you're at? Have you decided that God cannot speak to you where you are at right now?

29:58 That God simply cannot do what you think God ought to do. He can't do it right here. My friends, despite what we might think, there's not more of God over there. There's not more of God over here and less of him over here. God has you right here for a purpose.

30:20 God can use you here just as much as he can use you there. Do you believe that God is sovereign? do you believe that God has a plan for your life right God loves you and has a wonderful plan for life do you believe that then that means that where you are right now is part of that plan if God actually has a plan for your life then where you are right now maybe not just right now you're sitting in church but this season of life you have to admit then that must also be part of God's plan and if that's the case then right here is right where God wants you to be even if this is a short-lived right here right here right now is exactly where god wants you to be this is exactly where god has you and sadly too many people squander their here because they think that they need to be somewhere else god can't use me right here because i need to be over there the grass is so much greener over there i need to be over there and then god can use me i don't think God can use me right here. Right here, I don't know for how long, but right here is exactly where God wants you to be. God wants you to be right here, right now, and not just for your sake, because he wants to teach you things about himself. I believe that God wants to do things through you right here. Even if right here is a season that lasts two more weeks, don't squander you're here because you're pining to be over there. The Lord's hand was on him there.

32:00 I bet, Ezekiel thought, God's hand could only be on me if I'm in Jerusalem doing what I've trained my whole life to do. I bet everything up until the day before this, July 30th of 593 BC, he thought God can only use me if I'm home and I'm not. I don't get to do what I trained to do. And yet, it was on this day, July 31st, 593, that God showed up, that God's hand was on him there, sitting by a glorified drainage ditch in Babylon of all places. In fact, it occurred to me, if Ezekiel would have stayed in Jerusalem, let's just say he missed the exile, we might not even know his name. He might have just been just another priest. We might not have had a book full of his visions, his honest wrestling with God, the beautiful message of restoration that this book is if he would have been in Jerusalem. We might not even know who he is. But because he accepted that he was here for a reason, God's hand was on him there. That's where God's hand was on him. The place that you don't want to be might just be the place the Lord wants to use you the most. The place you do not want to be might just be the place that the Lord wants to use you the most. Your yesterday deserves to be remembered because it has shaped and prepared you for who you are and what God wants to do with you now. Who you're with, the circle that you surround yourself with or don't, determines how well you're going to hear from the Lord. You got to believe that there's not more of God over there. You believe that he's just as active here in my life right now and I need to be obedient to that. And finally, last observation, discomfort doesn't always mean disobedience. Discomfort doesn't always mean disobedience. This morning, I did my Christian duty. I ordered Chick-fil-A for breakfast. Got my four chicken minis, my hash browns, which I think honestly should be on the menu all day long. I don't know why they turned that off. I think I should be able to order that all the time. But Mick Jagger said, you can't

34:05 always get what you want. And I process that. But nonetheless, I go there. And I'll be honest, a Chick-fil-A, like a morning crew at Chick-fil-A, I would frankly trust that high school students who run Chick-fil-A's. I would frankly trust them with the running of our government at this point. But this day, they just weren't on their game. I was in line for 10 minutes longer than I thought that I should have. And it really bugged me. I did get my chicken minis. They were delicious, as were the hash browns in my diet lemonade, but I didn't get it as soon as I wanted to. And it bothered me because I like comfort. I like things on my terms. Like I'm not the kind of person who's like, hey, do you want to go like camp out for two weeks? No, no, that sounds awful. Why would I want to do that? I like AC. I like water. I like being able to make my espresso from machine that's plugged into electricity. Thank you. No. I like comfort. Most Americans do too. You like comfort. That's why we have on-demand streaming. That's why we have same-day delivery.

35:07 Because heaven forbid you get your batteries in two days. I want my batteries before I wake up tomorrow. What a wonderful world we live in. We like comfort. We like things on demand when we want it. We live in a culture of comfort. So much so that we often interpret comfort as a direct sign of God's blessing. Things are good. Things are easy. Things are comfortable. Therefore, this is God's plan for my life. This is what I'm supposed to be doing because things feel right. Things are coming up me. I like it. But on the flip side, in a culture of discomfort, when we experience discomfort, we automatically assume, I've done something. Oh no, I sinned. This is punishment from God. This is discipline. I've made the wrong decision. This isn't comfortable. I don't want to be here. I must have made a mistake. I want to get back to comfort. Look at verse 1.

36:05 I was among the exiles by the Kabar Canal. Verse 3, I was in the land of the Chaldeans by the Kabar Canal, the Lord's hand was on him there. I'm going to share a hot take with you, and you might not be prepared for it. This is a hot take. You're getting free of charge. You're going to be thinking, how did he even come up with this? I don't think Ezekiel wanted to be in Babylon.

36:29 I don't think Ezekiel wanted to be in Babylon, and I have this sneaking suspicion he wasn't very happy when he was there. I don't think Babylon was very comfortable for Ezekiel. He had comfort in Jerusalem. He was the son of a priest. He was probably quite wealthy. He was quite well off. He was well educated. He had job security doing what he loved doing. But now he's in Babylon. He is uncomfortable. He has none of those things that he had in Jerusalem. And yet that's exactly where God calls him. Not while he was in a place of comfort, but actually the opposite, when he was in a place of discomfort. the place that he didn't want to be, the place that it was miserable to be at. Ezekiel did not get the cushy ministry assignment. He got the worst one. Look at chapter three.

37:21 You can flip over a page. Chapter three, verse five. This is God speaking to Ezekiel. For you are not being sent to a people of unintelligible speech or a difficult language, but to the house of Israel, not to the many peoples of unintelligible speech or difficult language, whose words you cannot understand, no doubt, if I sent you to them, they would listen to you. But the house of Israel will not want to listen to you because they do not want to listen to me. For the whole house of Israel is hard-headed and hard-hearted.

37:55 That's tough. Your boss sits you down. Says, I got a promotion for you. You ain't gonna like it. Ezekiel, you are gonna be preaching to a lot of empty rooms. So get comfy doing it, dude. Nobody's gonna listen to you. and I appreciate that God told him this up front. That was very nice of God. Buddy, nobody's going to listen to you. Nobody's going to listen to you. You are not going to have a successful ministry. It's not going to feel fruitful. Are you going to do it? That's a question for us.

38:29 If Jesus' best for you falls well short of what worldly success looks like, are you going to answer that call? If what success in the kingdom of God looks like for you looks nothing like how our world would define success, are you still gonna walk in that calling? Are you gonna do it out of obedience? Because that's what God tells to Ezekiel. Hey, they're not gonna listen to you. I expect you to listen. And you have a choice to either listen to me or to be rebellious like them. What are you gonna do? God told Ezekiel right off the bat, not only are you in a place you don't want to be, doing something that you don't want to do, nobody's going to listen to you while you do it. It's going to be really, really tough. So strap in, buddy. But what I love is that Ezekiel records a very real, a very human response to this. If you look down a few verses, verse 14, the spirit lifted me up and took me away.

39:30 I left in bitterness and an angry spirit and the Lord's hand was on me powerfully. I came to the exiles at Tel Aviv who were living by the Kabar Canal and I sat there among them stunned for seven days. I was so angry and I was so frustrated that God had asked me to do this that I needed to take a week off of work. I had to take seven days of PTO because I just couldn't process and I was upset at what God had asked me to do. can I just say it's okay to wrestle with God over your calling it's okay to wrestle with God over what he's called you to do a few weeks ago when we were studying the the story of the man who had the legion of demons in him that Jesus cast out he begged Jesus Jesus let me come with you please these people are begging you to leave I don't have a community here please take me with you and Jesus says, no, you're going to the toughest mission field, your home, your own people. Paul, the apostle Paul begged Jesus to take away the thorn in his flesh. He's probably thinking, man, I could do ministry so much better if I didn't have whatever this is. And Jesus says, no, my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect, not in your strength or your happiness or your comfort, in your weakness. Jesus himself in the garden even said, if it's possible, let this cup pass.

40:54 So if you are in a place where you are wrestling, if we're being honest, you're a little bit frustrated where God puts you, what God is having you do, then please know you're in really good company. Ezekiel walked away from this transformative experience, kind of frustrated. Actually, a lot of frustrated. nevertheless all of these people they embraced god's call in their life to be uncomfortable they embraced it with obedience knowing that it was going to be uncomfortable knowing that it was not going to be what they wanted they still did it anyway out of obedience because they trusted god's plan for their life that they said okay i'll do it Thank you. my eldest daughter, she's seven. We were driving down the road and she saw how birds kind of park on top of the power line. She asked me, Daddy, how do they do that? Like, you told me that we can never touch that or we'll die.

41:48 How can the birds do that? And again, I'm not an electrician. But I know at least enough to know that the way that those wires are designed, they are so conducive to the electrical flow that there's the path of least resistance. that it's more resistance for the electricity to flow out of the wire into the bird than it is just keep going down the wire. The path of least resistance. I think that unfortunately a lot of us as Christians look for the path of least resistance.

42:16 When I'm trying to decide where is God taking me, I'm looking for the path that seems to flow the easiest. Where things seem to line up the most, that has to be where God has taken me. That's got to be a sign that I'm going in the right direction. I'd say often, it's probably the opposite. That oftentimes the path of least resistance is not a sign of God's blessing. Because sometimes God wants you in the discomfort. He wants you in that place where you are not in your comfort zone and you can't rely on the things that make you comfortable. So you have to trust in him. and that's hard. It's hard to be uncomfortable like that but often in that place of discomfort is where God wants to do his best work. In those places of discomfort. If Ezekiel would have stayed in Jerusalem, we wouldn't have this book.

43:11 We wouldn't know who he is and God wouldn't have shown up to him the way he did. But it's because Ezekiel embraced that discomfort. He understood that I don't want to be here but here is where God has me and so I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna do what God is calling me to do. Even though it's hard and even though my emotional reaction is, I'm really ticked. I'm gonna do it because that is what God has called me to.

43:40 You may not want to be here. In fact, you're here. Whatever here is for you might be the last place that you think that you should be and however long you're here, whether it's minutes, hours, weeks, or decades. Maybe God wants to do his best work in and through you right here. Not because it's comfortable, the opposite, because it's uncomfortable. Because it's not easy to be here. And it would be easier to be over there. But over there is not where God has put you yet. Don't worry, God will move you over there when it's time. Your yesterday should be remembered because it's made you the person you are. God's been writing a story in your life and he's not done yet. He's gonna use all of those bad things to prepare you for what's ahead so you can be of value to him in his kingdom.

44:34 The people you surround yourself with are going to shape for better or for worse how you hear from the Lord. But you have to understand that God is not more over there than he is right here. God can move here, he can move there, he can move anywhere. But right now, in this moment, God puts you here, even if it's uncomfortable.

44:56 Right here is exactly where God wants you to be right now, and he wants to use you. So tonight, as we continue in worship and continue in prayer, I believe that a lot of you, you are struggling with what's happening right here in your life. So if you've been tempted to be isolated, then take Ezekiel's example. Be connected with God's people. Let us pray for you. Let us pray over you. Let us encourage you. If you think that there's nobody else in this earth who might know what you're going through, you might be surprised. You might meet somebody who's gone through exactly what you've been through and has seen the other side and can help you walk through it. At minimum, you're gonna find connection. You're gonna be remembered. You're gonna be reminded that you are not alone. But I believe this, that however long you are right here, God wants to use you right here. Amen? Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this word. we thank you for the beautiful promise that you will meet us wherever we are.

45:52 We don't have to travel 3,000 miles away to a temple. We can be by a drainage ditch. We can be by the Rio Grande River. We can be in a room at Calvary Church and you will meet with us wherever we are. God, we believe that you have a purpose and a plan for us being right here, right now. And we want to embrace all that that means. God, help us not to squander this moment. We want to be used to our fullest potential. We want you to do the work that you want to do in our lives. We pray this in Jesus' mighty and powerful name.