 Howdy radiant church, how's everybody doing? Wasn't the traffic great getting here? Isn't it awesome? This morning I left home at like 6.30 in the morning to get across town, and there were all these crazy people who decided to wake up way too early on Sunday to run 26.2 miles. And I thought, there is no better place to be than in church on Sunday morning. You guys don't agree. You guys don't wanna go run a marathon apparently or something like that, but hey, it's my birthday and somebody asked me, why didn't you stay home on your birthday? And I said, are you kidding me? You can say things that you can never say any other time than on your birthday. So I thought, what a better day to preach than on your birthday. You can say whatever you want to and people have to put up with it because it's your birthday. And I am officially 47 years young and so thank you all for your birthday wishes. And this weekend is very special also because we're beginning a brand new series entitled Heroes. And this is going to be a 12 week series. It's really gonna take us through the heart of summer as we look at the Old Testament at 12 individuals' lives who we're calling heroes. How many of you know that right now most of the good movies that are out are based on like superheroes' lives, the Marvel, the Infinity Wars and things like that. Some of the things that I grew up looking at in comic books have now become some incredible, incredible movies. I grew up really being a big fan of Spider-Man. Any Spider-Man fans out there? A few of us. Some of you were Batman fans. Some of you were Smurf fans and there will be an altar call for you at the end of the service so you can get your heart right. I was a Spider-Man fan and I mean I loved Spider-Man. So I obsessed over the, at that time they had a cartoon that was on TV, Spider-Man used to watch that. And my mom one year when I was like five years old bought me Spider-Man under-rues. Does anybody remember under-rues? If you don't know what under-rues are if you're like under 40, under-rues were like comic book underwear, t-shirts and so like they were Spider-Man. And I wore them over my jeans, had a Spider-Man mask and my dad bought me these bracelets that had darts in them on strings with triggers. So you'd run around, you could hit it and darts would fly out of your bracelets. So imagine a five year old Lee Cummings running around the neighborhood shooting dogs with my darts in my Spider-Man under-rues and plastic mask on. No, I want you to imagine it. I want you, because that was real. That actually took place. And I was obsessed with it. And the whole time I was really young whether it was Star Wars or whether it was Spider-Man, Batman, Superman. More than anything that I wanted to be when I grew up I wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to be a superhero but I realized pretty quickly I did not have any superpowers. But then I found Jesus and I realized that the greatest power is the power of the Holy Spirit and that all of us can be heroes because we can live our lives by the definition of what a hero is. And here's what it is. A hero, this is Webster's, defines, Webster's defines a hero as a person that is noted for courageous acts of faith and character. Courageous acts of faith and character. And so, you know, your Bible is full of the stories of great men and great women that did extraordinary works of faith, obedience, had incredible character. They weren't perfect people but they were people that knew an extraordinary God, did extraordinary things because they had radical obedience and faith. And so over the next 12 weeks we're gonna be taking a look at men and women, 12 kinds of icons out of the Old Testament, the Old Testament universe, so to speak, at these characters. And we're gonna be drawing lessons from their lives because what God wants more than anything is he doesn't just want you and I to know the stories of what other people did. God wants you and I to be people that have stories of our own that other people someday will be inspired and encouraged by. Your faith can become an encouragement to other people. And 1 Corinthians chapter 10 is just this scripture in the New Testament that talks about this. It says, now all of these things happen to them and it's talking about the great men and women of the Bible in the Old Testament. It says that all of these things happen to them as examples and they were written down for our encouragement upon whom the ends of the ages have come. So think about that for a minute. We're gonna take a look at some people's lives, some characters that you know, some that maybe you have never really studied about but you know, you and I have the benefit of looking at their stories after the conclusion. How many of you are people that when you read a novel, you always read the end first and then work your way back? Anybody like that? I used to have a friend who would always read the end of the book and I'm like, why do you do that? You just ruin the whole story. It's like, read it from beginning to end. But if you're gonna read the Bible, you might as well start at the end because the end is where we read that we have the victory, amen? In Jesus. And so, you and I though have the benefit in the Old Testament of reading their stories beginning to end. We know their struggles but we also see God's faithfulness in their victories. But you know, every single one of these stories that we're gonna go through, these were men and women just like you and I. They were imperfect. They had limitations. They had struggles. Some of them had some big struggles. They had giants in some cases. They had empires in other cases. They had persecution and the threat of death over their lives. But every one of them had a story that required an extraordinary God to show up in a supernatural way to get through it. They weren't like you and I where we can now read their stories and see the finish line. When they were in it, it was just like your story. They didn't know the end from the beginning. It's like, how am I gonna get through this? They were average people, normal people, just like you and I who believed God. And so, we have the benefit of their story. And if you read other people's stories, it's what's called a testimony. And a testimony becomes a prophetic foundation stone for your future by being encouraged by other people's stories. And so today, we're gonna start. This is our very first hero of this series. And we're looking at the story of Noah. Everybody turn your Bibles to Genesis chapter six. The story of Noah. If you were like me and you grew up in church, one of the very first stories that they teach you in Sunday school is about Noah and the Ark. Noah built an Archea Archea. I mean, that was Sunday school, 101 right there. And so we don't know a lot about what Noah's Ark looked like until pretty recently a very inspired, very ambitious individual who wanted to see what the Ark really looked like. Actually spent years and millions of dollars that he raised before there was a Kickstarter and he built an exact replica of Noah's Ark. And there's actually, we have a couple pictures of it. This is an actual photo of the Ark that he built. If they'll turn the other angle of it, you can see it. Here's another angle of Noah's Ark. This is exact specifications as close as they could become. This is what Noah's Ark looked like. Now we don't know what Noah looked like, but we're pretty sure it did not look like this. He did not look like Evan Almighty and that is not God. But that was Hollywood's best attempt at it. But if we'll look here at Genesis chapter six, we're gonna pick up in verse number nine and we're gonna read the story, see the specifics and we're gonna draw some lessons from the life of this hero. It says in verse number nine, these are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and Noah walked with God. And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and the earth was filled with violence and God saw the earth and behold it was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth, therefore make yourself an ark of gopher wood, make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it. The length of the ark, 300 cubits, that's roughly 450 feet. It's breadth, 50 cubits, which is 75 feet and it's height, 30 cubits, which is 45 foot tall. Make a roof for the ark and finish it to a cubit above and set the door on the ark in its side. Make it with the lower second and third decks. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which the breath of life is in under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die but I will establish my covenant with you and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you and of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female of the birds, according to their kind of the animals, according to their kind of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to keep them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, store it up, it shall serve as food for you and for them. Noah did this in this next last part of chapter six is so important. It says, now Noah did this and he did all that God commanded him. Chapter seven, verse one, it says, then the Lord said to Noah, go into the ark, you and your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation, take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens, also male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth for in seven days, I will send rain on the earth 40 days and 40 nights and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out and Noah did all that the Lord commanded him. So man, this is extensive information and if you wanna read the whole story, which you should, should really start at Genesis five and then read all of Genesis chapter six because you're gonna find out an awful lot of information out of those chapters about the day that Noah lived in. How many of you have read through the book of Genesis and realized pretty quickly that the Old Testament has some really strange stuff in it? Have you ever read through it? When most people start off reading Genesis, if you're trying to read the Bible through in a year, typically you get through the story of Genesis. It's when you get to Leviticus that the breaks get thrown on. It's like, if I read another genealogy, I might as well read the phone book. I mean, it's like, how many different names can be get so and so and so and so and so and so I get it, but most people read through Genesis and when you read through Genesis, you find out pretty quickly that there are some stuff that makes sense and then there are some stuff that I think because a culture and time and distance and the fact that the writer, Moses of the book of Genesis isn't trying to give us the biography of every single human being. He's drawing a line, skipping across the surface of the beginnings of history to show us how we got to where we are and also to show us how God was guiding history by revealing himself to certain individuals because he had an end goal in mind, which was Jesus. Ultimately, the Old Testament is pointing us towards Jesus. Where God sends his son to be the redemption of a fallen world was started in a garden that resulted with a fall is repaired in a garden when Jesus says, not my will be done, but yours be done and he's willing to go to the cross so that at the end of the story in the book of Revelation, what starts at a tree and a garden starts with a tree in a city and Jesus is the Lamb and he is the story himself. But the Old Testament is just full of some things that along the way we look at and it's like, man, what is that all about? And what you quickly pick up out of Noah's story is that the times that Noah was living in are wicked times. I mean, they're just not normal times that pretty quickly from the fall of Adam, it says in the beginning of chapter six that man began to multiply on the earth quickly and daughters were born and the population began to expand and with the population expanding, there's also this increase of wickedness and evil that is supernatural in its dynamic. It's not just the natural course of things, it's actually very demonically inspired. And part of some of the weird stuff that you see here is that it talks about a race or a group of people that are on the earth during the times of Noah that are connected to the rise of evil and they're called the Nephilim. If you read that in your Bible, it'll say the Nephilim were the offspring of what it describes as the sons of God who saw the daughters of man, found them attractive, went in and married them, had relations with them and the result was they gave birth to the Nephilim. Now Nephilim, if you read your margins in your Bible, which hopefully you bring your Bible to church because you're gonna see things in the margins, underline things that are so important to you. But if you look at the margins, the word Nephilim in the Hebrew means giants. So when you see later on in the pages of scripture, giants in the promised land when the spies go in and Goliath and all of these different giants, these are Nephilim, they're the offspring of the sons of God who go into the daughters of man. Now there are two different schools of thought and this is bonus theological information for those of you who are nerds like me. There are two different schools of thought about who the Nephilim were and based on who the sons of God and who the daughters of man are. One school of thought says that the sons of God is a phrase that means the righteous descendants of the righteous line of Seth. So Seth is the third child, the third son that Adam and Eve had, he is the one who through the line of Seth, Noah is born and it's kind of a, it's the genealogical family line that dates itself back to the covenants of God. And then when it talks about the daughters of man, it's talking about the rest of the population that's probably the descendants of Cain, rebellious against God. And so there's a school of thought that says that they violated their covenant with God by intermarrying with Cain's descendants and because of that wickedness began to take over. There's another school of thought that's actually more ancient. It's really interesting, but it's really strange and it's held thousands of years ago, rabbis actually interpreted this as saying that the sons of God were actually a group of angels called watchers that God had appointed watchers over nations and over the course of human history being played out by guarding over certain groups of individuals and people like Israel and Egypt. They had angelic guardians over them. But that those sons of God actually saw human women and decided that they wanted to, they wanted to have sexual relations with them. And so they took, they violated God's boundaries. They entered into history, had relations and had this hybrid of a human and a demonic spiritual being that produced a giant. And that's what the Nephilim were. Now, lest you think that's weird, which it is, you're not gonna find that on most dating sites was the product of an angel and a woman. So most cultures though, Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese, African have legends that go all the way back to the beginnings of their stories where they believe that the gods came down and had relations with women and that there was a breed, demagogues and others that were the product of that. They were giants, they were strong and it's in everybody's story. If you're asking me what I think, I think it's probably 50-50 that it's either the line of Seth or it's this other tradition of the watchers. But here's what I want you to know, it doesn't matter how you believe that and somebody after last service, when I taught this, they came up to me out in the lobby and they said, you've been watching the NetGio channel with all the alien shows, haven't you? I'm like, I promise you, just reading the Bible. I think it's probably 50-50 either way, but here's what I can tell you based on that story. If somebody somewhere did something really wrong that produced a group of people that inspired so much evil that God actually says that every intention and every thought of every human being's heart was only evil continually. Think about that. The writer's compounds his negative description over and over and over by going every thought of every person was only continually evil. The world was in a mess. Sometimes we think that the longer we've been on this planet, the worse we've gotten, but there's a human nature, a sinful nature in the human heart that is bent towards sin. We're not as human beings bent towards doing things right. You would think that with all of our money and all of our education and all of our scientific discoveries that we found and our ability to travel and relate to one another, you would think that we would get better. That's what secular humanism has told us for the last 150 years, that we can create a human secular utopia if we just educate people. But now what's happened is we have more education, we have more races, we can travel anywhere, we've got more money, and yet we still have the same issues. We've just got greater issues. We discover subatomic particles, but instead of creating energy that we could run the whole world on, we create bombs to threaten one another with. Where does that come from? It doesn't come because we're good people and always have good intentions. It comes because the human heart is contaminated with something called sin and pride and selfishness and it produces all of this rampant wickedness. I want you to know that Noah lived in a time like that. So much so that God says, I'm wiping it all out, I'm cleaning the slate, I'm starting over because I need to get here to where I can send Jesus. But at the current pace of human evil and wickedness, if I leave it, there's not gonna be anybody left. So I've got to end God's mercy. God speaks to a man named Noah. He's 500 years old when God speaks to him. Think about that, 500 years old. And prior to the flood, people lived five, six, seven, eight, sometimes even eight and 900 years old. The oldest man with Methuselah, he lived to be 969 years old. 969 years old. How many of you know? You can get on Willard Scott's Smucker's Jam Jar on the Today Show nine and a half times. That's old, baby. And you know, it's also interesting that Methuselah, even though he was the oldest man who ever lived, the year that he died, the moment that he died, the rains that produced the floods of judgment actually began to fall, which is a picture of God's long suffering. He waited for the longest oldest man to live before he brought judgment. But he started with this man named Noah, he's 500 years old, and he speaks to Noah. And here's how he describes Noah. He says, Noah found favor in the sight of God, in the eyes of God. Here was this man in the middle of this perverse generation where there's probably these demonic hybrid. I mean, there's this threat of wickedness and evil. The devil probably thought, I've destroyed God's good creation. There's no way God could ever redeem, but God found one man. And his name was Noah. Noah in the Hebrew means a place of rest. And he found this man and he spoke to him. And he said, Noah, you found favor in my eyes. Here's what I'm gonna do. I've given man, I've put a time clock, a countdown clock, 120 years. And then I'm gonna send floods. I'm gonna flood this whole world. I'm gonna wipe it out, everything. I'm gonna destroy it and I'm gonna start over. But I, you have found favor in my eyes, so here's what I want you to do. I'm gonna give you time. Well, I'm about ready to pour out judgment. I want you to build an ark. And I want you to bring animals so we can repopulate the earth. I want you to bring your family so we can repopulate the earth. We're gonna start over, but I'm starting over with you. But I need you to do something for me. I need you to build an ark, a boat, in the middle of nowhere. And then I need you to do it now and I need you to get started on it because when the rains fall, I'm gonna call you to get into that boat and it's gonna rain, it's gonna cover the earth. I'm gonna wipe everything out. Every living thing's gonna die on it and we're starting over. And I'm starting with you, but I'm gonna need you to believe me that what I'm saying is true and I need you to go to work. And so he did, he built the ark, the rains came, God wiped everything out and Adam and his family were the ones who when they got off of the boat, they began to restart the whole human race and all the different species of animals. Somebody asked me, do you really believe in Noah's ark? Yes, I absolutely believe. I believe the Bible from Genesis to maps including the table of content, I believe it all. And I believe that actually God did do that. It's interesting that many ancient cultures including Babylonian culture, Keldian culture, Turkish culture, have stories in their ancient narratives of a great flood that wiped everything out. Why is that? It's because all of those nationalities came from Noah and his three sons and their family. And so of course they're gonna have oral tradition that stories in their cultures. There are some things in the life of Noah that I think that you and I can draw from for ourselves. This hero called Noah, that when we look at his life, I think you and I can draw some things that will help us live our lives in the day and the age and the culture that you and I are living in because it's not much different than Noah's day. And so let me just share a couple of these things that I think will help you and I today so that we can be like Noah who found favor in the eyes of God. Number one is this. We need to realize that what Noah built in himself actually prepared him for God to build something significant through him. What Noah built in him enabled God to build something through him. Think about this for 500 years. That's how old he was when God showed up and spoke to him. For 500 years, nobody else was seeking after God. There was not a revival of hard spec towards God. It was a revival against God, an unraveling of the human sinful condition. Sin is like a snowball. I don't know if you know this. It always starts small, but as it gains momentum in our lives, it picks up steam and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it's out of control. Do you know that it's true in an individual level? It's also true in a culture and it's also true in history. It starts small, but it infects and it gets bigger and picks up steam. And by the time Noah shows up, it's just rampant. But yet God finds this man, Noah, who did something over the course of 500 years that when God describes him in the midst of his generation, he uses these words in verse number nine, Noah was a righteous man, which means his heart was right towards God. It says he was a blameless man in his generation. Think about being blameless, that nobody can bring an accusation against you. And probably the greatest description of Noah that God gives is it says that Noah walked with God. Noah walked with God. Do you know there are only three people in the beginning part of Genesis that are described as those who walk with God? Adam, it says that before the fall in the cool of the day, God, the father would come and walk with Adam in the garden. And later on, there was a man named Enoch when you read the genealogy in Genesis chapter five, a descendant of Noah, his name was Enoch. Enoch says that he was 300 years old when he had children. And it says an Enoch walked with God and Enoch was not for God took him. Imagine this, he walked so closely with God that God just took him to heaven. He didn't experience physical death. It was like one day he was out for a walk with God and God said, we're closer to my house than we are to yours, just come with me. You see, because when we talk about walking with God that's a Old Testament biblical way of talking about relationship. How many know that you go on walks with people you have relationship with? Jane, we've almost been married 26 years. And when we were newly married, I was 21, she was 20. And I remember our first argument. You wanna know what our first argument was? She says, I wanna go for a walk. And I'm like, a walk, I wanna go for a walk. I'm not a dog, you don't have to walk. I mean, it's like, who wants to start here, walk around the block for two miles and you end up back at the same spot but you're sweaty. You didn't see, because I was an athlete. It's like, if you wanna play basketball, let's go play basketball. You wanna race, let's race. You wanna go play golf, let's go play golf but go for a walk, that's what old people do. Well, guess what? I'm 47 and guess what I do now? I go for walks. And I go for walks not because I like walks, I go for walks because Jane loves walks. She loves to go for a walk and she likes to talk. She likes to take dogs. We walk around, just enjoy it. And just, you know, sometimes we're holding hands. Just you go for a walk with somebody that you know because it's a way of having intimate conversation and it's relational. So when the Bible talks about walking with God, it's talking about relationship, that know-a-bill and intimate relationship with God. How many know you don't go for walks with people you don't know? I dare you to do it sometime though. Like if you see somebody just walking by themselves on the sidewalk, I dare you run out of your driveway, just walk up next to them and go, hey. And like walk with them for like a mile. It'll freak them out. That's like, what do you want? Nothing, how are you doing? You doing good? What was your day like? Who are you? You only do it with people that you're close to. So I want you to think about this. For 500 years, Noah built a relationship with God that prepared him in the middle of a culture and a world like a current, a river's current was going away from God. But yet Noah was counter current and he was walking with God. So when God finally has enough and he says, I've got to do something. The sin is rampant, it's a disease gone epidemic. I've got to deal with this. See, people look sometimes at the flood and say that was so mean of God. You don't understand, it was actually God's mercy that he did it because if God had not dealt with the epidemic and the virus of sin sweeping across the earth, the entire human race would have been lost forever. But God found one man that had history with him, 500 years of history or whenever it kicked in, a man that he says he's found favor in my eyes that he could start with. In other words, God could build something with Noah because Noah in the secret place in the private parts of his life had built a history with God. And it's so powerful that we see that it is, it's not only something that Noah did but it's actually, it's something that we need to do. That we need to build day by day, decision by decision, direction by direction. We need to build history with God. And listen, we need to know this, it's possible to be a Christian, to be a follower of Jesus in the midst of a world where maybe everybody sees things differently, everybody's opinion is different. The common group think is different than the Bible but you can still be blameless and called righteous in the midst of that. You don't have to get swept downstream by the culture. Do you know if I take you out in the Lake Michigan and find a big, you know, one of those currents, riptides and we pull up into a boat and we turn the motor off. If you sit in that current, guess what? That current will take you where it wants you to go. But if you turn that motor back on and you begin to exert energy and you pick a direction and you begin to go against the current, you can go where you wanna go. And if I'm in the boat and you're manning the boat and I tell you, turn the motor on, crank it up to 30 miles an hour and go, I want you to go, you can go where I want you to go. Do you know that if we just live our lives apathetically and lethargically as Christians in the middle of our culture and we just kind of are laxadaisical about and say, you know what, I'm a Christian, I believe in God, I believe all those words that we just sang, I believe in God the Father, I believe in the Bible, I believe in church and I kind of dabble in it, but you know, I'm not fanatic about it. Listen, if you live like that in this culture, the current, the jet stream of this culture is gonna take you where it wants you to go and it will shape you the way it wants you to look. I promise you, you know, if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, that frog will jump out. I promise you, I've never done it, thought about it. But you know, you can take the same frog and you can put it in a pot at room temperature water and you can up the degrees one degree at a time every minute and you can bring it to a boil and that frog will die and that water, he will never move because the change is so gradual. And that's exactly what happens to us. Culture begins to change, adjust, we begin to compromise, we begin to let the stream take us where we want it and then one day we wake up and we're over here, we may not even realize our heart has become hard, we become worldly and instead of building something on the inside is that, God looks at it and says, blameless, righteous, I can do something through them. We look just like the world and instead of us building an ark that can save other people, we're looking for an ark that will rescue us. When we look at Noah's life, he built an ark but can I tell you, you're building a life. You're building a life in the midst of a culture that doesn't know that this is not all that there is, that doesn't believe anything besides material, secular and when it comes to spirituality, let's just talk about spirituality for a second. Our culture, our world, American culture right now, views spirituality the way you and I view a salad bar at Ruby Tuesdays. It's like, we all line up and it's like, well, I want to be spiritual. So we get our plate full of lettuce, we believe in God. But then we begin to go down the salad bar and we begin to go, you know what? That whole thing about Jesus being the only way I don't like that, that's the beats. We don't like the beats but we all want to put some croutons on there. That's the you're more than a champion and sprinkle some sunflower seeds on that. That's so you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you and we all like a little bit of salad dressing of heaven and maybe you put some bacon bits on, that's the prosperity and by his stripes I'm healed. We like all those positive things but when it gets to a part where it says, take up your cross, deny yourself and follow me, it's like, I'm gonna leave the carrot shreds there and the macaroni salad and the kind of that weird stuff. Pickles, who puts pickles on there? And we kind of treat God like a salad bar. So I want to believe in the existence of God. I want to feel good and I want to pick these and by the end of it, we have our own special made salad. And can I tell you, God's not a salad bar and he's not your waiter and truth isn't optional. God is true and let every man be a liar and Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me. And can I just tell you, we need to live like it. I'm getting fired up, it's my birthday. I can yell if I want. We need to live like this. Some of us are trolling through life and we just got our little troll motor on. Can I just tell you, there's a 50 mile an hour current under the surface of our culture and if you're not red hot for Jesus, something red hot's gonna take you where you don't wanna go. Noah built something into his life. He was going against the grain. When everybody's heart was seeking after wickedness, he was, Bible describes it, he was walking with God. Number two is Noah demonstrated radical obedience in a time of rampant wickedness. Do you know that two times in this section that we just read it says, and God spoke to Noah and it says, and Noah did all that God commanded him. Think about that. Noah did all that God commanded him. Radical obedience. Do you know, Noah was doing something for 120 years. He built a boat in the Middle East where he wasn't within 1,000 miles of a body of water and he did it for 120 years. I have a hard enough time putting IKEA furniture together. Anybody else relate to that? It's like, what is that wrench? Some really wicked person invented that. Swedish Allen wrench. It's like, oh, you tighten everything, it worked. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. Noah built an ark without the tools that you and I have. In the Middle East, and it took 100 plus years for him to build it at a time when, listen, every day that he got up building it, it did not seem to be making a difference. The world wasn't changing. I'm sure he was mocked. I'm sure he was ridiculed. What are you doing? Why are you living like that? Come on, enjoy life. What are you building? You're an eccentric, crazy old guy out there in the middle of nowhere. Don't you know? There's no rains coming. You know, it had never rained on the face of the earth up until this point. Up until the flood, the earth was watered by springs that just came. It was like a mist that came up out of the ground, just watered everything. Up until this time, it had never rained. But he's telling people, you know, Peter, I think it's the epistle of 2 Peter, calls Noah a herald of righteousness, which means while he was building, the word herald means a proclaimer or preacher. He was preaching to people, judgments coming. God is not happy. Our sin has become rampant. It's overwhelming. This is, it's like the Academy Awards when they begin to play the music, it's like you're done. And I'm not anywhere near done, so you're gonna get some accent music. For 120 years, people were telling him, you're crazy old man. But Noah built it. Noah was radically, radically obedient. If you're a parent, you know that there are multiple different levels of obedience. Your kids will obey you because they agree with you. How many of you know? It's like, it's dinner time, oh my, we're going for pizza, yes! Get in the car, they run for the car. But when you tell them to clean your room, they become passively disobedient, which means, oh, I'm doing something else, I'm distracted, sister was blocking the staircase, I can't get up to my room. Why do I have to clean my room? You didn't clean your room, they said they cleaned the room, you looked at it and they jammed everything under their bed. That's not cleaning your room, I want you to take things out. Come on, anybody who has raised kids, you know what I'm talking about. And then we take the posture of disobedience, where we just adamantly say no. Do you know God is a father and he has children. And he's not looking for us to just be obedient in times that we agree. He's looking for you and I to not be passively disobedient where we say I know that's the right thing to do, but I'm not gonna do that because I'm busy doing some other things. No, God's looking for radical obedience because radical obedience produces supernatural results. He was radically obedient, for 120 years he built the ark. For 120 years he gathered his sons and he says, come on, we're doing this. Because he knew what was coming, he had a promise, he had a word from God. God had said it and he believed it and he applied his life to it. Can I just tell you this morning, God wants you to build a life day by day that to the world may not make sense. The world might look at you and ask you questions like, why do you choose to live like that? Come on, be like everybody else. The world might look at you and say, why don't you just give it up? Come on, you've been waiting for Jesus to come for 2,000 years. The world might look at you and say, why are you investing all of your time? Why do you give all of your energy? Why do you give money to that church? Why are you in there? Why are you supporting missionaries? Why do you do all these things? Why do you show up early on your Sunday morning and serve and volunteer to minister to kids and be an usher? Or why do you give your day to go and worship a God that you can't see? The world may not make sense, but radical obedience. I'll tell you what, God can do supernatural things when he confines one man or one woman supernatural obedience. That God, before you even ask the question, the answer is yes. See, you might not be building an ark, but you are building a life. And you can either build a life that dies with you or you can build a life that like Noah's Ark when times of crisis come, when people get to the end of their life's Jenga game and they've got no more moves. When the life that they've begun to build begins to collapse. Listen, when the rains begin to come, they look and they know that there's a place of rest. There's a place of safety. Noah's Ark was a life that he built that became salvation and you can become a life that equals salvation for other people. They look at your life and they know I can run there because there's something about their life. I can run there because I know that they know how to get in connection with God. I've seen their life, I've seen their marriage. And listen, we need to start building marriages that the world looks at and say, I want to emulate that. Instead of criticizing and yelling about other people's marriages, we just need to build some marriages that the world looks at and say, I want that kind of marriage. We need to raise some kids that the world looks at and say, I want kids like theirs. We need to build strength and confidence in our identity so that the world looks at us and says, I want to be secure in my identity the way they're secure in their identity. And that happens through radical obedience. See, Jesus said that there would be days. There would be days like those of Noah's day just prior to his own return. In Matthew chapter 24, he said, for as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying and giving a marriage until the day when Noah entered into the ark. And they were unaware that the floods came until they were all swept away. So will be the coming of the Son of Man. Now, you guys know that I'm not an alarmist at all, especially when it comes to the return of Jesus. But I want you to hear me. Jesus is coming. Jesus is returning. And it may be in our generation and it may be in the next. But when Jesus does come and our reality is altered, it's not some fairy tale. When it happens, everything changes. And we're supposed to be people that are ready for that. We need to be people that are prepared for his coming. And we need to be people that are living urgently every hour. Like today could be the day that he returns. Not living like we got 50 or 60 years. We need to live like today the rains could start coming. Like today, Jesus had cracked the eastern sky. When he comes, we don't have time to try and get everything together. We need to be prepared and build a life today so that when he appears, we're not embarrassed of the life that we have built. Listen to the words and this is in closing in Philippians chapter two that Paul writes. He says, Therefore my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or disputing verse 15. Listen to these words. That you may be the blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life so that in the days of Christ, I may be proud that I did not run in vain nor labor in vain. It says hold fast to the word of Christ. Do you know what Noah held to that kept him going? All those years that he was building when his sight was not reality, when what he saw didn't make sense and when what God spoke to him didn't make sense. He held to the promises of God. You know what UNR called to be? We're called to be people of the word of God. We're called to be people that build a life upon the word. That God's word is true. It's not sand, it's a bedrock that we have anchored our life to. If people say, oh, you're just believing in that old book, yeah. This book is tried and true. Every promise in Christ is yes and amen. It is for me. I hold steady to this word because I'm gonna tell you when things crumble in people's lives or when the things become dark in this world, this is going to be the bedrock that people are looking for. And we need to have it not just in our books, but we need to have it in our heart. We need to be living it so that we shine brightly because our life like Noah can become an ark that people run to for safety. Your life can become a legacy that you leave to the next generation should the Lord tarry. And I wanna ask you, are you building an ark? Are you building a life of radical obedience to Jesus? Or are you building on the sinking sand of this world? Because God wants you to be a hero in our generation. Everybody stand up with me. Here's what I want you to do real quick. Just want you to turn and I want you to look, it's kind of awkward, but I can do it. I want, it's my birthday. Okay, so I want you to take 15 seconds and I just want you to look at the people that are around you, just look at them. Look them in the eye. Everybody get a good look. You're looking at heroes. You say, heroes, Richland, Michigan? If you were Noah's neighbor and you looked at him, you would have looked at him just like you just looked at the person that you just looked at. You know what the difference is? The reason why you look at Noah different now is because you know his story. And can I tell you this? We don't know your story, but God does. And he sees the hero in you. He sees the unfinished written story. He knows the extraordinary things he wants to accomplish through you. You may not believe it, but let me tell you, God believes it because he's the author in the finisher of your faith. He started your faith and he wants to finish it. And in between, all we have to do is radically believe him. This morning, that's my prayer. My prayer is God would help you and I to be so radical in our belief and in our faith that we actually believe what God said, we believe what he says about us and we use every minute of our day to build something that changes the world that we live in. I want you to buy your heads with me all over this room. We're gonna pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for Noah. Thank you for his life and even in his weakness, even in his mistakes, he was a man who was blameless in his generation. He was a man who found favor in your sight. And God, we want to be people. We want to be men and women that other men and women would write about someday because of the way that we radically followed Jesus. It would nobody look it around, please. You may be here today and say, I'm not right with God. The rains are coming down on my life. I know I'm far away from God. I've been letting the jet stream take me where the current of this culture and my own desires take me where it's not supposed to take me, but I'm far away from God. But I want the grace of God to be extended towards me. I want my sins to be forgiven. I want to walk with God like Noah walked with God. I want to live a life of radical obedience to Jesus. And I've seen what the world has to offer. I've seen what I can produce in myself and I'm tired of it. And today I'm ready to surrender and I'm asking God, forgive me, I want to become a Christian. I'm ready to follow Jesus. I'm ready to follow him, no turning back. I want God to intervene and change my life. And today as you've been talking pastor Lee, I'm ready to surrender to Jesus once and for all. I want my sins forgiven, a new heart, a new life, and I want to be a follower of Jesus. Pray for me because I need to get saved. I need to get right with God. All over this room when no one looking around, if that's you right now, you raise your hand by faith. It's your sign, you're saying, God, I'm ready. Thank you, thank you. Come on, he's calling you. Will you respond? I see your hand over there. Who else say today I'm ready to become a follower of Jesus? Thank you, who else? Raise it high, yes, I see your hand. I see your hand, I have to see this all the way in the back. I'm looking to my left, if that's you. Thank you, sir, in the back over here to my left. Who else in this left section? Come on, this is your moment, young lady, I see your hand. Reject the world, condemn the world, reverse the world and say, I choose Jesus. I'm looking to my right, if you've not raised your hand, you raise it now, I see that hand over there. Everybody, you can put your hands down. Thank you, sir. We're gonna say a prayer together right now. This is a holy moment. If you just raise your hand, I want you to say this prayer. The Bible says if we believe in our heart and we confess with our mouth, we will be saved. This is how we receive God's grace. This is how we are born again by the Spirit of God. We confess Jesus. So everyone in this room, say this prayer out loud together. Say, Heavenly Father, I come in Jesus' name and I confess I'm a sinner. I'm dead on the inside. I deserve judgment, but I ask for grace. I repent of my sin, of living for myself, looking like the world. And I'm asking you, Father, to save me. I believe in Jesus, that he died on the cross, paid my sin's price, and he rose from the dead. Jesus, come into my heart. Sit on the throne of my life. From this day forward, I deny myself and I'm following you. No turning back. Thank you that I'm a new creation. All things have passed away. My sins are forgiven. My heart is clean. And from this day forward, I am a Christian. I am a child of God in Jesus' name. Amen, amen. You just prayed that prayer. Come on, church. Welcome to the family of God. Welcome to the ark. Welcome to the ark that is Jesus. Come on, that's what the church is. We're like one big ark. And there's a lot of animals in here. So hey, those of you who just prayed that prayer, we're so proud of you, so grateful for you, so grateful for what God's done in your life. And I wanna invite our prayer team and our care ministers to come down. And listen, every person that Jesus called, He called publicly. He called them to take a stand. You just prayed the prayer and you've just now begun a walk with God. I'm gonna ask you to take two very pivotal steps. Your next step is this. In just a minute, I'm gonna dismiss. If you just raised your hand and you meant that prayer with all of your heart, I'm gonna ask you to go against the grain. When everybody's walking up these aisles out, I'm gonna ask you to walk against the grain and come down to one of our prayer partners. And all you have to do is just say, I prayed that prayer. And we wanna pray with you. We wanna give you a Bible if you don't have one. We have a book called 10 Steps Towards Christ that's gonna help you. Today it's gonna help you. So that's your next step. And the step after that is we're gonna talk to you about water baptism, about becoming baptized. Baptism is a public declaration of your faith in Jesus. And we're gonna be doing that in the next month. And we wanna help you get linked up so that you can go public with your faith. Those are your next two steps as a follower of Jesus. Come on, this is where radical obedience starts right now. Noah built an ark, you're coming down to the front, but we're gonna obey Jesus together. And everybody else as you leave today, wanna remind you, you're not leaving radiant church, you're leaving as radiant church to shine brightly in the midst of a crooked and a twisted culture. Let the world see Jesus in you. And God bless you, we'll see you next weekend. Come forward if you just receive Jesus.