Our past can feel like the wrong ingredients for a quality life recipe. But the case of the Apostle Paul shows God thinks otherwise. He does not waste our past but uses it as He sends us out as agents of the same transformation we have received.

Study Questions

The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.

Preparation vs. Right Direction: The sermon uses the cookie-recipe metaphor to show how Saul had “all the right ingredients”—knowledge, zeal, training, and dedication—yet without Jesus, his efforts produced destruction rather than growth. What does this suggest about the difference between being well-prepared and being rightly directed? Are there areas in your own life where you may still be relying on your own “lemon juice” instead of inviting Jesus in?
Quiet Faithfulness vs. Visible Authority: Compare Saul’s role overseeing Stephen’s execution with the unnamed devout men who risked their lives to retrieve and mourn Stephen’s body (Acts 8:2). What does their quiet, costly faithfulness reveal about the presence of the “secret ingredient,” and how might that challenge the ways we measure spiritual impact or significance today?
God’s Timing and Misdirected Efforts: God allowed Saul to travel almost all the way to Damascus before intervening. Why do you think the Lord waited until that moment? What does this teach us about how God uses even our misdirected efforts and past failures for his purposes—and how does that shape the way you view your own story?
Mountaintop Moments vs. Daily Faithfulness: After encountering Jesus, Paul immediately became the target rather than the persecutor. How does the sermon’s water-brigade illustration speak to the difference between a dramatic turning point and the daily, sometimes scorching work of following Christ? Where do you currently need that “cool bucket of water,” and who might God be calling you to provide it for?
Redemption of the “Burnt Cookie”: The speaker describes Paul as a “flat, charred, utterly inedible cookie” that Jesus rewinds and redeems. In what specific ways have you seen God redeem something that once seemed beyond repair—either in your own story or in someone else’s? How does Paul’s transformation encourage you to keep inviting Christ into the areas of your life that still feel unmixed or misdirected?

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.

Okay, well, I don’t know what’s going on there. That was a moment ago, but anyway. So, thank you for always bearing with us.

So, over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at accidental missionaries. And we looked at two, over the past two weeks, we looked at Moses, who had pretty much given up on leadership, gone out into the wilderness, started a family, started tending to flocks, and probably thought that was going to be the rest of his life. And then God says to him, 80, hey Moses, it’s time to start your mission now. So, we see there that God is working things in unexpected ways and at unexpected times.

Likewise, last week, we were looking at Jonah. Now, Jonah may have had a little bit more of an expectation that he was a missionary of sorts. He was a prophet. He thought he was at least sent to the people of God to speak God’s truth. And yet, what did we learn about Jonah? Jonah didn’t have the right heart about it, right? He was ready to condemn the people he was sent to communicate with, but he wasn’t ready to restore them.

Now, we can take that a step further with this week’s missionary. We’re looking at Paul this week, the Apostle Paul. But before he was the Apostle Paul, we encounter him earlier in the book of Acts as Saul of Tarsus. Saul is not what you know, not someone you know as a great lover of the church and of Jesus at that time. Rather, Saul was spending his time killing people in the church. Now, Jonah wanted to see the people die. Saul went a step further and was actually making the people die.

Now, how do we get from Saul, the persecutor of the church, the one who oversees the execution of Christians, to Paul, the great apostle who goes and spreads the church and writes so much of the New Testament and so on? How do we get from point A to point B? It’s all about the recipe. Actually, that’s been true of the other two lives we’ve looked at, too, how God prepares them through the experiences they have, including their own faults and foibles, to get them to what he’s going to do.

Now, if we think about Moses, was he ready at 40 to lead God’s people? I don’t think so. He wasn’t really ready at 80 either, right, but with God’s help. Was Jonah ever ready to go and communicate the good news of the kingdom to God’s people? Not that we’re ever told, right? He never completely gets it, but God works through that. And the recipe in Paul’s life is an interesting one, a very, very important one. But it all comes down to the recipe, and that’s true for us, too.

All of us are called to communicate God’s word, and at times we think, well, why, God, are you doing things this way? Why are you doing things that way? Am I really called? Or we see someone else, and they have so much messed up in their life, and we think, well, that person couldn’t be called. But if we know the secret ingredient, it changes everything. Secret ingredients are key to things, right? You have to have all the ingredients right, and I’ve been reminded of that.

I’m on a bit of a quest at the moment. This is my quest in the last few weeks. I’ve been bothered by chocolate chip cookies. Now, not bothered by, oh, yeah, bothered by those, yeah, right there, those cookies, yeah. No, I love chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are fantastic. Chocolate chip cookies are just categorically the best cookie. Can I get an amen from anyone there? Yeah, okay, yeah, they’re just great.

However, here was the batch of chocolate chip cookies I made a few weeks ago. Now, notice how pale they are. They actually look better in the picture, but they almost look like a meringue in the center, and they don’t taste right, and it’s been driving me nuts. What is wrong? The bottom’s burnt, and the center isn’t cooked enough, and it’s been cooked for the right amount of time. All the ingredients match the back of the Toll House bag.

So I started to think, well, what else could I do? And I tried adding an ingredient. Well, well, yeah, they do look burnt a little bit, and they’re very flat, but I added baking soda. No, baking powder. It always has baking soda. I added baking powder. And you know what? Yes, they look bad, but they taste so much more like what a chocolate chip cookie should taste like. However, I accidentally put in too much brown sugar, so that’s why they’re all spread out.

So here is attempt number three. Thanks. Yeah, see, these are looking better, right? Not quite there yet, but getting so much closer. And it’s amazing. None of the recipes that I can find actually call for baking powder, but you put that in there, and suddenly the cookies are coming out. I don’t fully understand it. I understand the concept of baking powder and how it works as a leavening agent and all that, and I geeked out on that a little bit over the week trying to contemplate this.

But what I can say is that the cookie, you add that ingredient, and suddenly it’s starting to come together. Add too much of a different ingredient, suddenly it squishes out. And maybe you’ve had that experience with cookies or something else you’ve made. You need to get it just right for it to come out. And you put in that right ingredient, that special ingredient, and suddenly it starts to come together.

What’s the special ingredient in Paul’s life? That’s what we’re going to think about today because you have someone who’s a murderer, someone who has actually killed people for confessing Jesus who becomes perhaps the greatest evangelist of all time. How do you go from point A to point B? That tells us an awful lot about what we need to do too, doesn’t it?

Paul was zealous already. Paul was on fire already. Here’s someone who’s dedicated his life to the work of studying God’s Word. He’s willing to travel long and far and get any kind of filings he needs to do with the officials and so on for the sake of killing people that don’t get it right. That’s zealous, friends. It’s not the kind of zealous that we’re encouraging here at Little Hills Church, but it is zealous.

We can’t say that Paul is lukewarm. Paul doesn’t really want to invest his life into the work of the Lord. He does, but something is wrong. It’s like those first cookies. They have seemingly all the right ingredients. They look pretty good, but they don’t satisfy when I’m craving a really good chocolate chip cookie. Oh, store-bought chocolate chip cookies just don’t satisfy. You have to have the homemade ones. Well, those are pretty good. We do have pretty good ones here. There’s a reason that Amos is famous.

We need to know all the ingredients to get to the best. Paul has most of the ingredients. Oftentimes we have most of the ingredients, but are we actually all the way there? What we see in Paul’s life very clearly is that there’s one ingredient that transforms everything, and that’s Jesus.

You see, I’ve already given away the recipe. Let’s think a little bit more about what happens. Let’s actually go into Paul’s life and see what he’s doing and then ask God to help us to see how he’s using our lives and calling us to have that secret ingredient permeate us. Let’s pray.

Father, we come before you as those who are here, we’re watching online, or we’re sitting here in this building and we’re listening to your word. We look at our lives, and sometimes they make a lot of sense, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the ingredients pouring into them seem to be all fitting together, and sometimes it seems like the recipe is falling just utterly flat.

Lord, would you help us to have more of the ingredient, the one that we truly need? We need your Son. We need Jesus. Would you take every part of us, every part that isn’t mixed right, and fill us with Jesus, that we might be those who aren’t just zealous, who aren’t just excited, who aren’t just knowledgeable, who aren’t just skilled, but that we would be those who have everything that we have in our lives, everything that we know, everything we’ve experienced, all covered with Jesus, that we might proclaim your truth and your love to the world. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Let’s take a look at what happens when you have all the preparations that Saul, Paul, has. He’s gone to the best schools. He’s a man of great culture. But he doesn’t have Jesus, and let’s see what happens. Because our preparations without Jesus, they lead to destruction, and that’s what we see in Acts 8, verse 1.

It says, and Saul approved of his execution. That’s the execution of Stephen, and we’ll talk more about him in a moment. Here is Saul standing there as someone’s executed. And it says, and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.

So who’s Stephen? Stephen is one of the first people set apart to be what we call today a deacon. He is set apart in Acts chapter 6, along with several others, to care for the needs of the people of the church. There are widows and orphans. There’s the resources for those widows and orphans, but there are people that are needed to distribute those resources and to distribute it in a way that’s pouring out the love of God into the lives of the people being ministered to. Stephen is called to do that.

And if you look at Acts chapter 7, sometimes, and this is a great, great error, friends, we look at deacons in the church and we kind of make them like a second-class officer, and that, I think, is a horrible thing. Like, okay, some people get to be elders, and then you can be a deacon if you don’t quite measure up. If you think that, if we fall into that trap, let’s look at Acts chapter 7. If you go there, you’ll see why that is such a misnomer.

Stephen is not a second-class person called to serve the church. Stephen isn’t lesser. Stephen preaches one of the best sermons you will ever hear anywhere preached in the history of the world. Stephen knows the Bible. Stephen is on fire for God. Stephen is just called to the particular service the deacons are called to. And it isn’t just giving out money. It’s communicating God’s love.

And so what does he do when people question him, when he’s confronted, what does he do? He’s talking about the very love of God and how it ties in with all of history, that this story, over the summer we’ve been doing this series, this is the third part in the trilogy, rambling through Scripture, thinking about how we see this story that fits together through the entirety of Scripture. Stephen does that for them.

He doesn’t do that with months of preparation. He doesn’t do that with planning out carefully a series and putting together the graphics and doing notes each week and coming back each week and doing a little bit more. Stephen lays it all out right there, right in front of them, without any notes, in the moment. Stephen’s prepared.

And Saul’s there not to applaud him, not to be excited over what Stephen’s saying, but to oversee that Stephen is put to death for preaching the Gospel. That’s Saul. That’s Paul. The Apostle Paul, the one that we can turn and we can go and look at letter after letter after letter in this Word of God, is the man who is overseeing the execution of one of the most on-fire evangelists the world will ever know.

In some sense, in this moment, Paul is the one who has an anti-mission. He’s undermining the mission of the church. He’s fighting against Jesus. And you look at that and you look at him and you look at his life and how it’s committed to some extent, right? He’s committed to this cause. He is utterly in on it. He is bringing destruction and not building up the church.

And what we see here, as we look at the life of Paul up to this point, is that he has all this knowledge, but he’s missing the secret ingredient. And there he’s contrasted. Here he is, this man of authority, able to put someone actually to death and to oversee that. And then we read about those men. They’re not even named in verses 2 and 3 of chapter 8. Devout men who go and retrieve the body of Stephen. Make great lamentation, we’re told, over him.

We don’t even know their names. We know Saul’s name. We know some of these other names, but we don’t know their names. And yet, we’re told they’re devout. And more devout than we might initially even think to give them credit for, because here are men who go and retrieve the body of someone who’s been executed under proper authority. Paul, Saul, has that authority in certain places. So this is a condemned man. They retrieve his body, and they mourn over it.

That’s a risky, risky thing, friends. Here’s someone who proclaims the name of Jesus. He’s put to death. So let’s go and retrieve his body and act very, very sad and make it clear that we care about this man and care about his mission. They’re opening themselves up to the same sort of fate. Yet they do, because why? Because they believe in the message. They believe in who Jesus is, and they are on fire for him. They have Jesus, the secret ingredient in their lives. They’re willing to put their lives in jeopardy for him.

Don’t even know their names. What’s Saul doing in the meantime? Well, he’s hauling off both men and women. Oftentimes, at least in that time, they wouldn’t be quite as eager to find theological reason to haul a woman off to prison, but Saul doesn’t make any distinction there. Men, women, I don’t care. I’m going to throw them in prison if they preach Jesus. That’s the man we call the Apostle Paul now.

He’s not done in chapter 8. If we go on to Acts 9, look at 9, verse 1. But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest. And why does he go to the high priest? Well, if we go on, we’re told he goes on to get more letters to authorize him to go to Damascus because he wants to go and persecute more. He wants to expand his franchise of persecution, so to speak. And he gets those letters, and he’s ready to go.

Is he on fire for God? In a way. I think he genuinely is. But he’s missing what makes that good and powerful. I was reading a few weeks ago about a man by the name of MacArthur Wheeler. And MacArthur Wheeler is a man who isn’t really of any great note except for his one very unfortunate misdeed of robbing a bank in 1995. And there are enough bank robberies that you might say, well, why are you thinking about a almost 30-year-old bank robbery?

Well, see, MacArthur Wheeler thought he had it down. Because what happens when you go and rob a bank? Anyone have any experience on that? Yeah. Here’s one. What? You get money. Yeah, you get money. What might happen after that? You go to jail. So if you can get the get money part and short circuit the go to jail part, you’re really going to be good, right? This is good.

And so he thinks he had it all down because somewhere along the line he became convinced that the security cameras in banks couldn’t see you if you had lemon juice on. So MacArthur, before he went and robbed the bank, covered himself in lemon juice, went into the bank, saw the cameras, smiles into the cameras because they can’t see him. I don’t know if he thought it was invisible or blurred, but in any case, he actually posed for the cameras. Hi there. Goes in, robs the bank, leaves, thinks he’s scot-free until the police show up.

And when they arrest him, he says, but I don’t understand. I had on the juice. He had the wrong ingredient. He thought he had it all right. He had this power. Pardon? It was apple juice. Yeah, apple juice, yeah, yeah. If you decide to try apple juice instead, don’t worry. We are talking someday. We need to have a prison ministry, so we’ll come and visit you.

See, I mean, he had this perfect plan, but with the wrong ingredient, right? It comes apart. He doesn’t end up with money. He ends up in prison. And he becomes not only someone in prison for robbing a bank, but someone in prison for robbing a bank that people are going to laugh at because he thought he could put lemon juice on and be okay.

So often, that’s who we are, though. We read the Bible a bit. We think we have it down, and we say, I know this now. And we go out. We go out sort of like Saul, and maybe we’re not throwing stones at people, hopefully. We’re not executing people, hopefully. But we go out with what we understand and our own strength, and we say, I am now going to go on a mission for God. And we go out, and we go to do that, and it seems to just backfire, and it comes apart.

And here’s the thing that we need to understand. If we’re trying to do this on our own strength, if we think we have it down, here is what we need to know. If you study the Bible for years, if I study the Bible for years, I’m going to still look, you’re still going to look wimpy compared to Paul, who spent his entire life memorizing Scripture and studying under the best rabbis. Paul could probably recite Scripture a thousand times faster than any of us could, probably knew much, if not all of it by memory. Paul was the elite.

But he didn’t have Jesus, and so he destroys and doesn’t build up. He was right on so much. And so often we’re right on so much, but are we actually making sure we have what we need in that moment? And now, friends, you might say, well, I believe in Jesus, but here’s the thing. Even as we believe in Jesus, are we allowing Jesus to permeate all of our lives, the entirety of it?

When we’re at school, is Jesus permeating our lives? When we’re at work, is Jesus permeating our lives? When we’re in our neighborhood, is Jesus permeating our lives? And we should ask, when we’re at church, is Jesus permeating our lives? We need to make sure he’s everywhere, and sometimes it’s where we least expect it, that as much as we might confess Jesus, and even sincerely so, he isn’t actually transforming that part of our lives. We’re holding it close. No, I already have the lemon juice, Jesus. I don’t need you in this spot.

What happens then? Destruction. But why do we have this story about Paul? Why did God call Paul? God could have called Stephen and not Paul, and then protected Stephen. He could have, if God wanted, he could have made the stones bounce off Stephen and go back the other way. Paul, for his part, went through several different things that probably should have been his death, and yet, what did God do? He made sure he continued to live.

So why does God choose Paul? To show us what happens when you add the right ingredient. Our preparations with Jesus go from destruction to transformation. Take a look again at Acts 9, verse 1. Here we find Saul still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the high priest, and he asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, that is, those that would later be known as Christians, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting? He said, who are you, Lord? He said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, but rise and enter the city, you will be told what you are to do.

Saul thinks he has it all down. I need to stop these people talking about this convicted criminal Jesus. I need to stop them before they pollute the proper theology of the synagogues. What does God do? He lets Saul go all the way along to getting the letters to go travel, a key theme in Paul’s life later on. He spends a lot of his time traveling, communicating things. He’s off to do it, but with the wrong ingredients.

And what does God do? He lets him get almost to Damascus, and then he appears to him. Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Now sometimes we read that, and we read that Saul responds, Lord, who are you? And we think, well, Saul gets it. He immediately calls him Lord. But we need to understand that that word Lord could also essentially be the equivalent in the time of Sir. He realizes, obviously, if he’s been knocked down, there’s a great light shining on him, that someone of great power, someone probably of heavenly power is appearing, and so he uses a respectful title. He still doesn’t know who he is. He just says, Sir, who are you?

And in this moment, we see that secret ingredient entering into Saul’s life. In this moment, we see God taking this man who has all this zeal, all this fire, but misdirected, all this knowledge of the Bible, but misdirected. He’s going to reshape him to go in to use that for him.

A few weeks ago on Steadfast, on Monday nights, we’ve been going over the last few weeks through the different gifts that God provides in the church, and when we were talking about those different gifts, zeal came up, and certainly whatever God gifts us with, we should approach it with zeal. But we can say that Paul was approaching it with zeal. He was a great enforcer of what he thought was God’s will. He just wasn’t enforcing God’s will.

We want that zeal, but we need to make sure everything is filtered by God’s love and his truth and the fullness of his truth. And too often, we’re zealous, but we’re not zealous in a holistic sense, and we’re holding on to those places where Jesus isn’t speaking into our lives, and we’re allowing those to direct where even that zeal goes, where that excitement goes, and what happens that causes destruction.

When we look at the life of Paul, we see that God calls him here. He gives that clear call, clearer than most, if not all, of us will ever receive. That isn’t the way that God normally makes his will clear, but praise God he did in Paul’s life. He takes all that background, all those years of study and preparation and experience, even the persecution of the church, he takes that and he pours himself. Jesus pours himself into Paul’s life, and what happens?

Paul becomes the preacher par excellence, the great evangelist, the one who would write so much of the truth of the gospel that we can still study today, and would go from city to city establishing churches. He goes from the one who goes from city to city to persecute and the one from city to city who builds up the very ones he was persecuting.

Chapter 9, verse 15. But the Lord said to him, Go. He’s telling someone who is now very fearful because he’s told to go talk to Paul. Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and the kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for my sake.

Later on in verse 22 of chapter 9, But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. Now let’s just rewind for a moment here. We know who Saul was, and I reference that man who’s now fearful. He’s being sent to talk to Saul, and the reason we have that conversation, this man named Ananias is going to go talk to Saul, but he knows who Saul is. He knows that Saul kills Christians.

And God’s going and telling him, Go and talk to this man. Well, he obviously has reason to doubt, reason to fear, but he also hears God and he believes that God can transform, and so he goes. God tells me to go, I’m going to go. So he does, and what do we see? It’s the first stepping stone, because yes, God gives that call to Paul, and Jesus’ Spirit is now pouring through Paul’s life and enabling him to go and do the work that he’s going to do, but he also then needs the body of Christ, the church, to help him to start to be shaped and prepared, and we see a time of preparation now that Paul is going to go through to take everything he had before and to prepare him to be the missionary he was actually meant to be.

Verse 31 of chapter 9, Until the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up, and walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied. That’s where we get to. See, that ingredient changes, and that preparation starts to happen, and you go from a church being persecuted at the beginning of chapter 9 under Saul to a church that’s growing and being encouraged in no small part because of Saul.

One ingredient makes a difference, just like in those cookies. A little bit too much something, it flattens out a little bit of something else and it starts to brown properly. It just needs the right ingredient, and one ingredient that you always need, one ingredient I always need, is Jesus.

Too often in my life, I’ll be preparing a message, and I think, well, I’m going to wow them with this. It’s going to be great. After I get done, if you’ve ever shared the Gospel, if you ever share a message, you think it’s so brilliant, and then you get up there, and whatever we think is brilliant in our human ability, yeah, it’s worse than the flat cookies. Because it’s not Jesus.

But what does God do? He takes our flat cookies, He takes our failures, our messed up and wrong, and what does He do? He uses them for His glory. We’re told that when Saul approaches Jerusalem for the first time, there’s even more questions. Wait, he’s a persecutor of the church. Why should we take him in and train him? He’s just infiltrating.

What do we see? We see Barnabas, good old Barnabas. We get introduced to him, and what does Barnabas do? I will meet him. Why does he do that? Because he knows the power of that secret ingredient, and he knows that Jesus has encountered, brought an encounter into Paul’s life. If Paul is being transformed by Jesus, that yes, here’s someone who is a very flat cookie. He’s worse than a flat cookie. He’s a flat, charred-to-black, burnt, just utterly inedible cookie that’s so hard you can throw it at a window, and the window breaks cookie. That’s what Paul is at that moment.

Jesus can take that already charred and burnt and useless cookie that fills the house with that odor when you burn something terribly, and he can take it and just hit the rewind button on him and pull him back, and pull the gifts that God gave him back, and pull the image of God that’s in him back, and turn him into a delicious cookie that will actually nourish people. Yeah, I just used nourish and cookies together. You know it’s true. Emotional nourishment. Put oatmeal in it. There you go. It’s even more nourishing. Peanut butter. Yeah, yeah. See, you can make it happen, friends.

Now, it doesn’t mean when God does this and he brings that ingredient into our life that it’s going to be easy. Can I get an amen on that? Right? Because it’s not. It’s not. If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you know it’s not. If you’re thinking about responding to Jesus and thinking, well, maybe, oh, I feel like a burnt cookie. Maybe God’s going to pull me back and make me that good cookie, and then everyone’s just going to talk about what a great cookie I am. Let me just disabuse you of that notion right now. That’s not how God works. Pardon? I’m not going to do that.

And what do we see in Paul’s life? Immediately, in this chapter, we start reading about times where people are trying to kill Paul. Paul goes from the killer to the killee. God preserves his life. He doesn’t die, but he’s the target. But he keeps going. Because why? Because now he’s encountered Jesus, and he knows that Jesus is actually sending him to do this.

Is that what we know? When we encounter hard times, do we say, but Jesus is sending me. Satan wants to tell us when we encounter hard times, well, the problem is you’re not understanding this right, and he tries to twist us and twist our understanding and start turning us back to our human impulses and says to us, but that’s why it’s happening this way. That’s why you’re getting hurt. That’s why you’re afraid. That’s why things are difficult, is you think you’re doing right, but just go a little bit more of the way of the world. It’s okay. Just add a little bit of a different ingredient in.

And he wants to do nothing more than to discourage us and lead us into that sort of recipe, to pull us back into that flat burnt cookie. When we look at the life of Saul, the life of the man ultimately known as the Apostle Paul, and what are we reminded of? Yes, we’re going to face those times, but that doesn’t mean that we should be discouraged. It might be discouraging, but we shouldn’t be discouraged.

Last weekend, we had a very encouraging moment here at Little Hills. It was beautiful. If you remember, if you were watching online or if you were here in person, you know what we did. We did a water brigade. We have these seedlings out here that have been growing in our garden so that it looks welcoming as people come in here for the fall. We’re going into a week where we are having record-breaking triple-digit temperatures. It’s not usually that hot this late in the year, and yet it was going to be.

So we did this water brigade, and we took water out. Utterly crazy, right? And we take that out. We take all that water out. It was beautiful, but then you know that heat’s coming, and by the next day, it’s not going to be moist anymore. And so we had a whole group of you guys that volunteered throughout the week to bring water and to keep watering those flowers.

And if we imagine ourselves as those flowers for a moment, imagine that water brigade last weekend. I have to think that’s sort of like when we’re feeling in one of those mountaintop moments where everything’s going right and we’re excited. Those flowers are being surrounded by the love of God. And then you get to Monday morning, and it’s 100 degrees outside. And then they get a little water on Monday. And then it’s 100 degrees outside still, and they get a little water on Tuesday, and it’s 100 degrees outside.

It wasn’t easy, and yet what do we see as we arrive today? They’re growing and they’re blooming. God’s preserved them. Just like us. God preserves us too. Here are the flowers today right before the service. Aren’t they beautiful? And they’re just getting started. And there may be some more times where we need to encourage them and help them. And we’re going to need times where people speak into our lives with encouragement and help us because we’re going to get awfully discouraged.

But here’s the thing we need to know, friends. God doesn’t abandon us in our discouragement. God doesn’t let go in our failures. God is calling us. We have a call to be transformed. That’s a lifelong process, and there’s going to be times where we hit bumps in that. Sometimes we’re already transformed in an area and we’re just hitting the bumps of the world in that.

What we can see in the life of Paul is someone who encounters Jesus and everything is transformed in his life. It’s not easy. Not everything goes exactly how Paul would like it. But Jesus works in him. He works in you. We’re called to be those who bring transformation. Sometimes it’s a cool bucket of water on a hot day. Sometimes it’s that extra baking powder to make the cookie rise properly. Sometimes it’s sitting down and listening to someone. Sometimes it’s sending a scripture to someone. Sometimes it’s praying for someone, like we did this week during the prayer walk.

All these different things that God does. Sometimes it’s taking food to someone who’s hungry. Sometimes it’s helping someone who is sick. It’s all these different things. But as we take all these things and we keep asking God to pour more and more of himself into the mix as we do, as we keep feeling the spirit work in us and we pray, God, continue to put your spirit in me and transform me. We go from those who are transformed to those who are agents of God’s transformation.

It all comes from knowing Jesus who transforms everything. Would you pray with me, please?

Lord, would you transform us? Would you take us from those times that were burnt and charred? Would you take us from those times that were scorching under the summer sun and wilting? Would you take us from those times that we say unkind words and do unkind things? Would you take us from those times that we have run the exact opposite direction of your will? Would you take all those things and would you pour more of you into our lives? Would you transform us?

Lord, we know that you are faithful not just to do that in salvation, to rescue us from our sins, but through all of our lives ahead that you promise to continue that work that we might not just be saved from our past but redeemed for the future. Would you help us to bring that transformation to others? We pray in Jesus’ precious name.