We appreciate everybody being here today. We’re going to continue our worship with our tithes and offerings, and we always share a little devotional around that. Today’s devotional is titled “Seed Planted in Trust.” Paul gave us some insight into this in Galatians 6:8-9, from the Passion Translation: “The harvest you reap reveals the seed that you planted. If you plant corrupt seeds of self-life into this natural realm, you can expect a harvest of corruption. If you plant the good seeds of the Spirit life, you will reap beautiful fruits that grow from the everlasting life of the Spirit. And don’t allow yourselves to be weary in planting good seeds, for the season of reaping the wonderful harvest you’ve planted is coming.”
There are four things to be aware of when we sow seed, when we pay our tithes and offerings and give. Number one, God invites us. That’s an invitation from God, because He desires to bring blessing back to us. He says, come and sow, because of seedtime and harvest.
I grew up with my uncle owning a huge farm, a thousand acres, and that was our playground, me and my brothers. He had girls, and my dad and mom had four boys, so he claimed us as his boys. We’d go up there with our cousins and play all over that farm, and I learned so much from him about planting, about sowing and reaping. God invites us to sow, trusting Him for the harvest, because He’s going to multiply back to us what we sow.
Conia and I were driving to her open house yesterday over in McMinnville, Tennessee, driving Highway 70 through all those cornfields, and she said, “Look at all that green.” Each stalk had one ear of corn on it. And I said, yes, but that one ear of corn has between 800 and 1,200 seeds of corn on it. It multiplies itself, and that stalk was there just to support that one ear. One seed can give you up to 1,200 kernels. God wants to multiply back to us what we sow into His kingdom. So sow good seeds, and you can expect a good return, beautiful fruits from it.
That’s what I learned working with my uncle as I got older, going out to work in the fields during harvest time. One of my favorite things: he grew watermelons for market, and we’d go out harvesting them, stacking them up on the trailer to haul them in. And if some of us got thirsty out there in the field, somehow, accidentally, a watermelon would fall and split open, and we would grab the heart of it, because that’s where all the good juice was, and it would quench our thirst. That’s what God does. He brings back a harvest that blesses us beyond measure in a beautiful way.
So the word He gives us is, don’t grow weary. Paul says, don’t grow weary; the harvest season is coming. And the fourth point: you will reap. Just trust God, and you will reap. Don’t try to make it happen. Don’t try to finagle it and manipulate it. Just trust God. Conia just got a new coffee mug, and it’s got part of the verse on it — the part that’s important for her is, “Be still.” She says, God knows I’ll try to fix it.
As we prepare to give today, there’s a basket you can pass around if you want to give cash or a check, there’s a QR code in your bulletin, and our livestream friends can go to EmergeInternationalChurch.org and click the Give button. Let’s pray over this offering. Father God, we thank You for the privilege and opportunity we have to come together with You and partner with You in sowing seed into Your kingdom, so people can hear the good news of Jesus Christ and have their lives transformed and be blessed and become a part of Your kingdom, Your family, Father. We thank You for blessing us beyond measure in this. We give today, trusting You with all that we sow, knowing there’s going to be an abundant return, an abundant harvest come forth with it. And we thank You for it. Amen.
Father, we thank You for this time today, for this opportunity to come together. We lift our hearts to You, and we thank You for the word that’s coming. Give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand as we enter into Your word today. Amen.
As I mentioned at the beginning of service, Brother Kevin Williams is here with us today, and he’s going to be sharing. Kevin’s been with the Gaither Vocal Band, working with Brother Bill Gaither for, what, 33 years now, Kevin? He’s a dear friend of ours, part of our church leadership team, a great producer. He’s written songs, arranged a lot of things, and I could go on and on. But he’s coming to share the word this morning, so let’s welcome Kevin as he comes.
Thank you. My wife was the last one to clap, and I appreciate that. I’m glad to be with you this morning. This is always a privilege, and I haven’t met some of you yet, and I look forward to that. I’ve watched this whole thing come together, and in a beautiful way. God sent David into my life in 2019, and then we got on a weekly phone call in 2020 because COVID had hit, and I was going through some stuff wondering what the future was going to look like. I got a little upside down during that time. It was pressure time for me. And David said, “Let’s go over some scripture together.” And I thought, great, that’s what I need. I was raised in church; I think I know every verse in that book. But sometimes we just have to be reminded of God’s faithfulness and what He’s there to do and what our part is.
We were talking one day and David said, “God’s given us a dream and a vision to start a ministry.” He didn’t know any more than that, except it was supposed to be here in Franklin, Tennessee, and we’re grateful God pulled them this way from Texas. I said, “Well, I’ll help you pray about that.” And it was like no time, and they were packing the house up. I said, “Do you have a buyer for your house?” “Nope.” There’s a pod in the driveway, and they started packing stuff up, and I just saw great faith. David loves to sing that song about “I’m expecting great things,” and I could truly see that in their lives — what they were expecting God to do, because they didn’t know how to do this on their own. They didn’t even know what they were committing to with God. And now we’re seeing it flourish: an online ministry, and now in-person meetings, and this is a great-looking group. I’m proud to be a part of this in any way I can. I just want to applaud you for your faith in God and your obedience to do what you do.
This is my wife, Kathy. We’ve been married 30 years this August, and we’re going to celebrate in a big way — probably Steak ‘n Shake or something. But I look back at 30 years ago, and we were two broken people coming together in a way that only God could pull us together. The ways we’ve grown over 30 years in trusting Him has baffled my mind, because I’m not a truster. I’m just not a natural truster, and this is part of what God has given me even in the last few days about this issue in my life.
Now, I’ll backtrack a minute. David and I, when we were talking in 2020, it was about this trust issue. He said, “Let’s go over Proverbs 3:5-6,” which says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don’t lean to your own understanding” — your thinking. Don’t lean on that. Don’t gravitate toward that. Go the other way. Trust. And then, “In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.” Some translations say, “He will make your paths straight.” And David’s breakdown on acknowledge: know Him, recognize Him, and acknowledge Him, and He’ll make your path straight. And that just sounds so easy, unless you’re a control freak like me, and then you have some problems with it. God gave me a little download on that just in the last couple of days in regard to me personally and where some of that comes from.
Anytime I’ve spoken in front of this group, it has been on trust or surrender or something like that. I always speak out of where I’m living. And I just got back from a kayaking trip. I do river kayaking, and I love that kind of thing, the solitude part of it. Guys will say, “Don’t you want somebody to go with you on that trip?” Not really. I left at 3:30 in the morning, and Kathy says, “Good Lord, God’s not in 3:30.” But I left on purpose, because I wanted to get over Monteagle at about five, with that cup of coffee in my hand, my Kitt Pritchard mug, and my steering wheel in the other hand. I just know what that does. It creates a moment, a setup for me and God. And it happened again. He’s faithful to it. This is part of me being still and listening.
When I got there, it’s the Nantahala River, in the Nantahala National Forest, which is beautiful. Y’all should go. And it was like God was taking me around and showing me. I’ve been there a lot of times, but — can I sound crazy in front of y’all? — it was like He would say, “Hey, look at this. I did this.” Beautiful old trees. I don’t know when God did this. I’m looking at it going, this is immense, this is beautiful. Squirrels, all kinds of critters. He’s saying, “I did this.” And this river that runs through there, carved out beautifully, dam controlled so the kayakers can do their thing — the kind of kayaking I can do. I know my limits: class twos and threes, and above that, I’m out. I’ll raft it, but I won’t kayak it. So God just kept hauling me around going, “I did this. I did this.” Almost as if one of our kids would have said, “Look what I did.” And I thought, okay, God, You did this. This is beautiful, no question. What are You trying to say to me here?
As I was preparing this message, I would say, “Lord, what do You want me to say?” And in typical God fashion, I didn’t hear anything for about five or six days, except from Conia going, “What are the scriptures? I want to put them in the bulletin so everyone can follow along.” She’s so orderly and methodical, and I’m going, God, I’ve got to tell Conia something. Give me something to tell Conia.
Now, you all don’t know me that well, but I am a musician. I’m creative. I’m funny. I’m odd — let’s just say I’m odd. My mom would have said, “He’s kindly odd-turned.” I love to laugh, and I love to cry. I’m all over the gamut emotionally. My wife is rock solid, steady, and I’m this, on a graph. In the tough times, God has always sent me somebody to remind me of His faithfulness. And David, you were there for me in 2020. I have a friend named Buddy Greene, a songwriter and singer. I dropped our oldest daughter off for college in 2017, and on the drive home I went through an emotional breakdown, because I was leaving my firstborn at college six hours away. What’s this going to be? Have I done enough as a father? I called Buddy, who has two daughters and raised them very successfully, and I said, “What do I do?” He said, “Oh yeah, man, you’re hurting. We need to have coffee.” And that got me through it. A few years later I said, “Thanks for being there and ministering to me.” He said, “Oh, I just reminded you of God’s faithfulness.” And I think we need to think on that sometimes.
What I’m going to say today — I questioned God. I said, “Lord, is this it?” And He said, “Look at My word. Look at what I’ve done.” These are lessons I learned in Bible school when I was a kid. I learned these verses, but I’ve had to learn them in a fresh way over and over again in my life, according to what season I’m in. It’s what I already knew, but I wasn’t holding on to as tightly. We tend to let go of these things.
When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of my theology from country music songs. One of them I loved — you’ll know it — “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.” Thank you, Lynn Anderson. And it goes on to say, along with the sunshine, there’s got to be a little rain sometimes. That’s just life. There’s sunshine, there’s rain, we get clouds, sometimes we get storms, and then there’s sunshine. We just call that life. Here in Tennessee, you can have any season within one week. It can change on a dime.
There are thousands of promises in that Bible of ours, and they all have to do with victory in one way or another — victory in the sunshine, victory in the storms. That’s what the promises are there for. If I had to break down His promises, if you want to take a note, His promises fall into three categories: He promised His presence, He promised His power, and He promised His provision. And every one of those promises deals with victory in one of those areas. Whatever we face, Jesus is enough. God sent His Son to meet our greatest need, which was salvation. And because of Christ, He is sufficient for every other need that we ever have. He’s enough.
I was raised up in a little country Pentecostal church, and we had about this many right here. That church had been going for 80 years. We had one sister — whether she was awake or asleep, she’d say amen. So I really do appreciate that.
Have you ever heard of the IKEA effect? It’s a marketing principle. IKEA is a Swedish manufacturer of furniture, and the IKEA effect says — let me read it straight out — a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products that they have partially created. The IKEA stuff you have to build a little bit, right? People sense more ownership in that, and they tend to pay a higher price. A 2011 study found — you’re going to love this — that people were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for the equivalent pre-assembled items. That blows my mind.
Why is that? Because we are human. We want to have a hand in it. Something inside of us wants to do something that influences the outcome. That’s why we feel really good about ourselves after we’ve built a bookshelf that took an entire evening away from our family. Look at that bookshelf. I did that. I put the screws in that bookshelf. I got this scar from that bookshelf. In real estate, there are people who want a fixer-upper, not necessarily to get it cheaper, but because they want to have a hand in it. A guy told me one time he bought one of those guitar kits. You can build a guitar. That’s a 1969 Martin D-28, and I love that guitar. There’s no way I could build a guitar that sounds better, but somebody will try, because they want to have a hand in it and say, “Look what I built.”
We live in a world that tells us we need more all the time. More money, more success, more recognition, more possessions, more security, more followers. Lord knows I need more followers on Facebook — it’s one Kevin Williams on Facebook, you can follow me. And yet we know people who have everything the world has to offer, and a lot of times they’re as empty a person as you’d ever want to meet. Somehow what they thought was everything wasn’t enough. More is not always enough. There’s nothing wrong with more — we’re told to dream for more, have vision for more, be more, do more. But more is not always the answer. You’ve got to have a framework. I go back to Matthew 6:33: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” The framework is to seek God first and trust Him.
The greatest need of humanity has never been money, or health, or success. Our greatest need was reconciliation with our Heavenly Father. And God answered that. He sent Jesus for us. So — this is the Baptist in me coming out — I’m going to take a very simple point and make five points out of it. I want you to leave today understanding what enough is and who enough is.
Number one: God’s grace is always enough. Second Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” Whose weakness? Our weakness. Christ is not weak. So how is His strength made perfect in our weakness? Sometimes God changes the circumstance. Sometimes God changes us. And either way, His grace is enough. Think about what you’re going through in your life right now, what you’re facing, what your needs are, what’s weighing you down. His grace is sufficient, and He is more than enough to meet that need.
Scripture tells us about a seasoned champion Philistine warrior. Goliath stepped out every morning for forty days to mock the Israelite army. He had a massive spear, the Bible says, a huge sword, and it says he had a massive helmet — so I guess he had a big head like me, I’m just saying. And down the road from this battle site is this little shepherd boy, a teenager, and he was a musician, practicing his harp. He was the least of his brothers. In Kentucky they say, “What’s your least one going to do for a living?” — they actually refer to the baby of the family as the least one, which is a great self-image builder. He was doing what anybody could do. He was tending sheep. If you were young or inexperienced, they’d let you tend the sheep. So they send him to take some food down to his brothers — cheese and crackers, probably some olives, I assume — and he gets there and sees this massive giant of a guy over nine feet tall. And I know what it feels like to be a scrawny musician looking at a nine-foot-tall guy. Instead, something rises up in David, and he says, he can’t do that; he can’t mock God’s people. And he gets fired up and wants to go fight the guy. There’s no logic in this. Everybody’s laughing at him. His brothers are a little embarrassed by him. They try to outfit him with armor, and the armor doesn’t work, and all he’s got — he knows how to use a sling. None of this makes sense. David wasn’t enough for this situation. His experience wasn’t enough. His skill wasn’t enough. But God was enough. God’s always enough. The battle wasn’t won by David’s strength; it was won by God’s power.
Two: Christ gives strength beyond our own. Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” I’ve known that scripture since I was probably seven years old, and it hangs in our house. It’s on our refrigerator. We had a little girl with bad anxiety when she went to school, our youngest daughter. She would overthink everything, think through to the end, and it would always be the most awful climax she could imagine in her mind. What if a storm sweeps her mother away during the day? And she clung to that scripture. We read it every day. Our strength has limits. We’re human. There’s only so far we can go in our strength. God’s strength has no limits. Hear me: when ours ends, His begins. My phone comes with a little charging port at the bottom, and I charge mine overnight, up to 100%. But I’m around people all the time who never have a full charge: “Can I borrow your charger?” They’ll go 10 or 15% and go until it runs down again. A phone wasn’t designed to run on its own battery forever. That’s part of being an adult. Neither were we. We weren’t designed to run on our own battery forever. We’re designed to connect to a power source greater than us, and when we do that on a daily basis — it has to be every day, y’all — He remains our source of strength and power for anything that comes our way. And that power will always be enough.
Three: we are more than conquerors in Christ. Romans 8:37: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” You have to see yourself as that conqueror. That scripture has to get down inside you, and you’ve got to see yourself the way God sees you. He didn’t make a weakling. He made a conqueror. Conia, the day you were born, God didn’t look at her and go, “She’s not going to amount to anything.” God said, “She’s a conqueror. She’s got My Spirit in her. She’s going to conquer.” He said that about all of us. God looks at us that way. Why on earth do we not see ourselves the way He sees us? I’ll tell you why. Satan plays a good game, and he starts early, when we’re young, and he plants little seeds — just like that corn you were talking about — and it comes up in us, and we form what psychologists call limiting beliefs. It’s a foothold of the devil into our life. There’s no way we were ever supposed to believe anything less than what God believes about us.
You have to know full well that the battle has been won and that you’re victorious before you even begin. You have to know, when you’re packing the pod and the house hasn’t sold, that you are victorious. Trouble comes. Loss comes. That’s life. Trials come, but victory also comes. Why? Because Jesus won it. It’s done. We’re not fighting for victory. We’re fighting from victory. We are products of the cross, y’all. What Christ did at Calvary is enough.
Gloria Gaither, one of my favorite writers, who’s been like a mother and a sister to me all at the same time, wrote these words: “Yet in my heart, the battle was raging. Not all prisoners of war had come home. These were battlefields of my own making. I didn’t know that the war had been won.” She wrote it from a historical point of view. After World War II, there are documented cases of isolated soldiers on remote islands, and the war was over and they didn’t know it. Nobody had told them. They hadn’t heard from headquarters, and they kept fighting the same battles they’d been fighting for years, not realizing victory had been declared. How many Christians do you know living that way today? Still fighting the same old battles. I’m the poster child for this. I get into myself and my world, because I like me, and I begin fighting the same old battles that Christ died for. I begin thinking the same old way. I begin drifting away from feeling like a conqueror. Sometimes I feel like I’m just barely surviving. The victory’s been won. We just have to walk in it. What He did and who He is, is enough.
Four: our faith must rest in God’s power. First Corinthians 2:5 — I love this — “that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.” He’s saying, rest it in Me. Don’t trust what you know. Don’t think you’re all that wise — this is Paul saying this. Here’s the truth: human wisdom changes. Opinions change. Experts change. If they say bacon’s bad for you, give it ten years, it’ll be good for you. Everything changes. What never changes? God never changes. His word never changes. Our confidence isn’t built on personalities or politics or finances or emotions. Our confidence rests on God’s power to be enough all the time.
Five: God supplies every need. When I have a need — and we’re praying about stuff right now, serious needs, stuff that sounds a lot like your stuff — I don’t know why I ever stop and get anxious about it, because our God supplies. Every need, every time. I don’t know why I forget that, but I do. You guilty of that too? Please don’t let me be the only one. Philippians 4:19: “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” He didn’t say He’s going to pick apart your needs and tackle the ones He thinks are worthy. He’s going to supply all our needs. His supply is never based on our bank account. It’s based on His riches. He doesn’t pull out His phone and look at His banking app in the morning and see a negative balance. His resources never run out. Israel wandered in the wilderness, and God sent manna every morning. It never failed. It came every day. There was always enough for today.
And I think we make a mistake by trying to pin God down for the next 20 years: how are You going to do this ten years from now? How am I going to get from here to there? I have to know today what 20 years is going to look like, or I don’t start the journey. I don’t pack the pod. We do that. We just don’t allow that to be good enough for us. We don’t know how to live in the moment. God designed us to live in the moment. The past has been; you can’t do anything about it. The future is uncertain — and I’m not talking about our spiritual future, just circumstances. You don’t know what tomorrow holds; the Bible says that. And yet we have this incessant need to plan the next 20 years. We’ve got to know what it looks like. And I say “we” because I’m here. That’s called a need for control. We mask it and call it good planning. “We’re prudent.” We’re supposed to plan, but we’re supposed to live in this moment, y’all. If we try to live in that plan of what 20 years from now is supposed to look like, we’re always going to be disappointed. Live in this moment, in what God has given us. This is real. This is beautiful. Look at this: we are in a church in a garage, y’all, and we’re online, and we’re proclaiming His goodness this morning with people we love. And I don’t know who’s watching this — you may have stumbled onto it, and it may look like the craziest thing to you. If it does, just stay here. Don’t scroll, because you found the right place. There’s no accident here. You’re supposed to be here.
My method of obtaining security and peace in my life has been this need to know what it’s going to look like, this plan. Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Let’s talk about needs. We have needs for healing — sicknesses that last for years sometimes, that perplex doctors. I want to tell you, God is bigger than any diagnosis. He’s bigger than any medical mystery. We have a need for strength. We get tired. Sometimes you don’t feel like you’re any match for what’s coming up ahead, and you know what’s coming. Sometimes we just get physically tired. There’s a need for wisdom. Every prayer service we have — and we have prayer services here on Wednesday nights, and they’re good; I’ve been to some dull prayer services, y’all, but these are good — every time somebody will request prayer for clarity and direction. Every time. So we need wisdom. We need provision. We need money. It’s not the most important thing, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen. We need resources in this life. And I think we need hope. The world’s lost a lot of hope, y’all, and they sure don’t give it to us. We’re the ones who’ve got to give it to them. Most of the time I’m dishing out the hope, because you don’t walk out the door and somebody on the street gives you hope. Days can get pretty dark sometimes.
And so here’s the good news — we’re back to Bible school: the answer is still Jesus. Hear me. The answer is still Jesus. The world says you need more. God says, “I’m all you need.” When Moses needed direction, God was enough. When David needed victory, God was enough. When Daniel needed protection, God was enough. When Paul needed strength, God was enough. And when we needed salvation, God sent Jesus. And because Jesus is enough, everything we ever need is taken care of. It’s settled. And whatever your situation, whatever tomorrow holds, I want you to know God’s grace will be sufficient. The strength of Jesus Christ will sustain you. God’s power will uphold you. His provision never fails. Here’s what I want you to walk out with today, and I’ve said it at least fifteen times: Jesus Christ is enough. Let’s say it together. Jesus Christ is enough. He’s all you need. His grace is enough. His strength is enough. His victory is enough. His truth is enough. His power is enough. His provision is enough. Because Jesus is enough. He’s all you need.
Why don’t you pray with me. Father in heaven, thank You for an opportunity to come before You this morning and worship You and learn and just realize who You really are. You wanted us to be dependent on You. You created us to be that way. The world tells us that’s faulty somehow, that it’s weak to be dependent in any way. But You met all our needs at Calvary. Everything is done. Conia always says, “Doing the done.” So help us to realize that on a daily basis, and plug into You for the strength and power that we need. Help us to rely on You more and on us less. Help us to understand the magnitude of Your power, and to see it in trees and rivers and babies. Help us, Lord, to understand Your power in a new and fresh way this week.
And for those of you online who are watching right now — if you don’t know Jesus and you’d love to have this peace, and you’d love for something to be enough in your life, I’m going to pray for you right now. Father, I take this audience, these people I don’t even know, and I lift them up to You in Jesus’ name. They are Your creations, just like I am. We are all Your babies. Lord, make it easy for us to understand. Make it simple and plain. Put the cookies on the bottom shelf, Lord, and help us reach it. Your ways are higher, so help us understand that we can lean into You and trust You for those ways. We need You this morning. We have needs in our lives that we lift up to You. And for the greatest need of the person who might be watching — if that’s you, repeat after me. I am a sinner, and I come to You now, Jesus, for forgiveness. Forgive me. Love me. Come into my heart. Live Your life through me. I want Your power. I want Your protection. I want Your peace. And I claim this now as a blood-bought, born-again child of God. In Jesus’ name, amen.
As a child, I always wanted a big brother. That’s difficult when you’re the firstborn, so I don’t know how that would happen. But Jesus is the best big brother. And Brother Kevin said it: it’s in the moment. It’s right here and right now. Jesus says, “Here, take My hand. I can take you where we need to go.” And that taking of the hand is in the present. You can look back and see where God’s provided every single time, and He says, “Hold My hand right here in the present. I’ve got exactly what we need for right here and right now.” And then you can look ahead to the future and see where He’s taking you, and it’s a beautiful future. So look forward to your beautiful future, holding Christ’s hand, knowing you don’t need to get ahead of Him and you don’t need to look behind. You just need to stand right there with His hand. Pray with me. Father, thank You for Jesus. Thank You that He’s always, always enough. Lord, we come into Your gates with thanksgiving, and we come into Your courts with praise, and we sit with Jesus, holding our hand at Your right hand. We love You, Lord. We praise You and we thank You. In Jesus’ name, amen. Y’all have a great week.
