Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Hey everybody, thanks so much for sharing part of your day with us here at Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. And today, we're going to bring our series called This Is Us to a close. You know, in a world where many people feel so disconnected and uncertain, Rick will share biblical truths that will help you find your place in God's family, grow your faith, and live with greater purpose and hope. So, let's get started. Here's a message called How God Grows Our Faith.

Pastor Rick Warren: I I want you to know that in 40 years, preparing this particular message was the single most difficult message in my life. And here's the reason. Because in my mind, I really wanted to share with you all of the major lessons that I've learned in 40 years. So, you don't have to make some of the mistakes I made, and you don't have to go through some of the pain that I went through, uh because I care about you, and it's wiser to learn from somebody else and have to go through everything by experience. So, I sat down.

The first thing I did this week cuz I made a list of all the major lessons I've learned about God in life in 40 years. I came up with 52 lessons. And I thought, that's a year's sermon series. 52 week. There's no way. And I just thought, Rick, you are the dumbest person on the planet to think you could summarize 40 years in one sermon. So, I had to just take one principle because I knew we weren't going to have a whole lot of time this week, and I just wanted to take one principle and and nail down on that.

And it's there. If you pull out your message notes, it's how God grows our faith. If you get this one, it it's so important uh and and because the Bible says this. Look on your outline. You know, one day, the apostles are are walking along, disciples are walking with Jesus, and they say in Luke chapter 17 verse 5, they said, Lord, increase our faith. That is a prayer God will always answer. Lord, increase our faith. Now, why did they pray increase our faith? Well, there are many many reasons, but let me just mention two, the next two verses.

First, Hebrews 11:6, without faith, it is impossible to please God. That's why you want your faith to increase because without faith, it is impossible to please God. God does not respond to my complaints. God does not complain respond to my worries. God does not respond to my uh bitterness or whatever. But God moves heaven and earth when I trust him. He always responds to faith. And and the Bible says without faith, it's impossible to please God. Not only that, faith is the door to everything God wants to do in your life. But in Matthew 9:29, Jesus said, according to your faith, it will be done to you.

You get to choose how much I bless your life. According to your faith, I will do it. God responds to faith. You put a little faith in God, you'll get little results. You put a lot of faith in God, you get a lot of results. You put great faith in God, you'll get great results. That's one of the most important lessons I've learned in 40 years. Is that according to your faith, it will be done unto you. God says, you get to choose how much I bless your life. Now, Colossians 2:7 says this. Let your roots go down into him and draw up nourishment so that you will grow in faith.

Circle that. Grow in faith. Strong and vigorous. For 40 years, that has been my goal as your coach, as your pastor, as as a spiritual leader and helping you. My goal is that you will grow in faith and that your faith will be strong and your faith will be vigorous. Not some wimpy namby-pamby faith that that burns up when the heat's on, but strong, vigorous faith. That's my goal for you. You say, well Rick, how does God do that? How does God grow my faith? Well, in two big categories. Write these down. The two ways God grows your faith.

The first way God grows your faith is through knowing God's word. Knowing God's word. That's actually the easy way. It's God's favorite way for you to learn faith. He wants you to read the Bible, listen to the Bible, study the Bible, memorize the Bible, talk about the Bible because the Bible says in Romans 10:17, faith comes from hearing hearing God's message. And God's message is heard through the word of Christ. So, uh um I I can grow in faith every time I read this book. If your faith is weak, it means this. You're not in this book very often.

The more you're in this book, whether you listen to it or you read it, uh the more you get in this book, the more this is your soul food. It feeds your soul. And and some of you have been on a fast for a long time. You haven't been feeding. And so your faith isn't very strong. It's pretty weak. That's the easy way to grow in faith. But even if you study the Bible 4 hours a day, and you don't, that would still leave 20 hours a day that you're not studying it. So, God actually depends more on the second way to grow your faith than he does the first.

First doing is the easy way. Second way is the hard way. What was the second way? God grows my faith through circumstances that test me. God grows my faith through circumstances that test me. And while you might only read the Bible for a little bit every day, you have circumstances 24 hours a day. So, God depends actually more on the second way to grow your faith and grow your character than he does on the first. Now, faith is like a muscle. And the only way you grow a muscle is by stretching it, by testing it, putting some weight on it, by putting some resistance.

You don't grow muscle without resistance. You don't grow muscle without it being stretched. You don't grow muscle without it being um uh uh you know tested by a weight or uh some kind of exercise of some kind. The same is true with faith. You don't grow a faith just by sitting around and saying, oh I want more faith. You got to have it tested. It's got to be stretched. It's got to be pushed. And that's why God allows these circumstances that that test and stretch my faith. What I want to do, and I could have given you 14 or 20 uh faith steps or tests.

Let me just give you four. These are four that I have seen over and over and over and over in the last 40 years. So, I know they're going to come up in your life repeatedly that if you are going to grow in faith, God is going to say, learn the word, but also be realized that I'm going to use tests to strengthen, to stretch, to build, to grow, to develop your muscle, your faith muscle. Okay, what are these four tests that we're going to look at? Number one, God tests and grows our faith through dreams.

God tests and grows our faith through dreams. You say, what do you mean by that, Rick? I'm saying that God gives you a dream in your heart. He gives you a vision in your mind of what he wants to do with your life. And this is a test. Everybody's had a dream at some point in their life. Everybody's had a dream. Where do you think that dream came from? It came from God. And God gives us different dreams so everything gets done in the world. If we all liked to do the same thing, a lot would get left undone.

So, the things that you're interested in, the things that you're passionate about, there's some things that turn your crank, there's some things you couldn't care less about. Where do you think you got that? You got it from God. God made you to be you. He didn't want you to be me. You you're not responsible for the dream God gave me. You're responsible responsible for the dream that God gives you. Now, there's a big difference between God's dream for your life and your dream. And so we'll talk about that in a minute. But by the way, how do you know if a dream's from God?

How do I know it? Did I just make this up or or did it really come from God? So, how do you know a dream is from God? Two ways. One, it's going to help somebody. If your dream doesn't help somebody, it's not from God. Because God is not interested in just you living a self-centered life. Does that make sense? God is interested in you living a self-centered life. So, whatever dream you give it's going to help somebody out there, either a product or a service or an idea or a thought or a book or a service of some kind that you give.

You make somebody's life brighter. You make somebody's life more beautiful. You make somebody's life greater, easier, whatever. It's going to help somebody else. That's the first thing you drive. The other one is, listen, it'll be so big you're bound to fail unless God bails you out. When God gives you a dream, you can't do it in your own power. It is so big that you you go, there's no way I could do that. And God's going right, that's why you're going to have to depend on me because if you don't have to depend on me, you don't need any faith.

And without faith, it is impossible to please God. So, God will give you a dream that a is going to help somebody out there in some way. There's a need for it. Find a need and fill it. You know, find a hurt and heal it. Uh and number two, it it's a dream that's going to be so big you can't do it uh on your own power. Now, here's what the Bible says. Jeremiah 29:11. Very famous verse. God says, I know what I've planned for you says the Lord. I have good plans for you. I don't plan to hurt you.

I plan to give you hope and a good future. This whole thing, Saddleback Church started because God put a dream in my heart in my mind. Okay, and I when we got married, we actually thought we were going to be missionary somewhere in Asia. And we were ready to go. But God shut the door. And it was the biggest disappointment in my life. I had already been uh uh uh short-term missionary to Japan, lived in Nagasaki, taught English, helped plant a church in Nagasaki. I thought we were going back to Asia. She did too. And God shut that door.

God guides you not just through open doors, but he also guides you through shut doors. God slammed that one shut. And I thought, I don't get it when so many so few people are willing to go to overseas and we are. Why don't you let us go? God said, you're not going to be a missionary, but you're going to be a missionary sending church, and you'll send out thousands. So, I remember getting out a map of the United States. We were living in Texas at the time. I was working on my master's degree. And uh I put up a map of the US, and I circled every major city outside of the South.

Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix. Finally narrowed it down to four areas on the West Coast, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Orange County. I was in the South at the time. I thought, man there are plenty of churches here. I I'm going to go where there aren't enough churches. So, I studied Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Orange County. And one day, that summer, 1979, I discovered reading census statistics that this area, the Saddleback Valley where Lake Forest campus is, was the fastest growing area in Orange County. And and Orange County was the fastest growing county in the United States between 1970 and 1980.

That 's not true anymore, but I thought wherever you got a lot of people moving in, they're going to need churches. So, most of you know this story that I wrote a letter to a guy who was a kind of a director of Baptist churches in the area. I was going to a Baptist seminary. I wrote the guy and I said um I'm not asking you for money. I'm not asking you for support, uh but I'm thinking about coming to the Saddleback Valley to start a new church. And I just like your opinion. His name was Herman Wooten.

And I wrote that letter to him not knowing that somehow in the province of God, he had heard that I was interested in planning a church. And he had written to me. And as a seminary student, he said, uh dear Mr. Warren, we'd never met. He said, I've heard you may be interested in planning a church. Have you ever considered a place called the Saddleback Valley? And our letters crossed in the mail. I put my letter in one day, and the next day I went to the to the uh mailbox, opened it, and there's a letter from the guy I just written a letter to.

Knowing he probably just got mine that day. And I burst it into tears. And that started giving me a little sign that I was on to the dream that God wanted me to do. And and and so bottom line is um we um I I went around to some churches and tried to get some support, nobody would support me. At that time, nobody would support me. So, I said, okay K, um here's the thing. Uh I think God is calling us to move to a city we've never been to and start a new church with no money and no members and no building.

And I have never been a senior pastor. What do you think? And uh she did what you did. She laughed. Actually, then she said she looked at me and said, well it scares me to death. Scares me to death. But I believe in God and I believe in you. So, let's go for it. I've often thought, how would history be different if my wife had said no? There would be no celebrate recovery. There'd be no purpose-driven life. There'd be no Daniel plan. There'd there'd be no peace plan. There'd be no 55,000 people baptized and heading into heaven.

There would be no purpose-driven church ministry that's trained over a million pastors. None of that would have happened. There would not be the book that is the best-selling book in American history and just passed 50 million copies. It's the most translated book in the world. It's in Guinness purpose-driven life. None of that would have happened. I just want to pause here and say, when somebody has a dream, make sure you're not the dream buster. Cuz you may be thwarting the will of God. You just ought to be pretty careful about that. So, when K gets dreams, I'm going, God don't let me get in the way.

And I I I support her in what God is saying to her in the same way. Now, a lot of people say, well I don't have dreams because um because it's scary. Well, of course it's scary. That's why it requires faith. Every single decision, major decision I've made in 40 years as pastor of this church, every single one of them scared me to death. I just decided a long time ago, I'm not going to base my life on fear. We're going to do the thing that fears that that we fear. We're not going to let fear dominate our lives.

That's what courage is. If you're not afraid, you don't need courage. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is when you do what you know God's told you to do even though you're scared to death. But it's just trusting God, moving ahead in your fear. Now, a lot of people think, well I am not going to go after my dream cuz I don't have a peace about it. You're not going to have a peace about it until you take the step. God doesn't give you the peace before you take the move. You're waiting for him to give you the peace now.

He's not going to give it to you. Of course you got you got fears. But you make the move and you step into the water and you watch the waves part, and then the peace comes. Now, I'm already out of time and I did one point. It's And I I thought I'd teach you 40 years of lessons in one sermon. You guys it's time for true confessions, 40 years, if you haven't figured this one out. I have really good sense of space. You can drop me down in any city in the world, and I'll know which way to go.

I just have an internal gyroscope. I have no sense of time. Have you noticed that? My how time flies, all right? All right, I tell you what. I will give you the fill-ins and won't teach you and tell you the stories. Please beg me. Okay, one more point. I'll give you two. I'll give you two. Then we'll just have to teach you the rest of this later, okay? Oh first, let me just say this. Look at this verse, Ephesians 3:20. God can do anything you know far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams.

Here's the thing. Don't let the size of your God determine the size of your dream. Don't make the dream based on what you think you can do. That's going to be a pretty small dream. Make the dream based on what you think God can do. Second big test. God tests and grows our faith not just through dreams, but through delays. God tests and grows our faith through delays. No dream is instantly fulfilled. Here's the biggest problem you you you do. You set your goals too low, and you try to accomplish them too quickly. We underestimate we overestimate what we can do in a year, but we underestimate what we could do in 10 or 20.

Set bigger goals, bigger dreams for your life, and then give the rest of your life to it. Stop playing in in in the shallows of Baby Beach. Stop splashing around on Baby Beach with little dinky tiny goals. Make your life count. I can teach you. I can teach you how to do something great with your life. I cannot teach you how to do it quickly. It takes time. It took me 40 years. But inch by inch, anything's a cinch. How do how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Doesn't happen overnight. When God wants to make a mushroom, he takes 6 hours.

When God wants to make an oak tree, he takes 60 years. Do you want to be a mushroom or an oak tree? Now, I don't know how much time you've got left. 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 10 years, you don't know. I'm just saying that the most important thing in your life is not the duration of your life, but the donation of your life. What matters most is not how long you live. What matters is how you live. You have talents. You have abilities that he wants to use for a greater purpose than yourself.

So, just get on the train and let's go together. But it won't all happen at once. Here's what the Bible says. Habakkuk 2:3. These things that I plan for you, these good plans that Jeremiah talked about, they won't happen right away. But steadily, slowly, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair for these things will surely be fulfilled. Just be patient. They will surely come to pass. Just be patient. They will not be overdue a single day. I might be able to give you a hundred examples, stories in the last 40 years of how God used delays in the life of our church and in my own life personally to actually get us to a better place.

If God has given you a dream and it hadn't come to true yet, don't despair. The delays are part of the process. The obstacles are part of the journey. Because God is building your faith. He's strengthening that muscle. He's testing you. And he builds your faith through not just dreams that are scary, but delays that take time. There's always a delay between the dream and the fulfillment. And one of the things I want you to learn that I've learned over 40 years is that God's timing is always always perfect. He's never early. Sometimes I thought he was late, but he wasn't.

He knew what he was doing. What do you do while you're waiting on your dream? Well, you remember this basic truth. God is in control. Something you have to remember in the delays and the difficulties and the dead ends of life. God is in control. In all of the details, the Bible says they're on on your outline on the back, Isaiah 64:4. God acts on the behalf. God acts on the behalf of those who what? Circle that. Wait for him. God acts on the behalf of those who wait for him. God has acted on my behalf countless times because I waited on him.

I waited on his timing. I had the dream way way in advance, but God's timing of the fulfillment of it was going to happen in his timing. So, what am I saying? Never let an impossible situation intimidate you, keep you from your dream. Never let an impossible situation intimidate you. Let it motivate you. Motivate you to pray more, to believe more, to trust more, to wait more, to expect more, to depend on God more. Cuz when you do that, it is inevitable. What God starts in your life, he's going to finish. Let it motivate you to believe, to trust more and more and more.

Now, the Bible says nothing is impossible to God. So, you got a dream, but it hadn't happened yet. Hudson Taylor said it like this. He's a famous missionary. He said there are three phases to God's work. Impossible, possible, and done. You may be in what looks like the impossible stage right now, but it's going to get to the possible, and then it's going to get done. You've heard me tell this many times that if you were to come to my office and take my dictionary out of my office and look up the word impossible, you would find it's not there because I cut it out with an exacto knife.

Cuz if God says nothing is impossible, if that word isn't in his vocabulary, it's not in mine. Nothing is impossible with God. Satan's favorite phrase in your life, do you know what it is? You can't do that. You can't do that. Who do you think you are? You know your past. What makes you think you could be a man of God? The promises of God. What makes you think you could be a woman of God? Every every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. Doesn't matter where you've been. Doesn't matter what direction your feet have been.

What matters is what direction your feet are headed right now. So, I'm asking you, give your life to Christ. Get connected to a family. Get connected to this family. We welcome you here, but just find a church and make the rest of your life count.

Guest (Male): Hey, thanks for listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Here's Rick with an important message.

Pastor Rick Warren: You know, I just want to take a quick second to say thank you everybody. Thank you for listening, for sharing this broadcast, and for your faithful prayers, and especially your financial support. God is using you in a mighty way to get the message of hope out to a world that's desperately in need of Jesus Christ. Thanks for listening today everybody, and please be sure to join me next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope.

Guest (Male): This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.