Get Your Feet Wet: Taking a Step of Faith

Scott Jarvis: It's good to be on campus.
If I get this thing to work.
It's good to be on campus.
It's been a long time since I've been here, but it's nice.
It's good to be back.
So the other day I was working on a puzzle
and I was sitting at the table
trying to put all these pieces together
and I was getting super frustrated
and so my wife walks in
and she's like, "Why are you so frustrated?"
and I said, "I cannot get these pieces to go together
and it doesn't look anything like the box."
And she's like, "Why don't you put the frosted
place away and knock it off.
But that's kind of the story of my life.
I have been
operating out of the wrong box from the beginning of my life.
It's just a
challenge.
It's like trying to figure out how do the pieces of this life go
together and what do I do with these different things.
And I couldn't figure
out how to solve the issues in my life.
And unfortunately that led me down some
different paths.
My life got to be pretty close to a train wreck.
So I could tell you a lot of
stories of things that I did to anesthetize my pain,
or things that I did to try to overcome
the issues that I had.
It's nice to have friends.
Anyway,
I could tell you a whole bunch of stories
about things that I tried to do to deal with the struggles in my life and all of that.
I wound up
in a fistfight with my dad.
Then we were 23 years of not speaking to each other.
That has been
resolved.
I got to baptize my dad.
So some pretty cool things have happened in my life.
But it's
been a journey to get there. And in that journey,
there's a lot of challenges that came across.
Just to give you a picture of who I was as a teenager,
I was one of those kind of guys that every job I had I stole from.
I figured out a way that I could manipulate the system.
I'd jam something in the cash register and figure out how to steal from the cash register.
I would just all kinds of different things.
When my car would break down, I would go to the car dealership and borrow a car.
Now, this was before I'm old.
This was when you could drive a car off the lot and you didn't have anybody with you.
And I would just take the car down,
pull the battery out of it, put my old battery in it,
jumpstart it, and drive it back.
And you basically midnight auto my way through things.
This is just the kind of way that I dealt with things.
My anger came out in a lot of ways.
I don't know if you've ever played mailbox baseball before,
but I love baseball and I
don't like mailboxes.
So we would drive down the road with a baseball bat and see how many mailboxes we could take
out in the evening.
I worked for Baskin Robbins and, you know, what trouble can you get in at Baskin Robbins?
So what I used to do is take ice cream balls and scoop them up and put them in the freezer and get them rock hard.
And then we'd go out and throw them at different signs in the mall there that would break the sign because it was so hard.
But then it would melt so it would not leave much evidence of anything at all behind.
This is the way my mind worked because of my anger.
Now, there's this bridge.
Well, here, let me show you this picture.
There's this bridge.
This is a bridge in Honduras,
in Chiliteca, Honduras.
And literally,
this bridge is known as the Bridge to Nowhere.
The reason for that is that it was built in 1996.
They started building it, and it was finished in 1998.
And they hired a group from Japan to come build it
because they were supposed to be so good at what they did
that they could build a bridge that could withstand a five-point hurricane
and a Category 5 hurricane.
So they finished this bridge in 1998.
And what do you know, in 1998,
Hurricane Mitch happened. And
Hurricane Mitch was a five-category hurricane.
So the bridge survived.
But what's interesting is
all the buildings,
all the roads,
everything around was just completely washed away.
In fact,
there was such a dump of water. There was so much weight behind this massive wall of water that
came, that the river moved.
Well,
anyway, there's a cool picture if I could get this to flip.
Oh,
there it is.
This is the bridge after the hurricane.
Now, you might look at that and go,
what idiot built a bridge right there?
But literally,
the river moved.
And
figure that out.
Now we have a bridge and what do we do with a bridge that isn't even over the water?
But this is kind of the story of my life.
My parents got divorced when I was in middle school.
They'd had all kinds of problems leading up to that.
And it was sort of a river moving experience
in my life. It changed everything.
And as a result of that, well,
I went down this path of anger and
self-destruction and using drugs,
trying to have sex with every girl I went out with.
It's just the nature of who I was.
I spent three years after I graduated high school just trying
to figure out what to do with my life.
And it was during that three years that I worked with a guy
named Glenn,
and he taught me about Jesus.
And once I became a Christian, I decided,
how can I help teenagers not make the mistakes that I made?
So I came to Love It Christian.
Now, that's a story in and of itself that God had to move to get me here because I was living in
California and I had no money.
So I applied.
I hadn't taken the ACT,
which LCU required the ACT.
I had been out of high school for three years. I walked into it blind one Saturday and just sat
down and took the ACT.
Fortunately,
I scored well enough on it that I got the scholarship money that
I needed in order to go to school.
So I wound up here at Lubbock Christian, and what an experience
that was.
It was a place where I could come with a lot of baggage and little understanding of the
Bible and ask all the questions that I needed to ask and find the type of support that I needed to
find.
I showed up a week late to come to school because I was teaching at a youth camp,
and it ran
the first week of school.
And so I had called ahead of time, and I said, is it possible for me to still
come if I can't be there for a week.
And a guy named Steve Ekman was like,
you show up on campus,
I will walk you through everything you need to do.
Him and I became really good friends. We played
racquetball together.
He was my first Bible teacher and we became really good friends.
And that
moved me into a route of growing and developing in the Lord.
I don't know if any of you know Tammy
Hodnett.
She's around Lubbock Christian quite a bit, but she was in my first youth group. I worked
this little town right outside of Lubbock here. And I worked there my junior, senior year of high
school.
And her and her sister Jennifer were some of my first guinea pigs in learning how to do
youth ministry.
You might recognize,
if I can get that next picture up there, you might recognize
this guy right here.
That's the guy 42 years ago that I met when I was doing an internship in
Denton. That's David Fraze in the middle right there. Him as a strapping young man,
huh?
Yeah,
what a handsome dude.
Anyway,
so this is part of my LCU experience.
It is
meeting people and being enriched in things and having my life filled with all kinds of things.
I was part of Alpha Chi.
In fact, I was president one year and we had... We started this.
Okay.
We, anyway,
so the,
I had such great friendships during that time that tonight there is a group
of Alpha Chi and Kappa students from my generation that we're all meeting together to have devotional
time together this evening.
That's the kind of thing that Lubbock Christian put into my life, just an experience of meeting
people and growing with people in things like this.
Bottom line though, it comes down to this.
When I came here, I came here with a calling.
I had sat out for three years and didn't know what to do with my life.
And when I came here, I came here with a calling.
And that calling was,
how am I used by the Lord to help teenagers navigate through adolescence?
To help them figure out you don't have to walk a path of anger.
You don't have to choose destructive ways to face the issues that are going on in your life.
How can I learn how to do that?
And I was really blessed with a great education here.
but more than that with a support system here that I still cherish to this day.
I met my wife here
and we were married 42 years ago.
The same summer I met David was the summer I married my wife.
And so all that is because of Lubbock Christian and the things that I have here. So I want to
finish with one last picture for you to bring this around to you.
Because it doesn't matter.
This is my story, and I've lived it, and it's been great.
But what about your story?
And what about your calling in things?
So in Joshua chapter 3, you can see this passage up here.
It says,
It'll come about when the souls of the feet of the priests who carry the ark of the Lord,
the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan.
The waters of the Jordan will be cut off.
That is, the waters which are flowing down from above,
and they will stand in one heap.
This was God using Joshua to enter into the promised land.
But Joshua was following a guy, Moses, who was like almost God himself.
And Joshua was like,
how am I supposed to be the same kind of leader?
And God was going to part the Jordan like God had parted the Red Sea for Moses
and use this as a way of validating him.
But look at the situation here.
When they get their feet wet is when God was going to act.
And typically,
we like to do it the opposite.
Well, God, if you'll just do some great thing,
then I'll know where I'm supposed to be and
what I'm supposed to do.
I'll take that next step forward.
And God actually says,
no,
you step forward in faith and I'll meet you there.
And then I'll do some phenomenal act, move in some great way in your life.
But until you get your feet wet,
we're not moving anywhere.
What's interesting is this took place at flood stage.
God's sense of humor was,
let's wait until the Jordan is as wide and deep as it can be.
And then we'll move you across into the promised land.
And I'll have the Jordan come back in place.
And you're stuck here.
no way to get out that's a step of faith but God waited till it was flood stage and said all right
here's how we're going to do this the priest will take the ark and when they step in the water
I will separate this and make it happen maybe you're dreaming right now you've got these big
dreams about your life and what you want to do how God wants to use you maybe you have a sense
of calling in your life and you're trying to figure out what paths are going to open up for
me in this.
And I will tell you this,
those dreams may feel like they're a mile away.
And you may look at that and go, wow, there's so many obstacles between me and where I'm trying to
get.
How am I ever going to get there? And God will say,
it's not a mile away.
It's one step
of faith away.
You take the step.
You get your feet wet.
You move into where I'm calling you to
be, and I will open the path for you.
I can tell you from 42 years of ministry,
from 42 years of
marriage,
from raising kids in the Lord, from now having grandkids, seven grandkids that I'm loving
and raising in the Lord, all these kinds of things are things where they don't really happen well
until you get your feet wet.
You're never really ready to get married.
You're never really ready
to have children.
You're never really ready for some of the different aspects of things that are
going to happen in your life. And God's going to say,
take a step of faith.
Get your feet wet.
Trust the calling that he's given you.
Trust the size of who your God is. Trust the promises that
he has given and he says he's going to fulfill.
But believe that this doesn't happen until I take
a step of faith.
Let me pray over you and we'll finish with that.
God, I just want to say thank
you for these students that are here.
I ask that you fill their experiences here with awesome,
awesome things that happen for them, to them, through them, with them, sometimes even in spite
of them.
May you work in such a mighty way, Father, that someday they'll be standing before
family or friends or churches or different places where they can give a testimony of who you are
and what you've done in their life to take a train wreck and a bridge that seems to be going nowhere
and to give it purpose and to help them become,
Father, everything that you've created them to be,
that you've provided for them to grow in, that you have opened those doors of opportunity.
May they have the kind of faith, Father, that they will step forward,
get their feet wet,
and move by faith.
God bless them in all of that.
It's through Jesus and your Spirit I pray.
Amen.
Thank you.
Thank you.