Nicholas Vega
Sermon Transcription:
Hallelujah, Father God, we thank you for who you are. Lord, thank you, Father God, that you saved our lives. Lord God, you saved us from the law. You saved us, Lord God, from trying to win your affections. Lord God, you saved us. Lord, thank you for sending your Son to die on the cross, for being the perfect one for us. God, by faith, we may enter into rest. God, by faith, we may become righteous before you, Lord God. Thank you, Father God, for your goodness. Lord God, we love you. Lord Father God, I pray that you, Lord God, overshadow me today. Lord God, that you would take over. Lord God, that you would take my weakness and reveal your strength. Lord God, I thank you that you take the little you have given me and disperse it among your people. Lord God, I pray that you would feed your people today. Lord God, I pray that you would have the victory and the glory today, God, because you deserve it. Lord, you are worthy to be praised.
Jesus, thank you for giving up your life for ours. Lord God, thank you, Father God, for sending your Son, your beloved, your only begotten one, for us. Thank you that you care for us, Lord God, that you love us. You loved us when we were your enemy, God. You loved us, Father, when we were sinners. God, we don't deserve to be saved, but you saved us anyway, Lord God. You made a way. God, we pray that you would have your way in our hearts, that we would make room for you to be glorified, that others will be saved, that others will be drawn to you, and that they may get to know you as we do. Lord, may you be honored and praised in Jesus' name. Hallelujah, hallelujah, amen, amen.
Before I get into the word today, I just want to piggyback off of that song, "I Will Make Room for You," because it's pretty fire. When we say, "Take our traditions, break our traditions, break our religion," God, it's because God's way is better. Real quick, I want to read from Matthew 11:28, which is a scripture we're going to use today for another part, but recently this has been touching my heart. When Jesus says, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Hallelujah! We find rest when we put our trust in Christ. We find rest when we finally give that part of our lives up to God, and we no longer have to work for His affection any longer. We no longer have to work to please Him any longer, but because of Christ, we have all that we need, and we actually get to have rest in our souls from here on forward. Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus, for that.
As always before I start, I want to thank our pastors, Pastor Stan and Nina, and Pastor Inna, for giving me the opportunity to preach. We miss them—I miss them. They are on their well-deserved vacation right now, but I thank them for always giving me this opportunity to learn how to preach, to learn how to seek God on my behalf but also on everybody's behalf here, and to learn that skill. God has always blessed me in trying to bless you, and I hope that you know it's funny because sometimes we go through things in our lives that we don't like, that we don't want to experience, but out of those experiences, God has a mission, a lesson, that He wants to use to touch somebody else's life with.
This is kind of one of those times. Today, as I was studying this topic, I found out that I actually have two sermons, and I'm very grateful because I have to preach twice before the pastor comes back, so it really came in clutch. We're going to be talking today about casting your cares upon the Lord. For the first part, today is going to be just about our everyday life. It may be simple, but good things are simple sometimes. It's a good thing that God doesn't have to be complicated for something to mean something or to be valuable. It's the simple things that we can actually take on, take home with us, and work with every day. We get to learn how to walk by faith. Amen.
As I read, Jesus says, "Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We will find rest for our souls. In 1 Peter 5:7, it says, "Cast all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you." There is another scripture in Philippians where it has the same connotation: we pray to the Lord about everything that we are going through. We pray about those things, but we also give thanks, and as a result of casting our cares, we get peace and so on and so forth.
Recently, God has challenged me in how I viewed Him, and He has shown me an area of my life where I lack trust. He showed me that I actually don't believe He cares for me and about my everyday life. Trusting God has been a journey. Every time that I preach, I always revert back to those days when life was really tough and hard. Trusting God has become a journey. Amen.
In the beginning, I remember times when trusting Him felt like I was jumping off a cliff. When I was in Canada, we used to go to this place called Charlotte Falls. They had a couple of spots where you could jump off by the waterfall, but the highest point was about 25 feet. When you get up there, it's a little bit of a trek to get up there. I have a video if y'all want to watch it, but I'm telling the truth here. When you're standing up there, you know, from the bottom, you look up and think, "Ah, I got this. I can do this." But once you're standing up there, looking down, it's just like, "Uh, okay, it's going to take me a bit to get up there." You do those things where you step back, try to do a running jump, and then stop, thinking, "Let me just rethink this real quick. I'm not as young as I used to be. I might break my legs or something."
Trusting God was like that in the beginning. What I mean by that is the function of doing it. Initially, when we get saved, we trust God for the salvation of our life, of our soul. We trust, we put our trust in the fact that Jesus's sacrifice was enough, that God sees us as righteous as a result of it. But there was a time when trusting God felt like, "If God doesn't come through, I don't know if I'm going to make it." It felt like I was going to die as a result. Like, I wouldn't be able to bear the burden of Him not coming through for me in this area. That's what it felt like.
I found that there are parts of our life that are kind of like exercising, and trusting God is one of those areas for me. I don't know about y'all, but I started to work out, trying to look... never mind, let me not go there. In the beginning, when you start to work out, that first day is miserable—at least it was for me. That first day is very hard, it sucks, and it's painful. But as you do a particular exercise over and over again, it becomes easier to do. You develop muscle memory. I'm not a gym rat, so if you are, just please forgive me. But yeah, it becomes easier and easier to do those exercises. With proper nutrition and sleep, those exercises become more effective.
I have found that trusting God has kind of been the same situation. Every single time that God has asked me to either repent from my unbelief and turn to Him or start to believe a certain thing, it became easier and easier to do that function. Trusting God initially was daunting, but after walking with God for a bit, for some time, the act of putting my trust in Him and entrusting things to Him has become easier. At the last Builder's Retreat that we had, one of the main themes, if not the main theme, was about grace. It came in so clutch back then because it was so crucial for us to learn how to either continue to walk by grace or start learning how to walk by grace. We learned that we can do things by our own strength, or we can learn how to follow God's standard for those things, thereby learning how to operate according to His grace.
For me, I lived carrying life's demands, problems, and cares on my own. A lot of times, juggling my life versus the kingdom was a hassle. Trying to juggle those things together was a hassle. I would get so worn out by trying to deal with life and its demands that my kingdom duties started to suffer. My kingdom duties started to be neglected, and I would prioritize the care of my world over other areas of my life. It sucked because all of my feelings would tell me that if I didn't take care of this area of my life, it would fall and crumble. The world that I was carrying would fall apart if I stopped taking care of it, and so that was my justification for neglecting my duties in this work, my duties with what God has asked me to do, all those responsibilities.
There's a part of that scripture, when Jesus starts talking about the Beatitudes, where it talks about the cares of this world choking out the life, choking out the word that God has given you, and therefore that word would no longer bear fruit. That was kind of my life because of the cares that I was carrying. The thing is, it's true. If I stopped carrying those things of the world, it would crumble, fall apart, tumble, and break loose. The reason for that, though, is because I'm the one that's carrying it, not the Lord, just me.
Again, one of the points we learned in that Builder's Retreat is that when we learn to walk by His grace, God will allow us to walk in our own strength. He will allow us to continue on the way we’re doing things, to come to the end of ourselves, and find out that we've been carrying things all along and He wasn't carrying those things. It's in those moments where we have a choice: we either continue to carry on the way we have been, or we surrender it to Him and allow Him to be in control. We allow Him to tell us how He wants things to be, or whether or not He wants those things in our lives. Hallelujah.
So, God allows us to get to the end of ourselves to find out that we have been carrying things all along and not Him. As a man, growing up, I believed that this is what being a man is. I have to be the provider of my home. I have the responsibility of my family, so I’ve got to carry these things. I’ve got to do this because that’s what it means to be a man. If I don’t do these things, then I’m not, you know... I need to have that demanding job in order to pay for the life I want to give my kids because I didn’t have it when I was growing up. Whatever it may be—I’m not saying that was me, but what I’m saying is that’s usually the excuse people have. "I want to give my kids a better life than I had, so therefore I’ve got to give my life to my job. I’ve got to give my life to this. I’ve got to do this, do that. I have to have that big house and mortgage because if not, my kids won’t live safely," and so on and so forth. Whatever the excuse.
For me, the cares of my life often took up all the brain space in my mind. They would take control of my thought life. My job was a big thing for me. The cares of my job, the demands it had for security, and so on. There were a lot of times where I wasn’t even working, yet I was thinking about my job. I wasn’t even getting paid for it, but it took up that much space in my life. The security that I do here, and so on, gets neglected. Those are the things that become a problem. So, what is the problem with having cares in our life? One of the problems for me was that, well, first off, it was only the Lord who convicted me that I was actually doing something wrong, that it had become a problem. Without the Lord, I would still be doing the same things, living the same life. But the Lord saw fit that this was a problem.
One of the big things is that this is actually a form of pride. Because of the cares of this world, we begin to worry about these things, and worry is a form of pride. In 1 Peter 5:5, the second part of the verse says, "God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble." Just like we learned in that retreat, God will allow you to walk down this path of carrying these things for you to find out that you’re doing this in your own strength. He will allow you to do it. He loves you, and He will care for you and whatnot, but it sometimes takes a lot for us to find out the things that we’re doing wrong. He cares for our blind spots, if you will.
So, God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. I find it crazy when the Lord reveals this to me because here’s a God who deserves all the worship. He deserves all the praise, all our adoration; He deserves our life. Yet, I was very much comfortable believing that God didn’t care about my issues and my problems because He’s God—He’s got stuff to deal with, people to deal with, and so on. I thought I had to take care of these problems for myself. But here’s a God who, though He deserves all these things, still cares for my life. He still cares for the people I deal with. He still cares about the issues I run into. He cares about the fact that you’re trying to prepare your word, and all of a sudden, you walk outside and find out your car got busted into—they tried to steal your joint, right? He cares about those things.
It’s crazy because God deserves all these things, but He still cares for me intimately. He cares for me. God is not a God who puts this over your face, saying, "Look what I do for you; you need to obey me, you need to do this," and so on. He’s not that way. He’s kind and gentle. He’s represented by Christ. When we look at Jesus’s life, we can expect God to be the same way because that’s what Jesus was. Yet, He still loves us and cares for us. So now, the word "cast" or "casting" in 1 Peter 5:7. The word "casting" in 1 Peter 5:7 is the same word used in the triumphant entry of Christ in Luke 19. This provides a visual of what the Lord wants us to do. In this account, we have Jesus heading towards Jerusalem, and He tells His disciples to bring Him a colt or a donkey. He gives them specific instructions, and when they return, the Bible says that they threw their clothes or coats on the donkey for Him, and they placed Him upon it. In the same manner, Jesus wants us to throw our cares, burdens, anxieties, and problems upon Him so that He can deal with them. This is because He cares for us.
We live in a free society. We are free to live our lives as we want to. However, it is a skill that we need to learn: to trust God with our cares. You may think today, "Well, okay, this is a brand new thing for me. I've never done this before, and the problems of my life feel so big—they look like mountains, not molehills. How am I going to do this?" That's what your feelings might tell you. The good thing is that God is not expecting you to be perfect right now. Just like with me, you can start learning this today in terms of casting your cares on Him. The great thing is that you have so much material at this moment—all your problems—that you can use to start trusting God in this way.
Another reason to learn this is because when we start, the Lord employs us in His kingdom. God uses us to glorify Himself in His kingdom. As you grow and continue to get more responsibility within His kingdom, there will be many things you’ll start caring about. You need to learn how to set those things upon Him so that you can have free space and free hands to focus on what is actually important, on what the Lord finds important for you. Hallelujah. I would suggest that the cares we carry may be correlated with the treasures of our own hearts. A lot of times, God has been faithful to always bring truth from this pulpit and give us warnings about the fact that Jesus is coming back. We need to pay attention to the treasures of our hearts because if they’re not placed in heaven, we can become blind. We might forget who we are: pilgrims, nomads, sojourners in this land. We don’t live here permanently. According to Matthew, the worries of life are correlated to where our treasures are.
Before I even get there, the other thing that we receive or that we lose because of the cares of this life is peace—peace in our minds and peace in our hearts. I don't know about you, but when I first got saved, peace was one of the things I received. It was like, all of a sudden, I had so much time to think, and I wasn’t stressed about this or that. I had a lot of time to just relate, commune, and talk with the Lord, think about the Word, think about Scripture, and so on. It just felt like there was time.
One of the things that happens when we start picking up cares in this world, whatever they may be, is that peace starts to be removed. We begin to care for those things, and if anything, peace is something that we as Christians should have. To bring testimony to those who are not saved because, in our world today, peace is not there. The world doesn't have peace. In fact, our generation is filled with so much fear, anxiety, and trepidation. That you walking into a room with peace can be a testimony of what God has done in your life or who He is to you. Let that be an example so much so that when people get to know you, they start asking questions like, "How do you have that peace? Where do you get this peace from?" Let that be a divine appointment to share the gospel with them about Christ. Let that be a moment to share why you have so much peace. The act of learning to entrust God with the cares of your life can be a means of protecting your peace. Hallelujah.
So, Matthew 6:19-34 says this, and again, we know this scripture: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things."
I'm going to stop right there and interject real quick. Church, I'm not saying that we need to give up our jobs, give up these things, and be poor. That is not what I'm saying whatsoever. Please don't hear that. What I am saying is that the position and priority of these things in our life need to have an order. If you have a job that you love and care for, that’s great. It’s good that God also has that place in your life. You need to love the Lord a little bit more in those areas, let’s be real, because you can’t do both. If you do find yourself, like I did—there was a time where I considered my job, and as much as I loved it, as much as I loved being a security guard and dealing with knuckleheads on these streets—it took up a lot of time and space in my mind and heart. As much as I loved it, there was a cost to that. There was a cost to the stress, the strain, and the way I thought about my job. That cost ended up being my relationship with the Lord and my relationship with what He had asked me to do. It could even be your daily life. You’re so busy, or you have so much care, that even when the Lord calls you into that secret place, you push it off to the side, thinking, "I’ll do it later." Then later ends up being next month. I know I’m exaggerating, but let’s be real.
So, don’t hear me say that you have to quit your job. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, love the Lord. Give Him that place He deserves, that honor He deserves, and let Him be in control. This way, you’re able to cast your cares upon Him so that you can have the peace you need. We need peace. I need peace. So, what do we do now that we have peace? What do we do after we’ve learned how to cast our cares upon the Lord? Once we become good at that art or skill—of saying, "Lord, I’m giving you this person, I’m giving you my neighbor, you deal with them; I’m giving you my car that doesn’t want to work; I’m giving you this job position, I’m giving you my coworker, I’m giving you my boss"—what is the next step?
Verse 33 says, "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." So now, instead of worrying about these things, we get to focus on the kingdom. We get to seek first what God has in store for us that day because God gives us grace for what He has in store. If you waste that grace on other things, you won't have grace for the things that truly need it. Hallelujah! As I said before, I didn't believe that God cared for me in this way, and therefore, the cares of my heart were great and easily snuffed out what God had in store for me at that time. This is why I have started to learn how to cast my cares upon Him. I can now do this because He cares for me.
Church, this is where the gospel comes in. The gospel is that He cares for you. I know it sounds simple, but I couldn't cast my cares on Him because I didn't believe that He cared for me this way. It's as simple as that. I had to repent of my unbelief and believe that He cares for me—believe that He works out all things for good for those who are called according to His purpose and who love Him. I had to believe these things to be able to cast my cares on Him because, without belief, you won't trust Him, you won't do it, and you will continue to carry these burdens.
So, God is good. He's a good, good Father. He loves us, and He is willing. This is a process that I must begin and learn. It is imperative, for the sake of seeking first the Kingdom, that we learn to transfer these cares—transfer our paychecks, transfer our bills, transfer our debt, transfer our relationships that are bothering us. We must learn how to transfer these things to the Lord so that He may take care of them. Next time I preach, part two will be a more specific example of casting your cares in a particular area of our lives. In this area, we'll be talking about David and how he entrusted his enemies to the Lord when they were coming after him and trying to kill him. We'll see how the Lord dealt with that person. I'm not saying the Lord would do the same with this person, but I'm just saying the Lord has His way. Can you trust the God who took care of us with our biggest issue? Can you trust the God who saw your need for salvation and made a way so that you can handle it? In light of eternity, our problems are very small, let's be honest and real. But we are human, and our problems become big to us. Again, God loves us, and He cares for those issues. Those issues are not too insignificant for Him to care for.
God takes care of us so that we can now take care of the salvation of those who don't know Him. He takes care of our issues so that we can now build His Kingdom and do the things that He has asked and actually have something to say to those people who need it. They need to hear the truth. They need to hear that God loves them. There are people who are lost, who don't know that God cares for them and has forgiven them because of Christ. They don't know that God is kind and compassionate toward their struggles. There are people who need encouragement, but if we are too bogged down with what we have going on, we won't notice those people. We won't notice the people in the store, in Trader Joe's, or on the street who actually need salvation now. Church, God is a good, good Father, so let us learn the art and skill of surrendering our cares, surrendering our burdens, because He cares for us. Jesus loves us. If it is a pride thing, like it was for me, choose humility so that you may learn that God has given you grace to handle some situations in your life. And with that, I'm going to pass it on to Sophie. Thank you, guys.
What I learned is that a burden is simply a duty or a misfortune that causes you hardship, anxiety, or grief. So if you're here with me and you have a pulse, you can probably identify with this in some way or another. Whether it's your car causing you issues, or your family that you have grief over because you're waiting for their salvation, a burden has no size, but it does carry weight. The smallest inconvenience can bring the heaviest of weights if it's unsolved, if it's not cast onto the Lord. However heavy you think your burden is, I want to challenge you with one question: Do you think that you care about it more than Jesus does? There's no one in the world, not even yourself, that cares about you more than He does. Psalm 37:24 says, "The Lord directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives." That includes your burdens. A burden is something that causes grief, anxiety, and hardship, but it's also something that Jesus cares about in great detail. Most importantly, a burden isn't yours to hold on to.
But why does this matter for you? Why should you care to lay down your burdens or cast them? Because Jesus is the only one who can actually give you true rest. He's the only one who can exchange the weight of your burden and give you ease and rest, which is something we all search for in this world. But nothing will ever ease your anxiety, your worry, or your grief—at least not long-term, and not without side effects or strings attached—except for Him. Psalm 55:22 says, "Cast your burdens on the Lord, and He will sustain you; He will never permit the righteous to be moved." Only Jesus can make a promise like that and actually keep it. Amen.
I know it seems too good to be true, but that's how you know it's the Gospel. That's how you know it's Jesus, because nobody else could do it. Most importantly, as we head to our conclusion, here is how you lay down your burdens, how you cast your burdens. It's an act of trust and surrender. It's simply holding God to His word and His promises for you, saying, "Lord, this situation is causing me anxiety, this situation is causing me worry. You said you will sustain me. You said I will lack no good thing, so I'm going to choose to trust you and see you come through."
Although it seems simple—and it is simple—it's not always easy. It is like exercise, like Nick was saying. You will have those mind battles where you will want to worry about it again, but the key is to consistently hold God to His word when it comes back to your mind. The more you do that, the easier it will become, and the more rest and freedom you will see that He is leading you into. So I want to ask you guys to stand with me as we have an altar call in response to the word today. I want to read Romans 8:28, which says, "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." We know this, and you know this now that you've heard the word. But are you willing to trust what He says here? Are you willing to trust that all your burdens will work out for the good if you trust Him? Are you willing? Are you ready to let go of your burdens? Are you willing for Jesus to give you rest today?
If you want to exchange your worry, your grief, your anxiety for true rest today, I want to invite you to come make that exchange at the altar. At this time, I want to invite you to come forward if you want to choose to trust God, that He will sustain you, that if you surrender all to Him, He will give you the strength you need. Our prayer team is here, our prayer team is ready to support you at the altar as you make your step of faith and surrender today. He cares for you more than you think. This burden isn't yours to hold on to. Hallelujah.
Lord, we thank you for showing us the simple Gospel today. Lord, we pray, Father, that you teach us to walk in continual surrender to you, Lord God, as we make our first step of faith here today, Lord, at the altar. We pray that your Holy Spirit may strengthen us every step of the way, Lord God. When the mind battles come, Lord, when the unbelief comes, Lord, we pray, Holy Spirit, that you remind us of the truth, Lord God, that you remind us how much you care for us, Lord God, that we may cast our anxieties, our burdens on you daily, Lord. You say we lack no good thing, Lord, and we will trust you. You say you will sustain us, and we will trust you today, Lord God. We thank you, Holy Spirit, for showing us something we could have never seen before, Lord, and we pray that you give us the strength we need to walk out your word, Lord.
Let's worship as our prayer team prays for you guys at the altar.