What In The World Am I Here For? |07.21.24| Actions Speak Louder! pt.6

Acts 4:23-31 Pastor Erik Anderson We're continuing our series, "Actions Speak Louder than Words." We're walking through Acts, the book of Acts, this summer, seeing how the Holy Spirit was at work. Last week, Pastor Drew preached about Peter and John in front of the Sanhedrin, and we're picking up where that story left off. Beginning in verse 23, this is what we read.(...) "After they were released, they went to their families and friends and reported what the chief priest and the elders had said to them. When they heard it, they raised their voices together to God and said, "Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth, the sea and everything in them, it is you who said by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant, why did the Gentiles rage and the peoples imagine vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers have gathered together against the Lord and against his Messiah. For in this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your Holy Servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predustined to take place. And now, Lord, look at their threats. Grant to your servants to speak the word with boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your Holy Servant Jesus. When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. (...) Well, when I was a preteen, you know, 11, 12 years old, I had an experience that many of you probably had as well. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and my legs would hurt, like my shins would hurt. Sometimes my calves, sometimes up on my glutes and my hamstrings, but I would have pain in my legs in the morning. Sometimes when I woke up and, you know, being 11 or 12 impressionable, you don't really know what's going on with your body all the time. And I remember worrying because it would happen a couple of days in a row and then it would go away, then it would come back and I'd be like, do I have cancer? I was like, am I dying? Like I would have this like concern because I didn't know what was going on my body. Finally, I asked my mom, mom, what's I'm waking up and I have, I hurt. My legs are hurting. And she goes, oh, those are growing pains. And of course, I'd heard of growing pains, but I didn't realize that that was actually something you experienced. That as your body grew in puberty and you would grow overnight, you might actually have some skeletal or muscle pain, some discomfort going on. And that's what it was. As you grow, your muscles are contracting and your bones are growing and it can hurt when that happens. And this tells us something about our lives. In fact, it's almost a universal law that good things come from discomfort. That when something hurts or something is uncomfortable, oftentimes there's something good on the other end of that. Another example of this when it comes to our bodies is strength training. And exercise. We know that when we work our bodies hard, it actually hurts our bodies, but that makes them stronger, makes them more able.(...) When you're strength training and you're lifting weights, you want to stretch your muscles as far as they will go and you want to push them as hard as they can all the way up until and before injury. You don't want to injure yourself, but you want to get your muscles to that very last part, right? Right before you get hurt and that's called positive failure. Actually, failing a rep, failing a lift is called positive failure. And it's good for our bodies to experience this discomfort. There are muscles actually tear and then reform. (...) But to get outside of our bodies a little bit, even in our relationships, discomfort oftentimes brings good things.(...) And marriage is