(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Hopefully you've established the definitive comfort agent's items or foods and we'll fly from that. You'll find out that Jackson's story does relate to that, so see if you can pick that up. It'll actually come out a little bit in the introduction. 

So let's give thanks and pray first. Father, we are grateful for this day. We've prayed for this day for months and are grateful to have had the chance for you to speak through Dale Harris this morning, and I pray that you would continue to speak to us as we look ahead. 

Thank you for your mercy in bringing us all together this morning on a beautiful day. I pray that as we hear this faith story, it would establish our faith even stronger because of what you've done through Jackson's life. So thank you for this in Jesus' name, amen. 

Jackson Boyle is another one of those young men who's spent a greater percentage of his life at Faith Church than I have. Even though I've spent 60 years, it's only 80% of my life and Jackson's 95% something like that. He's attended Faith Church for 25 years and he's a volunteer with Faith Student Ministries. 

He actually just got back from the challenge event last night, right? Yes, so he's fresh with the experience of that. He works as a quality engineer specialist at a food manufacturing company. He enjoys baking, especially baklava. 

That's always been a mystery to me, and creme brulee. And if you look really closely, you notice one of those strange but true facts about Jackson. One of his eyes is a different color than the other one. 

You have to demonstrate that sometime. Afterward when we have a conversation, you could check it, but my left eye is two colors. The quarter above it is a different color than the rest, so it's hard to see from far away, but up close it's weird. 

Like the cats in the pictures, sometimes they have the bichromio something-something, what it's called. Yes. Have enough time to talk over the question already? Seems like we're getting started a lot quicker than the youngsters in the first hour, so appreciate the timeliness. 

To start off with the question about comfort, my one item of comfort I would mention that I picked out for the question would be my Crocs that I wore everywhere, as you can very much tell. But just the story title of just how comfort can sometimes be a prison for us, I was kind of thinking along the lines of how I wanted to go with my story of having three inflection points of times God really helped me surrender my comfort to him so I could further grow in living for his kingdom and living for his presence. So that's what I'll be talking through with it, although I first wanted to start it off with a fun question since I've been here all my life of who in this room has changed my diaper when I was in the children's ministry of all that, and just started off with an awkward moment to kick it off with some fun. 

So if you don't feel comfortable, no. And the title of it being the biggest defining personality trait, but then I also thought of a second alternative title of a common man with an uncommon God. Because it's very easy for me to see I've grown up in the church my whole life that I'm just not important, my story's not the same as, or when I get down into it, my story's not the same because God has worked it out for his glory of how I can best reach the people around me, and it's just as uncommon as anyone else because it's not me that's writing it. 

But to do some pictures first to start it off, I got about 90% of them from my mom's Facebook account and this one is one for me when I was the youngest probably, right after being born with a full head of beautiful hair. And then the next one from being a little bit older with my older brother, which when I had a weird face, I'm not sure, probably just didn't want to be there at the time, or the clothes were probably uncomfortable. And then the next one with me with having a little bit more hair and the beautiful curls that the Lord blessed me with and I still have. 

So, although it's not very comfortable washing so much hair, it's more of a tedious process, so, although I still wouldn't want to get a buzz cut because it'd make life much easier, but not the comfort that I would prefer. So, starting off with the three main inflection points, paradigm moments, you could say, of my life, of where I was, where God walked me through, and where I am now, they are very briefly being that I exist out of God's sheer love for me and Him wanting a relationship with me. Point two is sin not just being what God, I've learned, tells me not what to do, but because it's what spiritually and eternally separates me from Him, based on my choices of what I want to worship. 

And the final one of unraveling the American gospel of comfort for the biblical gospel of living for the kingdom of what God helped me grow in. And then from a long childhood of growing up facing these moments and not wanting to surrender and give in to the very past couple years of finally wrestling through that, I've much compared my life to Jacob wrestling with God and how he helped him really grow and see what he was trying to hold on to, that was not allowing God to fully work in his life and build him. And also someone like Joseph in Egypt, where because of Joseph's surrender, the whole world was blessed through it, and how I can best imagine my life in those situations with the stories the Lord has given me. 

So through childhood of facing these moments that I'll talk about through the three stories, to the past couple of years of really tackling them and surrendering them, through middle school, high school, and then college, it's really challenged my faith and allowed me to see if who I really believe in and God has helped me dig up the bitter roots of my past to dig deeper roots and trust and having a better foundation of faith and trust in him. So for a quick time of my childhood, the long 25 years plus nine months in the womb, I always like to add that on just for the comedic effect with that, but my mom was a stay-at-home mom and my dad was an engineering dad and helped with the Sunday school classes, so on the outside it would seem like I have a perfect life for my view, and nothing looked wrong from the outside of all my time through childhood, elementary, middle school. And from my view, from my definition of what perfect was, it seemed, although with my very limited view, that now looking back I was wrong. 

With the one interesting memory I can think of from elementary school, I had a friend who was a Muslim and I would go over to his house a couple times every week to play Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Roblox, other things, jump on a trampoline, and we had no issues, other things. I was able to go over there, it was fine, but when I asked him if he was able to come over to my house, the only response he was able to give me was that his parents claimed there was some monster at my house that didn't allow him to come over. I didn't really think of it much because my childhood brain, with the childlike faith, just couldn't think much more about that other than know his parents said he can't come over, but some monster. 

So I was like, I asked my parents, what is this monster? And they were like, well, we don't know either. And then that gets on to the first point. Then in middle school, things started to change. 

With people at church and school, with our growing minds and changing, challenging time of hormones, etc., there seemed to be a greater divide of what I actually believed and what the world expected of people. And I remember a specific memory in seventh grade science class one time where one of my friends genuinely asked the question that if God exists, then who created God? And that really stuck with me and scared me because I was thinking if I couldn't figure it out on my own and handle it and strong-arm my way through that question, then what else that I believed was implausible? And just really challenging the foundation of my faith and made me scared of the bigger questions and personally wanting to run from them and stay in my bubble of comfort. And then the first inflection point, when the long time in middle school to high school to up to a couple years of college, when God placed the people after that long time of struggle in my life to tackle that question and confront my fears from those times randomly from middle school, high school, and college, I would randomly have panic attacks or existential crises of generally thinking how do I exist and how does God exist if I can't rationalize it or if by my understanding I can't uphold my will to exist. 

Could I just blip out of existence and what's the point of everything if I can't make sense of it or make sense of the purpose myself? And I didn't really know much about it at the time but all I knew that I was, all that I knew was that I didn't know and that I was scared so I ran from those thoughts and it wasn't till college when I was on the leadership team of a campus ministry when I thought I still totally had it all together that I finally had the courage to bring up that dark place and trauma of the past years with the mentor at the campus ministry and he was able to help unpack the issues through talking with him and I don't remember much from it but that through it I knew that I didn't have to maintain my own logic of existence other than because God wanted me to exist out of a sheer love for me in relationship with him and just the humility and childlike faith he wants us to go to him through that and to put down our own pride through that with the childlike faith and trust and then growing and understanding just of worldviews and other things it's really helped to think of you know why is my faith in Christ different than differing worldviews or religions and understanding why is my faith the only one where God does tell me he loves me and that I don't have to be good enough or do enough good works at the root of it to be with him and that he gave up everything so I could want to give up everything to be with him and just that relational aspect of it that is void from other people in the emptiness of the world then the second inflection point being the idea that I grew up my whole life thinking that sin was just what God told me not what to do which if you tell someone not to do something majority of the time they're gonna do it which was a big hitting point for my heart and how it's so much more deep than this with in high school I wanted more to look good from the outside fit in with the people I wanted to at church and everything else while internally I knew I was messed up with my sin but not knowing how to confront it and what to believe of the lie that I could strong arm my way through it rather than surrender to Christ and have real healing from God and that other sins weren't really that worse compared to mine and not try to pull myself up from my own bootstraps and it wasn't till sometime in college that finally having my heart surrendered to Christ that I realized that the sin isn't just what God tells us what not to do but it's what spiritually separates us from God and if I want to chase those things I just can't have the presence of God because he he can't be in the same place as that because that's not who he is and the darkness that it is of the fruit of the spirit verse the fruit of the worldliness that Paul puts it and humbling myself to see that all sin on the spiritual level is the same to God and how it breaks his heart just as much for me trying to live a lie and think I can do it on my own as someone who has no idea who he is and it's just living for themselves and just the spiritual place of legalism of trying to think my sins may not be as worst as the next guys so I'll continue on with my ego thinking I can still try to earn God's love and that just I'm not as bad as the next one at the end of the day I caused Christ to need to die as much as the Romans or the Jews or anyone and then I don't have much of an understanding still of the severity of the damage that caused to myself and those around me of how I push down those hard questions of trying to hold on to my own comfort faith and a heart of stone slowly unpacking that and continuing to grow in that of realizing it and letting God show me so I can figure out how to help other people with the stories he's given me because all of the issues we've gone through either someone else has already gone through them or someone else is going through them so that's a big point I believe of the church is that we can uplift each other's through that because none of us are perfect and I also had the view growing up that all the Bible characters were great men and women of faith and that's why God chose them and I was trying to die to myself on that lie and not see the brokenness that if God could really use them then he could use me the same but growing up I realized oh well all the biblical characters are rotten people if you look at all them there it's like some of the most messed up people but God can still use them so if I'm just as bad as that then imagine how much greater God could use me through surrender through just anyone you could mention and just having that realization and that's just how good and big our God is that he can that we don't have to make excuses for ourselves but just the surrender to the cross in the kingdom and there was a song through that I was able to really learn from and glean a lot of knowledge with a lot of my growth coming through biblical songs based on scripture one called 10% by a band Gable Price and friends about the idea if that all my life decisions required Jesus to be pierced for my transgressions that he was willing to die to redeem me then how can I only be okay with just giving back 10% on a Sunday or anything with my time worship wealth that he's given me my heart if I think giving 10% back is okay for that's like I want to give everything because if he gave everything for me then I with my heart being softened should want to give everything back to him and just the emotion the heart they put into that and then the final I'll move on to some pictures getting too streamlined but this next picture with my younger sister and older brother with all of us looking very clean I'm sure was at a picture studio because you can tell all of our clothes are pearly white so it must have been somewhere where they had control to not let us get messy and then this next one is on a Christmas Day some 20 years ago probably where we all had our Chinese soca gowns from when my parents picked up my sister from China so we still have them somewhere in our house though that we don't fan them anymore but I just remember them being really cool and such a unique piece of clothing and then this is our family 12 years ago or so whenever at Florida where my grandparents had a beach house so just very great blessings I had and us to grow as a family and have great vacation time but all of us there somewhat smiling for the picture perfect moment so for the final and most complex heart issue for me to wrestle with and inflect on was that in the point of dying to the idea of a complacent comfort faith of the American Gospel and this started to be come seen by me when I was in college and had more of a worldview with the friends interactions I had and went to my campus ministry and we had annual Bible study event called Secret Church from the pastor David Platt and what that is for a backbone is it's a night-long Bible study from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. to really reference what it looks like to be a Christian around the world in a country where it's illegal to have Bible studies as so many of our missionaries go to and support and say someplace in Asia where you may only get together every once or two months and when you do you won't you have six hours through the night and then you escape and go back so it really helps understand what it looks like to be a Christian around the world when we can't just gather on a Sunday when we're when we feel like it and when we're not tired but just what that life and death looks like to take in the word and understand it and the book that I read from him being called don't hold back which confronted multiple points of American Christianity based on the American dream of the ways we try to uphold it over the biblical gospel of twisting it and chasing ease and complacency with a comfort faith rather than a life lived for the kingdom with the big paradigm shifts of how foolish it was to put my comfort over the gospel in many ways and a song I really related to in this time was a song particularly called John the Baptist and just through the scripture that he spoke through each of the gospels of the prayer Lord let your kingdom come and I know I didn't know the cost that it would bring to me to really choose to follow Christ and what that prayer looks like and how dangerous of a prayer it is because if we truly pray to the Lord let your kingdom come that's saying let everything I want all my passions to die for your sake and just the dying of my comfort and worldly hope for the sake of the kingdom and what it would really cost me if I prayed Lord let your kingdom come and then every day with God's mercies being a new of helping me make that choice daily of it being a daily surrender and not just a week-long time and when I go to church on Sunday I can say that and live the rest of the week my way but to live 100% for the kingdom in every aspect and even the hardest part for most of us probably is when we can't feel God working that he's still greater than our feelings that I have to wrestle with every day especially in such a Western culture of putting those feelings to death and choosing to let God soften my heart of stone and through my work when I first started out of college I worked on a night shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and that was probably some of the most growing times of my life because I was able to see one of the biggest lost people groups in America of nine-to-five workforce and not to say they're unreached because 99% of the people in these the States in some way shape or form know who Jesus is but they're lost in a sense where they're chasing the American dream and what that looks like for a comfort of just living for the world and for our own desires and just how those are so far from the life and the abundant life that Christ really wants for them and just being able to reach them and being a positive force to point them to the kingdom and what are challenging what they're really living for and various other aspects when I went on various mission trips in college to Florida over spring break with serve and learn trips to really love and support the people down there giving shuttle rides to college students who are there and trying to spark gospel conversations and some of those people are the people that are searching the most for truth but unfortunately being misguided by the devil just there's so many things of the world but it was just so eye-opening because you see that yeah any of these situations I could be in five minutes so who am I to not lavish the grace that God has lavished on me on others and show them what the real hope is and then also different trips to Mexico where I've gone on various mission trips of actually seeing more of what the global church really is and contrasting it to the Hispanic church to the American church and it's like wow and then having just that dream seeing it fulfilled eventually when we're all in heaven of every tribe nation and tongue and what that'll really look like and many other ways it's impossible to put it all in two words especially my logical American Western mind but with all the stories I have from work I could have a whole nother story of discussing of what the Lord has done to grow me through that and humble my heart to have compassion on those around me along with seeing the applicable ways the Lord has really grown the fruit of the spirit through me saying yes and through me not being completely comfortable I'll go to the next picture this was a time in robotics at a competition when I had a bunch of good friends there but one of them I had a friend who had a really hard upbringing where his mom was not the best Christian influence and was very toxic with him and that caused him to hate the church with all that he was forced to do and the trauma his mom brought on him and then because I was a Christian claimed it didn't live it perfectly but that caused him to lash out his anger on me through various forms of bullying through what was acceptable in high school and different ways people try to conform around that but through Christ and his grace for me I was able to see that like yeah he's bullying me because of his trauma that he's dealing with and he doesn't know how to unpack so how foolish will it be if I lash out and just build that trauma further for him so that was able and allowed me to have compassion I still didn't like it because I was a fourteen-year-old high schooler who hardly knew much about it myself but the little bit that I didn't know was able to surrender to Christ to not lash out and the best thing to do sometimes in those situations is to walk away and most the times that's what the Lord enabled me to do and through that we were able to connect after college one time and he got plugged in with a campus ministry where he went through the Lord softening his heart and I could see that the Lord was helping bring him out of that trauma very slowly and how the Lord used me not to further that for him but to possibly be the first seed for that in his life so just the great memories I do have painful in the moment but looking back and just wanting to be a vessel for Christ in his kingdom for the people that are the most lost and and then this is another picture from my time in the campus ministry where some of my best friends we went on a hiking trip to Turkey Run Park and more of just a fun photo is a great time and just relaxing and although I did I would like to say I hiked the hardest ladder trails and all the others in Crocs to prove to myself I could so with the comfort item just trying to through my hard head prove it to myself so there's that fun side of it too and then the next difficult situation I was in last year when I bought my first car a nice small Mazda Miata to have a really fun car but on one Tuesday or Monday sometime I was heading home from work for the last year when I was working in Lebanon at the cake factory there is the quality manager and I was just cruising on I 70 going south if that's the correct highway I was getting confused 65 so right before that you could exit Eagle Creek Park exit there is a bridge there and I was just in the right lane going 65 or so getting 40 miles a gallon enjoying my time and out of the corner of my eye I saw a semi-truck right next to me and I was like well that's in my truck is really close and then in the next second I noticed oh wow that's in my truck is like one inch away from my car but before I knew it I spun out unfortunately with a rear-wheel-driving car there's not much to do to regain that control and then I was screening into the barricade and then I smacked into the concrete wall over the bridge and luckily there's many points of grace in that where I didn't spin back into the truck but I spun out and hit the bridge barricade the smooth concrete wall to slowly slow me down at 60 miles an hour because if I had been hit a little bit further it was like the metal girder which is much more dangerous to hit or 30 feet in front of that there was the outcropping where it goes down a ravine into the woods right before Eagle Creek Park so it's like wow if I had hit there I would have flown into the woods so luckily even though I got hit I got hit in the best possible place although I still had to climb out on the bridge side to go on the bridge overhang to get back so that was exciting to say the least but through that moment it's like I've never been in a car crash that had your airbags go off before so the car was full of smoke and I was like what's going on with the adrenaline rush I didn't know if the car was on fire or anything I expected it to be after being hit at such a high speed and by something 20 times the size of you but I was able to get out make sure I was okay call my mom before 9-1-1 because I didn't really know what to do I'd never had to call 9-1-1 before I was like am I breaking a law calling them was like no but I really need them now and just that weird stuff it's like am I supposed to do this I've been told it but it feels weird and then getting out but the first thing I was able to do was not in some ways I was upset it's like what's going on what's happening here but I vividly remember thinking it's like I'm not angry or I don't I'm not in the state of malice right now based on the foundation the Lord was able to give me and whether the semi-truck driver hit me and didn't realize it or that he hit me and he purposely chose to go on and not stop in the hit-and-run that whatever the case if that is it's like I my heart breaks for the brokenness that caused him to do that and not stop and if I have had such a grace lavished on me by the Lord it's like I only want the same for him to realize what's happened and to help us save his heart from the evil and corruption that has been plagued by a fallen world on him which it's hard because you don't know and only the Lord does and once I'm in heaven I probably won't even care to ask him but in the moment it's like I just if I've had such grace given to me how can I not want that to be given to others through those difficult moments and knowing that if I tried to hold revenge or malice in my heart it would only pull me further away from God in his presence because in God's presence there is no revenge and malice so if I want to try to live in that I won't be living it'll be my choice to not have gotten those moments and I just based on what I've known and grown and what he's brought me through I couldn't choose that for even my worst enemy and then I still wonder in my mind and wonder why did my life end up this way and turn out the way it did by God's grace and the hard questions I still ask myself of Lord why are you holding so tight to me and not others

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