Finding Peace in my Pain

Greeting

Good morning Revival Church! It is an honor to be here today with you all. My name is Josh Herrera, and I have the privilege of Pastoring Lighthouse Church, just up the 15, and across the 78, in the City of Vista. I count it an honor to be here today with you all.

I need to do two things before I begin and the first is to honor your Pastors, Pastor JP and Jackie. Come on, let’s just take a moment to shout down this amazing couple! If you are here today for the first time, please come back next week so that you will have the privilege to meet this incredible couple. They are beautiful people with a heart for San Diego and a love for Revival Church. Listen, I don’t know what you you about them, or think you know about them, but this couple absolutely love you. They love this church. They can’t stop talking about how awesome you all are. They truly, love to serve you all.

The second thing that I need to do is come correct, and introduce to you all my family. My tribe. My people.

Can we show the picture that I brought of my family?

There they are!

My beautiful wife is Joanna, and in 31 days, we will have been married for 20 YEARS!

And I have 3 sons that I call my Lions. Jaden, Jude and Jaxon.

Finally, I wrote a book, and I brought it with me today. “It’s Not Complicated.”

All right, are you all ready to get to work?

John 20:19–22 (NIV)

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

Finding Peace in my Pain

Introduction

How many of you appreciate the dashboard in your cars?

I bet you haven’t given that much thought, have you?

Dashboards give us a lot of good info that we rely on, right? We don’t calculate the amount of gas we have in our car based on how many miles we drove when we last filled up, do we?

No, we rely on the gauge on our dashboard.

So let me tell you a funny story about that. Not too long ago my family went on a road trip, and we decided to rent a large SUV to make this four state road trip more comfortable. The car rental place gave us a brand new Chevy Tahoe. I mean this thing was so new that many of the inside components of the SUV had the plastic on it that I had the pleasure to peel away.

Isn’t it satisfying to pull away that new plastic on your electronics?

On the first evening of our trip, when it was already night time, I needed to stop and put gas in the car. The gas gauge on the new Chevy Tahoe let me know that we had 24 miles to go until we were out of gas. The station was only 4 miles away, so I thought we were good. As we are driving towards this gas station we are driving up a hill. Right as we get to the very top of the hill, this brand new SUV turns off.

We were out of gas!

The dashboard was wrong!

Fam… at 10 pm in another state, with my family of five in tow, I am freaking out and thinking I’m going to have to do the walk of shame for however many miles to the gas station.

By the grace of God, or what some would call dumb luck, the gas station is on the bottom of this hill and we just crested the top of the hill. I coasted that SUV down the hill, right into the gas station, and right into an open pump.

Joanna and I just laughed about it, but that could have been a pretty terrible way to start our road trip!

So, here I am in trouble, because what I see on the dashboard doesn’t match what’s really going on.

Transition

And that’s what I want to talk about this morning… Are you going through your life robbed of your peace because the dashboard has it wrong.

Fear Factor

Let me take you back to our text and give you the context of John 20. Prior to our passage that we read, Jesus has been crucified, just like he said he would. And he has already resurrected from the dead, just like he said he would. He has already showed himself to some of the women who followed him, but he hasn’t yet shown himself to the rest of his followers or his 11 remaining disciples.

That’s when we get to our text that we read.

The first thing that we notice is the disciples are hiding. They’ve locked themselves into the home for fear of the Jewish leaders.

Someone say fear.

Fear is a feeling that everyone has to learn to deal with. Fear is a very typical reaction to facing a new challenge.

When we are faced with a new challenge, we have to overcome fear. That’s natural. It’s to be expected. We shouldn’t make a big deal about that kind of fear.

In our text, the disciples were afraid for two reasons.

First, they were afraid of the Jewish leaders who had already persecuted Jesus.

And second, and I think the bigger reason, is because Jesus is gone.

You see the Jewish leaders had been after Jesus and his disciples for a very long time. This was not something new to the disciples. The reason they were not afraid in the past was because they had Jesus.

Those leaders were no match for Jesus.

The religious leaders would come in and question what they were doing and Jesus would put them in their place right away.

The disciples were like the little brother with a very strong older brother. You didn’t mess with them, becuase they had Jesus.

Now, Jesus is gone and their new challenge was figuring out how they would begin to live again with this new challenge.

[TRANSITION]

And I think that as a collective nation, we’ve kind of been living in this tension.

We face the challenges of inflation. The prices of everything is up; from eggs at the grocery store to the prices of buying a home.

We face the challenges of an election year. We know that elections have become increasingly divisive in our nation.

We face the challenges of wars that are happening over seas, and is there a chance that we get dragged in to another conflict.

Is it any wonder that there is so much fear in our world today?

There is a lot going on! We’ve got a lot of new challenges, and with that comes fear.

Peace is a Promise

And here, with a lot going on with the disciples, Jesus steps in and does two things. The first thing that he does is he says, “Peace be with you!”

This was so important that he repeats it to the disciples. He says it again.

Whenever Jesus, or the Bible, repeats anything, it is becuase it’s a truth that we need to internalize.

In the midst of everything that had happened in the last week with the disciples Jesus does not come in and tell them to cheer up. He does not come in and wish them happiness. He does not come in and remove the fear. He doesn’t come in and give them the latest self help formula for overcoming fear.

Instead, he simply says, Peace be with you.

Here’s the reason why I believe he comes in and speaks peace over them.

Peace is the Promise of His Presence

I think there are some things people assume about what it means to follow Jesus, and so we have to inform people what it really means to follow Jesus.

Following Jesus does not mean the absence of difficulty in your life.

Following Jesus does not mean the absence of struggles in your life.

Following Jesus does promise that when we are going through struggles, and when we are going through difficulty, we are never alone. Jesus promises his presence when we are going through hard times. And when He is present, we can experience peace. Peace that we only find through his presence.

BUILD RIGHT HERE

When we know that God is with us, we can go through struggles, and we can go through difficulty, with a confidence that God is by our side. God will always be with us. God will be present in the middle of whatever life will throw our way.

This is the peace of God.

TRANSITION

And what I love about God’s peace is this, just becuase I feel afraid, doesn’t mean I have to live in fear.

Yes, challenges produce fear, but that doesn’t mean that we are going to live there. We may pass through some fear on the road to where we are going, but we are not going to take up residence in fear. We aren’t moving in. We aren’t picking out schools, our favorite grocery stores, or our local coffee shop. We will not live in fear becuase the peace of God is with us.

STORY

I want to share a story with you all about a time in my life when I experienced anxiety. My family and I went through a lot of transition in 2021 as we moved to be closer to the church.

It was a change of home, schools, jobs, football for sons, it was a lot. And first time in my life I started dealing with anxiety.

I didn’t know what anxiety was, and even though I heard other people talk about it, I didn’t think that would ever happen to me.

It would wake me up in the middle of the night and I would be soaking in my own sweat. I would be hit with heart racing, sweaty hands, moments. I had never experienced this. I’m not that person, I would think to myself.

But I’ll never forget that when I had enough of this, I went on the offense. I started finding out how I could break this anxiety on my life.

I remember hearing a worship leader say, “Anxiety and Gratitude cannot co-exist. You have to chose gratitude.”

I started being more grateful. I started a gratitude journal. I started naming all the reasons I had to be grateful.

I didn’t take up residence in this fear. I didn’t go find a way to cope with what I was going through. I didn’t try to normalize this. I went to war the only I knew how. I wasn’t going to live in fear.

Peace & Power

The second thing that Jesus does for his disciples is he breathes the Holy Spirt over them. It’s definitely one of the more interesting moments of Jesus and his disciples, but I can explain what this meant for them, and what it means for us now.

When Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit over them he was breathing power over them.

We know this because Jesus explained that when we receive the Holy Spirit, we will receive power.

Acts 1:8 (NIV)

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you...

God’s spirit inside us gives us power to overcome what is happening outside of us.

You see when Jesus showed up later that evening, the disciples didn’t just lock themselves inside a house, but they locked out others becuase they were afraid of them.

Someone say them.

We deal with the reality of them. These are the external things that I cannot change. These are the people who just aren’t going to like me. These are the people who will never agree with me. These are the decisions that I have no control over, but boy do these decisions sure seem to have control over me.

These are the situations that require the Holy Spirit.

These are the situations that require you to be FILLED with the Holy Spirit.

Peace will get you through the internal storm that you are feeling, but the Holy Spirit is going to give you the power to overcome the external attacks of the enemy.

You need God’s spirit in you to overcome the things that are making you feel anxious.

You need God’s spirit in you to overcome the things that are causing you to be depressed.

You need God’s spirit in you to deal with the situation at work.

And let me go here...

What you don’t need is the power of positive thinking. You don’t need a new age idea that if you think it, it will happen. That’s called a counterfeit.

Here is what you need to know, whatever God creates, Satan counterfeits.

God gives us power from the Holy Spirit. The counterfeit to that is positive thinking, good vibes, happy thoughts. But there’s situations where no amount of vibrations are going to cut it - you need the power of the Holy Spirit to break those things on your life.

Don’t allow a counterfeit from the world be a replacement for what God wants to give you. He wants to breathe his spirit into your life.

He wants to breathe the very power that was in his son Jesus, into you. He wants for you to live and walk in the authority of God’s word. But this only happens when you are filled with Spirit of God.

But what stands in the way?

Now, immediately after this happens, there is a story about someone who was not in the room. I want to end with him. I want to talk to you about Thomas, or as we more affectionately know him in the church, doubting Thomas.

John 20:24–29 (NIV)

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

When the disciples went and told Thomas what happened, he felt nothing but doubt. He felt like this amazing experience that just happened wasn’t for him. Why? Because he didn’t see it.

The dashboard of his life wasn’t showing him what the others saw.

And I think that for some people who have had a rough going for the last two years, you can identify with Thomas. You wonder how in the world can I have peace and power at a time like this? How is it that I can experience this same type of freedom? These people at this church must be drinking more than coffee.

I don’t see what they see. I see crazy gas prices. I see wars on the other side of the world. I can’t keep up with the way things are going in this State.

Does this sound familiar to anyone here today?

But here’s what happens. Jesus gives Thomas the VIP experience. He lets Thomas not just see his wounds, but he also lets him touch the wounds. All of a sudden, Thomas not only believes, but he’s saying, “My Lord, and My God!”

And then Jesus, he’s there with him, but he also makes this statement. “Thomas, you believe becuase you see. But for those who believe without seeing, they are blessed.”

Thomas, if you want my peace and if you want my spirit, you can receive this without seeing. All you have to do is believe.

Our ability to receive peace and receive the Holy Spirit is solely an act of belief.

Jesus is telling Thomas, if all you do is believe some dash board of your life, you are going to miss out on experiencing the peace and the power that I want to bring into your life.

And for some of you here today… you are looking at a dashboard of how much money you have in the bank. You’re looking at the size of your house. You’re looking at your 401k. You’re looking at the amount of followers that you have. And none of that is giving you the peace.

So I am here to let you know, that you need to make a change. Those things aren’t giving you peace, so let’s get you to the one who can give you peace!

And for those of you who are here today wondering how you can have this kind of peace and this kind of power, all you have to do is, believe.

Conclusion. Faith is a Seed

Here’s the thing about believing, or what we call faith.

Faith begins as a seed.

We read about people of great faith. We hear stories about people who had faith that was seemingly dropped down from heaven, but I guarantee you it wasn’t always that way. That’s not the DNA of faith.

Jesus said this about faith;

Matthew 17:20 (NIV)

Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

And faith is believing in what you can’t see.

There are two things that I am going to do right now. The first is, we are going to make a prayer for people to receive Christ today. I’m telling you, when you receive Jesus, you are going to receive peace. You are going to receive the Holy Spirit. You are going to walk out of this place different than how you walked in this morning.

If you are ready to receive Jesus today, on the count of 3 I want you to raise your hand up, and then I am going to lead you in a prayer for a new beginning today. Are you ready? Here we go.

Now here is the last thing that I am going to do. We are going to close with a time of prayer and ministry. I’m going to lead us in one last prayer, and when I am done, if you want to be prayed for I want you to run on down to this altar so that the team here can pray with you.

Here we go.