Pastor Wayne Cordeiro
March 29, 2020 - W2013

“Sifted” 

Pastor Wayne Cordeiro

March 28 & 29, 2020

Welcome New Hope, everywhere and anywhere! 

A few years ago, I hired a fitness trainer to help me with my weight training. The first ten reps were work but I handled it; eventually, the reps slowed and on the 11th rep, I thought I was done!  The bar was glued to my chest and I said to the trainer, “I think I’m done.  Help!”   My trainer smiled and said, “Keep pushing because now you’re building muscles.  Now it begins.”  He gave me minimal amount of assistance with two fingers—just enough to bring the bar to the top.  I was spent!  But he didn’t let me stop, he said, “Dig deep.  One more.”  I remember saying, "This is the last rep I'm gonna ever be able to do."  He said, "No, no, no! The last rep is the most important rep of all."  I finally did it!  When I got up the next morning, I couldn't lift my arms to shampoo my hair! 

I replayed that scene in my mind over and over, and I knew that my trainer was right.  The real development of my muscles didn't begin until I thought I was spent—until I came to the end of my ability! It was on the 12th rep that the old muscle tissues would break down and the new and greater muscle mass would take its place.

Sifting is the 12th rep.  When our strength seems spent, that is when God increases our capacity, our aptitude.  There is a depth that was never there before.  That’s when God builds faith, not the first 10 or 11—it’s the 12th rep! 

In this process, we begin to build a new character: Old things pass away and a new trust starts to take its place. God is tearing away old perspectives and putting new truths in its place—former habits are being discarded; and wrong tendencies will be abandoned! It's the 12th rep that we are all tempted to skip—but that's the most important rep of all!

Whenever I'm going through a difficult season, I find myself wishing that the process of sifting could be optional, but in Luke 22:31-22 Jesus addresses Peter and his followers that a time of sifting is coming!

1.  Jesus Is Praying For You

Just as wheat is sifted on the threshing floor to separate the good from the bad, Jesus encourages Peter in…

Luke 22:31-32 NASB says: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat; ³² but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”

“I’m praying that your faith not fail” doesn't sound reassuring to me—it seems to suggest that there could be a good possibility that my faith might fail during the sifting time! Not reassuring. Sorry. 

My mind goes into overdrive, and I picture myself dangling over a cliff, my fingers hanging onto the edge and starting to slip, and in stark terror I begin yelling for help. A friend appears above me, and I yell, "Help!" Then he rapidly says, “Okay,” and jumps towards a picnic table, gets on his knees, and yells to me, "Don't worry, I’m praying that your grip won't fail." This doesn't look like a picture of friendship to me!

When these seasons hit and my grip is slipping, will I have the endurance and the spiritual strength necessary to go through this season? Here's the good news—Jesus is praying for you!

I'm thinking, God is praying for me.  You see, if Jesus' prayer comes to pass, and I'm confident it will, my faith will stay the course and, in the end, a new caliber of confidence in God will take place—a quality that wasn’t there before!

Sifting produces a clarity of who we are as it reduces the haze and we emerge with a better grasp of what matters most; and we begin to see the person that we’re supposed to become—a sifted person! A sifted person possesses a proven faith and sees that God can bring beauty in the ashes—and He will!

God has placed men and women in the Bible that have already gone through every problem and sifting that we are going through; they have left us a road map to guide us along the way—I call them Divine Mentors!

God's best people were sifted! They went through seasons of faith training because faith doesn't come in the beginning—you must train for that by going through the 12th rep, again and again, and sifting is one of those!

I'm reminded of David whose training didn't come from Harvard—his classes were held remotely in the classrooms of desert caves, hiding from his enemies, with few resources, and estranged from his family; Joseph's classes were held in prison; Moses was taught and humbled working with smelly sheep in the Sinai—not for a semester but for 40 years! And Jacob had a shrewd father?in?law, Laban, as his professor for 14 years before his sifting was complete.

Each of these men had the opportunity to refuse, to retaliate, to retreat, to run, but they didn't! They pushed through to the 12th rep. As a result, David became the greatest king Israel would ever know; Joseph became the second in command of the known world and saved the nation of Egypt from starvation; Moses led over a million people out of slavery; Jacob became the father of the 12 patriarchs of our faith laying the foundation for the coming Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Sifting.

God knows what He's doing because He sees the end from the beginning. He sees from eternity to eternity. Even when we can't see the end result, He does.

Hebrews 11:1 KJV says: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  

That’s what faith is. It's not just cushy optimism. Faith in its highest form is when I say that I am fully convinced that we will come through this COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis; I believe in the exceptionalism of the people of this country. I also believe that many dreams may have cooled but, if we will keep our faith from failing, we will come through this time, and our faith will be ignited afresh!

Some of you may remember the 1992 Hurricane Andrew that ravaged the East Coast leaving 25 billion dollars in damages. One optimistic weatherman was asked what would be left behind after the hurricane? His answer: New beaches! 

When Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans in 2005 leaving nearly 2,000 dead, one Christian lady was being interviewed, and she said, "My home is gone. My possessions are gone. My car is gone. Now praise the Lord, I'm free." I love her heart!

My prayer is that we will come through the COVID-19 crisis not only with new innovation, new companies, or new products—those things are great, but they won't last! As we can see, our economy will always be quite fragile, but what will give us solid ground and eternal hope is if we come through this time to build renewed faith, renewed ears, and renewed hearts for God!

God isn't just working on our capitalism—He's working on our character. He’s not just testing our finances—He's testing our faith and, Church, don't miss that! He’s getting the attention of our families, our churches, and our souls. The rest is temporal—this stuff is eternal!

God uses a temporal storm to reignite an eternal need, and God gives us His promises.  God's promises are redeemable in good times and bad times.  There are no blackout dates.  They don’t change.

Joshua 21:45 NASB says: “Not one of the good promises which the Lord had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass.” 

Let me give you what God uses in seasons of sifting: Storms—big ones, small ones, long ones, short ones—because they get our attention!

2.  There’s Correcting Storms and There's Perfecting Storms

A Correcting Storm is when you’re going the wrong way and headed for something that will steal or diminish God’s best for you!  God knows the future and sees where we're going, He loves us way too much to let us destroy what's best. God asked Jonah to go to Nineveh, but Jonah ran the other way to Tarshish—on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea!  Have you ever heard God say to do one thing, then you looked around, and did exactly the opposite? I think we all have.

But God loved Jonah and his future so much that He risked sending a Correcting Storm, an uncanny bizarre storm that arrested his attention. When Jonah was thrown overboard, God didn’t give him a mercy flight back to shore. No, He used two fingers to give him just enough assistance, so Jonah had to dig deep; God gave him a free three?night stay at the Blue Whale Hilton and deposited him on an abandoned beachfront property with a seaweed greeting! That’s about it. But then Jonah saw clearly who God made him to be!

God also uses Perfecting Storms, such as, the storm that Peter experienced when he walked on water going toward Jesus (Matthew 14:29-31); but all of a sudden, he started looking at the waves rather than to Jesus and he began to sink! Jesus reached out, took him by the hand, reproved him for his lack of faith, then stood him back up: This was a Perfecting Storm—perfecting Peter’s faith!

Perfecting Storms happen in our lives for many reasons. Maybe there's areas in your thinking that need to be refined that’s causing your map to mess up your GPS, and you're going the wrong way—not far off—just enough that you'll be way off in the end! Maybe there's things in your relationship, words, attitude, or disposition and you're slumping into poor people skills!

You may not be going the wrong way, but you could be going about it in the wrong way. A lot of Christians are not necessarily going the wrong way; they're just going about it in the wrong way. We might have the right answer, but we often deliver it in the wrong spirit, and it's stunting our faith. So like Peter, God allows us to go through a Perfecting Storm. These are tools God is using in times like these.

But let me warn you—sometimes it's not the depth of the storm that sifts you—it's the length of it. Many are saying, “I got it already, God.” We want that promotion now, that high salary now, that life mate now; and we cut corners and take shortcuts! We do it because we want something so badly, we're going to do it regardless of what we know God is saying—we're going to Tarshish instead of Nineveh! They say the theme song of hell is "I did it my way." But instead of letting us fail, God leaves us in the season of sifting, by lengthening the storm to refine and ratchet us back to Him!  It's God's way of making us more like Jesus to a watching world that's lost.  

You may be the only Jesus they will ever see—let Him refine you.  Walk through this time all the way, through the 12th rep.  Let the heart of God compel you to finish well through this time and bring others home across the finish line with you!

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1.  How do you feel when you’re being sifted?  

2.  What are some values that are being threatened these days?

3.  Have you ever taken the opposite path of what you feel God called you to take?

4.  What are some of the trials you are going through at this time?

5.  Who are some people that you can encourage today?