SUN STAND STILL: GUEST STEVEN FURTICK

Posted by Steven Furtick: First let me say thanks to Mike and Jud for giving me the honor of posting here and letting me tell you about Sun Stand Still. I had the privilege of speaking alongside Jud at a conference this past week and let me tell you, he’s the real deal. The things that God is doing through Jud and Central Christian Church in Las Vegas are out of this world and should serve as an inspiration to all of us.

And they go right along with what Sun Stand Still is all about. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the book, the crux of the message is that you and I were created and saved to do more than settle for mundane, ordinary faith. We were made to believe God for the impossible. To believe that that God who did the miraculous through the characters of the Bible is still able and willing to do the miraculous through us.

That sounds great, but what I’ve found is that this can be hard for people to believe. Maybe you’re that way. Maybe you think audacious faith isn’t for you. It’s not that you don’t want to live this way. You long to have a dream, pray impossible prayers, and take bold steps. But you’ve messed up big somewhere along the way. You’ve wasted time, hurt people, and fallen short—maybe over and over again. And now you don’t feel qualified.

This book is for you.

God wants to turn your mistake into a miracle. You don’t have to hand in your dreams and resign your faith. You can ask God to create a clean heart inside you and begin a new day all around you.

I’ve noticed that most of us don’t have a hard time believing that God’s grace is real—we just have a hard time believing that it’s really available to us. We know all the reasons why God should pull us out of the game and bench us. All of the junk from our yesterdays looms large in our minds when we try to think about what God wants to do through us today.

Each of us has our own personal catalog of screwups and failures. Maybe you did something incredibly stupid years ago and you’re still paying for it. Maybe your mistakes are more recent. Maybe you have wasted some years that you know you’ll never get back. Maybe you haven’t honored your marriage, haven’t finished your degree, haven’t paid your bills, haven’t been there for your kids…

Maybe you’re in real trouble right now, and you know in your heart that you have no one to blame but yourself.

Those are the hardest kinds of setbacks to overcome—the ones we create for ourselves. It’s natural to see the potential for redemption when someone else fails. But when we fail, it can feel like the game is over. Let me assure you that if you have a little bit of faith left, it’s not over. Many people would say God can still use you in spite of your failures. I want to take that a step further. God’s grace is so audacious that he will use the failure itself to show off just how capable he is. If you will have the audacious faith to believe this, God can and will turn your mistakes into miracles.