Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Hey, I can still run, man. Don’t mess with me. Good morning, everybody.

Happy summer.

What is this? This is what the best Yeah, that’s I I am in the right place.

Good to see all of you today. and uh great sunshine. When the sun is shining in the Northwest, there is nowhere better to be than in the Northwest.

It’s just unfortunate that’s only about 10 days a year.

Okay, I’ll behave today. Hope you’re doing good. I I want to uh first of all just say hello to all of the locations.

Hello to Deont. Hello to Belleview.

Hello to all of you in Yakama. And I want to pause right there because what a lot of people don’t know over here is that today is the very first day of church service.

Come on. In our new building. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

And it’s an exciting day. We have like four weeks of what we call soft launch, which means like we get in the building and we get used to all of the technology and we get, you know, we we we get the check-in systems for children worked out and we do our best to be ready. And then we do what we call a grand opening.

Grand opening. And so Friday night, June 26, anybody that wants to go, we’re going to we’re going to have a grand opening service on June 26. And that will be our official grand opening weekend of our new location. So, we’re excited and uh we’re going to do a lot of thank yous and give a lot of uh appreciation out because there’s a lot of people who have worked hard, who have given much to make this dream come true over in West Valley, Yakimal. And if you have friends or family in or around Yakamal, would you just make plans now to head over for a weekend, take them to Champion Center, and uh yeah, really, let’s all support. Let’s get behind. Let’s rally around our new location in Yakimal. Amen. Okay, say with me, God really is good.

God really is good. You know, we don’t just sing about it.

We don’t just talk about it. Like the reality is that we serve a good God. And a lot of people get confused with the events of the world, things going on that are not good. And a lot of people think, well, you know, that must mean God’s not good. But God is good. God’s always been good. And God will always be good. And for those of us who understand that and real the reality of it all, we know that uh we we live our lives by our choices. We live our lives by how we want to live it. And that’s happened now for generations and generations. And the things that you see that are not good are not because God’s not good. It’s because we we are all born in sin. We all are shapen in iniquity. And we bring into the world all of that generation after generation after generation. And yet God has continued throughout generations to be faithful and to be good and a God that we can trust and a God that we can lean into. A God who is merciful, a God who is filled with grace. A God who never ever turns uh his back on his people but is always ready to turn towards us.

Yep.

So, I don’t know who might be looking for hope today, but you came to the right place. And uh we we have a we’re going to have a great time in the word of God today. And I’m going to ask you if you would to just say this before I share with you the the the text today. I’d like you to just say, “My heart’s open. My heart’s open. My mind’s ready. My mind’s ready. Make me better, God. Make me better, God. By your word. By your word. I receive it. I receive it. I believe it. I won’t be the same again. In Jesus name. Shout a big amen. Amen.

Graduations are underway. And today’s word I just want to signal to all of the graduates is uh maybe a word for you that I I had you in mind. Let’s put it like that. It’s a word for everybody, but I hope if you are a graduate, high school, or college, um I hope that today you’ll really embrace what I’m going to share with you. I’m going to begin in Exodus chapter 23. Exodus 23 verse 29. It reads like this. It says, “But I will not drive them out in a single year.” And by the way, this is the Lord the Lord’s word. God’s talking here. I will not drive them out in a single year because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.

Little by little, somebody say little by little. Little by little. Say it again. Little by little. Little by little.

Little by little, I will drive them out before you until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.

So my title for today is that the best things happen little by little.

Little by little. Want to say it again?

Little by little. Now I want to confess to you today that this verse is not my favorite.

I don’t like the idea of something taking longer than it has to.

I like the mobile order at Starbucks.

Pull up, grab my cup of coffee, and keep going. I like direct flights.

And I like it when they’re on time. I like quick results.

Kind of feel like I’m not the only one. I like fast answers.

I like immediate breakthroughs.

My cooking skills are limited.

So, when my wife’s not there or we haven’t planned a dinner, I like the microwave.

And I always have a few of those on hand that pop in.

set it and boom, two minutes, I’m having dinner. I like that.

So, when I read this text, I’m sure that this is not what the Israelites really wanted to hear.

What they wanted was to leave Egypt and walk into the promised land without any resistance from their enemies.

What they wanted was to occupy the promised land in a day.

They wanted to experience no delays.

They wanted to have their enemies surrender without a fight.

They wanted to go from being slaves to being land owners, owning their own house, having their own farms. and livestock.

And they wanted to do it overnight. I’m sure of that.

But that’s not how it works. I said that’s not how it works.

And that’s not how it is with any form of real progress or success in our lives.

You see, there’s no such thing as overnight success. No such thing as overnight success.

Everything worthwhile takes time.

I mean, if we could, every person who wants to lose weight would take a magic pill, go to sleep, wake up, and be 25 lbs lighter.

Can I get an amen?

Woo. And of course, the advertisers try to make us believe that happens. Don’t fall for it.

If we could, we would go to sleep, wake up, and have strong muscles.

Go to sleep, wake up, and have a college degree. Come on, somebody.

Moms would love it if they could go to sleep, wake up, and be holding their new baby in their arms.

Instead of 9 months, let’s just microwave this one. Like, there’s an old saying, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

And that saying literally started way back in the middle ages when Rome was the first city in the world to reach a million in population.

People marveled at the architecture, the internal structure, the expansion that spilled into three different continents.

The economic engine was admirable that was behind all the development of Rome as an empire. And people started saying right then Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Rome wasn’t built. They all knew like this is a big wow wow wow. And it didn’t happen overnight.

So, I want to remind you today, whether you’re starting a business or writing a book or running a marathon, there’s no such thing as overnight success.

Success happens. Little by little.

And I want to encourage you, don’t underestimate little by little.

Little by little becomes a lot. I said little by little becomes a lot.

Another way to think of it is that consistency compounds over time.

So what we hope for to happen quickly overnight will happen if we’re willing to go at it little by little.

And you know because we live in a era of time where we look at one another and we compare oursel with the people around us. Sometimes we assume that they arrive somewhere like really fast, really quick. And here’s what I want to tell you is that victories that appear to be sudden were actually slow before they were sudden.

Good. Let that sink in. They were slow before, they were sudden.

I recently watched a professional baseball player named Brian Torres play his first major league game.

And in that first major league game, he got on base three times and one of them, one of his hits was a home run.

And I watched his family just going wild. I watched, you know, the cameras kept going to mom and dad and brothers and sisters and everybody like, my goodness. And a a as you watch it, you know, you’re you’re just thinking, wow, overnight success that look at that. Wow.

But after the game, they interviewed him and he started thanking his parents for taking him to practices. He started thanking his coaches all through the little league, all along the way.

And then they told how he had played 11 years in the minor leagues.

11 years in the minor leagues, just below the professional or the major leagues. And then

one night the phone rang late at night telling him to pack his bags, get on a plane.

He was going to the major leagues.

If you don’t know the background of it, you’re like, “Wow.” Phone rings, boom, pack your bags. Welcome to the dance.

Welcome to the big leagues.

That’s how it felt for those of us who were watching. It was like Brian became a Major League Baseball player suddenly.

But you know what?

He wasn’t It didn’t happen like that. He wasn’t in the lineup in one day. None of us knew his name. Like just a few hours before.

I’m a fan. That’s the St. Cardinals I’m talking about. By the way, I grew up there. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a kid for the Cardinals. I didn’t know his name. Brian who. But the moment he hit a home run, I knew his name.

In reality, what seemed sudden was actual actually slow.

Slow for him. It was slow for him. It felt like he would never get there. A slow grind year after year.

You see, you can let slow stop you or you can let slow grow you.

Am I helping anybody today?

David didn’t step out onto a battlefield and slay Goliath in a day.

He spent years in the hills, right?

Watching his father’s sheep, taking target practice with that slingshot like aim over here at the at the fence post. Boom. Missed it. Boom. Missed it.

Bam. Got it. Got it. like years of pretending there was a lion coming before a lion actually came. Pretending there’s a bear coming before pretending that you know he’s just doing target practice hour after hour after hour, day after day of preparation.

So what looked sudden publicly had been developing privately for years.

The hill with sheep prepared David for the valley with giants.

Some people pray for promotion in their life and they resist preparation.

In the halls of of my home growing up, my mother had a little quote and I stopped often and read it and looked at it again. It just it just resounded with me because I knew I was going somewhere. I knew I I was going to do something with my life.

But it was Abraham Lincoln’s word and he said, “Prepare yourself and your day will come.

Prepare yourself.” A lot of people pray for something they don’t prepare themselves for.

We don’t grow suddenly. We grow little by little. Healing doesn’t happen suddenly. It happens little by little.

I know there’s miracles, but most healing happens little by little. Your body is designed to heal itself. Little by little.

Trust is earned little by little.

Skills are developed little by little.

Credibility comes little by little. Say it with me again. Little by little.

I picked up a statistic I or something that I on skill development that some research suggests that those who master a skill like art, music, dancing, writing, whatever it might be and get to the top 1% of those who do that skill will spend 10,000 hours practicing and preparing to get to the top 1% in the world. 10,000 hours.

10,000 hours. I think you’re going to see it on the screen.

So, if someone practices for one hour a day, it would take 27.4 years to reach 10,000 hours.

2 hours a day, 13.7 years. 3 hours a day, 9.1 years. 4 hours a day, 6.8 years. eight hours a day. So if it’s your job and you’re doing it every day, 3.4 years.

But you know what? We’re not all excited and most of us are not trying to be in the top 1%.

So there’s another encouraging stat that says being in the top 5% at something requires roughly 20 minutes a day.

And you can get there in a year with holidays off.

Somebody say, “Amen.” I like that. I like that.

But what we do is that most people overestimate what they can do in a day and they underestimate what they can do in a lifetime.

Oh, that was good. Somebody ought to write that down.

With consistency, you can be really, really good at just about anything.

But just know that it happens little by little.

You see, reaching your full potential is a process that happens little by little.

We typically think that we’re ready for opportunities and blessings way before we’re actually ready.

We think we’re ready, but we’re really not ready.

Our kids think when they’re 11 they’re ready to drive the car, but we know they’re not really ready.

They dream as children at seven, eight years old and they assume like at that point I could just get out on that basketball court and I could I could like play in the NBA. No, no, you can’t.

You’re you’re not ready. And of course, they learn more as they mature like there’s a gap here. There there there’s a gap and I’m working on on the gap. But we all, even as adults, we we fall into a pattern of thinking like we’re ready for something before we think we’re ready.

People come to our church and they see what’s happened in 40 years.

They watch our church that was just so small in its infancy, its very beginning. And here we are like my 40th year, Sheila and I, 40th year of ministry.

And you know, I was probably easily replaceable for a few years, but now I’m not.

I I’m not.

And I’m not really bragging there. you, many of you are the same way in the things that you’ve been doing and the area that you’ve been focusing and the business that you’ve been building. Like you’ve got stuff now you didn’t have in year number 10, you didn’t have in year number 15, you didn’t have in year number 25. Like it it you you you just if if you’re willing like to just stay the course.

Big things happen, but they happen little.

by little Yakimal building that we’re celebrating today. Like that building didn’t happen overnight.

It happened little by little before we ever broke ground.

We were dreaming and we were thinking about it and we were we were praying and but it it seemed like forever and now here we are opening a new building. Now, I wish I could tell you in Yakimal that building going to fill up three times a weekend in a couple weeks.

It won’t. I’m not going to mislead you. But Yakimal is going to grow. People are going to come.

Lives are going to get changed. Going to be a great church someday right there.

Little little by

little. So, I want to go back in kind of the closing part of this message. I want to go back to the text that I I read to verse 30 and I want to take a look closer at God’s reason for advancing them little by little. Okay, here’s what he said. The Lord said, “It won’t happen. It won’t happen in a year, but it’ll be little by little. I will drive them out before you until you have increased enough to take possession of the land. Did you catch that?

God was saying that he would act on their behalf little by little until they had grown enough to fully take possession of what he had in mind for them.

So good.

It’s as if God was saying, “Some of you are waiting for me to drive them out, and I’m waiting on you to grow into the capacity where I can fully trust you to occupy the land.”

Back to the example of the automobile. A wise parent doesn’t allow his son or daughter to get behind the wheel when they want to. The wise parent waits until they are ready for it.

And there’s a time of testing.

But I want to ask you the question, how often are we waiting for God to move? And he’s waiting for us to grow.

That’s good.

See, God grows your capacity before he enlarges your territory.

Did you get that?

Some blessings would would literally crush us if they came too early. Right?

And I got to tell you that because some as I’m going through the message, some of you are like, “Well, why isn’t God like just give me that quicker?” And and I want to say to you, the process is not punishment.

It’s not God withholding something and teasing you.

It’s not him withholding a promotion in your life. just because he wants to.

God waits for us to be ready before he advances us and promotes us into the next level of opportunity and provision that he has for us in our life.

So you can look at it like this. On the journey to the promised land, God was not just preparing the land for them. He was preparing them for the land.

And I talk about this a lot in my I talk about in the whole book proving ground.

If you if you want to know why you’re stuck or why your life keeps staying at the same level that it is, if you’re a person who’s like, “Okay, I could handle little by little, but I’m just straight up stuck.

I keep going in circles.” which is what the the children of Israel did, right?

They got to a point where their own they got in their own way.

And and so the proving ground is all about, you know, you don’t Aren’t you thankful today that when you turn a a hair dryer on, like you plug it in, turn it on, it doesn’t turn into a blowtorrch?

Aren’t you thankful? But you know how that happens? It’s been tested. It goes through a proving ground.

The right amount of heat, the right like, aren’t you thankful?

Aren’t you thankful when you hit the buttons on the microwave that it doesn’t go and explode in your kitchen?

How do you know it’s not going to happen? Cuz it’s been tested. That’s what the book, the proving ground, I’m I’m giving a shameless plug for the book proving ground.

Because in that book, you start to understand the times of testing and and why we are tested in our life and why it’s not it’s not because God’s withholding something from us. He wants to promote us, but he doesn’t want to promote us into failure.

He He doesn’t want to promote us into a place where our success crushes us.

One of the tests in the nine tests in the book, The Proving Ground, one of the test is called the test of time.

And in that test, I talk about how some people are like milk. They get bitter over time.

They get sour on life. They curdle.

More difficult, more stubborn, less flexible.

Well, they’re just getting old. You can get old without getting mad.

You can get old without getting bitter. You can get old and stay young at heart. Amen. Amen.

So some people over time they they’re milk people. I call them milk people. They curdled.

And then there’s other people like wine. They get better with time.

Anybody want to join me in and be that?

Like let’s just aim for that. Let’s work on that. We’re going to get better over time. Not bitter. We’re getting better, you know, more self-aware, not grumpy, but happy, cheering people on, loving life, always improving, never knowing it all, always growing and developing.

I love the young people of our church and you know we think three and I’m thankful for all the youth and the young adults and and the children man thank God for it but you know what without a great older what’s the right word like me what am I feisty strong but older in age congregation we cannot cohabitate

We can’t cohabitate. We can’t raise up a great generation if everybody that has been around a few years is now grumpy, frustrated, impatient, talks about the youth like all them young people. They young people do this and they wear their jeans way down here and they have baseball caps on in church and that’s about you. talk like that, you’ll chase them all away.

But if you love them, come on. You love them, you keep your heart right, your attitude right, your mind right, we’ll raise up, we’ll raise up strong young leaders. Amen.

Okay.

It’s natural. I want to admit today that it’s natural to want big instant results, to crave breakthroughs that happen quickly. Like, that’s natural.

But I hope that today I’ve encouraged you to see that more often than not, God doesn’t move through big bold leaps.

The pattern is little by little.

We crave things to happen quickly and in a grand way.

But the best things in our lives unfold, little by little.

Scripture says, “Don’t be weary in doing well.

Just keep on doing the right thing at the right time.

Go to work and give it your best when you don’t feel like it.

Give your children attention and parent them whenever you’re tired and you’re weary.

Like keep on keep on working on that marriage.

Like how will you reach your 10th, your 25th or your 50th anniversary?

Little by little.

How do you build a nest egg for retirement?

Come on. Are you getting it today? Am I helping you? And I’m encourage you today. Come on. We’re in it for the trip. Amen. Give the Lord a great big hand. Will you give him thanks today? Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

So, let’s thank God in the closing moments of prayer. Let me or this message. Let let me just encourage you to thank God that he’s working in your life. And let’s thank him that he has been working in your life.

Let’s remind ourselves that when I don’t see him or I don’t see it, he’s working.

I don’t see the tree grow. But when I walk away and come back a year later, it’s grown.

It’s grown.

When I don’t see the answer to my prayer suddenly, let’s just thank God that he’s answered prayers before.

He’ll continue to answer prayers today, and he’ll continue to be faithful tomorrow.

Amen.

Let’s just give thanks to him, honor him, praise him for the progress he’s brought in our life, and let’s celebrate the progress that he’s going to continue to bring in our lives, in our marriage, and our family. Amen.

Let’s just let God know we’re thankful. Come on, we can handle some more.

We can handle some more. Anybody handle some more? Praise God.

With every head bowed and every eye closed today, I want to invite you. I want to encourage you that if you’re here today and you’re not ready, if your life were to end today, you’re you’re not ready really for eternity. you’re not ready to meet God.

If you’re in a place where maybe you have known as a child or a young person, you’ve known God, you in some way you’ve known been around church, but you got away from all of that.

Maybe you would say there’s good reasons that I did what I did, but today God’s calling you back.

I want to welcome you back today. I want to invite you to open up your heart to him again.

Put your faith in him again.

If you’re a person who’s never really known about God, you’ve never you’re hearing things talked about that are brand new to you, but you’re here today and you you understand that you’re being drawn. God God actually is drawing me at this season of my life to himself.

I want to encourage you to say yes. I want to encourage you to lean in.

Lean into a relationship with him. Get started with those baby steps and watch how God will show himself strong in your life. He’ll become a friend like we sang about earlier like no other friend. Now, if I’m talking to you and you here today at one of our locations, you say, “Pastor Kevin, I want a new beginning in my life, my relationship with God.” Would you just raise your hand like boldly without hesitation? I I want to pray with you. Good. Hands are going up. I see hands up in the high seats. I see hands in the middle seat. I here at our location, every location.

Just if you would, this is your moment.

Like, this is your time and you know who you are.

I want to invite you to join me in this prayer. God bless you. Fantastic. Fantastic.

God bless you. Good.

Okay. With your hand held high, I’m going to invite you to pray this prayer with myself and all of our church family today. Say it out loud. Say it from your heart. Say, “Lord Jesus, welcome to my world.

Forgive me of all my sin. Forgive me. and come into my life. into my life. I invite you today.

I invite you today to be the leader to be the Lord of my life.

Starting right now starting right now. I put my faith in you.

My faith in you, my confidence in you.

Confidence in you. I boldly declare I boldly declare that Jesus Jesus you are you are my savior my savior and my lord thank you for a new beginning thank you for a new beginning thank you for a fresh start thank you for start in Jesus name in Jesus name and everybody in the house let’s say a great big amen and let’s celebrate brand new beginnings