The passage this message was preached from, in full, with every other passage it reached for.
Revelation 4read at the opening to lead the congregation into worship
1 After these things I looked and saw a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard, like a trumpet speaking with me, was one saying, “Come up here, and I will show you the things which must happen after this.”
2 Immediately I was in the Spirit. Behold, there was a throne set in heaven, and one sitting on the throne
3 that looked like a jasper stone and a sardius. There was a rainbow around the throne, like an emerald to look at.
4 Around the throne were twenty-four thrones. On the thrones were twenty-four elders sitting, dressed in white garments, with crowns of gold on their heads.
5 Out of the throne proceed lightnings, sounds, and thunders. There were seven lamps of fire burning before his throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
6 Before the throne was something like a sea of glass, similar to crystal. In the middle of the throne, and around the throne were four living creatures full of eyes before and behind.
7 The first creature was like a lion, and the second creature like a calf, and the third creature had a face like a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle.
8 The four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within. They have no rest day and night, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come!”
9 When the living creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to him who sits on the throne, to him who lives forever and ever,
10 the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives forever and ever, and throw their crowns before the throne, saying,
11 “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, the Holy One, to receive the glory, the honor, and the power, for you created all things, and because of your desire they existed, and were created!”
main passage read in full, covering testing, temptation, endurance, wisdom, and pure religion
1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are in the Dispersion: Greetings.
2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various temptations,
3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
4 Let endurance have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
5 But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach; and it will be given to him.
6 But let him ask in faith, without any doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven by the wind and tossed.
7 For that man shouldn’t think that he will receive anything from the Lord.
8 He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
9 But let the brother in humble circumstances glory in his high position;
10 and the rich, in that he is made humble, because like the flower in the grass, he will pass away.
11 For the sun arises with the scorching wind, and withers the grass, and the flower in it falls, and the beauty of its appearance perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in his pursuits.
12 Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to those who love him.
13 Let no man say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God can’t be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one.
14 But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.
15 Then the lust, when it has conceived, bears sin; and the sin, when it is full grown, produces death.
16 Don’t be deceived, my beloved brothers.
17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, nor turning shadow.
18 Of his own will he gave birth to us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
19 So, then, my beloved brothers, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger;
20 for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God.
21 Therefore, putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with humility the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
22 But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves.
23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror;
24 for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.
25 But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and continues, not being a hearer who forgets, but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does.
26 If anyone among you thinks himself to be religious while he doesn’t bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, this man’s religion is worthless.
27 Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Paul counts his earthly credentials as worthless because of what Christ has done
1 Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not tiresome, but for you it is safe.
2 Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision.
3 For we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh;
4 though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If any other man thinks that he has confidence in the flesh, I yet more:
5 circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee;
6 concerning zeal, persecuting the assembly; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless.
7 However, I consider those things that were gain to me as a loss for Christ.
8 Yes most certainly, and I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ
9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith;
10 that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death;
11 if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on, that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus.
13 Brothers, I don’t regard myself as yet having taken hold, but one thing I do. Forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
15 Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, think this way. If in anything you think otherwise, God will also reveal that to you.
16 Nevertheless, to the extent that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule. Let us be of the same mind.
17 Brothers, be imitators together of me, and note those who walk this way, even as you have us for an example.
18 For many walk, of whom I told you often, and now tell you even weeping, as the enemies of the cross of Christ,
19 whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who think about earthly things.
20 For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ;
21 who will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able even to subject all things to himself.
closing benediction about God deciding in advance to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, to the saints who are at Ephesus, and the faithful in Christ Jesus:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ;
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without defect before him in love;
5 having predestined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his desire,
6 to the praise of the glory of his grace, by which he freely gave us favor in the Beloved,
7 in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,
8 which he made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence,
9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him
10 to an administration of the fullness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things on the earth, in him;
11 in whom also we were assigned an inheritance, having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who does all things after the counsel of his will;
12 to the end that we should be to the praise of his glory, we who had before hoped in Christ.
13 In him you also, having heard the word of the truth, the Good News of your salvation—in whom, having also believed, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,
14 who is a pledge of our inheritance, to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of his glory.
15 For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and the love which you have toward all the saints,
16 don’t cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers,
17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him;
18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints,
19 and what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might
20 which he worked in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places,
21 far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come.
22 He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things for the assembly,
23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
The message in order, in a few minutes of reading.
Glenn Blake filled in for the pastoral staff this Sunday morning and shared his family's adoption story as a way into James 1. The message was personal and direct: saying yes to what God asks, even without enough money or strength or certainty, is how faith becomes a living thing. Glenn drew the thread from his own family's experience all the way out to a broader call for the congregation to keep listening for whatever God has placed on their hearts.
What was said
Glenn opened by reading a stretch of James 1 that covered testing, temptation, the danger of hearing God's word without acting on it, and what genuine religion actually looks like in practice. He let that passage set the table before he said much of anything else, so the congregation had the text in mind as he moved into the story.
He was upfront about two things that made him hesitant to share the adoption story at all. He did not want anyone to think he was impressed with himself, and he wanted to honor the fact that the story belongs at least as much to his daughter Sealy as it does to him. He framed the whole thing plainly: obedience in this case was just saying yes, and God did the rest.
He and Liz had talked about adoption almost from the beginning of their marriage, shaped partly by a church community early on where adoption was simply part of the culture. When they started the actual process, they were in their mid-twenties, carrying school debt, and working modest jobs in Bondurant. None of the conditions looked right on paper, and Glenn said that in retrospect not thinking too hard about that was probably a good thing.
The process ran through two collapsed attempts before it landed. Their first agency went bankrupt after eight months. Ethiopia, their first matched country, closed to international adoption before they could finish. India, which they had not previously qualified for because of their age, became the path forward. They were matched with Sealy in late 2016 and traveled to bring her home in September 2017, with their qualifying income landing literally $56 above the required threshold.
Glenn described the orphanage, the local court surrounded by jungle and monkeys, the week in New Delhi finishing paperwork, and the moment their three other children met Sealy at the airport. He was careful with the details, keeping some things private, but painted enough of the picture that the weight and strangeness and grace of the whole trip came through.
The turn in the message came when Glenn asked what the point of all this actually was. He was honest that he struggles with the pull toward comfortable circumstances and that he sometimes feels like a fraud. His argument was that as believers we do not measure success and failure the way the world does. The family did not have enough of anything required, and they said yes anyway, and God provided through them and through the people around them who also said yes alongside them.
He closed by putting the question back on the congregation. He described Sealy as a little girl who exists, who would have existed somewhere regardless of what his family chose, and asked people to sit with what an alternate path would have meant. Then he widened it: saying yes to God looks different for every person, and it might be accepting Christ, or reaching out to a struggling neighbor, or fostering, or something else entirely. The point was not earning favor but letting God's grace overflow outward because it is too good and too large to keep inside.
Doing a Bible study?
Here is a guide we have prepared for you: the passages
in order, questions for the group, and room to write.
Glenn described a season early in his marriage when he and Liz were both genuinely open to whatever God wanted, and he thinks that openness shaped everything that followed. What does that kind of openness actually look like in day-to-day life, and what makes it hard to sustain?
The adoption process hit repeated walls: an agency going bankrupt, Ethiopia closing its doors, barely qualifying on income by $56. Glenn pointed to James 1 and the idea that tested faith is where endurance grows. Has there been a moment in your own life where an obstacle turned out to be part of the path rather than the end of it?
Absolutely. Thanks for breaking the ice. I yeah. Good right? Good morning, first b.
You congratulations. You have made it to church on time at Spring Forward. Please stand up. We're gonna we're gonna worship together. Carl and Ray are out of town as you could see, but Florine and I and Glenn are gonna gonna do our best.
So here's a good word from re Revelation four to lead us into worship. It says, you're you're worthy, our lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things, and by your will, they were created and have their being. Let's sing of it. Stars declare who you are I'm so but still you forever my heart
Alright. Good morning, everybody. You can be seated. Welcome to First Baptist Church. Ray and Carl are away on a retreat this week.
We're really excited for them. Be praying for them that they'd be, rested and renewed and ready to go. We've got a bunch of stuff still going on here. So let's go ahead and check that next slide out there. Oh, I got it.
Oh, Monday night's a first b. Brad, do you wanna come on up? I'm teaching. Oh, Brad is Brad is speaking. They can't hear you online.
So if you have anything else okay. Alright. Brad is speaking. Come on by. I'll be surprised tomorrow.
It's pizza night tomorrow, and also Owana is on. So bring your kids at 05:45, is it, to sign up? And then, we'll have pizza and stuff ready to go. There'll be enough for the kids and for you. The Monday night service is still on.
Brad's gonna be preaching, so, come hear what he has to say. We'd love to have you. The connect hours between services, come come down the hall, meet the people for the 11:00 service. Just stick around for a while. It's great.
Grab some coffee. The ladies fellowship meets on Thursdays at 6PM in the Fellowship Hall. Come even if you haven't been here before, even if it's your first time, whatever, just just show up. It's great. You don't have to worry about being in the middle of something.
Also, the ladies one day retreat, we have Nancy Traziano, who's supposed to talk about that. There she is. Come on up, Nancy.
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. It's good to be in the house of the Lord this morning. Amen?
I just wanted to take a moment to encourage the ladies to join us this Saturday for our one day ladies retreat. Even though the venue has changed from the lodge to fellowship hall, the content will remain the same. Amy Litzelman has graciously accepted to teach us the way of love, and Casey along with Christine will be leading us in worship through song and we believe that God, the Holy Spirit will have a word for each lady who attends and I know that we all have busy lives and busy schedules but I also think it's important to carve out some time to hear what the Lord would like to speak to each one of us. We will have a morning session after breakfast and a second session after lunch. So, you could join us for the morning or the afternoon but we hope you can join us for both.
And as pastor Ray said a couple of weeks ago, it will not only benefit you but others as well in your life. We do have some planned activities between sessions for fun and fellowship. We have a silent auction that will be going on and if you're doing some early spring cleaning this week at home and you have something you'd like to donate, be feel free to drop it by the church foyer. We also have a close swap and an A con and some other door prize drawings. But we hope that ladies, you will be encouraged to come and invite your encourage your teenage daughters, your friends, your sister, your mother, your neighbors, your coworkers, because it's gonna be great day for all.
And men, if you've tuned out for a minute, tune back in because this is an opportunity for you to encourage your wife and your teenage daughter and your sister and your mother and your friends and coworkers to come. We're excited to see what God is going to be doing in the hearts of the ladies who attend. And I will be in the foyer after the service if you have any questions or you wanna sign up. Thank you.
Great. And you can also sign up all week long. There are some little slips on this back table here. You can turn them into the office and I'll get them where they are going. Sunday school volunteers are needed.
If you have any questions, contact Liz Owings. Please, please, please consider doing that. It's on a rotating schedule, so sometimes you only have to do it once a month. So it's pretty low commitment, but a big impact. And it also gives the people who've been doing it habitually, they'll have a break for change, which would be really nice.
And, this is, for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. They are doing some classes here in May. They're free, and, they're to help teach you how to share your faith. I think it's a really extraordinary opportunity to get grounded and get practiced with sharing your faith because in September, they're doing a big rally over in Idaho Falls. September 23 is the Kids Fest.
September 24 is the tour where Will Graham will come and share, and Crowder will be playing music. That will be free, and we're encouraging people to invite friends to go take take your friends over there, take your neighbors, and would you consider taking this card home that's in the back of the chair? This is for you. It's not for us. Take this home.
Pray about it. It asks you to to put some names in the back of people to pray for, to take, there so you can share your faith with them, and hopefully bring them to the Lord, because it's really a big part of who we are as Christians is sharing our faith and and trying to build other people up. Would you put some names on there that you can consider? Put it on your mirror at home. Put it on your refrigerator.
Pray about it. And, and I'm challenging people to put one impossible name on there, one person that you think will never come to the Lord. Put it on there, pray for them every day, and just pray for an opportunity to share with them and maybe invite them to the the event. It's free. The classes are free.
We've we've interacted with them a couple of times already. I love these people. They're here to to sow into your life and make a difference. So would you would you show up for that? And I think that's the last slide.
So we'll go ahead and sing a little more. Thanks a lot.
So let's stand up. Let's do something a little different. Let's say hi to your neighbors. We haven't done that in long time. God, we we just come before you this morning, and we just thank you for for your grace and your mercy that you have on our lives.
We pray that you that you would be blessed this morning, that we would worship you, worship your name. You have created us for a purpose, and we just thank you for today. And we just pray that you would be with this time and be with Glenn as he brings brings the word. Amen. It's in your name we pray.
Sing of the goodness of God I love your voice you have led me for the fire in darkest night you are close like no other I've known you as a father I've known you as a friend I can say You can have a seat for a minute. So we're heading into a time of the worship through giving part of the service, and I'll invite the ushers to come on forward. Brian, could you lead us in prayer?
Lord Jesus, thank you so much for loving us, and thank you for supporting this church and giving us the ability to
to live here and to
to serve you. And thanks for blessing us, Lord. Thanks for your faithfulness, like the song said, your goodness. And I just pray, God, that you'll you'll use this offering and you'll bless not only this church, church but the local missionaries, the international missionaries, our staff, and use this this offering for your glory, Lord, and multiply. And it's so exciting to see how many different around around the world with with these funds that you provided for us, Lord.
So thank you, Jesus. We love you. Amen. Amen. Amen.
It's time for children's church.
Children's church time. Am I on? I think so. All right. Well, I definitely never had, so much sympathy for Moses.
Literally that was my first thought this morning. My first thought was, man, it feels early because of the time change. My second thought was, I feel for Moses. I understand now. I don't know who my Aaron would be.
Brad maybe would be a good choice. I was the first person who came to mind, but I was like, Brad, you can just read my notes. But Brad's busy tomorrow doing that. So thanks, Florian and Ryan for worship. Great job.
I know that's a big thing to take on, so we appreciate that. We're going to start today by reading a passage from James one. We'll bounce back and forth in it a little bit, but, I'm just going to go ahead and read through it. God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation. Afterward, they will be they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
And remember, when you are being tempted, do not say, God is tempting me. God is never tempted to do wrong and he never tempts anyone else. Temptation comes from our own desires which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions and when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death. Don't just listen to God's word, you must do what it says.
Otherwise, you're only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don't obey, it's like glancing at your face in the mirror. You see yourself, walk away and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free and if you do what it says and don't forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. If you claim to be religious but don't control your tongue, you are fooling yourself and your religion is worthless.
Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God, the father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. So that's kind of our our main passage today. My name is Glenn. I know many of you here this morning, certainly not all, if you're not a regular attendee. As you've heard, things are a little different this morning, but I'm certainly glad to be here with you.
I love our pastoral staff. We're really blessed to have them. The way they teach the Bible is so valuable to this church and the community. My wife, Liz and I have four children, Logan, Caleb, Timber and Sealy. Blake, And there we go.
We've been in the area since we moved to Bondurant from Montana about eleven years ago. We've been attending First Baptist, since 2015, and then Liz has been doing children's ministry here for the last several years. We're both off and downstairs, so I might be maybe more likely to see some of you in passing, than in this very room, but I'm glad to be here with you today. So Ray and Karl had this upcoming trip and asked that I fill in with a message. I tend to be somewhat academic in just how I approach things, life in general.
So, this is gonna be a little different, and that's, it's gonna be a stretch for me. Like, it's gonna be somewhat personal, and, that's a good thing for all of us maybe. So as I was praying today about today and what I should talk about, I felt pretty clear direction I should share our adoption story, which is not really a standalone thing. It's part of our life and our testimony, as a family. Some of you know, many of you know probably that we adopted our youngest child, Sealy, from India a little over five years ago.
There are a couple of things that immediately brought some doubt and insecurity into my mind, just to be totally honest. They're both probably a little delicate and hard to articulate. I hope I come across the way that I mean to. The first is that I don't want anybody to think that I'm like impressed with myself that we did this amazing thing. God asked us all to do things.
Some things we say yes to in obedience and some things we don't. And, I know that I've wasted time and opportunities to serve Christ, and obedience in this particular thing was saying yes to God and just simply that, and him absolutely doing the rest. And, he used other people who said yes and continue to say yes to come alongside of us to make it happen. So it's really not not about us at all, it's about it's about God a 100%. Any good thing that we do as believers is a reflection of God's goodness to us, and that's kind of one of my primary main takeaways from today.
The second is that this is Sealy's story too, and in a way, it's hers more than anybody else's. She will have her own completed story someday, and I hope that God is in the very middle of it. I tried to be thoughtful about what details to share and which to kind of keep more privately to ourselves, and I hope I landed a good balance on that. With that, we'll begin. So the beginning of our adoption story is really the beginning of our marriage in a lot of ways.
Liz and I met about fifteen years ago. At that point in our lives, we both truly wanted to do whatever God wanted us to do. That's probably the thing we remember most about one another at that time, during that season of life. It was a really short season because, we met in August and got engaged in September, and we got married in November, and we had Logan nine months later. So, this is not a timeline that I recommend, in general, but it was the right thing for us, and I can honestly say we were lockstep with God's voice during that time.
And I think that has a lot to do with what took place afterward. When we were very first married, we attended church where there was a strong I call it a culture of adoption, I don't know what else to call it, for lack of a better term. So many of the staff and attendees had either adopted children themselves or been involved in helping others do so, and that just felt right and felt biblical to us, Our kind of mentors at that time that we spent time with at that church had a big impact, on our worldview. So that concept to just being open to God's plan and that being really what brought us together kind of set us off, on this path. We moved to Bondurant in 2012, with our two boys at that time and kind of began our adult life, so to speak.
I don't know exactly when we started talking about adoption in a less theoretical and more literal sense, but not long after that. So here we are, we're 25, 26 years old, two kids, school debt, not making much money. I was working as a range ecologist for Sublette County. Liz was doing some tutoring and, homeschooling the boys. We were both praying about it and just kind of came to the same conclusion individually through our prayer time that it was time to jump in.
With international adoptions, there are multiple concurrent processes going on. And some of it depends on the foreign country that you're involved with, the agency, where you live and just in terms of access to resources domestically. So we needed to focus on a country where the age limits for adoption for us as parents were fairly low because we were pretty young at the time. Many countries require the adoptive parents to be like at least 30 or 35 before you can even start the process. Which is something you might not necessarily know.
It couldn't be a country that required months and months of in country stays because of our other young children. So that narrowed it down. Finally, maybe the biggest hurdle for us is, at least at that time, was we had to demonstrate a certain level of financial security, and savings and income. And I mean, once I probably didn't think about it that hard and maybe that was a good thing. Once we got started, remember saying basically, I don't care if we have to borrow every dollar to do this and live our life in debt, we're going do this and see it through.
We started working with a domestic agency to do our home study and then an international agency to begin work on placement and just the mountains of logistics that have to take place. At that time, based on our criteria of kind of where we were at in our life, Ethiopia was one of the only countries that we qualified for. So, we began praying for this little person that we didn't know who would be our child. Things are kind of humming along after about eight months. We learned that our agency was going bankrupt.
Thankfully, we didn't lose a ton of money in that process. I know some people did. It was a tough emotional setback for sure. It was kind of like gut check, are we really doing this? Is this really what God wants us to do?
James says, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So we end up moving to another adoption agency. And just kind of as a look behind the curtain, you know, in terms of the process, the many countries don't adopt out children who don't have some kinds of physical challenges, and that varies again by country. But as part of the process, you tell the agency and ultimately the foreign government what medical conditions you would consider and those that you wouldn't.
And it's a really heart wrenching process. You basically get a checklist, and you know that every box that you don't check represents real people, and that's tough. Because we lived relatively far, we still didn't bond or anything. Hard to get medical emergency medical care, we decided it needed to be something where it wasn't going to be something where it was likely we would need emergency medical care regularly. And also just it's a with all the snow, frankly, and something where the child can still like be mobile.
So then fast forward to 2016, we got word that Ethiopia was going to be closing their doors to international adoption, and that remains the case to this day. At that point, we'd put quite a lot financially into the program. The agency offered to transfer all the costs that they could into another country's program, which was maybe half of what we paid up to that time. So India, which previously we did not qualify for because of our age, by this time we did. And so that was our next option.
We said yes. We immediately started praying for a little Indian girl. By October 2016, we were notified that we had been matched to Sealy. Those are a couple of the first pictures that we got of her. We periodically get a new photo every couple of months, but we never really knew when the pictures were taken.
They do some, at least in this circumstance, some kind of basic health checks. So we'd occasionally get kind of like a one pager about kind of her general health. But
we were
thrilled to see the pictures. It was great. At that point, it makes it easier in a way because this is the person that's going be part of our family, but also harder because this person who's going to be part of our family is across the world and we don't know when we're going to be able to go. It's just a waiting game for paperwork and court processes. During this time, many of our family members, friends, this church specifically, to never stop praying and giving.
It's just tremendous how how giving people were and and helping us fundraise and just all those things to make it happen. And God used that absolutely to keep our faith strong when we were doubting or we weren't like, can we do this? God used God used folks to help us in that way. And I guess, you know, if the theme today is saying saying yes to God, many brothers and sisters in Christ said yes along with us. And that's that's part of the testimony too.
Sometimes in our journey, we we are the God ordained support that holds one another up. As the country did its final review of our finances, we found out that we made enough to move forward with the final steps of the adoption by literally $56 of annual income, which is crazy. All right. That's more familiar. Okay.
That sets me at ease. So this is not a dramatic reenactment. This is literally the spot that I was sitting on 09/16/2017. I was hunting, backpacking alone, sitting on this knob. I've been glassing all morning, and I got a text from Liz that we're leaving to go to India in less than a week.
So I don't even remember the rest was kind of a blur. I don't remember if I could text back or not. It's kind of those places like there's one bar, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I've been back to this place many times. But just kind of started mentally, like preparing.
I actually ended up shooting a nice buck later that afternoon. I was like, alright, I got to like get this hunt over with, and it worked out great. So it's a really special place to me, a special memory, and, that'll always be a special place and a special time. So from there, we hopped on a plane. I mean, I have frantic e mails and calls and all of that once I get back to civilization.
We hopped on a plane to Pennsylvania to leave our other three kids with Liz's parents, and we flew from there to London, and then London to Bangalore. We spent, just one night in Bangalore, and then drove about a half day drive or so to her orphanage from there. Without going into lots of detail, I'll mention a couple of things that I remember specifically that maybe kind of help paint the picture of, what it was like. The caregivers there definitely loved the kids a lot. That was obvious and really a blessing to see.
It really encouraged our hearts that, that was the case. The orphanage had two main rooms. It's that building there, it was two stories, each with about 15 to 20 kids. You kind of went up these stairs, turned the corner and the room immediately off the left off of kind of a landing was for older kids, so maybe like five to 12 years old. And after I mean, after that age, they're basically on the street on their own, trying to make it on their own as semi adults.
Then there was a separate room as we kind of kept going around for younger kids, which was babies all the way up to, four or five years old. Many had physical handicaps of varying degree. Was kind of off of that room with younger kids, there was kind of a side room that was a little bit more of the smallest babies. Otherwise, just a big open room. Kids would take turns sleeping on the ground on a rug and in the cribs because they didn't have enough beds.
Pretty much immediately, Celie was with us. They kind of just like, here you go. I mean, it was emotional for them though as well. Just gals who've been taking such good care of her to to do that was tough. And it's one of those moments where well, so from there we're we're whisked away to the court.
So we're we're in this local court in this state in India with millions of people, and I just remember being kind of overwhelmed in a way because of how reliant we were on everybody else. We were worthless. Like what we don't know the language, we're in a court, like we're about to appear before a powerful judge. And it was this giant cement structure. It had big banks of open windows, windowless windows, glassless windows.
It was cool. It was interesting. It was in the jungle. There were monkeys all over. You couldn't really like where the building stopped and where the jungle started was nebulous.
So that was cool. I mean, was really, again, kind of surreal experience. There are rows and rows of attorney's offices. We met the attorney who been dealing with our paperwork this whole time. Was like, okay, so you're the guy.
We stood before the judge and said our piece, which was essentially, you know, we're thankful to be there, we're excited to add to our family, most of the court spoke English, which was helpful to us. So after that, we were again taken away by car back to Bangalore. The next day we got on a plane to New Delhi, where we were in Delhi for about another week while we did more appointments, doctor appointments, court appointments, and then a meeting at the US Embassy. Truly by the grace of God, we made it out on a flight before the country closed for a holiday weekend, so we were able to get back home. And the first time that our other kids saw Cely was here at the the airport.
A lot of just kind of day to day survival followed, obviously the jet lag. Another big step was just getting ready for the surgeries that she would have to repair a cleft lip and palate. The first one was just over a month after we got back. And we also found out that she had recently recovered from hepatitis and also had giardia, so she was really not healthy enough to do that quite yet. And so it took a few weeks and she kind of started to gain some strength.
Most kids with cleft lip and palate start their surgery process fairly shortly after their birth. So we kind of had a unique situation in terms of her care plan, and we're very thankful for the medical care that she's had at, Salt Lake Children's. It's been amazing and, really blessed to have that. She's now had quite a number of major surgeries to graft bone and skin and a variety of things to make it easier for her to breathe and to eat and swallow. That will be ongoing until she's an adult, but we're kind of in a lull right now, which has been a nice break.
So here we are. What's the I guess what's the message, the meat of the message that God put in my heart? Life is a series of choices. We make mundane choices like what to eat for breakfast, what are we going to wear. We also make big choices like where we are going to live, if we're going to get married, what we do for work, who we surround ourselves with as friends.
We decide if Jesus is real to us, We if we accept him as savior. And my challenge for you and for myself is just to be sincerely seeking God for what he might be asking of us, not vaguely, but specifically. Something that he's said upon your heart, maybe even in years past, that seems right and purposeful and fulfilling. It might also be scary and it might be hard. And ask yourself, what does failure look like, and is it actually failure?
As children of God, we don't measure success and failure the same way that the world does. In Philippians, Paul's talking about his earthly credentials of which he had many and comes to the conclusion in chapter three that, I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. And there's this constant push and pull. Our human nature craves comfort and ease, yet our lives are fulfilled with joy our lives are filled with joy and purpose by surrendering to God's better plan at the cost of our comfort and maybe even our short term happiness. I struggle with this temptation to pursue comfortable circumstances all the time, and frankly, sometimes I feel like a fraud.
And I have to go back to those promises of of who God says I am in him and not of what I am on my own. What if I step out in faith and get embarrassed? What if I'm not skilled enough, strong enough, old enough, young enough, wise enough, or righteous enough. The truth is we're not enough of any of those things. It's just whether we want to admit it or not.
We do have gifts that God's given us to use for his glory, and we do have the Holy Spirit as born again believers, and we have the promise of heaven. We're strong in his righteousness. We are wise in his guidance and truth, and we are supported by his provision. And I say this not just generally today, not someone who has everything figured out by any means. Today's testimony is really about just a regular family who didn't have enough time, and we didn't have enough strength, we didn't have enough money, we didn't have enough patience and grace, but without knowing the answers we said yes to this particular thing, this particular time, that God asked us to do, and we took step of faith.
And he sent others to walk along with us that again said yes with us and helped in ways that he asked them to in order to paint this complete vivid living story. And right now, this moment, there are little boys and girls around the world who will never know the unconditional love of a mom or dad. They'll never hear the name of Jesus. We don't know their names, but they have names and they have faces. They have hands and feet, and they have joys and sorrows.
They have passions, things that they love. They have talents from God. They have struggles. They have temptations, and they have souls. They represent just one of the many, many opportunities that we have to say yes to God.
Something that haunts me a little bit is to imagine an alternate path where we chose not to do this, and maybe we made a safer financial decision or decided it would put too much stress on our family, which are totally reasonable concerns. And from a human standpoint, those are reasonable things to consider. But Sealy would still exist. She would have different circumstances, but she would still be on this earth. She would still exist.
The little girl downstairs with the big sometimes mischievous personality who loves animals and loves Jesus would still be here. She'd still be somewhere. And maybe for you saying yes to what God has placed on your heart means taking that step to say, yes, Jesus, I accept you as the son of God and, I want you to be Lord of my life. Maybe it's, starting a business that gives you the flexibility to lead short term missions trips. Maybe it's saying yes to fostering or adopting a child even though you don't have the time, you don't have the money, or you don't have the grace in your own power.
Maybe it's reaching out to your neighbor or your coworker who you know is depressed and struggling to find any joy in their life. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about doing good things during God's favor. It's just extending the grace and love that he's shown to us because it is so great and it is so good that it just overflows. Is everything going to be perfect when we say yes in obedience? No.
Definitely not. In the first part of James one, it says that when troubles of any kind come your way, consider an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. If you need wisdom, ask our generous God and he will give it to you.
He will not rebuke you for asking. Many members of this church and the greater local church model this love in action that I'm talking about by serving those in need. I know that that encourages me to be listening for that next next whisper from God and to be looking for his guidance and and the next opportunity that he has orchestrated. So with that, let's pray. God, thank you for this time together.
Thank you for your grace and for your wisdom and for your guidance. I pray for strength and your will to be clear to us all. I pray for peace in all of our decisions to follow you. Give us strength. Give us your words as we go out today to visit with our families and our friends.
We're thankful for your grace and your peace and your forgiveness. We love Jesus. Amen.
Thanks a lot, Glenn. If you guys will stand, we'll we'll end with one more song. Righteousness Thanks for coming this morning. I can't see the back of that. So we've got a little benediction.
God decided in in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for this for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son. Thanks for coming. Have a great day.
