Well, again, happy Father's Day to all the dads out there. And I know that this day for a lot of us can bring different feelings and emotions because you know you everybody has had a different experience with a dad. And so whether you had a good relationship, a strained one, or a non-existent one, here's just what I want to start out with today is that God is the perfect father and he loves you and he is here with you today.

, and the other thing that I would add is if you look around the room, I would say that Destination Church has a an amazing church full of awesome father figures and brothers in Christ that maybe if you did have a rough relationship with your dad growing up, there's lots of great guys around here. So, can we just give it up for all the guys here at Destination Church. , I am blessed enough and I am so lucky about this that I get to have my dad here serving at the church as well as my father-in-law. My father-in-law plays guitar up here every week and I get to watch him do that. And my dad who is sitting in the front today gets to serve on our welcome team and and also our crew.

And I also got the opportunity to lead my dad to Jesus which was just an amazing experience. And thanks and I would I I get to get to experience that and I when I get to Father's Day, I kind of think through all of the different Father's Days that I've gotten to have as a dad and with both of them. And I think my absolute favorite Father's Day was in 2017 because I had both I'm going to say that again.

It was in 2017 before I go any further. And I had my dad and my father-in-law in at our house for just like an outdoor barbecue. And we got them a present. My wife and I got them a picture frame that was a black and white picture inside with it was just like blobs.

Okay, that's all the picture was. And so if I've lost you, good, because they were lost, too. And I want to show you a video of them getting this picture. So check this video out. >> Why can't you hear us.

>> Because love. >> I don't know. I don't want to though. To capture like Arizona.

>> It didn't work. >> Oh my god. >> I say this Sorry, they're going to know you.

>> All right, that was Father's Day 2017. If you didn't catch the ending where we were having our first our first child together. And it was the black blobs were the ultrasound pictures.

And it was a great moment and I love watching that video. It kind of still chokes me up watching it. And kind of the backstory that I maybe even should have told before the video is that Chelsea and I were the only ones, at least in her family, who hadn't had kids yet. And we honestly were not sure that we wanted kids.

We were kind of going back and forth and I had already brought a daughter that we were caring for into our marriage and and so my in-laws were kind of bummed about this and my parents wanted a boy in our family to carry on the family name and they both got that that day. And it was so interesting how all of that kind of came together in a way where they waited while we were wrestling and God was working. And after 7 months after that video, our son Ellis was born.

Now, the crazy thing about this is something so small and so insignificant to the moment becomes this big everlasting everchanging thing. And so something as small as a picture frame with a little black dot in it became their grandson. For us, something so small as God nudging us to start a family turned into our three kids, right.

And so, , God just does things with small beginnings. And you think about even like, , the way that pregnancy kind of progresses. If you've ever seen one of those like apps when you're when you're pregnant, they compare the kid to the size of like a fruit. So, at this point, Ellis is about the size of a banana. But when they first start, okay, they're about the size of a mustard seed, >> something so small that God takes and forms into something so life-changing.

And that's what we're going to talk about today. We've been in this series called growing season and we've been looking at the parables which parable is really just this spiritual truth that's taught by a literal one. And so it's a comparison story that Jesus gives us seven of in Matthew 13. And just to recap if you've missed the last two weeks, we talked week one about the parable of the swer and how you hear and receive God's word. The second week we talked about how you clear it.

How in our lives we have some things that we are either weed or wheat where we have to clear some of the things in our lives that are pulling us away from Jesus. And today we're looking at the parable of the mustard seed and the yeast. So if you want to grab those blue Bibles next to you and pull them open to Matthew chapter 13.

It's on page 839. Which by the way, if you don't have a Bible today, happy Father's Day. That's our gift to you.

We would love to give you a Bible because we believe that these need to be opened every week. Okay, you guys. It It's okay if you can you talk back to me and stuff like that.

It's all right. So, we're going to start in verse 31. So, if you follow the little numbers down to 31, we'll hear Jesus speak two short parables. He says this.

He told them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds come and perch in its branches. He told them still another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about 60 pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.

Okay, so there's two again parables which are these spiritual realities illustrated towards a literal illustrated by a literal truth. And here's what's going on in this parable. This is the context that Jesus is trying to get to us is back then people had different expectations of who Jesus is and what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.

Let's just be honest destination. We do the same thing in our relationship with Jesus. Sometimes we have expectations of our own selves, how God is going to answer our prayers or how God is going to grow us or our kids or our friends or whatever it is. We come into some of our relationship with Jesus with some expectation.

And what Jesus is doing is he's speaking to these people's expectations because they have been waiting for hundreds, thousands of years since the Old Testament for this coming Messiah. And then they see Jesus and some people want to just kind of judge how he's doing his ministry and and they have this expectation that Jesus's ministry should have been this big thing, this big deal and and the and it was going to be this big thing that was so impressionable and so but it looked to them so small. And so Jesus takes this idea of something being small and he wants to show how this small beginning can start and and grow into what we know is Jesus's amazing ministry.

Now, the tension for us, as I kind of alluded to already, is like Jesus ministry, we have expectations. And what Jesus is showing us through these parables is that there is a clear process to his kingdom coming in our lives to how we clear our lives for Jesus to come in and start small and grow us into something. So, for us, I want you to really hear this. This is the goal of today that we need to if we don't start the process and if we don't have trust in the process we won't see the lasting impact of the process.

Okay, that's what Jesus is trying to trying to show us here. And let me show you what I mean by that. Let's start in verse 31.

In verse 31, Jesus says, "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field, though it is the smallest of seeds. " This shows us that small starts are better than not starting at all. And so, it is okay for us to start small with things in our faith and in our lives. It is okay to start small with just a little bit of Bible reading until trying to get this full understanding of the book of Leviticus. Okay, it is okay to start small.

The prophet Zachchariah in the New Living Translation says it like this as he's talking about the end and he's talking about Jesus. He says, "Do not despise these small beginnings for the Lord rejoices to see his work begin. " This is a good truth. This is good news for all of us because we live in a society that despises and questions the small beginnings. Let me give you a couple of examples.

For this church starting, okay, it was a small beginning. I want to show you how small of a beginning it started with. It started with this. The four of us saying yes to a call from God, saying yes, we were going to go and plant this church. This was a small beginning for us.

And then we by the way we said yes to this almost a well it's been a little over a year and then through the whole summer so this time last year we were sitting down and we were meeting with different families and asking them if they'd want to go and plant a brand new church in East Bethl. And we had a whole group of people eventually join us to help launch this brand new church. And let me tell you during this time there were people like these people who said yes who said yes I want to help start a brand new church.

I want to serve. I want to see this amazing life change. But then there were also people who did it.

And some of those people were very warranted and in like it just wasn't a good match. So I don't want to discredit that. But there were some people who were just like, "You know what.

You're gonna have folding chairs. Okay, my butt needs a really comfortable place to sit, so I'm not going to come. " Or, "You don't have this ministry or you don't have that ministry. " And it was really easy for somebody to find an easy out and despise the small beginnings.

But now, let me show you because of that small beginning, the next two pictures of what God has done. Look around at what God has done. Think about the 35 people who has had life change because of what God has done. >> Okay, let's let's get a little bit excited.

Look around at this room. You would not know some of these people if it wasn't for a small beginning. Okay, now this is not a pat on the back to me. This is on a pat on the back to all of us because for you just being here and being present at destination, you are part of a small beginning and the Lord rejoices to see small beginnings.

Okay, so this is good. This is good for us to have a small beginning. Let me give you another example kind of a different direction here. Little bit more of a personal one.

A long time ago, I was struggling mentally. I was having a lot of spiritual warfare. I was going through a lot of depression and anxiety and just some really dark thoughts. And I made a a promise to myself at that time cuz I had already given my life to Christ.

I'm like, I'm going to I'm going to sit down and I'm going to take a dedicated hour every single day to read my Bible and pray. And I'm just going to take that hour and I'm going to own that hour as my prayer and Bible reading time. Okay, this is very young in my face and I was working an overnight shift at the time and we got like an hour kind of where nothing was going on. And so I would do my my time in that hour and I had a coworker who would always ask me, "Oh, is this your Bible reading time.

Is this your God time. And he said, "I don't see how that's helpful. " And to him, he was looking at the surface things that I was struggling with, the depression, the anxiety, and he was seeing that the struggle was there. And he wasn't seeing what was happening underneath as I did these things consistently day or after day after day, which is what Jesus says here in verse 32. Look at verse 32.

Though it is the smallest of seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest in the garden and becomes a tree. Something that you need to know about when you grow in your relationship with Jesus is it starts as a small thing and we don't despise the small beginnings. But something so so vitally important to your faith, so important to your faith is that you know that God is doing something underneath even when you don't immediately see it or feel it. It's very important to know. Let me kind of say it like this because what happens a lot of times with us is we become impatient when we try something and then it doesn't instantly work.

>> And so we'll hear somebody at church say, "Well, you know, why don't you just pray more. Would you want to consider praying more. " You're like, "Well, I've tried that. " And it just kind of feels like I'm talking to the ceiling.

And what happens with us so often is it's like if we plant a seed in a garden and we just come out the next day and we're like, "Well, it's not sprouting up, so I might as well dig it up and move it again. " And then we come back out, "Oh, it's not sprouting up. I might as well dig it up and move it again. Is that ever going to grow.

>> No, it's not going to grow. I think about I I got the opportunity back in 2014 to go to the island of Maui. And at the island of Maui, there were these bamboo trees everywhere. They look something like this.

Beautiful trees. , and we got to learn a little bit about how the bamboo tree works and that back in , the early days of of Hawaii, early settlers would bring the seeds from the bamboo trees and they would they would plant them. And what would happen is they would plant them and nothing would happen.

And so they plant some more and nothing would happen. And then they plant some more and nothing would happen. So, they're thinking, "Okay, bamboo trees don't grow here. " What they didn't know back then that we know now is that bamboo trees have a complex root system that takes 3 to 5 years to develop. >> And you know what happens after those 3 to 5 years.

A bamboo tree can grow up to 3 feet per day. And so something is happening underneath the surface in a bamboo tree that can grow exponentially almost instantaneously. Can I say two things about this again. Okay, this is going just bringing it back to destination just for one moment. This is how church plants work.

This is how what you're sitting in today works. That for the first one to five years, we are as a church developing a root system and you are part of that root system. We're establishing the ways that we do things like finances and serving and groups and processes and we don't despise the small beginnings in that because once the roots are established then what happens. Growth exponentially. This is the same thing that's true for you parents that having kids sometimes feels like a bamboo tree.

You are scattering tons of different life lessons and values and things into your kids and you're like, "Dang, is this ever going to grow. " And you're wondering if this is going to take root in them. But then you see years down the w the road how some of those values you instilled into your kids grow into something so beautiful. And so listen dads lock in just for a second. Dads, spiritual fathers, all the guys in the room, okay.

I can't stand how every Father's Day message in lots of churches are just, you know, beat you down, do better, do all the things. I want to encourage you. And so hear this. You matter way more than you realize.

>> In your kids' lives, okay. >> And so if you're not getting the validation from your kids, if some days they don't like you, if some days it just feels like you're playing second string quarterback to your wife, like, is that funny to anyone. I thought it was funny.

When that happens, keep going. Know that your job is so important. Your influence is so important on the next generation. Your influence in kids that walk the hallway that aren't even yours. Your influence matters.

Everything that you do establishes this root system in the next generation. And that thing underneath requires faith. And so this is the big idea of those two just this idea that Jesus is giving us that growth starts small and it happens in unseen in the unseen places and that those unseen places require faith for us.

It requires faith to start small. It required faith for every athlete, for every business, for every success story to start as a small beginning. And then it required faith.

Knowing that even if something wasn't happening, that God was establishing something to happen. And then what's the result of that. Look at verse 32.

About halfway through, Jesus says, "Yet when it grows, when the seed grows, it becomes the largest of garden plants in the trees so that the birds can come and perch in its branches. " He then told them still another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed about 60 lbs of flour until it worked all through the dough.

The big idea with the ending of the mustard seed and this whole very short parable that Jesus gives us with the yeast is that small starts have big impacts with the kingdom with Jesus with the Holy Spirit by your side. The small starts have potential to be big impacting things. Now, not only do we get the example of the mustard seed in this parable, but we also get the example of yeast. Now, the way that yeast works, which by the way, I'm reading this straight off of here.

I've never baked bread, and if I do break bread, it's going to be banana bread. , so the way that yeast works, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it is a living almost active ingredient in the dough that when you mix inside of the dough, it comes from the inside out causing the dough to do what. And the same is true and the reason why Jesus uses this parable is the same is true of us. That this is how the kingdom works.

That it starts as something small but it's when it's spread all throughout our lives and it moves from the inside out it causes us to rise where heavenward right this is good news and so Jesus is giving us this idea that these small starts in faith have a lasting impact have a lasting impact I feel like you guys are not getting the awesomeness of this and has a lasting impact in your life so that means that small insignificant thing that you're doing that feels like it's no big deal is a big deal cuz God is doing something with that that is going to last into your life and that is going to grow exponentially. So let's get real about it. The reason why we stop those small beginnings, the reasons why we don't keep going and continue to dig up the seed, the reasons why we keep planting cuz we're not seeing anything growing is because in those times of waiting, it kind of stinks, right. Like if you think about almost like this is going to be a weird comparison, but just go with me here for a second. Think about the POV of a seed.

A seed gets put into the ground and gets literally buried. It sits in complete darkness. If we were a seed, we'd be like, "Oh my gosh, get me out of here. It's sitting in complete and utter darkness.

But during that time, something is happening. There is growth happening in your dark places. And so I want you to think about it like this. In high school, one of my favorite classes was video and photography. We had an amazing teacher, Aaron Kyle, I'm looking at you guys, named Mr.

That's where we all met is in that class. And it was it was an amazing class where Mr. Crawford taught us about a dark room.

Now, if you don't know what a dark room is in photography, how many people were born in the 1900s in this room. Okay, let me just explain for all the middle schoolers in here. There used to be a time where cameras weren't on your phones. You used to have to take the picture with something and then you take something out of it called film. And you'd have to bring this film to a drugstore, which was a that's a whole another thing.

, you'd have to bring the film to a drugstore and and you'd have to get it developed. And the process of developing a photo is that they would bring it into a place called a dark room. And in the dark room, they had various different chemicals and various different lights. And they had to keep the lighting low in the dark room.

And do you know why they had to keep the lighting low in the dark room. It's because the purpose of the dark room was that so light could be properly exposed to a photo. So that light could be properly exposed to a photo. In your dark seasons, God is developing you with his light.

In your dark rooms, in your dark times, God wants to take that mess and turn it into a message. He wants to take that trial and turn it into a testimony. He wants to do something in your dark spaces that develops you for what is next.

That's the whole purpose of this Romans verse that Paul gives us that God makes all things, not some things, all things work together for the good of those who love him. And so for us, we walk forward in the faith knowing that even when it doesn't feel like it, even when it feels so incredibly difficult to keep faith, even when it feels so incredibly difficult to be a parent, when it feels so incredibly difficult to keep up on on going to church, on reading the Bible, on doing these things, know that Jesus is walking with you during those times. And it isn't do better, try harder. It is I am developing you. And in that we don't lose heart because we have Jesus with us.

We don't need to lose heart. Galatians , I love this verse says it like this. Let us not become weary in doing good.

For at proper time we will reap a harvest if we what. Do not give up. >> So destination don't give up. Keep planting.

Keep starting small. When it feels like it is a dark season, God is developing something in you. God has a harvest waiting for you. A small start that you that we have to have faith in that unseen place.

And I want to end with this. I want you to remember that in Jesus's ministry, back to the whole point of this parable, everything looked small. Think about it.

Everybody was looking at him and they're like, "You only got 12 followers. What are you doing with that. They were looking at things like the cross that looked like defeat or the tomb that looked like it was final.

But God was doing so much big, so many bigger things than even they realized back then. God is doing something so incredible inside of you if you would just remember, have the small start, keep the faith, and remember that there is a big impact that God wants to work in you and through you. And what looks small to us is never small to God.

And so remember that as you continue, as you start small, as you have faith in those unseen places, that God is with you in those dark places and do not give up. >> All right. So, this is what I'm going to do.

I want to bring the worship team up. I want to invite you to just close your eyes and and bow your heads here for a second. And I just want you to reflect on one key thing this morning.

Where do you need to start. Where is your small start. Or maybe where is your faith in the unseen.

Those are the two big things. Maybe for you, your small start is just saying, I want to try a relationship with Jesus. This is where I fell in with my dark seasons.

In my times of depression and anxiety and struggle, I've found that the thing that I needed most was Jesus. And maybe that's it for you. Maybe the small start is just saying yes to Jesus. Maybe for you, the small start is just spending time with Jesus.

Maybe for you the small start is just getting some people around you that can pray with you, that can walk with you, that can encourage you in your faith. Maybe for you it's growing a faith that takes a little bit more of a route that you move past the yeah, I believe in God to I want to live for God. And so if that's you, if you are in any of those camps in this in in anything that I just said, just know that we are here as a church as a small beginning. But we want to see that growth in you. We want to see you find and follow Jesus.

And so if you need to find Jesus for the first time, we got some people at the back table that would love to pray with you. You can even go back there during this song if you want to. , but for the rest of us, take that next step. Let me pray for you.

God, we thank you so much for the small starts, for the things that require faith. And now, God, we come to you knowing that we can't do those things without you. We can't do those things on our own strength, by our own skill sets.

That you, God, make our path straight, that you have great plans for us, that you make all things work together for the good of those who love you, and what looks small to us is never small to you. And so God, we just give it all to you. Plant in us this deep, lasting, rooted faith in Jesus name. >> Would you stand and worship with us.