When God Says No

What do you do when whether it's a physical issue or a relational issue emotional issue, or sometimes it's just finances or a job. You pray, you pray, you pray, and God says no. How do you respond? I share that because I'm experiencing some of that right now and I've experienced quite a bit of it in the last seven years. Where God in a particular area of my life, just keeps saying no. And so I've gone to where the Apostle Paul, he prayed three times. Paul has lots of faith, so the issue isn't faith. Paul loves God. He's being used by God. He's in the center of God's will and he has some sort of physical issue. it's actually called a messenger from Satan, and he prays in faith once, twice, three times. The answer is no. But then he gets this, “And he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you. For power is perfected in weakness. Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weakness that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

And that word dwell is really interesting, in the Old Testament, that word was used for when the tabernacle would move from place to place. It would be the manifestation of God's presence. And so the Apostle Paul says, God said no to me, but what he said yes to is I will give you grace ability, endurance strength in the midst of my, no, I'm not going to change your circumstance. The answer's, no, you're not getting relief on this one, at least not right now, but my grace will give you all that you need. And then He says, the reason is because power is perfected in weakness. It's in these times that we are drawn so close because we hurt and we're frustrated and at times we're angry and we've asked God and we're seeking him and we're not getting delivered out of them.

God is going to deliver us through them. And then he goes on in the next verse with the therefore, Paul realizes, okay, this is the game plan, not what I would choose, not that I would really want, but if the game plan is when you say no, and I'm going through difficult, challenging times and I'm weak, that's when God's power manifests itself through my weakness.

Therefore, he says, I'm well content. With notice weaknesses, plural with insults, plural with distress, with persecutions, plural with difficulties, notice why for Christ's sake. “For when I'm weak, then I am strong.” And I want you or maybe there's someone you love that's going through something like this and your application from today's broadcast is you're gonna send them this and say, you've got to listen to this because this is where you are.

Because I can tell you that you can get frustrated and angry and disillusioned. And, and what I know is God made us to want to know and experience love and joy, and peace and hope in the midst of the most difficult challenges. And spoiler alert, what the Apostle Paul is going to tell us is in the midst of this, we're not victims. God is not mad at us. It's not that we don't have enough faith. He's going to show us that we have every spiritual blessing currently in the Heavenly realm and that we must learn to choose to actually take hold of what he's already given us, in the midst of it.

He's gonna teach us that we can choose joy in negative circumstances. We can choose love in the midst of being rejected and hurt. We can choose hope when we don't see anything on the other side of that, dark tunnel. We can choose peace in the midst of anxiety and mental health issues.

I've met with so many people, traveled so much lately and and the uncertainty and the issues in people's lives are at an all-time high. In my own personal life I've had about seven years of just incredible pain. Everything you could do for your back. I mean ice packs, every procedure, epidurals, anything you could do with any kind of medication, I tried. And finally I had a fusion in my back. And I mean that helped about 60%, but still ongoing pain all the time.

And then fast forward a couple years, in the middle of COVID it tears above and below where they fuse my back at L three and L four. So I have another major surgery, and since that time I've had little windows of relief where the pain's only like a three or four and times of 7, 8, 9. And, uh, I'll be honest with you, Lord, What's the deal? And at the same time, I've watched God explode and expand, the ministry of Living on the Edge in ways that are beyond anything I could have dreamed.

I'm finally realizing there may be a correlation here, Chip, my strength. My power, is manifested in your weakness. And I would like to tell you that I have learned to be well content. I am learning, I'm making progress. And one of the things that helped me the most has been the teaching of God's Word in the midst of that.

Well, today, I wanna just pause I got a cup of coffee in front of me and I'm in the studio, and rather than a formal teaching would you gimme just a chance maybe to share my heart about although I wouldn't want them to happen to me, how God, in the midst of our difficult, challenging times when all we can on the outside feel is we're getting a no. He's saying yes, where his power shows up.

And so I'd just like to share a little bit of my experience about how I'm learning to choose. And some of the impact of why we're going to talk about, in the weeks to come, about choosing joy, about choosing love, about choosing hope, about choosing peace. At the end of the day, I love to teach God's Word, but teaching God's Word is a step. It's a step in the disciple making process. And our dream, is that Christians would live like Christians to the glory of God and for the good of all. That's the heartbeat of Living on the Edge. That's our vision. And we do that in a number of different ways. And one of the most important ways is gonna be what I'm going to be teaching.

And so let me take a minute and share. This is what I'm gonna teach in the next month, month and a half. And this is why, and this is how together, we're longing to see in the midst of this very turbulent time in world history, we can help Christians live like Christians and make a real difference.

You're gonna hear the next series, beginning tomorrow called I Choose Joy, and it grew out of a very dark and painful time in my life. This was probably a couple years ago, my wife privately said, Chip, do you realize how negative you've become? And I, I bristled a little, and yet I knew she was really right. And boy, I knew my thinking was negative.

And she goes, you know, I understand you've been through a lot, but you were one of the most joyful, upbeat persons I've ever known. And just little by little, by little by little, you just kind of have a negative view of things. I had to admit I'd lost my joy. I mean, I was choosing to do the right thing and, it wasn't like I was being a terrible person, but what I realized, I wasn't rejoicing. I wasn't, having a sense of that vitality and joy and walking with God. And you know, I'm still praying, I'm still reading my Bible, but an awful lot of it was a, this really is hard and God, I don't know why you haven't done this yet, and you nevertheless, I'm gonna do what's right. And she really challenged me.

And first of all, when things aren't right, you just have to own what's really true. And that was painful, but, little did she know the negative thoughts and struggles inside my mind that never even came out my mouth. And I'm like the rest of you, you're most honest with the people that love and accept you the most. So I'm sure my wife got more of my negativity than anyone else. And about that time I was supposed to teach at the Billy Graham Center a few months later. And, of all things I was scheduled to teach on Philippians chapter one.

And as I was framing that and, studying Paul's life, I realized. Oh my, this is how you choose joy. The Apostle Paul in the midst of prison and possible looming death. His focus is on you, and he evaluates his circumstances based on your purposes, and he, he has this hope and expectation of the reality of Heaven. So whatever happens in this temporal life, he can say, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” And his expectations weren't that it would be rosy, but not only would he have great grace for joy and salvation, but also part of the game plan is to suffer. And so I taught that and it became, I Choose Joy, a series. And, it had a profound impact on tens of thousands of people.

And in fact, I did three overseas trips already, this year. One in the Philippines, then in Egypt and then later in Dubai. Each one of those I talked about how we can choose joy, and I saw how it's just not here in America, but around the world. And because it had such an impact, we have a book coming out, I hope you'll get it and I hope you'll share it. I see so many people with mental health issues and like me, what happened was little by little by little, I hate to admit this, I saw myself as a victim. You know, God isn't coming through and, I'll still obey. I'll still do what's right.

I wasn't someone who was living above their circumstances, I was living under them and it had a debilitating effect on me. We'll learn from the Apostle Paul even in his weakness, in his struggle, and even looming death when he has that kind of attitude, supernaturally given by God because God's grace is sufficient for him, God's power shows up that's what I got to experience and that's what I want people to experience. And so that's the next series coming up.

And then right after that we'll talk about, I Choose Love and I meet so many people that are waiting for the right person or wanting a relationship to change and waiting for something to happen out there somewhere somehow. And we're gonna learn that you can actually choose to love. And we'll talk about the four characteristics of when you and I choose to live in this certain way as modeled by Jesus and taught by the Apostle Paul, we can experience supernatural acceptance and love and connection with people.

And so after that, then we're gonna talk about, I Choose Hope, and after that we're gonna talk about, I Choose Peace, and here's what I want you to get: I declare that circumstances and external things and things I can't control whether it's the economy over here, or politics over here, or a family situation or a job situation, in the month of June and early July, I'm gonna learn how to choose joy and love and hope and peace.

And I wanna be a Christian who lives like a Christian by the grace of God, regardless of my circumstances. And as you do that, and I do that, not only will we experience the benefit, but all the people around us will experience that as well. And so I just wanna encourage you, would you lock on with me, when we choose to do what God wants us to do, I think you'll experience what I've been experiencing the last few years. In the midst of when I was weak and struggling and praying and dependent, God was expanding and exploding the impact of Living on the Edge beyond anything I ever, ever dreamed. It started shortly after COVID and we started doing Daily Discipleships, and then countries would open up and we help with pastors.

And all I can tell you is that our vision and our mission is to see a movement of Christians living like Christians for the glory of God and the good of all, literally the good of all mankind. And as we have done that at Living on the Edge, we developed three specific pillars, if you will. We have a strategy to help Christians live like Christians, not only here in the United States, but all around the world. So our pillar one is discipling God's people. We prayed and God showed us just do what Jesus did. He taught the multitudes. He got the disciples in a small group, and he gave them tools so they could share with others what He taught them. That's what discipleship is, it's walking with Jesus, following Him and doing what He did.

So we do teaching and we provide training and we provide tools. We're on 1,192 radio stations Monday through Friday. Living on the Edge is also on 12 streaming platforms, you may listen on Pray.com or OnePlace.com or 10 other different ones where just the Word of God is going out through Living on the Edge to millions and millions of people. We have over 1 million Living on the Edge reading plan subscribers on YouVersion. In recent months, we taught a brand new series where we day by day went through the entire Gospel of Mark.

We partnered with Jennie Allen to promote, Gather, 25, the Global Prayer Initiative. We don't think we're something special we think we need to partner with, churches and organizations that are making a difference. And what a joy it was if you got to be involved in that to see people praying all across the globe. As I said before, this new book, I Choose Joy comes out June 3rd, I just finished writing and turned in I Choose Love that will come out next January.

And then we have a small group coming out on, I Choose Joy in the fall. And of course, many of you are connecting through the Daily Discipleship. We wanna help ordinary, regular people learn to open the Bible, study it for themselves, learn how to hear God's voice, maybe even journal a little bit, pray very specific prayers, and learn to hear God speak to them and then through them.

But if you really want to disciple God's people, you have to realize God has a plan and his plan is the church. And the key to every church is the pastors and the pastoral staff and the leadership of the church. When you have healthy pastors and healthy pastoral staffs and healthy elders and deacons, I will tell you, you have healthy churches. The bad news is 85% of the churches in the United States are in decline. And that's a sad, sad thing. 40% of pastors, when we came through COVID said I would do anything else but I don't have another job. It was in that time that we stepped in to say, we're gonna help a pastor's heart.

We trained 236,238 pastors in 2024, and that's double the impact from 2023. To date, we have - Are you ready for this? - had over a million visitors to The Real God Arabic site. Did you realize that Muslims are coming to Christ through Living on the Edge? We've had 479 Muslim background believers come to know Jesus. This isn't that they clicked on a website. Over a million have come already and they're asking questions. And that started on a conversation. That conversation led to individual counseling with those people, often done in a very clandestine manner.

We're currently in 22 countries. Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and beyond. In January, I had a chance to partner with the, Intentional Discipleship Conference in Manila, training 14,000 pastors. About not just teaching God's Word, we're helping pastors learn to become disciple-making pastors how to measure the church differently. Not in how many people show up on a weekend, but how do you grow a church where leaders are becoming Christ-like and they have a responsibility and are given tools to help others become Christ-like. And so we have a very clear simple replicable plan that God is using called Growing a High Impact church.

In February, our team went to Africa and we have a huge imprint there and a number of countries. It's growing like crazy and we invited 34 organizations, from 23 different countries, those leaders represent 800,000 churches in Africa. And, uh, of those leaders who we shared, this is what we do, this is how we do it, we gave them a taste. We hoped 50% would say, I'd like to investigate it. Maybe 25% would say, ‘Hey, we're ready to partner.’ That was not our experience. 100% of those 34 organizations said, we got people coming to church, but we're not making disciples. Will you help us?

About two weeks later, I went to Egypt where we trained 609 pastors, wrapping up a two year journey with them, and the head of all the Protestant churches had lunch with him afterwards and he gave us the green light for another two years. to literally go to the next level to train the trainers inside of all the Protestant churches in all of Egypt. Now, that may not sound like a big deal, but listen carefully: half of the entire population of the Middle East lives in Egypt. It is so strategic. This is such an open door, and it's so amazing what God is doing.

Later in the month of March of this year, I was in Dubai. We had 35 leaders from the Gulf States. We also brought in our staff members and trainers from Nepal and India. And then I had the privilege of speaking at Movement Day to a thousand leaders, pastors and marketplace leaders from 40 countries. The same message, the same message, the same message. We can make a difference. We have to get back to the basics. We have to help regular people be Christians who live like Christians, to become disciples, to follow Jesus, to get into His Word, to pray, to prioritize their lives, to say no to the world, to say yes to the Lord. That's the message of Jesus.

And so I just wanna tell you that we are having an impact in churches here and all around the world because when churches are healthy and pastors are healthy, churches begin to have impact. Impact in their community, impact in their neighborhoods, impact in the marketplace, impact in whole cities and eventually whole nations. And we're seeing God do that. Our first pillar is, disciple God's people. Our second is to equip and train pastors and leaders. And our third pillar is one that's near and dear to all of our heart it's reaching the next generation. And many of you'll remember this time last year, we came out with a book called, Not Beyond Reach.

It was our partnership with the Steiger Ministry and Aaron Pierce and, some training with them the year earlier in Germany, and their staff came from around the world. They're reaching the young people that are farthest from Christ in a hundred major cities. And as I spent time with them, I saw they have such a biblical approach, but it's one that we've missed. And I said, Aaron, we need to codify this in a book and get into the hands of people. And so we did, and it has had a huge impact.

And then the next step was how could we get it from a book that people could read to a small group video resource that could go to churches all across America and all around the world, helping pastors and parents and grandparents and regular people reach to the next generation in their community? And so that's finished and a little bit later I'm gonna have Aaron come and give us a report on how that's going and what's the impact that we've made together. Uh, we did a series, dealing with doubts and, we really focused on that whole reconstruction that's happening with young people and really sought to answer their questions from where they're coming from. And brought some expert voices to help you and me connect with and understand what's happening in our culture people like Sean McDowell.

And finally we did a three day offsite to say, what is our plan to reach the next generation? What's the technology? What's the focus? What's the target audience? Where are we gonna go? How are we gonna do it? It means that we need to go where young adults get their information. It means we need to break up the teaching in, shorter snippets, it means we need to have new and younger communicators that can connect with them in ways that I can't. We're asking God for a movement of Christians who live like Christians for the glory of God and for the good of all. We've watched this happen. We've seen God explode, and here's what I would remind you. All this has happened while my own personal life and I'm not unique, many of the leaders on our team have experienced things very similar and some even more challenging than me.

God wants you to know his grace is sufficient for you, power is perfected in weakness. I'm on the journey and I invite you to go on the journey with me to be able to say, I'm well content. It doesn't mean I like it, but I'm well content. I'm well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distress, with persecutions, and difficulties for Christ's sake. For when we are weak, we really are strong.

And so as we start this month of June, there's never been a better time to say, I'm gonna choose Joy and choose love, and choose Hope. And what's great is we're just entering our midyear match, so every dollar that you give, thanks to a very generous small group of people that have created this match, every dollar you give will be matched dollar for dollar. To make a double impact.

I wish, in many ways I could say I never have a bad day, and I'm just knocking it out of the park. But what I would say more is that I'm on the journey. I'm doing way better than I did a few years ago. It's still a battle. I sure wish God would heal my back and take away some of the pain I have, but if that's the small price to pay for seeing not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, millions and millions of people's lives, many of them transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, and having new life now and new life forever and ever and ever with Jesus, it's worth it. Let's choose to make an impact and let's choose to do it together.