Jesus Walks With You

• I found out when you have a funeral for your  expectations, God replaces them with grace. When you have a funeral for your  expectations of how your kids need   to turn out, God will give you grace to  raise them and stop comparing to others.   When you have a funeral for your expectations  of where you’re supposed to be at this point   in your life, God will give you grace to accept  where you are on the way to where you’re going.
• Every 34-year-old in this room is not created   equal. Some of you will bloom late  and your branches will reach wide,   but it is having a funeral for the expectation  of when the bloom needs to occur that allows   the roots to grow down deep enough to sustain  the structure that will accommodate the fruit.
• I’m trying to say that God is not through with you  yet. God is not through pruning your branches yet,   but every pruning process in the  hands of the master gardener we   call God is designed to produce fruit  in the future that your eyes have not   seen and your ears have not heard and  it has not entered into your heart.
• “So, why would you preach about a funeral on  Thanksgiving? Why, Pastor Steven, would you preach   an Easter sermon a few weeks before Christmas?”  Because the Lord told me to. He told me that   a lot of us in this room are like these two men  in this passage, Cleopas and his buddy, who are   leaving Jerusalem after the crucifixion of Jesus  Christ, headed back home to a place called Emmaus.
• Emmaus is not a famous place. Emmaus is not  even technically known by archaeologists   today as to its exact location, but the  thing about Emmaus I do understand for   these two men is it’s the only place  they know to go. It’s home for them. They’re walking there, and they’re  talking as they walk about their deep   disappointment in what didn’t happen, their  deep disappointment in what Jesus didn’t do.
• There are a few honest people in this church  who are not so concerned with showing you their   halo that they will wave at me right now and  say, “There are some things in my life that   I am disappointed that haven’t happened  yet that were supposed to happen by now.” This is the situation in Luke 24 when, all of a  sudden, a stranger begins to walk beside them.
• You   say, “He wasn’t a stranger. He was the Savior.”  Not as far as they knew. Not as far as they   understood. You know how you think when God shows  up in a situation it’s going to be immediately   obvious that it’s him, because you already have  an idea of what he’s going to do when he shows up? “When God shows up, when God turns  this around, I am going to know it,   because I have a list of what he’s supposed  to do.