Something to Believe In

Come to the point of our service where we just like to take a few moments and just pray. You know, we recognize that, you know, in and of ourselves, we could probably accomplish some really cool stuff for the Lord. We could do some meaningful ministry and leave some sort of impact on this world, but it’s only by God’s power, it’s only by God’s wisdom that we can actually accomplish what God wants us to do.

So we take a few moments every Sunday where we just pray and we ask for God’s power and God’s wisdom to get all up in the plans and the ideas and the desires that we have. And we’ve already seen God bless that time and time again as we’ve been doing this every Sunday morning.

So we’re just going to take a few moments for those of us who call Sauldam home and our regular worshipers here week after week, you know, this is pretty normal for you at this point. We’re just going to take a few moments. We’re just going to pray out loud. If praying out loud is not your thing, if this is really uncomfortable, that’s okay. In a second, you just put your head down like this and everybody around you is going to think you’re really spiritual. They’re not going to interrupt you, okay? So don’t worry about that.

We’ve been praying all month for our Sauldam Kids Ministry, just begging God to bless this ministry. As He continues to give us more kids, we recognize now we need Him to continue to give us more volunteers. And I’m super happy to say that in the month that we’ve been praying for the kids ministry, God has been faithful to lay it on the hearts of a couple of our members to start serving in the kids ministry, which I’m super excited about.

I met one of our newest kids ministry volunteers this morning during the prayer time. I won’t out him, but man, he always wears suspenders, looks super sharp on Sunday morning. So I asked Rob, I said, “Hey man, so like what led you to want to help serve in our kids ministry?” And he said, “I can. I don’t know everything I need to know, but I could show up and I can do it.” So man, he stepped up and this morning he served in the kids ministry for the first time. So man, thank you. It’s a heavy hitter, man. I knew you’re going to launch Celebrate Recovery. I didn’t know you’re going to serve in the kids ministry. So thank you for that. Why not? Man, well said. Why not?

So let’s take a moment. Let’s just keep praying, thanking God for the blessing of all the children that He is giving our church and continue to ask for Him to provide more leaders to serve in that ministry, but also for God to keep using that ministry. Y’all take it away. I’ll put a bow on it here in a second. Thank you.

Holy Spirit, thank you so much for today. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity that we have to gather as a church family, to be here, to worship You through singing, to worship You through prayer, to worship You through meeting and greeting, to worship You through even giving announcements. Lord, let everything we do be done for You. Let it all be done in a spirit of worship, please. God, even in how I deliver this message, let this be an offering of worship to You and how the congregation receives it. Let that be an offering of worship.

Lord, in a world where You are the King and You own everything, which means we don’t actually have anything to be able to give You. God, let us worship You. Let us treat everything with spiritual intentionality, this whole life devotion to You, please. God, it may not be that every Sunday morning, all of our kids volunteers feel like they are worshiping You through teaching lessons, through rocking babies, through handling drop-off and pick-up, but let them know that what they are doing matters. It is worship.

Father, I want to thank You for the kids that You continue to provide this church family. Lord, thank You that we have had the opportunity, Lord, to come alongside dozens of families, Lord, as we help those parents make disciples of their little ones. Lord, I pray for those kids. I’m begging God as they are released to their own mission fields every week, Father, of classrooms and ball fields, all the little places that these kids go, I pray that they would know that there’s a God that has sent them to those places to be missionaries now. Lord, I pray that You would raise up more volunteers for our kids’ ministry so that we can continue to adequately respond to what You are providing us. And help us, Father, as we do that, to do it with the spirit of worship. Holy Spirit, I’m begging that You would get a hold of me right now. You and I have worked together this week to prepare this message. Help me to deliver it in a way that is in some way worthy of You. Let this be worship. Let me not do this in a way to draw attention to myself, but in a way, like Clyde said, to give this to Jesus. I don’t have anything. I’m not worth anything. But Jesus, You are worth everything. Help me to preach in a way that shows that. I’d ask Your great name that we pray. Amen.

Well, if you do not know, today is Homecoming Sunday. I like to think about Homecoming in two ways. One, it’s kind of like our church’s birthday party. Every year we celebrate another year of God keeping and holding Sauldam Baptist Church. It’s also like a family reunion where we get to welcome folks that we haven’t seen in some time. Some of y’all who have called Sauldam home since Homecoming last year will get to share some table time in a few moments with people who at some point knew Sauldam as their church home. And it’s kind of like that.

When I think about Homecoming, I think about God beginning this church 185 years ago. Wow, indeed. That’s astounding. 185 years ago, 185 years ago, there’s this group of believers that gathered together and they believed not only is Jesus Christ Lord and Master of all things, not only is He the resurrection and the life, but also that He would hold them and keep them and that this community deserves a fellowship of faith where He is King and He is primary. 185 years ago, this group of believers first gathered and established a covenant of committing to one another and said, “We are here because God deserves it. And the souls of men and women and children around here demand this, that there would be a group of people who would hold fast to the Word of God, who would lift up God and who would carry God’s message and the truth of His personhood and His mission into this world.” 185 years ago, this group of believers gathered together and started worshiping Him in a formal way.

As we stand here 185 years later, I look and I see Sauldam in some way making a full circle. Those that go through Discovery learn that in the first 24 years of our church’s existence, God used Sauldam Baptist Church to establish four other churches in our community. It’s incredible. In a matter of 24 years, God had multiplied what He started up in the Beach Hill community, which moved here to this plot of land. He started four other churches.

Today, October 18th, 2026, at six o’clock tonight up in Greenville, another new church is going to start having their first gatherings. And we get to take part in that. Isn’t that incredible, Clyde? We’ve been talking about Storyline Church way back some about March time, February, March. Storyline Church is a new Southern Baptist church being begun, being started on the east side of Greenville, South Carolina, and Sauldam, we get to be the official sending church for Storyline, which means that whenever they have success, we get to claim that success and say, “Man, we get a share in that.” And whenever they go through hard times, we get to mourn with those who mourn, come alongside them. And I’m super grateful tonight they have their first gathering of prospective members. They’re going to worship, they’re going to eat together, they’re going to talk about what the Lord might be doing amongst them. That’s incredible. Who knows 15 years from now when Sauldam turns 200 what God might still be doing in and through Sauldam Baptist Church? 185 years ago, a group of believers gathered together believing in Jesus’s message and power, and their belief is still echoing blessing up until today.

If you will go ahead and turn to John chapter 4, John chapter 4, verses 43 through 54, we’re going to read another passage, or we’re going to read a passage about another man who also believes in the message and the power of Jesus Christ, and through his belief others will be blessed as well. You know, the Bible in many ways is autobiographical. It is our story, it’s our history, it’s how we ought to live and it tells our our ways. Pray that we continue to live into it. John chapter 4, verses 43 through 54. I give you a road map for this morning. If you got the sermon insert guide, you’ll see this. First off, we’re going to look at a couple different examples of belief found in this passage, and then I’m going to share a couple enemies of belief that will kill your faith and your belief, and finally offer to you a few exercises to build your belief. I figured on homecoming I got to alliterate something, so there you go: examples of belief, enemies of belief, and then finally exercises to build belief.

I want to set a little bit more of the context though of the passage we’re going to look at. If so, John chapter 4, still relatively early in Jesus’s ministry. What we’ve seen happen so far is Jesus—he’s in Jerusalem in John chapter 2. Remember, He is there for Passover. He sees all the tables filled with all the money changers in the temple. He hears all the cows and all the goats and all the doves and all the commotion. He starts flipping tables, driving all the animals and the money changers out, right? And He says, “Stop making My Father’s house a house of commerce.” And then after that moment, He has this private meeting with Nicodemus. Nicodemus, Nicodemus is one of the spiritual leaders. He’s one of the big dudes in Judaism, and ultimately it feels like Nicodemus doesn’t really believe the gospel message, or at least he’s really struggling with it. And then in John chapter 4, Jesus has left Jerusalem. He’s gone to the wrong side of town whenever He goes to Samaria, and He has this conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, and she ends up believing that Jesus is the Messiah. It’s the first time in the gospel Jesus reveals Himself as the Messiah. She believes in Him as the Savior and the Lord of the whole world, and she goes back telling her story and sharing this message with people, and her whole town—or at least many people in her town—come to believe in Jesus Christ as well. So you have this this weird moment where Jesus is confronting the religious leadership in Jerusalem, and then He gets out of Jerusalem and He finds faith in Samaria, and then later in John chapter 5, Jesus is going to confront disbelief again in Jerusalem. So we’re in this weird sandwich spot between two pockets of disbelief where Jesus keeps finding faith.

We’re going to read this morning this next example of belief or faith. John chapter 4, verses 43 through 45. “After two days”—that’s that is two days in Sychar, the city in Samaria where He’s been explaining who He is—“after two days He left there for Galilee. Jesus Himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in His own country. When they entered Galilee, the Galileans welcomed Him because they had seen everything He did in Jerusalem during the festival, for they also had gone to the festival.”

I’ll stop there for a moment. So Jesus finds this first, I think, example of faith. He finds this region, the Galileans, and the Galileans have heard—they saw what Jesus did way back in Jerusalem, way back in chapter 2. They saw Jesus flip over all the money tables. They saw Him drive all the people out. They saw Him trying to return the temple to its original purpose: “Hey, let’s make this a place of worship. Let’s make this a place of prayer, a place of honoring Jesus, not honoring ourselves.” They received that. They’re they’re excited about that in some capacity, and they start welcoming Him. This is this region of people that seem to be welcoming Jesus. They seem to be believing in Him, but out of that region, the story focuses on a single man.

Pick me up back in verse 46. “He”—Jesus—“went again to Cana of Galilee. Remember that’s where He turned the water into wine. There’s a certain royal official whose son was ill at Capernaum, about a 20, 25 mile walk from Cana. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea into Galilee, he went to Him, pleaded with Him to come down and heal his son, since he was about to die. And Jesus told him, ‘Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ ‘Sir,’ the official said to Him, ‘come down before my boy dies.’ ‘Go,’ Jesus told him, ‘your son will live.’ The man believed what Jesus said to him and departed.”

So the first real obvious objective example of belief.

In this passage is the dad. Put yourself in the dad’s sandals. You are a royal official, your son is dying, and you’ve heard about this itinerant rabbi teacher who flipped some tables in Jerusalem and turned a bunch of water into wine at Cana, and you recognize that man is your son’s last hope. So you make the 20, 25-mile walk through the foothills, the foothills, the foothills of Israel just to try to figure out, just to try to find this man, and you want Him to do for you what only He can do: heal your boy.

This man, this dad, clearly had enough belief in Jesus to move him to action. The son’s sickness reduced this dad into a desperate beggar. He’s a royal official after all. Imagine that you are part of the king’s entourage, you work in his court, you have access to some of the highest privileges and powers in all of your kingdom, and yet you find yourself on your knees in front of Jesus Christ asking Him to heal your son. You see, the dad believes that Jesus and Jesus alone could solve his greatest problem, and the dad’s belief led to the son’s healing.

“Go,” Jesus tells him, “your son will live.” Pretty short conversation, if you ask me. Imagine that. Imagine, imagine walking days to try to find Jesus, and you, you get to Him, and you’re begging Him: “Jesus, Jesus, please come heal my son. Please come home with me. We, we, we have to go now. Things are desperate. He’s been getting sicker and sicker. None of the doctors can do anything. I keep throwing money at the problem; it won’t go away. None of the other priests can do anything. I’ve been praying like crazy; nothing is happening for me. Jesus, please, please come and heal my son.” And what does Jesus say? “Your son will live.”

As a dad, I’m supposed to just get up like, “Thank you, that’s all I needed, man.” Can I get a guarantee of some sort? Can I, can I get some sort of promise? Get a note, perhaps? “Go, your son will live.” The man—what’s it say? What, what does the man do? Believed. Believed. It’s just, it’s just another way of saying faith. So it’s the same Greek word in the Bible. If you have faith, you show that through belief. Whatever you believe in, that’s what your faith is in. Same thing. The man had faith, as simple as it was, as infantile as it was, the man had faith.

Verse 51: while he was still going down, his servants met him, saying that his boy was alive. The dad asked them, “Hey, what time did my son get better? When did it all turn?” “Yesterday at one in the afternoon, the fever left him,” they answered. The father realized that was the very hour at which Jesus told him, “Your son will live.” Amen, Valerie.

So the father himself believed, now get this, along with his whole household. This was the second sign Jesus performed after He came from Judea into Galilee. So you see this region welcoming Jesus. Now, whether they welcomed Him because they wanted to see Him flip some more tables or they welcomed Him because they recognized that He was the Messiah, the sent one, the Savior of the Lord, we don’t know. But they welcome Him, and it zooms into the single dad having belief and faith in Him, and that dad’s belief and faith becomes a whole household’s belief and faith.

Do you see what’s happening here? What starts small, what starts as a single seed of belief and faith, bears fruit for an entire home. If you’re gonna write something down this morning, if you’re gonna try to take a nugget away from this, man, if you need something to talk about while you’re having lunch over there in a few minutes, you just write this down: belief multiplies. That is God’s intent for your belief in Him. God’s intent for your faith in Jesus Christ is for that faith, for that belief to multiply. Man, this is the pattern of the Bible. Individuals come to faith in Jesus, and that leads to families or groups or at least more individuals coming to faith in Jesus. That is God’s desire for you, that your belief in Jesus would multiply into the lives of others.

That word “household” in verse 53 is interesting. We think of household as in our nuclear family. If we are privileged to have a spouse and maybe even a couple kids, that’s my household. In the Greek world, though, in the Jewish world, household is totally different. It means your network, The people that you associate with regularly. So it’s not just the fact that I’m married and have four kids. My household, if I’m living there, it’s not just six people. It would also be my parents. It’d be my wife’s parents. It’d be my friends’ kids. It’d be my friends. It’d be the merchants that I regularly talk with, the people that I buy stuff from regularly. It’d even be people that work for me. That would be my household. Think less about a nuclear family living in their own tight little thing. Think more about a community farm that’s operated by a whole group of people. That’s a household.

So when it says that the man’s household came to faith in Jesus, He’s not just talking about what Jesus did to his wife and his couple kids. Man, he’s talking with dozens of people who were all believing in Jesus with him. His faith is not just adding two or three more people to the kingdom. It is multiplying into dozens more people. Man, I’m curious. Has this happened for your household? Has your faith in Jesus changed the spiritual trajectory, not just perhaps of a spouse if you’re married, a child if God’s giving you kids? Man, has your faith in Jesus changed your coworkers? Has your faith in Jesus made it to your cousins? Has your faith in Jesus made it to the cashier at Publix you see every Tuesday? Has your faith in Jesus changed your employees? Or is your faith in Jesus just something you kind of stick in your church jacket? You tuck it right here, real safe, real nice. You hold it with you whenever you come to 5945 County Line Road on Sundays at 11 a.m. But then whenever you leave, it stays there.

I’m convinced 185 years ago when Sauldam Baptist Church first gathered, it was populated by a group of people who understood that their faith in Jesus is supposed to change the lives of people around them. Where would we be if they believed that faith in Jesus was meant to be private and never public? Now, your faith in Christ, it’s personal. You must have a personal belief in Jesus Christ. You must personally believe that God sent Jesus to pay for your sin and to redeem you from the darkness that you have cast into this world. You must personally agree to this. You must personally grab this in your soul. You must personally rely on this. But that personal belief is never meant to be private, something you toss in the closet whenever you get home. It’s meant to be public, something that’s on display for all to see, something that’s supposed to impact the lives of other people.

Has your faith changed anybody else? Man, do people know where you are right now? Like, do they know that you’re here worshiping Jesus Christ in a church service? Probably the best way to let them know that you did is you talk with them about Jesus whenever you see them next time. You don’t just post about it on Facebook. I don’t think that really counts, to be honest. I think what counts is picking up the phone or it means, man, having that awkward conversation. And man, I share stories all the time about my conversations with other dudes in the sauna at YMCA. Guess what, guys? Yeah, you said they’re not in a rush? Is that what you said? They’re not gonna run away. You’d be surprised how fast they get out sometimes. It’s still hard for me. It’s still awkward for me. It still goes against the grain of what I want to be doing. Like, when I get to the sauna, I still have to take my little earbuds out and choose to have a conversation with somebody. I’ve just chosen to embrace that awkwardness. Because if I don’t choose to embrace the awkwardness, I’m choosing to embrace something else, that I am content with them not being in God’s family.

This man, this father, comes to Jesus Christ, looks to Jesus to do what only Jesus can do, has this incredible experience of Jesus’ power and His love. I mean, Jesus doesn’t even go to the boy and He can heal the boy from 20 miles away just by speaking the word. That’s incredible. The father could have kept this to himself. We get the sense he did it. So why do some people’s faith never change others? What keeps you from sharing your faith? Let me put it that way. I want to give you a couple enemies of faith, enemies of belief. The first one is just fear, outright fear. You see the circumstances of life and you surrender to fear instead of embracing faith in God or exercising that faith. Man, fear will kill your faith. Fear of a medical situation, fear of a financial situation, fear of relational repercussions. Man, fear will tell us that something is bigger and stronger than God. Whether it’s somebody else’s disapproval or your diagnosis, something is bigger than God and you choose to surrender to that instead, it has killed your faith.

Another enemy of faith, honestly, is self-confidence. You are the hero of your own story. So why believe in Jesus as your hero? Man, why believe in Jesus as your hero when you have all of your good works that make you look so good? Why believe that Jesus is your hero when you have all that money that can give you everything you need? Why believe that Jesus is your hero when you have all that power and influence to wield in this world? Why believe that Jesus is your hero when your family is what you live for?

Man, another enemy of your belief, honestly, is lesser loves. What I mean by that is anything you love as much as or more than God. You see, God is never supposed to be tied with anything in your life. If God is tied with anything, if it’s God and God, He is not number one. And what God commands in the Bible is for us to love Him number one. Man, sometimes we love our families as much as we love God. We bow down to them. Sometimes we love our accomplishments as much as we love God. So we work like crazy or we try to succeed on the ball field. Man, sometimes our jobs, we love as much as God. So we give them our first and our best. Sometimes our treasures and our toys, we love them as much as God. So we never sacrifice anything.

Man, it would have been so easy for the dad in this story to fall to those enemies, whether it be fear over his son’s sickness, confidence in his privileges of being a royal official, or loving his own dignity too much to run through the streets and simply plead with Jesus. Yet the dad chose to exercise his faith in Jesus, albeit without really knowing a whole lot about the guy. Instead of falling to an enemy of faith, he exercised his faith.

So how can you conquer an enemy of your faith? I want to give you a couple exercises for your faith as well. Man, the first one is this, to observe God’s world. Observe God’s world. Man, sometimes when I feel so scared of my circumstances, I just need to go outside or I need to drive to the beach and just look. I just need to look at things that are bigger than me. I need to go to the backyard and look at those oak trees that have been in that yard for decades and nothing’s bringing those things down. Sometimes I just need to go and, sometimes, like I literally, like I will Google picture of mountain. I need to see something big and strong and hardy and recognize that this is a beautiful, big world. And there is one who has sculpted those mountains. There is one who has knit my children in their mother’s womb. There is one who paints the sunset every night. There is one who filled up the oceans without exhausting His reserves. And His name is Jesus Christ.

Man, are our problems really bigger than the God that can make mountains, Randy? Are our problems overwhelming to the God who commands all things and upholds all things by the word of His power? No. Nothing is too big for God. Sometimes I just need to observe God’s world because it helps me see how big our God is.

Other times I just need to remember God’s works. That’s the next exercise. Remember God’s works. Man, sometimes I get all caught up in my feelings, Miss Mary Lou, and I get so discouraged about something. And I heard this from another pastor. He said, for however old you are, make a list of all the things you’re grateful for in your life. So if you’ve turned 39 a couple times, you make a couple 39 lists. And for our 10-year-olds in the room, our other 33-year-olds, our octogenarians in the room, you write down one, two, three, four, five, for every year you’ve been alive. And you just make a list of all the things you’re grateful for that God’s done in your life or provided for you. Man, it could be as small and insignificant as Chick-fil-A, which it is for me. It could be as big as a promotion. It certainly should have salvation. Man, it could be that time that God totally came through on that financial need or healed you of that sickness. Man, whatever it takes for you to remember the things that God has done in your life and watch how when you remember what God’s done in your past, how that will give you faith to go through whatever God’s got for you in the future. Man, just watch how that works. God is incredible that way.

But finally, the best way to exercise, the best exercise to build your faith is to cherish God’s word. John’s gospel, he tells us in chapter one and chapter 20, he wrote these things so that we would believe. And not just believe that there is a God, not just believe that this God likes us, but we would believe that the God of the universe has come and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ so that Jesus would totally satisfy all the requirements of the law that you and me, we can’t fulfill, that Jesus would die on the cross satisfying God’s punishment for our sin that we deserve. And after dying on the cross, Jesus rose from the dead so that we could be made right with God forever. John wrote his gospel so that we would believe these things and through our belief, we would have eternal life and never perish.

Man, cherish God’s word. Read this word. Man, this is living and active, Lauren. This contains the power of God unto salvation for anybody who would believe. Man, this is what shapes our hearts so that we would live in this world the way God wants us to live. Man, if you are feeling weak in your faith this week, how about you turn off the news? How about you put down the cell phone and you just take this and you just start reading this and let God’s word get inside of you and accomplish something in you that you know the news channel isn’t accomplishing, that you know social media is not doing for you and watch what God does in your life.

There’s this study done a couple years ago called The Power of Four. I love this so much, Beth. As a pastor, I am paid to tell you to read this thing, okay? Part of my job security is bound up in you actually reading this. But as a follower of Christ, man, I saw this study called The Power of Four and I’m starting to wrap up here. Over 100,000 Bible readers were tracked for years. Starting, or some of them were as young as eight years old, others were as old as 80. And the whole thing was, how many times a week do you need to read the Bible for it to actually change you? And what they found was, when you read the Bible once, twice, or three times a week, there’s really no change, Becky. It’s basically the same amount of habitual sin. It’s the same amount of darkness. It’s the same amount of frustration. It’s also the same lack of evangelism. It’s the same lack of tithing. There’s no change.

If your only time getting in the Word is right now, every week, if this is the only time you get into the Bible, I don’t think it’s gonna bear much fruit in your life, if I’m being honest. However, if you are getting into the Bible four times a week on a consistent basis, that’s when the magic starts happening. Man, that’s when the sexual deviancy goes down. That’s when the problems with substances and addictions goes down. That’s when sharing your faith goes up. That’s when walking by faith goes up. It’s that fourth time. It’s like God knew that we need the majority of the days of our week to be spent in His Word in some capacity. God wrote this into the fabric of the universe. Man, if you wanna build your faith, read the Bible. It’s as simple as that. And watch as you read the Bible, as you exercise your faith, as you grow your faith, how it’ll multiply into the lives of other people.

So I just wanna close with this. If you just bow your head with me, close your eyes. I wanna invite you to do the ultimate exercise of faith. I trust that somebody came in here this morning and you don’t actually know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior yet. If you’re to look at your life, you’re to say, honestly? Honestly, I don’t actually feel God’s love for me. Honestly, I actually do love other things more than God. Honestly, I Actually, I am more confident in myself and what I can do than God. You never actually admitted that you are a sinner that’s desperately in need of a Savior. I want everybody in the room right now, just by themselves with the Holy Spirit, just you and Him, pray this simple prayer: Holy Spirit, is Jesus my Lord and Savior? Holy Spirit, if He is not, can You show me, please? I trust for somebody in the room, the Holy Spirit did just tell you that Jesus is not yet your Lord and Savior. May if you feel comfortable to share that with me, all eyes are closed, all heads are bowed. If you do not think that Jesus is your Lord and Savior, can you raise your hand, please? For those who have yet to give their lives to Jesus, you just pray a simple prayer like this: Lord Jesus, I recognize I’m a sinner. I’ve broken Your law. I’ve broken Your heart. I don’t live for You. I’m sorry. Please forgive me, God. Please forgive me in the name of Jesus. Help me to live for You instead. I don’t know all of what it means, but I live for Jesus now. For everybody else in this room, Holy Spirit, I’m asking that You would just speak to them. You would move in their lives. That You would use the faith and the belief that they do have to multiply into the lives of other people, please. Pray that we would trust You for everything that we need. That we would not look to our own resources, our own ingenuity, our own wisdom. We wouldn’t look to the world, or we wouldn’t cut corners on what the Bible says we should or shouldn’t do. Help us to look to You instead. God, we love You. Thank You for loving us. In Your name we pray. Amen.