In about a year and a half that I’ve been here at Cherry Hills, I’ve just been so encouraged and inspired and challenged by so many members that are living their faith out for the Lord in all walks of life. We have a lot of people from the medical field and the healing work. We have first responders, we have teachers and coaches and academics. Uh, I met a member who went to Nashville last this year and, and cut a country music album. Uh, another couple who have now on the board of one of the, I believe, nation’s most strategic blended family ministries. We have one of the world’s formal authority on apologetics. A lot of you got to meet him a few weeks, often just kind of slips in and out. But we see you Lee when you’re here. Uh, I even met a guy last week who works at the DMV, so I can’t give any more easy DMV jokes, which a lot of us know is where our souls go to die.

We avoid if we can, but there is now one spirit-filled man, bringing the joy of Jesus and competency to an administration that we know often needs it. Uh, and next week it’s about to get even bigger. Here we have a church called Cornerstone that’s joining us. They wanna assimilate with us. Next week will be their first week here. So if you see them, just please welcome ’em and introduce them yourself to them. Welcome them in. God is doing great things here at Cherry Hills. And I was reminded this week as I was reading a work from a great Puritan Richard Baxter, his warning against the dangers of hardheartedness, that it can happen subtly where your heart just becomes hard toward God and the things of God. And one of the things he recommends most is to do what you all are doing this morning. He says this, live if you can possibly under a lively quickening ministry and in the company of serious lively Christians.

I believe we get to do that here at Cherry Hills. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, this one Corinthians 12, 12 through 14. There is one body, but it has many parts, but all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ. We are all baptized by one Holy Spirit. And so we are formed into one body. It didn’t matter whether we were Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free people. We are all given the same spirit to drink. So the body is not made up of just one part. It has many parts. And one of the members of his body that I got to meet rather early on who has really inspired me is Dr. JD Kim. He’s an ordained teaching elder from the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He has a PhD in systematic theology from Aberdeen University. He’s an adjunct professor of theology and also the assistant director of the Doctor of Ministry, uh, Korean studies program, also at Denver Seminary.

And he’s president of JD Kim Ministries, which is affiliated with Johnny and friends. Many of you know that with Johnny Erickson as a young man, JD Kim was an aspiring sushi chef. He was finding great success, really enjoying himself in the world. And though his father was a pastor, JD didn’t really open his heart up to the things of God. He was trying to find other things. He thought he could build a satisfying life without God and it didn’t work out so well for him. It’s the story of so many of us. The story some of you may be on now, Clarence McCartney talked about this in the prior century. He said this, you can find him in Pittsburgh, you can find him in Rome, you can find him in Athens, you can find him yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Always the experiment has the same dismal ending.

How merciless the world is to those who worship it, how cruel it is to those who love it. These desperate souls are those who are trying to get more out of the world than there is in it. And some of you may be experiencing that this weekend. Maybe you’re here with your parents, it’s a holiday weekend or you’re here with your kids and you’ve grown up surrounded by faith, but you haven’t internalized it. It’s not your faith. ’cause you’re thinking, I think there’s a better life outside of faith and you keep trying to wrench more out of it and you find out it’s not until the world offers something else and you wake up one day as JD did and find you might even be addicted. We want you to know when you realize as these souls do, that you’re trying to get more out of the world than there is in it.

We’re here. Invite you to go to Trailhead afterwards. Today we wanna introduce you to the joys of life in Christ. And we believe the superior pleasures of Christ. JD was woken up by a terrible accident when he was snowboarding. Suddenly he fell down, he couldn’t move. And that physical debilitation actually launched a spiritual revival in his life. He remembers going back on his parents’ faith and literally reciting the Lord’s prayer as he’s waiting for the officials to get him down the ski patrol to get him down from the mountain. That led him into terrible diff terribly difficult months. And then years hoping he could walk again thinking he would walk again until he realized it wasn’t going to happen. It was devastating to him. Here’s how he describes it in his book. I was completely broken in every way. My confidence and hope of walking were shattered into a million pieces without any possibility of repair.

I was finally awake from my fantasy and faced a cruel reality for the first time since the accident. I thought I was dreaming a nightmare. But the reality was worse. In his book from Walking to Wheeling, JD Kim is amazingly transparent and honest about the humiliations he faced about the limitations and and what it meant for him to realize this future without God. And I’ve seen this happen with others. It’s heartbreaking to me as a friend, as a, as a pastor, you think some people have had their share of suffering and and and they would be done and then more gets piled on. ’cause for some of you, when we see you out there suffering doesn’t get ladled out by the teaspoonful. You feel like it is a rogue faucet that you can’t turn off. And JD will talk about this in a video we’re about to see that.

Haven’t I had enough? And yet you’re facing more. And the temptation when that happens is to end up with one prayer. A friend of mine who went through this said, Gary, for years I had a two word prayer. Every time I prayed. It was basically heal me, heal me, heal me until God got hold of him and said he had something else in store. JD experienced this as well. Here’s what he said. I was so focused on receiving what I wanted, that my relationship with God became focused on his healing and powerful hands. And I neglected to seek his face. I mistook God for a genie in a lamp thinking that if I rubbed the lamp hard and long enough, he would come out and grant my wishes. Maybe some of you are here this weekend and you realize your whole prayer life. It might not just be a physical healing, it might be a relationship.

It might be for someone you love and you realize your prayer life has been focused on this one issue and you just got want God to be that genie that comes out of the lamp and grants your wishes. But here’s what JD says so powerfully, we will never be satisfied by a genie. We can only be satisfied by God. And so when God took away every comfort that JD had known, even allowed every hope and dream that JD had to be shattered, JD was surprised to find out that the joys of Christ that his parents testified to, that he saw in the church around him were real and were available for him. Here’s what he said. I began to experience joy in reading and reflecting on God’s words and spending time with him. It was a joy that I’d never experienced before. It was different from the pleasures of the world going to parties and on vacations, playing golf or hanging out with friends.

Sometimes the joy felt like fireworks of dopamine. That’s great writing JD filling every part of my body, soul, and spirit in perfect balance. I was often so fully immersed in the presence of God that I wanted to dwell in that moment for the rest of my life and wanted time in the world to stop. Some of you might have even been curious during worship, you see someone next to you and they’re so wind to worshiping Jesus and praying Jesus, you think, what is it with them? ’cause that seems boring to you. JD had to have the other things of the world taken away from him so that he could see the power in it. And here’s what he found out. I’d never understood the psalmist when he said that the word of God was sweeter than honeycomb. I thought he was exaggerating, but I was wrong. The psalmist did not go far enough in describing the joy of reflection on God’s words. It was truly a miracle. I used to think that the Christian life without any drugs or alcohol was boring. I could not understand the smiles and happy faces of my parents and church members, yet I became another fool in Christ. We wanna share now a video where JD shares in his own words the journey for him, for him to become one of those fools in Christ.

Hello, my name is JD Kim and I’m very grateful for this opportunity to share my testimony with you. Regardless of our differences, we have something in common that is all of us experience suffering one way or the other. And my life changed dramatically after a snowboarding accident. On December 13th, 2004, my friends and I went snowboarding to Aspen, Colorado. It was sunny, there was no cloud. It was a perfect day to have fun with your friends. And as I was snowboarding, I went over this bump and I was on the air. And as soon as I landed, I fell and heard this sound going be and immediately I knew something was wrong. So as usual, um, I tried to get up and move on. However, something was different. My legs and arms weren’t moving. And after a few examination, uh, they put me on a helicopter to be transferred to nearby hospital in Grand Junction.

As soon as I got there, all the medical, uh, the staff, they were ready for me and rushed me into the emergency room. And on the surgery room, I thought I would just walk out of the hospital. Within three months, two months passed by, nothing happened. So I talked to my primary doctor and he told me, when the nerves in your arms or legs are damaged, they usually regenerate by themselves. When they are damaged in your spinal cord or brain, you need stem cells to regenerate them. Unfortunately, we don’t have the technology for that. So for that reason, you’re not gonna walk for the rest of your life. And that was like a dead sentence to me. And there are many times I kept hearing many voices, your life is over. No, just give up. You failed. And at that moment, I decided to just give up my life. But at the hospital I saw the stair sign and I thought, well this wheelchair weighs about 300 pounds, so I’ll just fall myself down on the stair and that will do the job. And as I was about to make the decision, I remembered all the stories that I learned from the church, the way in which Jesus healing people and raised the dead. And I prayed to him, Lord, I don’t even know if I really truly believe you or not. However, if there’s something that you can do about this situation, please take my hands.

And God took hold of my hand and he never let it go. And this my journey with Jesus began almost 19 years has passed by since the accident. And I experienced many ups and downs. There are times of suffering, sorrow and grief, but there are also times of joy, peace, and uh, gratitude. So today, um, I would like to share with you how God uses our suffering for His glory. First, God uses our suffering to transform our lives. After the accident, um, I was really desperate to move again. Uh, I wanted healing. I wanted to move. I wanted to live my life like before. But when I turned to God, it seemed like God wanted something else. So I was really desperate and I prayed to God for all my needs. And I cried out to God, you know, two to three hours a day, Lord, have mercy on me.

Please help me. And even though God didn’t hear me, things that I never experienced began to happen. God began answering my prayers. Although I couldn’t receive any government support, I received all the support that I could receive from nonprofit organizations. Once organization, uh, donated a monthly, uh, medical supplies to me, another came to my house to repair, uh, the bathroom built a new desk for me and also helped us with repairing other necessary furniture for me to use. I just couldn’t deny his hand and his power upon my life any longer so that I was truly able to say Thank you God for your grace. Second, God uses our suffering to transform our conditional love to unconditional love. As I began to feel that God was answering all my prayers, I became very confident that yes, God does exist and he will answer my prayer and will heal me.

However, about five years after the accident, um, something happened to me. Um, I had a fever for weeks. You know, truly at that moment I was really frustrated. I was thinking, Lord, why am I going through this? Don’t you see that I already have spinal cord injury? Am I not already suffering enough that you are allowing this or you are adding this type of suffering upon me? So days and nights I just pray to God, shivering and adding blanket on myself. And there was a time when God spoke to me through this verse from Isaiah 41 10, do not fear for I am with you. Do not be dismayed. For I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you and I’ll oppose you with my righteous right hand. Some people might say, why do you still believe in God if God cannot heal you?

If you’re still going through difficulties? And the one thing that I can tell them is God has been with me throughout my whole journey. He has been with me in the fire, walked me through the waters. He encouraged me and he comforted me. And he bears the burden with me daily. And I truly believe that even though I may not walk again, God’s glorious will will be accomplished through my life. And he will provide all my needs according to the riches of his glory in Jesus Christ. Third, when suffering strikes us, God wants us to dream His dreams. After the accident, God gave me this Bible verse from Jeremiah thirty three, three. It is says, call on to me and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things, which Tao no is not. Um, I had no understanding of God’s great and mighty things that he had for me because the reality was dark, having disability.

There was not many things that I was able to do. But I knew that what I had to do each and every day to recite and memorize scriptures and pray to God, I wasn’t so sure about those great things. But I just try to focus on my daily things, confessing my faith in him, believing that he has great plans for me. So after God gave me the opportunity to go back to school so that I was able to apply and complete my degree in systematic theology from the University of Aberdeen in PhD. And at the same time God led me to a Cherry Hills community church in 2013, just a time when I was seeking support from you know, other brothers and sisters. And at Cherry Hills I met wonderful brothers and sisters and especially the international groups and also special needs ministry called Uphold.

We are able to, uh, build and share our life together and to serve God together for his glory. And as of now, I also work at Denver Seminary as a systematic theology professor and assistant director of teaming program. Truly all these things, they’re not my dreams, but God’s dreams for me, God’s dreams are different from the way we dream. It may be fulfilled according to different timing, schedule or a method. However, we can still put our hope in God’s plans because these are the plans that God has for known already. He has designed with these great and good and holy intention. Some of you might be going through difficult challenges in your life. It could be with your family, your friends, or your sickness, or it could be even your relationships with God. Even though these experiences of suffering can really impact our life, God understand exactly what you’re going through. His love is perfect for our brokenness. He welcomes all of them and he wants to walk this journey with you. He wants to give you strength, he wants to comfort you. And more than that, he wants to accomplish his wonderful plans throughout lives, even in the midst of suffering. God loves us and he’ll always be with us. So take your burden on him, he’ll bury it with us and we’ll do great things throughout lives for his glory.

Amen.

Three quick things we wanna mention. JD mentioned a temptation to self-harm. Where it becomes really significant to take care is he was even thinking about how he might do it. Well this chair weighs 300 pounds. If I could just go down the steps that would, as he put it, do the job. There may be some of you, you’re, you’re watching online or you’re here and you’ve thought about how you might do it. When you get to that stage, please come talk to one of our counselors at Trailhead after the service today. If you’re online you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline and then come in next week if you want some pastoral counsel as well. JD had to find out that though he felt like his life was done, God was giving him another life. Remember when he said, our dreams aren’t God’s dreams.

God can give us new dreams. He thought he would be a party hardy sushi chef, right? Enjoying the life and creating sushi. And then God created him to be an amazing academic scholar to, to work at the seminary. He just presented a paper at the Evangelical Theological Society, which is really all they do is sit there and read papers, most of which none of us could really understand. Uh, JD actually showed me a paper that was so helpful a month or two ago. It’s called God’s Merciful Accommodation for People with Disabilities, A Disability and Theological Exegesis of Leviticus 21. And I was shocked ’cause as a teacher I would never read the passages in Leviticus about how if you have a disability or you just figured you can’t enter into the Holy of Holies or you can’t here that I would’ve never read it how that would make somebody today with a disability feel.

But JD, with his experience and his expertise as a scholar was able to go in and say, actually if you look at these passages, God is a God of inclusion, not exclusion. And the God of the Old Testament is as much a God of mercy as we see in the new. It’s a powerful paper. If you’re interested, I would encourage you to look up and read. And so if your life hasn’t turned out like you thought it should and you’re thinking maybe it’s not worth living, please, we implore you. Maybe this is the reason God wants you here to hear this, to get help and to realize God has a new dream ahead for you. The second thing I notice is a love of parents for their child. There’s no way JD could do what he does if his parents weren’t behind him. You saw Ung who was preparing his meal and caring for me was a full-time pastor and he left to take care of jd.

Um, J d’s mom, grace has built a thriving small business to provide for them as a family. There’s just something about parents that are behind you. We just wanna celebrate them. I was just with my parents just before Thanksgiving. I sit in the living room, my mom looks at me and she goes, Gary, is your hair growing back <laugh>? I said, mom, you are literally the only person in the world that could look at this head and with hope, actually think there is hair growing back. I said, no, but thank you. I appreciate what you’re doing. It’s just that love that parents have for their kids that we wanna celebrate that, that he couldn’t do. He couldn’t be who he is to the body of Christ. If he didn’t have parents behind him or others have caregivers behind him or siblings behind him. We just honor that.

As Paul said, we’re all a part of the body of Christ. We all need each other to do what God has called us to do, to wanna honor Jada’s parents for supporting him as he serves us so well. The third thing I wanna stress is that we do as a church, believe God heals because we have seen God heal. And we will pray for people to be healed and we’ll lift up prayers of faith and anoint people with oil because we’ve seen God work that way. But he doesn’t always answer the prayers the way we want him to answer those prayers. And when that happens, cherry Hills isn’t done with you. In fact, we feel like we’re just getting started. We’re building a community of faith that will work with you to help you deal with the doubt and frustration and anger when those prayers aren’t answered the way you want.

How do you find your way back to faith? How do you deal with your new reality? How do you enjoy God’s comforting presence? As a relative newcomer here to Cherry Hills, I am honestly astonished at how many programs we have to help the herding to walk with you. I wanna highlight just some of them. You can get ’em all on the app. It’s a great thing to do. If you get open up our app, you can connect on groups and classes and then groups to check out. Click on that and it will list all that we have for so many people. If you don’t have the app, the QR code in the seat in front of you will give you an option to install the app and do that. And I just wanna highlight some of what is happening here. I think of the advancing warriors.

I love this ministry. Uh, they minister to returning veterans and first responders who’ve been through traumatic events. Just because the war is over or the arrest has been made or the fire has happened doesn’t mean it stops impacting those who are rescuing, who are serving, who are a part of it. And this incredible group reaches out to provide comfort and healing for those who are still haunted by what happened as they served the rest of us. We have regeneration. This is one of my favorite ministries. Terry Hills is not a church. You’re not where we’re, you’re not gonna hear Kurt and I stand up and say, just stop it. Just don’t do it. Just be stronger. Shame on you if you fall again, it doesn’t work. We’re not into trafficking and guilt. It said, we have a group called Regeneration that says, you know what, we’re all wounded and we’re all hurting.

And most of us are trying to find ways in the world to comfort ourselves. But hey, let’s take a step back. Let’s understand those hurts. Let’s look at the, the, the trauma behind the temptation. Let’s look at the triggers and we’ll give you people who will pray with you and talk with you and and and encourage you that you can call so that you don’t have to face this battle alone. We have the uphold ministry. You saw JD and the pictures up there with those with special needs. The Mosaic widows ministry I mentioned I was with my parents. My dad is 94, my mom’s gonna be 89. Uh, shortly. It’s amazing me how well my mom is doing. I mean physically and mentally. She’s just right there. I think she’s got another decade or two in her. And yet she keeps telling me she doesn’t wanna live a day longer than my dad.

They’ve been married for 67 years and she doesn’t want a day when he’s not in it. And I can understand it can be devastating facing this someone that you’ve been with your whole life. And we just wanna say widows, you don’t have to face this alone. You can talk to other women who have been through it. They meet on Tuesdays. We encourage you to do that. We have a breast cancer support group. It could be so hard on a family, not just the medical issue, but the husband doesn’t know how to respond and maybe he’s scared or the kids just don’t get it. Or maybe they’re too young to realize that mom is sick and needs extra help women. There are those who have walked through this that want to walk through it with you and encourage you. We have the Faith quilters. It’s a group of women who provide quilts for the hurting, for, for the newborn, for those who are grieving.

Uh, and if you don’t know how to quilt, they’ll teach you how to do it. Now a related group is the kingdom knitters, uh, who are also doing that. And rumor has that there is a fierce rivalry between the knitters and the quilters. The knitters think the quilters are cheating. They just start with these big things of cloths and just put ’em together. They make something outta nothing. The quilters point out, well, if I pull one string, everything you did is gone. I mean, it is a fierce rivalry. Little inside talk. Our senior pastor Kurt Taylor, spends about half his time trying to find peace between the quilters and the knitters. So if he’s successful, I think we should put him on Russian and Ukraine ’cause it’s about that level. But if you’re into that, um, we’ve got group, whether you’re quilters or quilters or knitters, we also have first Monday moms that’s led by Lauren Taylor, it’s Kurt’s wife.

And when, uh, I was talking to the group here about Kurt and telling him why he would be the best guy they could find after we went through all of the strengths of Kurt, I said, and here’s the thing, if you get Kurt, I said, you get Lauren. She’s amazing. Her background in education and the way things she did with the women, uh, back at the church where we were in Houston, she’s incredible. She’s leading this group of moms. Um, it’s called First Monday Moms. There’s also a MOPS group, a couple of those. It stands for Mothers of Preschoolers. And we just say, as women, we we know it is just tough to have kids this age. A friend of mine preached a sermon on anger and he had all the people come forward who needed prayer if they felt like anger was ruling them.

And when they came forward, 13 people did. He laughed because he realized that every person who came forward was a mother of toddlers. Alright, so there, there are just sort of occupational hazards in certain stages of life. We don’t want you to have to try to be a mom alone. We have an internationals community group, whether you were born here or not, but you feel like you haven’t found your place. We wanna emphasize Cherry Hills When we say there’s a place here for you, we wanna help you find that place and feel like this can be your place. We not only help moms, we have a men’s bible study and huddle groups. And this is really gonna be ratcheted up. One of the, well actually the senior pastor from Cornerstone, Dr. Anthony Pano, will be focusing on men’s groups. ’cause guys, it’s not easy being a man today.

What does it mean to be a man? We have a lot of responsibilities, a lot of challenges. You are gonna get support like you never had before. So you don’t have to face becoming a dad or facing retirement or dealing with teenagers alone. We wanna work with you reengage as a ministry close to my heart. ’cause I’ve worked in marriage issues for so long. If you’re in a difficult stage in your marriage, I can bet it’s most likely you’ve been married about seven years or 15 years or you’re just going into the empty nesters. Statistically, those tend to be very predictable times when marriages really are going through tough times. And again, we’re not a charge that says Don’t go to divorce, go out, hey, divorce. Right? We wanna take a step back and say, Hey, let’s look at what’s making marriage difficult and why.

How do you reengage? Here’s some issues, here’s some help, here’s some talk. We wanna walk with you. Uh, and we have a wonderful couple that’s leading that, the Gathering Place for seniors. I love this because there is an amazingly strong connection between longevity and community. In fact, one of the reachers researchers says, as we get older, loneliness is more dangerous to longevity than smoking. We can’t help getting old. I mean, the alternative isn’t the best. So we kind of wanna get old. But what we can help is being old and lonely. And again, we’re ratcheting this up because Mark Chupe was a pastor at Cornerstones are gonna be focusing on 55 plus. And people have just been raving about him. I told Kurt, well he can never do a baptism. And Kurt said, why not? I said, well, the way everybody talks about him, he walks on water and we need somebody that can actually sink to do the immersions.

But then I had lunch with him and met him and I’m so excited the heart, he has to help everybody in that other part of life apply their faith, grow in their relationships, and serve God a great blended family ministry. Even a women’s incarceration, reentry bible study. And there are more. I don’t have time to go over all of them. So we will pray that God will lift the challenges in your life. But when the challenges remain, we wanna be a churchless. We will provide people that will walk with you through it. They’re aware of it. They know your pain. That’s what Cherry Hills is all about. We are not just a church between eight and noon on Sunday. We wanna be a church that helps you walk out your faith Sunday through Saturday, find God’s healing and find God’s hope. Hebrews 10 leads us in this direction, verse 24 through 25. Let us consider how we can stir up one another to love. Let us help one another to do good works and let us not give up meeting together. Some are in the habit of doing this. Instead let us encourage one another with words of hope. We have j d’s parents Grace and sung here today. We wanna honor them. If you would please stand up for what they’ve given us,

The gift of their son and the service that they show.

Thank you.

And J’s gonna say just another couple words and then he was going to pray for those who are hurting and please stick around. We’ve got exciting thing afterwards and j d’s gotta get out to sign some books. So jd

Well, I’d like to thank the leadership of Cherry Community Church, particularly Kurt Taylor and Gary Thomas and Chris and others. Also for the project team that has wonderful of video for this, uh, very occasion. I also want to thank my friends and brothers and sisters who are part of Cherry’s community church, international community and also opposing ministry. And I also want to, um, thank my parents, uh, who have been committed, who have sacrificed their lives to gimme the best opportunity to live a new life. And also I learned what it means to being a Christian and to love others, to through the Christ like love. So I’m very grateful for their teaching through direction. And of course I want to thank God, um, I love him very much. I’m so grateful for all the things that he has been doing throughout my life. And I want to continuously worship him and love him and to follow him even in, even while in this wheelchair. So let’s pray together.

Father God, we’re grateful for this church that you have given to us in a place where we can freely worship you, freely serve you, and to build a intimate and very close relationship with our brothers and sisters. Laura, as Gary mentioned, you know, within this church or within your body, there are different parts, different people gathered together. But we are one in your name. We are one as the body of Christ receiving one mission to share the gospel with the world, receive the one mission to serve each other and to serve by one another. We ask for your strength and blessing to carry out the will, the plans that you have given to us as a church, as one church. Lord, we also ask you to have mercy on us. There are many of us who are going through different challenges, even at this moment.

Maybe there are someone who is, uh, going through cancer, uh, kidney drug problems or dementia disability or whatever the sickness may be. Maybe there are others struggling with addiction, depression, financial hardships, broken relationship. Lord, we know that we don’t know completely how they’re feeling right now, but we know that you know exactly what you’re going through. So we ask you to regenerate the brokenness that we are going through for your love is perfect for nothing in this world can separate your love from us. Yes, no terrorism, no suffering, no hardships, no disappointment and uh, frustration can separate your love for us. And as Paul says in Romans eight, in all things, your will be done throughout life. And your name is victory your conqueror. So help us, Lord, to put our faith in you. Help us to believe that you have plans for each one of us and for this church as well. Use this church. Use us for your glory continuously. Help us to share your love and words in action. In the name that is above all name. In Jesus’ name we prayed. Amen.