Pastor Jason Hillier: Okay, all right. We actually believe that. There's no better feeling than being able to worship and be with the people of God and be in His presence. In His presence, there's a fullness of joy. It's so much better to spend like one day in God's house than it is thousands of days elsewhere. We actually believe that. And so, thanks for being here. Welcome to Valley Creek Church. My name is Jason and I get to serve as the campus pastor here. And I'm basically out of breath because that was great. And at Valley Creek, we are truly passionate about the presence of God, because the presence of God changes things. It changes things in our life and we are also passionate about raising up the next generation of hope carriers. You see at Valley Creek, that's right, we call it, we call it gen hope, gen hope, because the generation defined by the hope of Jesus. They're not defined by what the world says or says about them or calls them. They're defined by the hope of Jesus. And so, we're so passionate about raising them up and helping them become everything God says they're going to be and resourcing them on their journey with Jesus. One of the ways we like to resource is to help them learn to be worshippers, to live a life of worship, which is why we're so excited to tell you that this weekend was the launch of our very first Valley Creek student worship album called We Are Gen Hope. So, today, we're going to celebrate the anthems of Gen Hope. We're going to celebrate the songs that have been written by them and produced by them and actually played on the album. They're the ones that are leading the charge on this album, really leading the charge for worship across our church. So, here's what we're going to do. We’re going to sing some of the songs. And you may not recognize them, because a lot of them are newer. But what if you tried to go for it? As soon as you pick up on it, you go for it, you worship with us. You just speak out the words, you read them, you let them just go in your mind and your heart. And as you do, continue to pray for Gen Hope. Continue to pray for the next generation. Continue to declare God's goodness over them and believe that wherever they're going is better than where they've been, and wherever you're going is better than where you've been. There's hope for you in these songs. There's hope for you as we declare this truth over our lives and over the world. So, thank You God, for the anthems of Gen Hope. Thank you for worship. Thank You that we're going further and farther. Thank You that You are raising up a hope-filled hopeful generation. Thanks for Gen Hope, in Jesus’ name.

Pastor Becca Reynolds: Hey, Valley Creek, everybody. It is so good to see you. Welcome in to all of our campuses. What an amazing Sunday we are having so far. We have so much to celebrate, y'all, so much to celebrate. I'm saying, an 18 year-old, saying, "Come, raise us up!" I am celebrating the next gen today. We are celebrating the first-ever students’ album which is not just for students, y'all. It is a great album. I want to encourage you to get it. We have a celebration in the next Sunday, Pastor John is going to be here. He has some great things that he's going to share from his heart. I'm excited about that. So, don't miss it. And finally, we are celebrating today. We're wrapping up our summer series, 60 Days of Unfamiliar Promises. Okay, we know that the summer just hits different. I mean, your schedules are different. Things are crazy. All of that's going on. So, in the summer, we want to provide a series for you that will still support your journey with Jesus amidst all the crazy scheduling and traveling and everything that's going on. So, this year, in the summer, we wanted to give you a handful of verses that are super familiar. They're probably on a poster on your wall or on a sticker on your water bottle. But they're so familiar that the depth of them has maybe become a little unfamiliar. So, I hope that you had a chance to grab one or two of those verses and really go deeper in your own time with the Lord. If maybe you missed one, if you have not gone to ValleyCreek+, what are you waiting on? It is the best resources, all of the messages are there. So, I want to encourage you to go and grab those. But today, I have the honor of sharing our last promise in this particular series. The promise I get to share with you comes from the book of Jeremiah. Now, Jeremiah was one of the Old Testament prophets. All that means is that God spoke through him to His people and the Book of Jeremiah, well, I’d kind of say it’s good news, bad news. See, the people of God were actually in exile in Babylon. That means they were taken captive. And Jeremiah had the bad -- the message of delivering that bad news to the people to say, "Hey, y'all kind of quit following God, you've disobeyed God, you've dishonored God, you're not even serving God anymore, so bad news. That's kind of why we're in the position that we're in." But good news, good news, God had a plan for His people. And He had a plan for them after exile. He wanted to restore the relationship with His own people. That's where we're going to pick up on our promise for today. It's in Jeremiah 33:3 and it says this. "Call to me, and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Now, all summer, we've been saying these verses out loud together, so that we can build our faith and get them deep in our heart. This is the last one, and we're only going to do it one time. So, all of our campuses, I want everybody together, come with me now. We’re going to read it out loud. Here we go. "Call to me, and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." That's a great promise for some people who really needed it. 

And I don't know if you caught it. Did you catch that this is actually a BOGO? There's two promises in one in this verse. Did you see that? See, He says, "Call to me and I will answer." Not, "I might answer." Not, "If I'm in the right mood." No, no. "Call to me and I will answer." That in and of itself is a great promise. But He goes on and says, "and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Huh? I got curious. I was wondering, well, what is a great and unsearchable thing that I do not know. What exactly does that mean? So, I went back and studied the original language, the original text. And what that means in the original text is this. It means that it's something that is inaccessible for man to find. It's divine knowledge only. So, I don't want to just rush by this. I want you to catch the gravity of that. God is basically saying, "I've got some stuff for you, custom-made for you, knowledge, encouragement, inspiration just for you that you're never going to find by yourself. It’s only going to come through Me." It made me think of like, a treasure chest. Can you imagine a treasure chest that just has like, encouragement and words of knowledge and inspiration and solutions and all of that stuff, and it's custom-made just for me? Can you imagine opening up your front door right by your Amazon packages, there's a treasure chest, and it’s just for you. And you can have access through God. I mean, I think that's pretty amazing. And you may say, "Well, you know, I don't think I'm going to have that on my doorstep, because I don't know that I'm worthy of that." Okay, remember who the audience was. This was first written to the people of God that had turned away from Him. They had quit following Him. And He says, "Hey, I know you've given up on Me, but I haven't given up on you. So, call Me. Call Me, because I want to tell you some great and unsearchable things you don't know." If I was to paraphrase this in modern-day language, you know what I think He would say? "Call Me because the best is yet to come. The best is yet to come." What, a promise for them? What, a promise for us? I mean, is that a promise that you can easily receive today? Do you believe that? Do you believe that the best days of your life are in front of you? The best memories are yet to be made. The best friendships are yet to find. 

Do you believe that as the hearer of this promise today, do you believe that promise, because I’m going to tell you something? As the communicator of this promise today, okay, I'm struggling with it. I've wrestled with it. As communicators, we all wrestle with our message. And what that means is that we study and we pray and we try to find the right illustrations, because we want to present it to you as best as we can. So, we wrestle with our message. But this message has wrestled with me, because where I am in my season of life right now, this isn’t easy for me to believe over my own life, because I'll be honest, I got some stuff. I've got some stuff in my health I didn't see coming. I've got some stuff in my family I didn't see coming. I've got some stuff in ministry that I didn't see coming. And my stuff is on the spectrum. And it's everything from disappointing to really devastating, okay? But I have never wanted to be anything but real with you. So, I just want to stand here and say, if this message is a little bit hard for you to hear, it's a little bit hard for me to give. And yet, and yet, as I've gotten with God, and as I have studied this, and as I have leaned into the wrestle of it, I'm going to tell you something, He’s grown my belief in it for me. He has. I would call this a promise. I would call this a promise-in-progress in my heart. That's what I would call it. And today, I kind of hope it makes progress in yours, because when I say the best days, the best part of your life, the best is yet to come, some of you in here are like, "I know." You're like, "My life is awesome and my future is bright." And if that is you, I am genuinely, genuinely happy for you. And I genuinely wish I was you. But for the rest of us that we can't grasp it like that, what I want to do is I want to share a couple of perspectives, a couple of camps, if you will, that maybe you can relate to and maybe you can take encouragement in.

See, I think there's a camp over here. This camp is the camp that says, "My best days are behind me. I can't believe that my best is yet to come, because my best days are behind me." These are people that are stuck in the stories of their past. They relive the tapes. They replay the tapes of their past. And they're always talking about the good old days, the glory days. You can recognize these people, because they say things like, "Oh, remember when..." or you share something that's great that happened in your life and they want to one-up you by going, "Oh, that's nothing. One time, I..." And it's not just people in later seasons of life. This can be a college student that wants to go back to high school, because they won the state championship. This can be a young adult who is struggling with a very real transition from university into young adult life, and they just want to go back to college when I was in my sorority or my fraternity, and we made friends, and it was so much easier. This could be a spouse in a marriage that's grown cold. It's gotten dull. And that spouse just says, "Remember when we were young and in love, and it was easy, and everything was spontaneous?" Or this could be the empty-nester and all they can think about is when the house used to be full of kids and laughter and laundry and all of those things, and now, it's gone. The kids are gone. And it's never coming back. The best of my life, those best days, they're behind me. Have you ever been in that camp, because actually the Israelites were in that camp. They had that perspective when God had set them free from slavery in Egypt, He had unlocked the door and He had set them free. So, boy, you would think it would be so easy to be like, "Yeah, the best is yet to come." But look what the Israelites had as their perspective. "All the Israelites grumbled against Moses. And whole assembly," all y'all, "said to them, 'If only we had died in Egypt or in this wilderness, wouldn't it be better for us to go back to Egypt?'" Wouldn't it be better for us to go back? That's what they're thinking. And y'all, it wasn't better. They were in slavery. But isn't it interesting? Sometimes the farther that we get from our past, we have a tendency to embellish it. We forget the pain that got the gain. We may remember that state championship, but we forget all the hard days it took to get there. We may remember the young and love, early seasons of marriage, but we forgot how many times we fought over the toothpaste lid and how to load the dishwasher, right? We forget, we forget those things, because it's so much easier to look back at what was than it is to look forward at what can be with God that our best days are ahead. 

I mean, can you relate at all to that struggle? Because I can, and I’ll tell you who encourages me as I look in Scripture, I'm encouraged by Caleb. Remember him? Caleb was the guy that was with Joshua, and they ran recon on the Promised Land. I mean, the Promised Land, the land of great and unsearchable things, where the best ever was yet to come. They went to go look at it. And when they came back, a whole lot of the spies were like, "Yeah, no, no. We don't want that. We want to go back." But not Caleb, not Caleb. He had a completely different attitude. He actually rallied, and look what it says. It says that Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, "Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it." Caleb had confidence, and his confidence was contagious, because the crowd actually listened to him. And he's like, "Guys, we can do this. We can totally do this. Not only can we do this, but we are well able to overcome it. So, let’s go now. Quit wasting time, because wherever god is leading us is better than where we've been." We’ve said that around Valley Creek for years. But have you forgotten it? Because Caleb didn't forget it. And because Caleb didn't forget it, you know what, God didn't forget Caleb either. "But as for my servant Caleb, because he has had a different spirit and had followed me fully. I will bring him into the land in which he entered and his descendants shall take possession of it." He had a different spirit. Caleb had a different spirit and the spirit that he had, it made him courageous and fully obedient was part of that. So, can I ask you a question? Do you have a courageous spirit within you? Because I'm telling you, if you're in Jesus, you do. It's the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit will allow you to appreciate your past, but to anticipate the future. That's what He will allow you to do. If we just have the courage to say goodbye, God will give us a new hello. But we have to be able to walk into that. We have to trust Him for the great and unsearchable things that we do not know, that we cannot know. So, if you're in camp one, my best days are behind me, I want to encourage you to shift your perspective. What if we said, "I remain confident of this. I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." Because the land of the living, it's in front of us. It is not behind us. So, it’s okay to look back and thank God, but we've got to look forward and trust Him. We've got to pursue His promise. We can't continue to pursue our past. Your best days aren't behind you. They're waiting for you. That's one camp. 

So, there's another camp. Here's the, "best days are behind me. "I'm stuck in stories of the past." Here's the camp, they're not stuck in stories of the past, they're stuck in circumstances of today. I call this one the "Meh, this is as good as it gets" camp. "It's all right, it's fine. I can deal. Meh, this is just as good as it gets." And you can recognize people in this camp, because they use extreme words like "always" and "never." "This job has always been awful, it's never going to get better. But you know, it pays the bills, so it's as good as it gets." Or, "My health has always been a struggle, it's always been awful, it's never going to get better. But you know what? I've learned to cope with it. I've learned to deal. So, it's as good as it gets." Or it’s people that say, on the other side of COVID, "I am really struggling to like, find my passion and my vigor and my zeal for life. I can't find it. But hey, at least we're not arm wrestling over toilet paper in the grocery store anymore. So, really, it's fine. It's as good as it gets." The people in this camp, they've gotten beat down by the circumstances in life, and actually the circumstances are real. I mean, if you're in this camp, you may be facing like, grief and deep loss. You may have bypassed heartache and you may be holding a shattered heart. And you're like, I can’t even begin to think about the better days are ahead of me, because this is awful. And what I would want to say is, don't let your belief in the bad circumstances be stronger than your belief in a good God. Even though it's real and even though it's hard, don't fall into that because what you're tempted to do is say, "You know what, I'm just not even going to pray to God," because sometimes you feel like you're praying if you feel like the circumstances get worse, and then you're like, "Fine, I can deal with it. Fine, it's fine, I'm fine. This is as good as it gets." Have you ever pitched a tent in this camp? Because I certainly have. 

And I'll tell you somebody else that knows about bad circumstances. That's our friend Gideon. Remember him? Gideon was an Israelite when they were fighting the bad guys, the Midianites, and I have no idea why they were all "-ites" in the Old Testament, I really don’t know. But the Midianites, they were some cruel dudes. The Bible says that the Israelites actually built places to go hide from them, because when the Midianites came in, the Bible says that they were as thick as locusts and it says that they had droves of camels too numerous to count. I'm just saying, you got a camel stampede coming at you, and there's so many of them you can't count, that's some bad circumstances. And that's where the Israelites were. And you know what they did? They actually, they did call out to God. "When they cried out to the Lord, He said, 'I brought you up out of slavery in Egypt. I rescued you from the Egyptians and from all who oppressed you. I drove out your enemies. I gave you their land. I told you, "I am the Lord, your God. You must not worship the Gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live." But you have not listened to me.'" They called and God answered. And He said, "Look at all the things I've done for you. I was so faithful to you, but you haven't listened. You forgot about Me." And I think sometimes we can do the same thing. We can get stuck in circumstances and we forget about God, and we don't cry out to God. And when we do that, we make not-the-best decisions. And then the circumstances of those not-the-best decisions show up as consequences in our life. And sometimes we can get in a messy situation, true, that we had nothing to do with. It's just a storm called life. But here's the truth. God is not as interested in how we got in the circumstance. He wants to get us out of it. And the way that He gets us out of it, it's oftentimes in great and unsearchable ways or methods. Enter Gideon. Gideon was not the likely person to lead them out of the bondage that they were in. He was the smallest guy in the smallest family with the smallest faith in his tribe. And God shows up and says, "Great and mighty warrior." Gideon is like, "Who are you talking to?" So, God has to get Gideon over here and He has to do some convincing. He has to convince Gideon of who he is and who God is. While this is going on, the camel guys are over here and they're getting a brigade together. They're going to double down and they're about to come in hot. And I love it. The Bible says that the Spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon. The southern translation would say, boyfriend found him some divine gumption. He got fed up and he said, "I'm done with these circumstances. This is not as good as it gets. The best days are ahead of us, let's go." And so he gets this army together and he's about to go out and God says, "Hey Gideon, you too many." God changes the circumstances. "You got too many in that army. And if I let you win, you're going to think that you won it in your own strength. So, you’ve got to shrink your army." Gideon is like, okay. So, he takes the army and he says, "Hey guys, if y'all really aren't feeling it, go ahead and tap out." 22,000 of them tapped out. And they were happy to go back to the land of is "this as good as it gets." And Gideon is like, okay, let's go. And then the Lord shows up and says, "You've still got too many." He gives them a test and if you know the story, 300 of them passed it. Okay, okay, new circumstances and they seem to be getting worse. Gideon has a choice. He can either go back to the land of "this is as good as it gets," or he can go forward by faith and believe that the best is yet to come. And if you know the story, you know what happened, he did. And they had an amazing victory. And the smallest guy with the smallest faith, with the smallest army, won one of the biggest battles in the Old Testament, all because he was willing to believe that the best is yet to come. Now, what I think is fascinating in that story, there's one Scripture that blows me away. When God came and found Gideon living in the circumstances, stuck in them, look at what God said to Gideon. "The Lord turned to him and said, 'Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?'" Go in the strength you have. When you get so beat down in your circumstances, and you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror and you look like you've been run over by a camel, all God is saying is, "Hey, come here. Just go in the strength that you have. I will meet you there. I have gone ahead of you and there is a victory that is waiting for you." 

So, I've got the question for you today. What kind of strength do you have today? Because it doesn't matter if you've got the smallest strength in your family, if you’ve got the smallest strength in anybody in the Valley Creek family, God says, "Just come on, just go in the strength you have. I've got you." That's what He wants to say. So, it really doesn't matter which camp you are in, because the step to get out of these camps into believing the promise, it's the same step. It's a step of faith, because any promise is a step of faith, it’s just in disguise. Look at what Hebrews 11 says. It says, "Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." See, a promise is just a declaration awaiting fulfillment. But we don't see it. We do not see it. So, it requires faith. Have you ever thought about this? Do you realize that fear and faith, both require you to believe in something you can't see? Fear and faith, they both require you to believe in something you can't see. Which one are you going to choose to live in? Because if we choose to live in faith, we're actually choosing hope. Look what the Bible says about hope. It says, "Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently." See, hope is future-focused. Faith is future-focused. Promises are future-focused. The best is yet to come. All of that is future-focused. And if God answers your prayer quickly, He's increasing your faith. But if He delays a little bit, He's increasing patience. And I tell you, I don't know about you, but I know what gets in my way of being patient sometimes and it's my feelings, because sometimes, my feelings seem bigger than my faith. And feelings, they're real. But the thing is, we don't go looking for our feelings. They come find us. Grief and sorrow and loneliness and bitterness and depression, we don't go looking for them. They come find us. And then we follow them into the sorrowful place of, "my best days are behind me," or to the hopeless place of, "this is just as good as it gets." And instead of calling on God, we call out to the world to say, "What should we do?" and they give us horrible counsel. They say, "Oh, follow your feelings. Just do what feels good." Or what's worse is they say, "Follow your heart." Okay, your heart is not going to take you to Disneyland. Your heart is going to take you to deception. "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Your heart and my heart, they are going to deceive us and feelings are not our friends. Feelings don't lead us to the future, y'all, faith does. And the best things our feelings can do, you can't stuff them. I'm not saying you stuff your feelings, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying leverage those feelings to be an alarm, just say, oh, something is off, something is off. I got to go. And I got to go call to God, because that's where I can find things that I cannot find on my own, and I cannot find them by following my feelings. So, they have their place, but we have to be so intentional about what we focus on. We have to be so intentional, because what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore, that defines the quality of our life. What you choose to focus on and what you choose to ignore, that's going to define the quality of your life. And oftentimes, we choose to focus on how good it was in the past and we ignore how great it will be with God in the future. Or we choose to focus on the circumstances of the day and we forget the promises of God tomorrow. So, what we choose is really important. 

And in that moment is when we've got to have the kind of faith that Abraham had. Remember Abraham? "Abraham did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God. But he was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God." Boy, I want this verse to be true of me. I do. It's okay if people say I'm a little wild and out there, because I kind of am. But at the end of the day, I want them to say, "That woman, she did not waver. She was strengthened in her faith and her life gave glory to God." Because you know what unbelief does? Unbelief says, "What if..." Unwavering says, "Even if..." And there was some "even if" followers of God in the Scripture. Daniel, he was an "even if," because he's looking at the lions, licking their mouth and he says, "My Lord will save me from this, but even if He doesn't, I will still serve Him." Esther was facing death as she stood up for the people of God. You know what she said? "Even if I perish, I perish." I want to be an "even if" follower of God. How about you? I think you do. I do. I think you really do. But you know what? There’s one word in this that trips you up and trips me up. It is the word "best." When I say the best is yet to come, what best do you think of? Do you think of your best house, your best financials, your best friendship circle, your best social media following? What are you defining as best? Because if we define best based on what the world defines as best, we've just put a limiter on experiencing the best of God, because what God has is so much better than anything the world could call best. But sometimes, we go out from God, we forget God, we forget to call on Him, and we go out here and we start finding the best in the world. And I'm going to tell you something. Anything you have to go outside of God to get, you have to stay outside of God to keep. But whatever is given to us by God is sustained in us through God. Hear me. Whatever you've gone outside of God to get, you're going to have to stay outside of Him to keep. And that's where our heartache comes. That’s where our circumstances get so hard. But whatever God puts within us is sustained in us through Him. And how does He do it? He does it through his Holy Spirit. "In the last days," God says, "I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams." There it is, prophecy, vision, dreams, great and unsearchable things. So, young people, you guys want a life of adventure? You guys want to live something, a life that is purposeful, a life that matters? Because God wants to show you stuff. He wants to give you prophecy and visions. Are you willing to call out to him for it? Are you going to let the world get in the way and go out here and find out what the world's best is? Not-so-young people. You know what? God wants to give us dreams. He wants to show us. He wants to give us hope-filled ideas and the possibilities that come from kingdom. Are we willing to call out to Him or are we going to let pride stand in our way? Because what if God gives me the dream, but then He asked me to entrust it to somebody younger to walk it out? Listen, we have got so much to gain if we lean into this promise. But we have so much to lose if we don't. And what I'm telling you, I'm telling you that if you still have a pulse, you still have a purpose, and your purpose is not to stay stuck in the stories of your past. Your purpose is not to get stuck in the mire of the circumstances of today. No, your purpose is to walk this verse out. "Call to me, I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things that you don't know." "Call me, because the best is yet to come." 

So, we do the same thing with this verse that we've done with the others. We claim it, we declare it, and we walk in it. How do we claim it? We call Him. When you are sad and you are having a horrible day going down the vortex of memory lane, call Him. When you got the camels coming at you and your camel circumstances are just beating you down, call Him. When your feelings have found you and they're saying, follow me, don't, call Him. That's how we claim it. And then how do we declare it? We declare it by faith. Because God won't always put the promise in our hand, but He never puts the promise out of reach. We have to reach out by faith and take it. And then, well, then we walk in it. 

And so, what I'd like to do is, I'd like to close today by just sharing with you a quick story of how I've recently walked in mine. I told you, it's wrestling with me. And a few weeks ago, I had a chance to take some vacation and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I wanted to go back to this beach resort that I went to 20 years ago, because it was there on the beach in this specific place that I had one of easily my top three most significant encounters with Jesus. It changed the trajectory of the way I follow Him. It was amazing. I wanted to go back, because I knew if I go back and I call to Him, He will answer me and He'll tell me something great and unsearchable, so let's go. So, I booked the reservation. I got there at night. The next morning, I got my Bible, I got my journal, and off I go. It was a property shaped like in a big U, and right here, right here. Can y'all see it? That's where it was. And so, I'm going. And I come kind of over this little, kind of a little bumpy thing to get to it. And my heart just fell, because in 20 years, the landscape had changed. The hotel had actually built like a retaining wall. And so, there wasn't even a beach there. It was just rocks. And it was like a mechanical yard. So, it was ugly. There was PVC pipes and electrical boxes. Oh, my heart just fell. And of course, I stayed because I had reservations. And yes, over the coming days, I sought the Lord. And yes, He gave me some great things, and I'm not discounting that. But on my last day there, my tradition on my vacation is the last day, I always go watch the sunrise, and I pray, always. And so, I was trying to figure out where to go, and I was like, okay, and the Holy Spirit said, "Hey, go back to the spot." I said, "The spot's not there." He said, "Go back to the spot." And I was pulling a Gideon, and we're sitting there having a little fuss and an argument. And so finally, I said, okay, okay, I will go. So, I get my stuff, and here I go. And I'm going, and I come up over, and sure enough, and it's rocky, and there's not even a walkway. So, I'm looking down, and I'm trying to be careful. And all of a sudden, I look up, and I heard myself gasp at what I saw. Look at what I saw. Here's the rocks, here's the ocean, and here's that. But if you look a little closer, there was one rock painted. And on the rock, you may not be able to see it, is the word hope. And you can’t tell it in the picture, it was gold glitter paint. Now, here's what I want to ask you. I just want to ask you, who does that? Who does that? I’ll tell you who does that. It's the God of fulfilling promises, who says, "Hey, Becca, you're kind of wanting to relive your past a little bit, and you're hoping that I'm going to give you some answers to this stuff and the circumstances you're dealing with, but I'm going to take such better care of you." Because what I'm going to tell you is, it was on a rock. Hope was on a rock. And I was like, okay, you're taking me up here. You're taking me higher. 

And for those of you who don't know me, the reason that the gold glitter is so hysterical is because I'm basically an overgrown four-year-old. I get so excited about glitter and sparkles. It just thrills my heart. And that's so important. You know why? Because it says that my God knows me, your God. Oh, He knows you. Oh, He knows you. And He knows exactly how to speak to your heart that will make you gasp and say, "Come on, come on, call to Me. And I'm going to answer you, because the best is yet to come." So, here's what I say. I say to you, if you don't have the faith to believe this promise today, it is a promise-in-progress, but I've got enough of it in my heart, I've got enough faith for the both of us. And I’m going to declare over you. These declarations are not decorations on a pillow or a sticker. These are declarations, and I declare over you, the best is yet to come. Students, your best year is yet to come. Marriages, the best days of your marriage, the best days of your parenting, Valley Creek Church, our best days of ministry, they are yet to come. And you know why? Because we are going to call out to Him and He will answer us. And He is going to show us great and unsearchable things that we cannot find outside of Him. The best really is yet to come. So, will you close your eyes with me? Father, I thank You. Lord, I thank You that You have a special, unique way to speak to every one of our hearts, in a way that tells us You know us and You know what is before us. You've already gone there. And if nothing else, every day that we live, we learn more about Jesus. That's a better day than the day before. Every day that you live, that I live, we become more like Jesus and that is the best thing we can pursue. So, Lord, I thank You. I thank You for the truth of Jeremiah 33:3, and I declare it over all of us today. May we walk in it with the confidence that You've gone before us. Because of You and only You, the best is yet to come. In Jesus' name, I pray, amen.