playnext.fm

HIllcrest Baptist Church Lebanon, TN

Pastor Tyler Gaulden - How To Do The Hard Thing

·35 min·3 clips
He declares he moved to middle Tennessee to see drunk people leave bars and come to altars under Holy Ghost conviction.
He changes course at the pulpit. Bibles turn to 2 Chronicles 15, and the morning still has a loose, live feel: visitors, front-row jokes, a preacher saying the song moved him off his plan. Then the room tightens. The passage turns into a charge to make the place of sacrifice bigger, because the first thing on the altar is the self. Sacrifice keeps coming back. Tyler repeats the word until it quits sounding like church vocabulary and starts sounding like something that touches ordinary life. He preaches at himself first. God is leading him into deeper waters, he says, and then he puts that pressure in front of everyone listening. Why are we afraid? Fear of failure, fear of mockery, and fear of whatever else gets named as the reason people step around the hard thing. The altar gets larger. Doing the hard thing means making more room for the self to die before God. The sermon keeps pushing. Personal illustration, Bible exhortation, and present-tense challenge move together in a fast, urgent cadence. He wants more from God, but the path is not ease, money, a big house, or a carefully protected life. Death is the doorway here: the Christian idea of dying to self so the hard thing can grow larger than fear. The ending turns personal. Tyler asks what he wants said about him when he dies, then rejects the shallow measures that will not matter in the grave. He wants one verdict. He gave everything he had, left nothing in the tank, and chose the hard thing over the easy life. Then the question comes straight at the room. What is God challenging you to do?

As heard by us

A forceful sermon on sacrifice, deeper waters, and giving everything before the end.

Tyler Gaulden frames 2 Chronicles 15 as a call to sacrifice, moving past general courage into the harder language of death to self. The recurring image of deeper waters gives the sermon its momentum, while fear of failure and mockery become the pressures listeners are asked to…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play when doing the hard thing feels like stepping into deeper water and backing out sounds tempting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from HIllcrest Baptist Church Lebanon, TN