509 Prospect Road, Hurt VA

Church #169 was a beautiful online worship service with New Prospect Baptist Church of Hurt, Virginia, and what a gift it was to begin the morning with such a beautiful prayer, because I truly needed that on this Sunday.

Sometimes before the sermon ever begins, before the Word is even read, your soul already knows it needs help. It needs stillness. It needs comfort. It needs Jesus.

And that opening prayer felt like one of those moments where the Lord was already settling my heart before the message even started.

The service also began with beautiful praise songs, and hearing Amazing Grace as one of them was right on time. That hymn, written in 1772, has outlived generations, cultures, styles, instruments, and even religions, and it still reaches people because the message at the center of it never grows old… grace.

If you strip away all the extra things, all the instruments, all the arrangements, all the other stuff, and just focus on Jesus and His amazing grace, you find the reason this song has lasted through centuries.

It is probably one of the most well-known hymns in the world, and for good reason. Generations of people have found encouragement in it because grace is still the thing we all need.

We need grace when we are strong, and we need grace when we are falling apart. We need grace when we understand life, and we need grace when nothing makes sense. We need grace when we have wandered, when we have worried, when we have grieved, when we have failed, and when we are simply trying to make it through another day.

Today’s message came from Luke 12:13–21, and I found myself praying that the Holy Spirit would speak to us as if we were standing in the crowd that day, hearing Jesus with our own ears, watching Him with our own eyes, feeling His precious words with our own hearts.

Because it is easy to read a story in the Bible and think it belongs to somebody else. It is easy to assume the warning is for the wealthy, the powerful, the greedy, the obvious people. But Jesus has a way of speaking so directly that no one gets to hide behind “that does not apply to me.”

In this passage, a man comes to Jesus asking Him to settle an inheritance dispute. It is such a human moment.

He wants Jesus to step in and fix a material problem. And instead of simply settling the matter, Jesus does something deeper. He exposes the heart. He warns the crowd to be on guard against greed, because life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.

Then He tells the story of a rich man whose land produced a great harvest. The man has such an overflow that he decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones so he can store it all up for himself.

He speaks to his own soul as if he has secured his future, as if more stuff means more safety, more control, more peace. And then God says to him, “You fool. This very night your life will be demanded from you.” It is a sobering story, and it is meant to be.

And I think the lesson is actually very simple, even though it cuts deep.

Jesus is showing us that we must never let anything become what we worship instead of God.

We must never trust in what we can pile up, build up, store up, save up, or control more than we trust in the God who gave us life in the first place.

The rich man’s real problem was not that he had a harvest. The problem was that his heart turned the blessing into his security. Instead of asking, “Lord, how do You want me to use this?” he only asked, “How do I keep this for myself?” Instead of seeing abundance as something to steward, he saw it as something to worship. And that is where the danger begins.

That is why this story is not just about the rich and powerful.

If we think that, then we are fools ourselves. The warning is for all of us. We may not be tearing down barns and building bigger ones in the literal sense, but we all have things we are tempted to trust more than God. We all have places where fear and self-protection start whispering to us. We all have moments where we look for the solution to our problem somewhere other than Jesus.

What if God gave us two sandwiches and instead of sharing one with another who also needed the sandwich as He meant for us to do, instead we just ate both of them.

I found myself continuously asking myself today, where do I truly seek the solution for my problem?

Do I run first to Jesus, or do I run first to fear?
Do I trust the Shepherd, or do I trust my own plans?
Do I bring my worries to God, or do I build mental barns and try to store up enough control to feel safe?

That is where this message met me personally, fear and worry have been so consuming in this season of my life.

Since suddenly losing my mother, everything feels more fragile. The world does not feel as sturdy as it once did. Grief has a way of exposing how quickly life can change, how little control we really have, and how much we want something solid to hold onto.

And in this kind of season, worry starts to feel like a strange kind of protection. It cannot actually save you, but it tricks you into thinking that if you think about every possibility long enough, if you brace yourself hard enough, if you stay mentally prepared for the next hard thing, maybe you will not be caught off guard again.

But oh, how exhausting that life of worry is.

It demands everything and gives nothing back.
It promises safety and produces fear.
It offers control and leaves you more afraid.

And that is why this message felt so directed towards me.

Jesus is reminding us that the answer to life is not bigger barns, bigger plans, bigger attempts to manage what only God can hold.

The answer is to be rich toward God. To live with open hands. To trust Him with the harvest and with the hunger. To trust Him in abundance and in the unknown. To remember that He gave us breath and deserves our worship.

There are so many days when I can feel my heart trying to build barns of anxiety. Barns of what-if. Barns of fear. Barns of trying to prepare for every possible future hurt. Barns of wanting certainty so badly that I begin to feel trapped inside my own need to figure everything out.

But Jesus keeps calling me back to something better. He keeps reminding me that my life does not consist in what I can hold together. My life is hidden in Him. My peace is in Him. My hope is in Him. My future is in Him.

That does not mean I stop caring. It does not mean I stop being responsible. It does not mean I stop working, planning, or thinking wisely. It means those things are no longer the place where I put my trust. It means I remember that God is the miracle worker, not my frantic thoughts.

It means I remember that Jesus is still trustworthy even when the path ahead looks unclear. It means I remember that I do not need to worship security when I belong to the Savior.

One thing I also thought about today is how easy it is to shut ourselves off from parts of the Bible that do not immediately feel like “our” story. Sometimes we hear a passage like this and think, “Well, that is not really me. I am not rich. I am not storing up barns.”

But that kind of heart posture can keep us from hearing the deeper question.

What is Jesus trying to expose in us? Where have we started to trust something else more than Him? Where have we turned blessing into an idol, worry into a ritual, control into a comfort? Those are not easy questions, but they are necessary ones.

I do trust Jesus. I really do. I trust Him with my life, with my grief, with my fears, with my family, with the broken places, with the future I cannot see clearly.

But I am also still learning how to trust Him more deeply than I trust my own fear. I am still learning how to choose worship over worry. I am still learning how to hold everything with open hands and say, “Lord, this is Yours before it is mine.”

That is a daily surrender for me. Sometimes it is a moment-by-moment surrender if I am being raw and real.

The sermon on my heart today is do not let anything take the place in your heart that belongs to God alone. Not money. Not control. Not worry. Not the illusion of security. Not the need to understand everything.

Keep your eyes on Jesus. He is the provider. He is the Shepherd. He knows the number of our days, our grief, the fears we do not say out loud, and the needs we still have. He is still worthy of our worship, and His amazing grace is still enough.

Thank you to New Prospect Baptist Church for such a beautiful online service, for the prayer, the worship, and the reminder that grace still speaks to every generation and that Jesus still confronts our hearts because He loves us too.

And as always, I cannot wait to see where the Holy Spirit leads next.

Love you all,

Annie Stewart Lambert