This month marks our church’s 30th anniversary. On June 22, 1996, Sovereign Grace Baptist Church was organized by Landmark Baptist Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thirty years is a long time. It deserves a word.
The preacher gets up on an anniversary Sunday and everybody expects the same thing. Look how far we have come. Count the years. Pat ourselves on the back and go eat. There is a place for thanksgiving, and we need it. But notice what Samuel did when the battle was over. He did not throw a banquet. He picked up a rock.
He took a stone, set it in the ground between Mizpah and Shen, and gave it a name. Ebenezer. Stone of help. The word he spoke over that stone was not “look what we did.” It was “Thus far Yahweh has helped us.”
Hear that little word. Thus far. Up to this point. That word looks backward and forward at the same time. It tells you the road behind was paved by God. It also tells you the road is not finished. Thirty years is not the finish line. It is a stone in the middle of the journey.
So we will do two things. Look back and thank the God who got us here. Then look ahead and ask the harder question, the one nobody likes to ask on an anniversary. Will you finish?
The same God who has helped this church for thirty years is the God who calls us not merely to start the race, but to finish it.
I. Look Back: Thus Far He Has Helped
Look at what stood behind that stone. The enemies of God’s people came up against the people of God. Israel was afraid. They had no strategy that would save them. So they sent for the prophet and they said one thing. Do not stop crying out to God for us. Samuel offered the lamb, he cried out, and God answered with thunder.
That is the history of God’s people in one scene. They were helpless. They cried out. He answered. The stone marks the spot where the helpless were helped.
Open the Old Testament and you find these stones everywhere. Noah and the ark. The children of Israel pinned against the Red Sea, water in front and Pharaoh’s chariots behind, and Moses saying stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Little David and the giant. Daniel in the den. The three Hebrews in the furnace who came out without the smell of smoke on them. Every one of those is an Ebenezer. Every one says, thus far the Lord has helped.
The history did not stop with the Old Testament. Paul stood before Agrippa, a prisoner in chains, and gave his testimony.
Having obtained help from God to this day. That is Paul’s Ebenezer. And it is yours. The man who has been saved looks back over his life and traces every good thing to one hand. Not luck. Not chance. Not his own grit. The hand of God. Sometimes it is even the small details. The one lug nut that gets you home safe when all the others fail. What is that? That is the hand of God.
We have seen it in our own time. I think of men who have gone on before us who are now with the Lord. Men like Brother Reggie Moore and Brother Joe Wilson. They had a hand in the organization of this church. I think of my own grandfather, Brother James Hobbs, and the hand he had in my own ministry. In many ways I would not be who I am today if it were not for him. The Lord worked through these men in our hearing and our memory, and we are still standing in part because they were faithful. I think of pastors who were here but are now in other churches. Brother Doug Newell IV. Brother Rob Jeffries. I thank God they are still serving the Lord.
Here is the thing that ought to grip us. It is more profitable to trace the hand of God in your own life than in any book. So trace it. Thirty years ago this church did not exist. Here we are.
That was no accident. Consider what these years have cost the church in America. Church membership in this country has fallen below half of the population for the first time on record. Before the pandemic ever hit, more churches were closing their doors than were opening them. Congregations that looked stronger than us have folded. Where is Calvary Baptist Church of Ashland, Kentucky? They printed the Baptist Examiner and sent it to every continent in the world for years. They looked unshakable. Now you can drive to Ashland and you will not find them. We are still here, still preaching the Word, still gathering His people. Sometimes it may seem like we are hanging on by a thread, but it is God’s thread.
Pull out your old pictures this week. Look at the faces. Some of them are with the Lord now. Look at the years you would rather forget, the splits and the sicknesses and the seasons you wondered if the lights would stay on. You will find the same thing Israel found at Mizpah. A stone in every one of them. The Lord was there. He helped.
I want to say something plainly, because somebody needs to hear it. Israel is not the church and the church is not Israel. I am not confusing the two. But I will tell you this. The same God who thundered for Israel that day is the God who has stood with this church when her enemies meant to put her in the ground. The same hand. The same help.
Build your stone. Before you leave this week behind, settle it in your heart that you are not here by your own doing. If you are saved, that is grace. If this church survived, that is grace. Go tell somebody one specific way God carried you this year, and call it what it is. Help from God.
That is the sweet part of an anniversary. But Samuel’s word has a hard edge, and I will not preach you only the sweet half. Thus far. The race is not over. And not everyone who started this race is still running it.
II. Look Honest: Not Everyone Who Starts Will Finish
I have to say this with a heavy heart, but I have to say it. Some who stood in this congregation thirty years ago are not standing here today. Some who were with us just a few years back are gone too. Not all of them moved away. Not all of them went home to glory. Some of them simply did not finish well.
That is not a new sorrow. It is the oldest sorrow in the church. John watched it happen in the first century. People who sat under the same preaching, sang the same songs, took the same supper, and then walked out. The Holy Spirit gives us the explanation through John. They went out from us because they were never truly of us. The leaving exposed what was already true on the inside.
Paul saw it too. He wrote to Timothy from prison and named the men by name. Demas, having loved this present age, deserted him. Alexander the coppersmith did him much harm. At his first defense, no one supported him; all deserted him. That is the apostle Paul, not some obscure brother. Even he stood and watched men walk away from the work.
Hear me carefully. The starting line proves nothing. A man can begin loud. A man can begin with tears and raised hands and a testimony that makes the whole church say amen. That same man can be gone in five years, or ten, or twenty. Beginning is easy. Anybody can begin. Finishing is the thing.
Paul knew it about others, and he knew it about himself. Listen to a man who preached to thousands and still trembled for his own soul.
Paul kept his own body under, lest after preaching to everybody else he himself should be put on the shelf. If Paul guarded his finish that closely, what makes you think you and I can coast? Not me after being here for five years. Not this church after being here for thirty. None of us.
The Lord Jesus said it in seven words that ought to wake all of us up.
To the end. Not to the revival. Not to the honeymoon. To the end.
I have stood at a graveside on a cold morning and watched a family bury someone who once sat in church like us. They started. Somewhere along the way they let go. The obituary said they were a member of such-and-such Baptist church. People came to the funeral and said, I did not even know he was a Christian. Standing there, I have thought that the saddest thing in the world is not a man who never came to church. It is a man who came, who heard, who tasted, and who turned away.
So I have to ask you, and I am asking myself right along with you. Are you finishing? Not did you start. The South is full of people who started. Ask them if they know the Lord and you will get the same answers: "I walked the aisle. I made a decision. I am a member of such-and-such church." But are you born again, and are you finishing? Is there more of Christ in you today than there was five years ago, or have you been drifting and calling it being settled? Could you imagine being married thirty years and knowing no more about your wife than the day you met her? That would frighten you. Then let it frighten you that a man can be a member of a gospel-preaching church for years and know no more of Jesus than the day he walked in.
Some of you have been hurt by people who left. You watched them go. Maybe you watched them turn on this church. Do not let their unfaithfulness make you bitter, and do not let it make you careless. You young people especially, do not let the sins of the gray hairs make you run from the Lord. Let it make you sober. The fact that they did not finish is the very reason you must.
In the early church there were twelve apostles. One of them, Judas Iscariot, was a preacher and the treasurer of the group, and he betrayed the Lord Jesus. That did not cause the other eleven to betray Him too. The early church went on. The treachery of one did not undo the faithfulness of the rest, and it must not undo yours.
That is the warning. But God did not leave us only with a warning. He set a race in front of us, and He told us exactly how to run it so we cross the line.
III. Look Ahead: Run to Win
Run to win. That is the command. Not jog. Not stroll. Not warm a bench. Run like a man who means to finish.
I cannot tell you what the next thirty years hold. I am no prophet, and I am not the son of a prophet. We may not get thirty more. Lord willing, the trumpet may sound before then, and would that not be the sweetest finish of all? While He gives us breath, we have a race to run, and the Word tells us how.
First, lay aside the weight.
A runner strips down. He does not carry what he does not need. There are weights in your life right now that are not even sins, just dead weight, and they are slowing your race. Lay them down. There is sin that wraps around your ankles every single lap. Confess it and run.
Second, keep your eyes in the right place. Fix them on Jesus. Not on the people who quit. Not on the ones who hurt you. Not on the empty seats. On Christ, who ran His own race all the way to a cross and is now seated at the right hand of God. He finished. He is the proof it can be done.
Then there is the finish itself. Hear how Paul talked at the end, an old man in a cold cell, waiting to die.
That is how a man ought to come off the field. I fought. I finished. I kept it. There is a crown the righteous Judge is holding for everyone who runs like that. Not just for apostles. For all who have loved His appearing.
Let me ask you the question I asked five years ago, because it has not aged a day. Five years ago we marked the 25th anniversary of this church, and I was just getting started here as pastor. Are you a bench-warmer? Jesus Christ did not die on the cross to be your fire escape. What have you actually done? Are you serving in this church, are you supporting it, or just attending it? Do you have a plan to grow in the next stretch, or are you running on what you learned twenty years ago? You would not accept that from an employee. Do not accept it from yourself before God.
Thus Far. By That Same Grace.
Thirty years ago this church started. That is worth a stone in the ground and a song in our mouths. But a start is not a finish, and Samuel’s word will not let us rest in the start. Thus far the Lord has helped us. Thus far. There is road in front of us still.
Some who began with us are not here. That should not make us proud that we lasted. It should make us tremble and hold on tighter. The runner who looks back at the ones who dropped out and slows down to gloat is the next one to fall. Eyes forward. Eyes on Christ. Run to win.
Go back to the battle for a moment, because the gospel is hiding in plain sight in this text. Before Israel won anything, before God thundered, before a single Philistine fell, Samuel offered a lamb. Verse 9. He took a suckling lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering, and then he cried out, and then God answered. The victory came after the lamb.
That is the whole Bible in one battlefield. There is no help from God, no deliverance, no Ebenezer, until a Lamb is offered. The Lamb has been offered. Not a suckling lamb on an altar at Mizpah, but the Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, offered up once for sin on a cross outside Jerusalem.
If you are reading this without Christ, hear the warning in this text. You have no Ebenezer. You have no stone that says God helped me, because you have never come to the Lamb. Every year you add is not a stone of help. It is a stone in a wall between you and God, growing higher. Without Christ as your Savior you will stand before God condemned, and on that day nobody else will answer for you. No one will say my mother failed me or my church failed me. You will answer for yourself. Come to the Lamb today.
If you are in Christ, here is your comfort. The God who could have thundered against you, the holy God your sin offended, has become in Christ the God who thunders for you. The same hand that struck down the enemies of Israel is the hand that holds you, and it will not let you go before the finish. He who began the work will finish it.
Here is your charge, and it is for this week, not for someday.
Set up your own Ebenezer. Sit down and write out one place this year where the Lord plainly helped you, and keep it where you will see it. When the next hard season comes, and it will, read that stone and remember.
Check your stride. Be honest about one weight you are carrying that is slowing your race, and lay it down before the Lord this week. Not next month. This week.
Take your eyes off the empty seats. There will be people missing at this church’s next anniversary. Some of us will be with the Lord. Some will serve Him in other places, and we will rejoice in that. Some, God forbid, will turn back. Do not let any of that set the pace of your race. Fix your eyes on Jesus and run to win.
Whatever good we are, whatever good we have done, in thirty years or thirty days, comes down to one verse.
Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I am constrained to be. Thus far the Lord has helped us. By that same grace, let us finish.