I Am - The first & last - Matthew Williams

So we've been doing a series, um, we started last week, a series called the I Am series.

And why we wanted to do this series, we feel that often we do not trust God because we don't really know God.

Or we know things about him, but we don't believe and receive that this is who he says he is, therefore, this is how I'm gonna live my life.

Um, we go through difficult times and, and then we find, for whatever reason, that in our heads, in our view, we say, "Actually, I feel like God isn't trustworthy, and I can't trust him in this situation because of this, this and this." And then we live in this middle, in-between, lukewarm type of life.

And I feel like God wants to come and break that down tonight.

And where there are places in our hearts and in our minds where we have not trusted God, he wants to come and help us to trust him.

And last week, we started the series with I Am Who I Am, Exodus 3, Moses in the, um, in the desert.

Burning bush was this beautiful moment.

And tonight we're gonna look at Isaiah 44, and this is where Jesus or God says, "I am the first and I am the last." The next slide will show you kind of we- the series is gonna be a 10-week series.

We're at week two, and I wanna encourage you to come for the full series, not just on Sundays, but also on Wednesdays.

If you're not in a connect group, join a connect group.

We're going on this whole journey together, and we believe that our trust will grow week in and week out, Sunday in, Sunday out, Wednesday in, Wednesday out.

[laughs] God's beauty of who he is will be revealed to us, and we will learn to trust him in a new way.

So we're in week two, so we're reading Isaiah 44 tonight.

Context for Isaiah 44 is that God's people are in a place where they might have, from their view, lost all confidence in who God says he is.

So they were in Egypt.

God set them free.

God sent them to the promised land.

It was a long journey.

They, the kingdom of God was established on the earth through an earthly, godly king.

Um, they had a temple.

They, they had armies.

They conquered other kingdoms.

They were powerful.

They were wealthy.