Welcome to Waymaker Church! We are so excited to have you join us today! We exist to Encounter, Live for, and Advance the Kingdom of God!

Let me set up today’s message. I am calling today’s message “victory formation”

I am a huge football junky. I played football for about 13 years. From the time I was 4 until my senior year of high school. I was blessed enough to receive a couple of lower level school interest letters but never pursued collegiate football. Since I can remember I have spent Saturdays, Sundays, and Monday nights watching football.

Not so much in the last few years but I used to be able to tell you what the first 5-10 draft picks were going to be. To be completely honest I can still tell you where some NFL players played college football.

One of the best plays in all of football whether it was actually running this play or it is seeing it on TV is a play called Victory Formation. It is one of the most boring plays in all of football but it is one of the best plays your team can run.

Victory formation is what it is called when a team takes a knee to run out the remainder of the clock. It signifies that the opposition no longer stands a chance and no matter what they try to do, they are not going to be able to win. That’ll preach right there.

While for every football fan or player the victory formation is what we all hope the game ends with, the reality is that you don’t start there.

There is a lot that gets you to that point and in our walk with Jesus it is the same way. We believe here at Waymaker Church that we don’t fight for victory we fight from a place of victory. We don’t fight to earn God’s love or to get to heaven, Jesus did the work, lived the life we are called to live, died the death we deserved, and rose again on the 3rd day to get heaven on the insde of us.

We also believe that faith without works is dead. We would all love to fast forward to our moments of breakthrough but we need the process of the breakthrough to appreciate the breakthrough. We all want to the mountaintop experience but we fail to recognize that the fruit is in the valley.

Principles of Victory

Something that happens before almost every game is one of the commentators will give what they believe are a team’s “keys to victory” and these are things that they believe if a team does these things then victory is almost guaranteed.

We fight from a place of victory so I am not going to give you keys to victory. What I want to give you is 4 principles of victory.

We are turning to one of the most iconic stories in the bible.

We have an enemy which is Goliath who was the champion of the Philistines, and he is challenging the champion of the Israelites. You see in these times champion would fight against champion. Best vs the best. It was a way to not have needless casualties of war.

Goliath was 9 feet 9 inches tall and mocked the Israelites. The Israelites didn’t have anyone to send out to fight Goliath.

Jesse’s 3 oldest sons went out for battle but David was tending to the sheep and working Uber eats on the side. On this particular day he was asked to bring a charcuterie board to his older brothers and their field commander. So David comes up carry his Uber eats order and before he could send the confirmation picture he hears someone speak. Goliath like he had been for 40 days and 40 nights begins to shout his usual words.

The first principle of victory is determination. I want you to notice the response between the israelites and David. The Israelites all cowered and trembled in fear and David sees Him and has the determination to say I will go and fight this Philistine. Your mindset and the renewing of your mind is half the battle.

Moses sent 12 spies to the land of the Canaanites to scout a land that was already promised to them, and 10 came back sayingNumbers 13:33 “33 We even saw the Nephilim there—the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim! To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and we must have seemed the same to them.””

How many times have we done this in the face of opposition. We count ourselves out before the battle has even began. As much as I hate to admit this we did this in sports all the time. You get the scouting report and there were weeks you just knew. We played at the time top 10 midland high and the guy I had to block was somewhere around 6’3” and 315 lbs and was commited to play collegiate football. I knew it was going to be a long night, but I had mentally convinced myself that I had lost the battle. I had a moment like the Isrealites where I cowered in fear and a moment like the 10 spies that said “we looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes, they must think the same.”

The first principle of victory is determination

The second principle of victory is preparation.

This one is huge. You can have all the determination in the world but if you don’t have any preparation you will not know what to do in the heat of battle. So many of us want the Holy Spirit to give us scripture in a time of need but we haven’t spent any time in the word. We want the Lord to bless us or to give us breakthrough but we hold on to everything with a tight fist.

In 2007 Jamarcus Russell was a top talent coming out of Louisiana State University and was drafted #1 overall by the Oakland Raiders. He was gifted and proven at the college level but due to his amazing gifts and abilities he lacked preparation.

He struggled he threw the ball to the other team almost twice as many times as he threw touchdown passes. Their coaches weren’t convinced that he was watching film on their opponents. So they gave him a set of tapes and told him that it was film on the other team. The next day he said that he had watched the teams blitz packages. The team knew he hadn’t watched the tapes because the tapes they gave him were blank.

The bible calls itself the sword of the Spirit inEphesians 6, which means that it is a weapon to be used agains the opposition. Jesus while being tempted by the devil inMatthew 4, the devil uses the word of God as a weapon against Jesus, but Jesus says “it is also written.” It is important to be prepared by reading the word of God which is the sword of the Spirit.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to search a plan on the youversion bible app or to find the notes that are live right now and there is a daily devotion to help you get started attached to the notes.

The second principle is preparation.

The third principle of victory is Knowing your role.

Football is called the ultimate team sport but in reality the ultimate team is the body of Christ. Knowing your role will help us and yourself go farther. Many of you will never preach from this platform but that is okay, because that is my role. We like to diminish different roles in our own eyes because it isn’t what we see as important.1 Corinthians 12:4–7 “4 Now there are different gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are different ministries, but the same Lord. 6 And there are different activities, but the same God works all of them in each person. 7 A manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person for the common good:” I won’t read the entire thing but Paul gives us a roster sheet for the Kingdom of God. He says that there are those who have the gift of a message of wisdom. a message of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miracles, to another prophecy, to another discernment, to another the gift of tongues, to someone else the ability to interpret tongues.

Paul says we need all of these to come together to edify the church and to advance the kingdom. We like to diminish the roles we have and sometimes we diminish the role of others. Saul attempted to put his armor onto David but 1) he was apparently a shmedium and 2) he wasn’t used to wearing armor. Saul was attempting to put something onto David that he wasn’t intended to carry.

David knew his role and knew that if he carried out the fight in the way he needed to he was going to win.

The fourth principle of victory is the Vision of Victory.

David said I come against you in the name of the Lord of Armies, for some of us we need to start there. We speak to whatever giant is in front of us and we say I come against you in the name of the Lord of Armies. In the name of the Lord God almighty.

David says “today, I’ll strike you down, remove your head, and give the corpses of the Philistine camp to the birds of the sky and the wild creatures of the earth. Then all the world will know that Israel has a God.”

We need to be able to see the victory before it happens. The bible saysHebrews 11:1 “1 Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.”

David had proof of what had not been seen yet.

I want to show you a video but let me set it up for you. Nov 1, 2008 there was a David and Goliath matchup between #1 Texas and #7 Texas Tech. To put this into perspective this was the highest Texas Tech football had ever been ranked and the overall record is 55-18 in favor of Texas. Texas Tech hardly ever beats the university of Texas and Texas Tech had never beat a #1 team.

Almost nobody picked them to win in the pregame show. It was 22-6 Texas Tech going into halftime and I remember our family gather was hopping and you could hear the rumbling in the neighborhood. Then Texas came roaring back and eventually went up 33-32 and with 8 seconds left this happened.

There was an interview done that I couldn’t find, but they later asked how they made that play looks so seamless. Graham Harrell the QB said that Coach Mike Leach made them practice that play for the last 10-15 minutes of practice every day. To the point, where they were tired of it but could run it without thinking. Harrell knew exactly where to throw the ball and could time it perfectly without having to think about it.

I didn’t show you that video to relive the greatest moment in the histroy of the team that I root for. Here is why I showed you that video.

They knew the principles of victory.

Determination - Did you hear it in their voices postgame? They had a determination to the point where they said oh yeah leaving us with over a minute is too much time. We knew we were going to be able to do something.

Preparation - They ran that play over and over again until they were bored and tired of it.

Knowing your role - Crabtree said we were going to try and at least get into range for our kicker. Either way they knew exactly what their role was.

The Vision of Victory - I remember he became a bit of a joke after this. There was meme’s all over the place in the football world laughing about him saying he dreamt of it. The reality is that he got a vision of victory and it came to pass.

I want to focus a little bit on that last principle of victory - the vision of victory.

I believe this is where the Lord is going to speak the loudest to some of you. Some of you don’t think you are worthy of victory. Some in the room have been told this since they were little, “this is just how it is always going to be. This is how it has always been in this family. Well you’re from Roswell, that is just the way things go.”

One thing that will hold you back from having a vision of victory is a poverty mentality.

A poverty mentality has nothing to do with money but everything to do with what you think is available to you.

We have to see the victory in all of our situations. If you are dealing with a body ailment, we have to see ourselves as whole. If we have marital issues we have to be able to see that there is health in our future. This isn’t a name it claim it. Hebrews 11:1 “1 Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.”

There was a woman who had the issue of blood for a number of years. This meant that she couldn’t live in the city, she couldn’t visit family, she would constantly have to tell people she was unclean. She dealt with this for 12 years, she had seen doctors and spent all she had and they couldn’t help