SERMON NOTES WITH APPLICATION - "AFTER ALL I BEEN THROUGH, I STILL BELEIVE GOD" PT I - JOB 13:1-19 (MSG)

Series: ENGAGING IN THE HOLY

“AFTER ALL I BEEN THROUGH, I STILL BELIEVE” — PT I - Job 13:1–19 (MSG)

Year Theme: HIGH AND LIFTED UP

Monthly Focus: October — Engaging In The Holy Sermon Movement: From Getting Beyond the Brokenness to living with a faith that can withstand life's contradictions.

BIG IDEA (For Everyone)

Following “Getting Beyond the Brokenness” Parts I and II, we now encounter Job—a man whose faith is being tested not only by what he has lost but also by the people who claim to understand why he lost it.

Job has experienced devastating loss, grief, physical suffering, and the painful disappointment of friends who should have offered comfort. Instead, they offer explanations, judgments, and religious clichés.

But Job refuses to let his circumstances, his friends, or their interpretation of God become the final authority over his life.

He insists upon something remarkable:

I know what I've experienced. I know what I believe. And even when those two realities don't seem to agree, I am not surrendering my right to speak, question, hope, and trust God.

This is not the faith of someone who has all the answers.

It is the faith of someone who refuses to abandon the relationship because the answers have not yet come.

Engaging In The Holy means learning to live faithfully in the tension between what we believe, what we desire, and what we are actually experiencing.

And sometimes our greatest declaration is not, “Everything worked out.”

It is:

“After all I been through, I STILL BELIEVE!”

1. GOD MAKES ROOM FOR OUR HUMANITY (Job 13:1–5)

What's Happening?

Job begins by asserting his dignity and intellectual independence:

“Everything you know, I know, so I'm not taking a backseat to any of you.”

His friends have approached his suffering with explanations they believe are rooted in divine wisdom.

Eliphaz appeals to spiritual revelation. Bildad invokes ancestral tradition. Zophar argues from assumptions about God's superior wisdom.

But Job insists upon another important source of knowledge:

Lived experience.

He has seen suffering with his own eyes. He has heard what has happened with his own ears. He has experienced realities that their tidy theological explanations cannot accommodate.

Job isn't rejecting God.

He is rejecting their insistence that his humanity must fit inside their religious explanations.

When he says they have covered his life with lies and calls them incompetent healers, he exposes the danger of religious language that stops listening.

His friends have become so committed to explaining his suffering that they have stopped seeing the person who is suffering.

And Job refuses to disappear inside their conclusions.

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is refuse to let somebody else's explanation erase the truth of your experience.

Cliff Note (Plain Talk)

You do not have to pretend you're okay to prove you have faith.

You can love God and still be hurting.

You can believe and still have questions.

You can be strong and still need somebody to listen.

Your humanity is not an embarrassment to your faith.

Practical Application

Christian: Bring your whole humanity into your relationship with God—your grief, anger, disappointment, confusion, and questions. Faith is not strengthened by pretending you don't feel what you feel.

Non-Christian: You deserve to be heard without having your experience dismissed by somebody else's worldview. Your lived experience matters, even when others cannot easily explain it.

Gen Z / Millennials: Don't allow people to invalidate your experience simply because they are older, hold authority, or have followed a different path. Respect wisdom, but recognize that your own experience also has something to teach.

Professionals: Don't confuse credentials or established expertise with complete understanding. Effective leadership requires listening to the people closest to a problem, especially when their experience challenges familiar assumptions.

Families & Friends: Sometimes the greatest gift you can offer someone in pain is not advice but attention. Before trying to fix their situation, ask whether you've really heard them.

Black Community Word: Black people have repeatedly been told that our lived experiences of racism, exclusion, economic inequality, and injustice were exaggerated or misunderstood. Yet our communities have insisted upon the authority of our own testimony. From the spirituals to the blues, from the Black Church to the Civil Rights Movement, bearing witness has been both a means of survival and an act of resistance. Our humanity cannot be reduced to somebody else's interpretation of our circumstances.

This Week: Identify one place where you have been minimizing your own feelings—or dismissing somebody else's experience. Practice honest listening without rushing to explanation.

2. GOD DESIRES OUR AUTHENTICITY (Job 13:6–13)

What's Happening?

Job now challenges the religious language of his friends.

“Or are you going to keep on lying ‘to do God a service’?”

What an extraordinary accusation!

Job is essentially asking:

Do you really believe God needs you to misrepresent the truth in order to defend God?

His friends believe they are protecting God's reputation.

But their religious explanations have become substitutes for seeing, hearing, questioning, and exercising sound judgment.

They have turned theology into a collection of labels.

If someone suffers, they must have done something wrong.

If someone prospers, they must have done something right.

Once the label is applied, no further listening is necessary.

Job refuses this shallow certainty.

He recognizes that authentic faith must be capable of confronting difficult realities without manufacturing easy answers.

This is where the tension between faith and experience becomes important.

Job knows what he believes about God.

He also knows what he has experienced.

And the two do not fit neatly together.

But rather than denying his experience or abandoning his faith, he chooses to remain in the difficult space between them.

He insists upon speaking truthfully to God.

Authentic faith is not the absence of tension; it is the courage to remain truthful while living through it.

Cliff Note (Plain Talk)

Stop pretending everything makes sense when it doesn't.

You don't have to choose between being honest and having faith.

God is not threatened by your questions, and truth does not become less holy because it makes somebody uncomfortable.

Practical Application

Christian: Move beyond religious clichés. Rather than saying “God has a reason for everything” to someone who is grieving, practice presence, compassion, listening, and honest prayer.

Non-Christian: Authenticity means refusing to build your life around appearances. You can acknowledge uncertainty without surrendering your values or your desire to understand.

Gen Z / Millennials: You don't have to perform happiness, confidence, spirituality, or success for other people's approval. Your real life deserves more attention than your curated image.

Professionals: Authentic leadership means telling the truth about what is working and what isn't. Organizations become healthier when people can acknowledge problems without fear of punishment.

Families & Friends: Create relationships where people can say, “I'm struggling,” “I disagree,” or “I don't understand,” without risking their belonging. Healthy relationships make room for difficult conversations.

Black Community Word: The Black Church has historically been a place where faith and protest could inhabit the same sacred space. Our spiritual ancestors sang of heaven while confronting earthly injustice. They prayed for deliverance while organizing for freedom. They trusted God without pretending oppression was acceptable. Our faith tradition is at its strongest when it refuses to separate spiritual conviction from truthful engagement with lived reality.

This Week: Replace one automatic explanation with an honest question. Instead of assuming you understand somebody's circumstances, ask, “Help me understand what this has been like for you.”

3. GOD WANTS OUR BOLD EXPECTATIONS. (Job 13:14–19)

What's Happening?

Now Job makes one of the most daring declarations in Scripture.

“Because even if he killed me, I'd keep on hoping. I'd defend my innocence to the very end.”

Job is not describing comfortable optimism.

He is taking a tremendous risk.

He has lost nearly everything.

His friends have condemned him.

His circumstances offer little evidence that things will improve.

Yet he insists upon presenting his case before God.

Why?

Because Job believes that truth matters and that his integrity deserves a hearing.

His hope is not simply that he will escape suffering or even death.

He expects that his integrity can ultimately be vindicated.

This is bold faith.

Not because Job knows exactly what God will do.

But because he refuses to surrender his expectation that God can be approached truthfully and that justice remains worth pursuing.

There is an important distinction here:

Bold expectations do not mean demanding that God produce our preferred outcome. They mean refusing to abandon hope, truth, and the pursuit of justice because the outcome remains uncertain.

Job is willing to risk the encounter.

He is willing to speak.

He is willing to stand.

He is willing to believe beyond the evidence immediately before him.

Bold faith does not require certainty about the outcome; it requires courage to keep pursuing what is true and possible.

Cliff Note (Plain Talk)

Don't lower your expectations just because life has disappointed you.

You may not know how everything will turn out.

But you can still expect your life to matter, your voice to be heard, and your future to hold possibilities you cannot yet see.

After all you've been through, you can still believe.

Practical Application

Christian: Approach God with courageous honesty. Pray boldly, pursue justice, and trust God's character without assuming faith guarantees an easy outcome.

Non-Christian: Don't allow disappointment to convince you that hope is foolish. You can recognize uncertainty and still take meaningful risks toward a better future.

Gen Z / Millennials: Your setbacks do not disqualify your dreams. Rejection, financial struggles, delayed opportunities, and unexpected changes may require adjustments—but they do not automatically require surrender.

Professionals: Bold expectation means refusing to confuse temporary failure with permanent impossibility. Reevaluate your strategy, learn from setbacks, and remain willing to pursue meaningful goals.

Families & Friends: Be the people who help restore somebody's imagination after disappointment. Sometimes encouragement means saying, “I don't know how this will work out, but I still believe there is more possible for you.”

Black Community Word: Black history is filled with people who held bold expectations while living under circumstances that appeared to contradict them. Enslaved people envisioned freedom. Formerly enslaved communities built schools and churches. Civil Rights leaders imagined political and social transformation. Black entrepreneurs created institutions despite exclusion. Their expectations were not guarantees of easy victory; they were commitments to pursue possibilities that oppressive systems denied. Our ancestors did not wait until the world agreed with their humanity before acting upon it.

This Week: Identify one dream, goal, relationship, or possibility you have quietly abandoned because of disappointment. Ask whether it needs to be released—or whether it deserves a renewed, wiser, and bolder commitment.

BIG PICTURE TRUTH

Job teaches us that believing through brokenness requires three things:

GOD MAKES ROOM FOR OUR HUMANITY. You do not have to erase your pain to remain faithful.

GOD DESIRES OUR AUTHENTICITY. You do not have to manufacture explanations to protect your beliefs.

GOD WANTS OUR BOLD EXPECTATIONS. You do not have to abandon hope simply because the outcome is uncertain.

And perhaps the most important insight is that Job refuses to choose between his faith and his lived experience.

He holds them in tension.

He doesn't deny what has happened.

He doesn't pretend his friends have answers they don't possess.

And he doesn't walk away from God because he has unanswered questions.

Job's belief is not merely a statement he repeats. It is a lived conviction—a way of engaging God, himself, and his circumstances.

That's what it means to move beyond brokenness into Engaging In The Holy.

FINAL WORD

Somebody has been through enough to question everything.

You've lost people.

Lost opportunities.

Lost confidence.

Lost resources.

Lost time.

Perhaps you've even lost the version of yourself you thought you would always be.

And then somebody came along with an explanation that made you feel worse.

They told you what you should have done.

What you should have believed.

How you should have prayed.

What you must have done wrong.

But Job stands up in the middle of his suffering and reminds us:

My experience matters. My humanity matters. My voice matters. My integrity matters. And my hope still matters.

So—

GOD MAKES ROOM FOR OUR HUMANITY.

You can be wounded and still worthy.

You can be disappointed and still have dignity.

You can be confused and still belong.

GOD DESIRES OUR AUTHENTICITY.

You don't have to perform a faith that isn't honest.

Bring your questions.

Bring your grief.

Bring your unfinished understanding.

GOD WANTS OUR BOLD EXPECTATIONS.

Don't let what happened convince you that nothing else can happen.

Don't let disappointment shrink every dream.

Don't let suffering become the only story you know how to tell.

Dream Big. Because what you have experienced does not exhaust what remains possible.

Decide To Become. Become someone whose convictions are strong enough to coexist with questions, uncertainty, and difficult realities.

Demonstrate Your Power. Speak truth, pursue justice, build community, take courageous steps, and keep living toward the future you believe is possible.

Because being High And Lifted Up does not mean you never experience the valley.

It means you refuse to let the valley become the limit of your vision.

And sometimes the most powerful testimony isn't:

“I never struggled.”

It isn't:

“I never questioned.”

It isn't even:

“Everything turned out the way I wanted.”

Sometimes the testimony is simply:

“AFTER ALL I BEEN THROUGH, I STILL BELIEVE!”

Not because I have all the answers. Not because I haven't been hurt. Not because the road has been easy.

But because my experience has not exhausted my hope, my suffering has not silenced my voice, and my present circumstances have not canceled the possibility of my future.

I STILL BELIEVE!