My Favorite Word

(9/13/2026 Sermon for Huntley Community Covenant Church)

So, first off, THANK YOU for the unanimous vote to call me as your pastor! I am humbled and honored and astounded, absolutely astounded at what the LORD God has done here. Thank you for making me part of this family. As I have said many times before, I am blessed beyond all measure, far beyond what I ever thought or imagined would have possible when I told God I would go wherever He sent. I’m amazed. 

Okay, so let’s get straight on to the message before I get something in my eye and require a facial tissue or something like that…

The title of my message today is, “My Favorite Word.” Have any of you noticed that I have a favorite word? Anyone want to guess what it is?

YES! It’s HALLELUJAH! 

I LOVE that word because… well it means “Praise ye Jah” in Hebrew. Literally, Praise God by the name the Jews believed was too sacred, too holy to speak out loud! It’s a word that almost every people, every tribe,  every nation, every tongue understands. It’s virtually universal anywhere in the world!

HALLELUJAH!

And, I’m sure you’ve heard me say, quoting a pastor I heard a long time ago on the radio, that praise of the LORD creates an atmosphere the enemy cannot move through.

I thoroughly and firmly believe that there is great POWER in praise of the LORD. I have been asking God in my daily prayers for some years now to help me live a life of gratitude and praise, to take delight in Him, and I hope you don’t mind if I now pray that same thing for us as a church family.

Lord, please help us to be a church of gratitude and praise! Help us, LORD, to take delight in you! AMEN and HALLELUJAH!

And, speaking of gratitude and praise, I have just returned from a week of vacation in Itasca County, Minnesota, which is one of my favorite places in the world – and, as a missionary, you all know I’ve been to a lot of places! 

To be honest, up until Thursday of last week, I thought I had booked my stay at Cedar Point Resort on North Star Lake for Labor Day week. I’ve been doing that for years. It was only when I looked at my Google calendar on my phone that I saw it said it was scheduled for the week before I normally enjoy that annual vacation. 

(In other years, this had been a family vacation with my wife and daughter and numerous in-laws involved, but for the last couple of years, it’s been a solo vacation where I spend time with the LORD in some of the most beautiful and glorious scenery on earth. There are also fish and lakes involved so, you know, there’s a Jesus thing going on there.)

As it turns out, I had indeed scheduled it a week earlier than last year because Mike, a wonderful guy and the co-owner of the resort, had offered to do so because Labor Day came later than usual this year. 

That meant when I thought I had a week and two days to prepare and pack, I actually had only two days! Nonetheless, I managed to get everything in order and I was fully packed and ready to go at 6:00 AM on Saturday.

That is, until I stepped into the laundry room after my shower to get a pair of socks at approximately 5:47 AM and noticed a puddle on the floor in the utility room. It was coming from the pressure tank for my well.

Folks, I was thirteen minutes from walking out the door when it became obvious that my vacation would have to wait until I was done being a plumber. There was no way I was going to leave my wife with leaking plumbing for a week while I was 300 miles away. Thank God the leak started when it did instead of when I was already 300 miles away! HALLELUJAH! 

So, I got on the Menards website, saw that they had a suitable pressure tank for about $300, and headed off into town. On the drive in, I called Home Depot and Bomgaars to see if they had pressure tanks with a warranty of more than five years because my wife is ten years younger than I am and I don’t want her to have to deal with this after I have departed this life. I also would prefer not to have to deal with this again before the LORD calls me home.

Nope, every pressure tank I could find had the same five-year warranty. But, as it turns out, Bomgaar’s pressure tank was $100 cheaper than Menards – and a friend of mine named Keith was working in that department. HALLELUJAH!

Now, I knew Keith from working at MVAC and I knew that Keith, despite being very likable, intelligent, and amusing, was a devout atheist. 

So, I get to Bomgaars and Keith sets me up with a pressure tank and all the extra parts I need to hook it up, (because you always need extra parts when plumbing is involved) and then Keith introduces me to his friend and co-worker, Gary – who is a Christian Counselor.

Gary and I spent an hour in the middle of Bomgaars talking to Keith about Jesus! In the middle of it all, I look up to the heavens and say, “I SEE what you are doing! I GET IT!

HALLELUJAH AGAIN!

So, I headed back home and I got as far as Beauford when I realized I hadn’t checked the new pressure tank to make sure it had the same size fittings as the old one. It did, but they were too too short and I was going to need about six inches of galvanized one-inch pipe, so I turned around and went back, this time to Menards and while I’m there, Discount Tire calls and says my wife asked them to call me because the lawnmower tire they were fixing for my daughter needs a new tube which they don’t have but which Tractor Supply does. I am about one block from both, so I go and get the right tube and deliver it to Discount Tire – which was an easy-peasy dad errand that took me maybe ten minutes – but most assuredly would  not have been so easy for either my wife or daughter.

So, I got home and started the plumbing repairs probably three or four hours after I noticed the puddle. All went well with only one “do over” and no further trips into town necessary.

HALLELUJAH!

I left my house about nine hours behind my original “schedule” but spent the whole drive up praying for Keith and marveling at how God orchestrates His plans despite my plans. 

If that whole episode brings Keith one step closer to a relationship with Jesus Christ and eternity in heaven, I’m absolutely fine with missing a tiny slice of “vacation.”

HALLELUJAH!

And, in the midst of all of that, I was constantly thinking about and praising God for what He had done between me and this church – his Church. 

I see what you have done here, church. I suspect, no, I am relatively certain you all have conspired and prayed me into this position as your pastor! You listened when I told you our Savior, Jesus who died on the cross to take away all our sins then defeated sin, death, and the devil by rising from the dead, said if you ask for anything in His name, He will do it! I know with some degree of certainty that some, if not all of you, took that knowledge, colluded together, and came before the throne of God asking that I be your pastor!

This is NOT something I was seeking when I started filling your pulpit one Sunday a month, nor is it something I saw coming at the time. 

No, this is God Himself tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hey kid, watch this.”

HALLELUJAH!

You will remember that I told you after my first mission trip in 2015, after God poured out the indescribable enormity of His love on me and changed my life forever, I prayed, “LORD, I will go wherever you send me.” And He said, “Okay kid, watch this.”

What has happened here, between us, is part of the outflow of that moment. It is and always was, inevitable.

HALLELUJAH!

What I did not tell you at the time was that the mission trip in 2015 had a theme song. “Multiplied” by Needtobreathe was playing on Christian radio all over the country. Our team leader, Jim Levine, had been telling us in training sessions prior to the trip over and over, “God is not a God of addition, He is a God of multiplication.” That’s why I asked Tammy if she could play that song with the lyrics:

“God of mercy sweet love of mine

I have surrendered to Your design

May this offering stretch across the skies

And these Hallelujahs be multiplied.”

When we surrender to His design, when we tell God we will go wherever He sends, that we will do whatever He asks us to do, get ready because His HALLELUJAHs are going to be multiplied and amazing and glorious things are going to happen.!

In the middle of vacation week, after I had spent a beautiful morning fishing on my favorite lake up there, that song was playing as I was driving down Itasca County Highway 38. And as those lyrics played, and I thought about all God had done in my life – how He had taken me from a drug addict hippy in a pup tent under a tornado and made me a missionary and now a pastor – a PASTOR!!- the tears started to well up. 

Folks, if God can do what He did in my life, I know with absolute certainty there is nothing He cannot do!  

As a side note, if you’ve ever driven on Itasca County Highway 38, you know I had to get control of those tears pretty quickly because, despite the gorgeous scenery, that road is a roller coaster that requires clear vision and your utmost attention or there’s gonna be problems.

Okay, so moving on… As I was pondering this message, I had a mind to assign all of you mandatory homework prior to this Sunday, in that I believe all of you should watch this video, but fortunately I was granted a modicum of mental clarity, grace, and mercy and relented from that plan. (Probably not a good idea to use words like “mandatory” and assign homework so soon after you’ve just called me.) Instead, I will attempt to summarize a 20-minute You Tube video of Mark Hall’s full testimony. Mark Hall is the lead singer for Casting Crowns, one of the most popular and successful Christian musical groups ever. I love their songs, not only for the music, but for the excellent theology and commitment to Jesus and the Great Commission.

Anyway, in his testimony, Hall tells how he was diagnosed at a young age with both dyslexia and ADD. When he was age 20, he moved out of the house, moved out of the state, got married, and started ministry school in Florida. So, because he sang with his dad in church, he figured maybe he should major in music. The thing was, on the first day of school, in orientation class, he suddenly remembered he doesn’t know how to read music. And, on that first day, he was sitting with 40 other students who were the best of the best in their churches. 

The head of the music department came in and said they were going to take a test to see how much the students knew about music. As Hall explains it, “When he said the word ‘test’ it does the same thing to me the blue lights in your mirror do to you.”

Mark says he didn’t know the answer to a single question on that test, so eight minutes into his two-hour test, he wrote his name on the top of the page, walked to the front of the room, put his paper face down on the professor’s desk, and walked out of that room.

He left that room trying to think of how he was going to tell his wife and his family he was done with college on the first day, but the sidewalk led straight into this giant chapel. He sat down in the back and started stewing because he had finally been obedient and instead of people giving him cars and houses and stuff and choirs of little baby angels singing because he was obedient, all he could feel was anger and disappointment.

Eventually, the chapel fills up with five or six hundred people and these people get up on stage and they sing and play beautifully – much better than he thought he could ever do. Well, the service ends and all the people file out, but Hall is still just sitting there in the back. Eventually, he walks to the front of the empty chapel where they have turned all the lights out and there is this huge piano in front of the stage. He sits down at the piano and starts playing the only four chords he knows, the chords that sounded so cool when he used to play them in his home church, only they don’t sound cool at all anymore in this time and place. 

And Hall said he had his first fight with God.

He was torn apart because he had moved away from home, his wife had started her first day of work to pay for his education, and his parents were so proud of this great thing he was going to do for God, but he was going to quit and come home on the first day because he knew he wasn’t good enough to do any of those things all those people and God expected of him.

And he says, “That morning, God started to say to me, ‘Mark, I don’t need you. I want you. Do you think that all these fears and limitations and all these things that make you feel so small that are worrying you are worrying me?... Mark, I am going to do something in the world. I just want to know if you want to come.’”

So, he went back to school the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and six years later, he graduated from that four-year college. 

He said that thirteen years later, he found himself as a youth pastor for about 400 teenagers and, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I sit in my office sometimes and I’m thinking, well, this is it. We're going down today. There’s some committee somewhere in the church right now, they're having a meeting, and they’re gonna walk into my office and say, “Brother..” (And you know it’s bad when they say “brother.”) ‘Brother, we been talkin’ and we’re really not sure what you’re doin’ and we don’t think you do either.’ And it’s on those days that God has to remind me – and I have ‘em alot– Mark, if I’d have wanted somebody else, I’d have called somebody else. You get up there, dyslexic boy, you show the world what I’ll do through somebody that will let me. And I have spent thirteen years saying things I’m not sharp enough to say. I write songs I’m not good enough to write. I’m a part of things constantly that are so above me. I am swimming in the deep end because God doesn’t need me. He wants me.”

So, don’t let anyone tell you, Huntley Community Covenant Church, that you are too small. Don’t let anyone ever, especially the enemy of our souls, tell us that we don’t matter, that we are not good enough. 

God doesn’t need us, He wants us.

God wants each and every one of us, even this former drug addict you people prayed into being their pastor without asking him first. 

And I cannot wait to see what God does in this world with a church that will let Him. I cannot wait to see His HALLELUJAHS multiplied in and through this church!

I cannot wait to see those Holy Spirit tears well up in your eyes as God says, “Hey church, y’all watch THIS!

HALLELUJAH! 

“Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21 NLT)

AMEN!

(Photo of Lake Gunderson by author. )