“You Can Skip This”

A man approached Steven Furtick in a movie theater bathroom and said, “It’s quite possible that your church saved my life many years ago.” His son, now an adult, had been coming to Elevation Church since age five. The exchange lasted maybe thirty seconds. Furtick walked out of the theater skipping. But he caught himself: the danger of that kind of summary is that someone else might hear it and conclude their own story is broken by comparison. The man’s sentence was not his story. And that gap—between a summary and the actual experience of faith—is what Furtick builds the entire sermon around.

The gap between the waters and the walls

Furtick reads Hebrews 11:29-30: “By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land” and “By faith the walls of Jericho fell after the army had marched around them for seven days.” Two verses, two miracles. But the author skips something enormous. Between the Red Sea crossing and the fall of Jericho lies forty years of wilderness wandering. The generation that passed through the water is not the generation that saw the walls fall. All the men over age twenty died in the desert—except Joshua and Caleb. The author of Hebrews, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, simply omits the wilderness. Furtick’s thesis: “The Holy Spirit said, ‘You can skip this.’” Not because the wilderness didn’t happen, but be