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A Man After God's Heart

Series: A Kingdom Divided
February 21, 2021 - David Stockton

It’s a day for a new sermon series. We’re going to be going into the book of 1 Kings, if you want to grab a bible and turn there, or flip there or scroll there, whatever you do on your phone. 1 Kings. It’s in the Old Testament. Not everybody in the world calls it the Old Testament, but it’s definitely a part of the library of scriptures that we hold to as being very important and relevant. We think it’s inspired just like the New Testament. We’re so thankful that we have the New Testament to help us interpret the Old Testament in order to make application of it today.

We’re going to be in 1 Kings for a little while and learn from some ancient writers and some ancient prophets and see what the Lord was doing in that time. Because I think it actually is very relevant for our time today.

It’s a good time to be a Christian, even though it might not feel like it. As the world around us, at least in America, society seems to be less interested and less excited about the ways of God through the library of scriptures and Christian doctrine and Judeo-Christian ethic. It actually is a time where Christianity shines brightest, whenever there’s an adverse situation it finds itself in. I’m not saying it’s the most enjoyable for Christians. But the more adverse, usually the more powerful Christianity shows itself to be. So it’s a great time to be a Christian.

It’s a good time to be part of Living Streams. We’re kicking off a bunch of new things. We’ve got our Explore class going on right now. Some new people being added to the number of people who are knitting their lives together here. We have a bunch of Life Groups, which are our primary discipleship vehicle. We always make sure that everybody who comes on Sunday mornings for this hour, that they remember that following Christ really is not a one-hour a week deal. Being part of a church community is going to be very shallow, empty and maybe even trivial if you are only a one-hour a week type part of the community. So make sure you find other ways to connect with people outside of this. And obviously serve the Lord outside of this, as well.

That being said, 1 Kings is where we’re going. It’s going to be a fun book. The challenges that we’re facing today are real and are large, but the bride of Christ is alive and well all over the world. I got some letters in the mail this week from non-profits, Christian non-profits. I was just sitting there thinking about these and how they represent so many others—churches around town, churches around the world, Christian organizations around town, around the world that are fighting for what’s right, that are fighting for the unborn, that are fighting for justice, that are fighting to make sure our homeless, our elderly, or people with addictions or people in sex trafficking, that someone is really advocating and fighting for them.

I just think the challenges are so great and the sadness is so real, but it really is cool to see that there are so many people, you and I included, that are actually trying to see the kingdom of God come and his will be done right here on earth as it is in heaven.

So I was encouraged. I was discouraged and encouraged at the same time, if that makes sense. Okay, it’s going to be a little tight this morning. I get it. No problem. No problem.

You know I make fun of second service a lot, right? Everybody’s with me on that? Like, first service I was thanking them so much for being first service, I said, “I don’t thank the second service people for anything really.” And I’m going to say this, too. I tell people who are guest speaking here that, just because second service doesn’t laugh or give them any kind of feedback, doesn’t mean they aren’t with you. They really are.

And I know you guys are. As I was watching you worship, I was feeling like the Lord was saying, “These are people are hungry. These people want to see me move.” So I know that’s true. But sometimes I wonder with you guys. Sometimes I wonder.

Anyway, 1 Kings was written by Jeremiah, tradition tells us. Jeremiah was a prophet of God. He was actually called the Weeping Prophet, because he lived in a time of Israel and prophesied to the people in a time when they had great prosperity, but for some reason they did not really continue to serve the Lord. What Jeremiah saw—I want to put a few images in your mind—was basically like that old adage we hear all the time about the frog that you put in the boiling pot of water. I know it sounds weird. But I’ve heard, I’ve never done this because it seems a little mean. But if you take a frog and put it in a boiling pot of water, it’ll jump right out because it’s hot. But if you take a frog and put it in a cold pot of water and then you turn up the heat, it will actually die because it will never actually notice what’s happening and it will burn to death or something. People talk about it all the time as a good illustration. Man, it’s brutal.

But anyway, so that was one thing that I want you to see. That’s what was happening in Israel’s day when Jeremiah was prophesying. He’s like, “The water’s getting hotter! Do you understand? The water’s getting hotter!”

And the people were like, “Ah, Jeremiah and his hot water stuff.”

And they just never would listen until, eventually, Israel found itself in exile, taken over. The Assyrians took over the north and the Babylonians took over the south. They basically had seen their people be ripped from their own land. The temple of God was destroyed. And now they were living as slaves in another place. And Jeremiah watched all that happen.

Another image that comes to mind is, I don’t know where it came from, I feel like it’s Jack and the Beanstalk or something. You’ve got the big giant and they didn’t know how to beat the giant, so after he fell asleep they tied him up. And then, when he woke up he couldn’t do anything. And that’s the idea of this big giant that’s so powerful, but as it falls to sleep, it’s susceptible.

Which made my mind then go to Samson because I’m a Bible guy. And I was thinking about Samson who had all this power and strength and was able to deliver the people of God in great ways. But he didn’t take seriously the Nazarite vow that he had committed to. He was playing around with it. He was with Delilah. He started to even mention his hair. “If you tie my hair up I’ll be weak like anybody else.” He just kind of slowly but surely compromised. He didn’t think it was a big deal but, ultimately, I think he started to feel so secure in his own strength and wisdom that he wasn’t sure he really needed all that hair. So he told her, “If you cut my hair I’ll be weak.” Then one of the saddest verses in the Bible happened. It says he woke up, the Philistines were upon him, and he had no idea that the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him.

And Jeremiah was constantly calling to the people of God, “You’re going to wake up one day and not realize that the Spirit of the Lord has departed from you.” And it wasn’t just a spiritual thing, but it was a real, practical thing, as well, as they watched the armies besiege them and take away all their young people, and, ultimately, take away everybody to become slaves in Babylon.

Then, also, the image of Jesus when he’s teaching about the parable of the sower, and he talks about the goodness that was there and then it gets choked out by the weeds. Little by little, the choking happens until, ultimately, all the good seed, all the goodness that had been there has died out.

So this is why Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet, because he was just continuing to see this decline. So he’s writing this book probably during the time of the exile; so all of that has now happened. He prophesied against it. Now that it’s all happened, he started to write a book, the annals of the kings or the history of that time period. And he’s talking about what happens. And he talks about what kings helped the people follow the Lord and what kings didn’t help the people. And there are very few that actually helped the people follow the Lord.

And this was probably circulated after they had come back from the exile, back to Jerusalem, back to Israel to kind of build back better, so to speak. And there in that place Jeremiah said, “I want to make sure everyone knows this.” And it was circulated, this book of First and Second Kings so people would be reminded how they got to that place of exile, that they would never forget the slow and steady decline that took place. They’d take heart next time to know there were divisions; because there are divisions all over this book. It’s a nation divided, a people divided.

Then all the secularization that came, where they never stopped worshipping Yahweh, they just started adding other things. It would be like in this place; if one day you saw there was no cross there, but instead there was some other sign of some other religion up there. You would be like, “I think Living Streams might have changed a little bit. I think something’s a little different here.” And you would be right. That should be a real indicator you should go somewhere else.

But what they did is, they never took down the cross, so to speak. They just put something else over there, and maybe a little something else over there, and it just was slowly, it became this kind fo pluralistic idea. “If one God’s going to give us goodness, then how about all these other gods? Maybe we can get all the goodness they can give us.” Not realizing that the God of the Bible is a jealous God. He doesn’t want to be one of our many wives. He says, “It’s all me or I’m out.”

And this is the state of Israel at this time. The divisions include—for those of you who are bible students some of this might ring a bell and if it doesn’t, you should probably read your bible more—but Saul versus David. We have that division of the people, where Saul was a guy who kind of started out all right but then he started to care more about what the people thought than what God though. And God said, “I’m getting rid of this guy because I want someone who’s going to be in here that only cares what I think.” That’s why David was called a man after God’s heart. Even when public opinion was going the opposite way, David said, “No, we’re going this way.”

David versus Absalom. Davis was king and his own son, Absalom rose up a coup and tried to take over power. So we have that here.

Adonijah and Solomon in this time period, and that was actually in chapter 1 where David’s two sons kind of were fighting for power after David passed away.

Rehoboam versus Jeroboam. And this comes that, Solomon, after he passed away, Rehoboam was his son. And Rehoboam decided that, instead of listening to the older elders and advisers and kind of going easy on the people and easing in and earning a voice with them, he listened to the younger people who said, “If you really want to be strong, you’ve got to impose taxes and you’ve got to tell these people who’s the boss right now.” So he did that. He just imposed taxes. He tried to really be strong and the ten tribes of the north said, “Nah. We’re good.” And they just broke off and made Jeroboam their king. Super confusing. I wish they could have had different names, because I never know. Was it Jeroboam in the north or Rehoboam in the south? Come on. I mix the names up.

But Rehoboam was Solomon’s son and he maintained power over the two southern tribes; whereas Jeroboam maintained power over the northern ten tribes. Then we now have a divided kingdom, which we’ll talk more about later.

Israel versus Judah. The name of the northern ten tribes remained Israel, but name of the two southern tribes became Judah.

Jerusalem versus Samaria. Jerusalem was the capital of the southern tribes, and that’s where God was worshiped. That’s where his temple was; whereas Samaria was the capital of the northern ten tribes, and Jeroboam didn’t want his people going to worship in Jerusalem, so he built his own temple and basically his own form of worship, worshiping Yahweh but not in the ways of Yahweh. Very bizarre.

Yahweh versus Baal. Monotheism versus polytheism, like we discussed. They didn’t stop worshiping Yahweh, they just added other gods.

Do we want to be like the other nations? Or are we good with being set apart from the other nations? This is always a constant question to Christians. We don’t like being the alternative community. We don’t like being countercultural. We want to be like the other nations. We want to be cool. We want to be hip. But as soon as we do that, we lose. We lose. We lose so much.

More taxes versus less taxes was actually a big theme in this book, which is funny these days, right? You guys aren’t laughing at that? Why aren’t you laughing at that? April 15th, how are you doing?

God’s ways are old fashioned versus God’s ways are right and true, was a big debate in this time. It was a huge debate in this time, as we’ll see in just a minute.

So, ultimately, you have the nation of Israel was in slavery in Egypt for four hundred years. The Lord brings them out with a great deliverance. He gives them a land and he starts making them into a nation. And you have all this wonderful time where God is their king. But the people want to be like the other nations so they say, “Give us a man king.” God’s like, “It’s not going to be good. Men aren’t that cool. Women, you’re not that cool, either.” But he felt like they were rejecting him as king, but he said, “I’ll give you what you want.” So he gave them Saul as king. When he passed away David became king. And when he passed away Solomon became king. And then that’s where that divided kingdom. So three kings of a united kingdom and then like twenty-five different kings within the divided kingdom. And First Kings helps us understand that whole process.

Are you with me? You’re like, “Is this school or is this church?” It’s both. It’s church school, maybe. I don’t know.

I want us to notice this one more moment. Because you’ll have some of these revivals. We’re all praying for revival. We want an awakening in our America. We want awakening in our church, where people will just really run back, will catch the vision for the righteousness of God, will hunger and thirst for that above everything else so that we won’t be tossed to and fro by all the winds of doctrine and all the people claiming to have the high moral ground right now. Yes, that’s what we want.

So there were times where that took place in First and Second Kings. One of them was on the top of a mountain called Carmel. There was Mount Carmel, and they were up there. And Elijah is the prophet of Yahweh. He feels like he’s the only one left because of the gross secularization by the king and his wife Jezebel. And they basically brought in the worship of Baal as a mainstream thing.

So Elijah calls then prophets of Ball to a duel, a battle. So he’s up on the top of Mount Carmel and opposing him are four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. And all the people have gathered around, and the setup is in First Kings 18:21, it was in our video too.

Elijah went before the pope and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal is God, follow him.”

So he sets up this mighty duel. I wish I could do this, but I don’t know. But he says basically, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to both make a sacrifice, and whatever God answers by fire will demonstrate that he is the true God and we should follow him.”

So Elijah is up on this mountain and says, “You guys go first.” So the four hundred fifty prophets of Baal gather together animal sacrifice. They put together their altar and they start doing their Baal worship type stuff. They get to the point where they’re just screaming and crying out and they start cutting themselves because they want to show how sincere they were in their worship. They’re doing all these things and it just goes on and on and on.

And Elijah is sitting there watching, all the people are watching, and there’s no fire coming, nothing happening. Then Elijah says to them, “Maybe you should just scream a little louder.” Seriously, Elijah is talking trash. I didn’t know you were allowed to do that, but you are. And then that doesn’t change anything and he’s like, “Oh, you guys. Maybe he’s in the bathroom or something. Maybe just keep going because he’ll come back out if he’s in the bathroom.” I’m not joking. This stuff is in there.

And then nothing happened and eventually they give up and Elijah says, “Now my turn.” So he just puts some stones together in a very Mosaic law kind of way. He prepares the sacrifice just like ordained in the the law of Moses. Then he actually says to everyone, I don’t know why, just to show off, he says, “Why don’t you go get all the water you can find,” even though they were in a drought, “and pour it all over the sacrifice. Actually dig a trench around here and let’s fill it with water too.”

And then he just prays a real simple prayer. “God will show them? Will you show them?” And fire comes out of the sky and consumes all of the water, consumes the sacrifice. And there’s this moment, momentary sad to say, but a moment where the people’s hearts were once again turned back to the Lord. They got to see that, got to experience that. Their hearts were turned back to the Lord momentarily. Momentarily.

So there are these moments of revival that happen in here, which are so encouraging. And that’s what I’m praying for us in our day and age, that we will somehow be inspired by God to go and create moments in people’s lives where they can see the reality of the power and goodness of God. I’m not saying you should go and challenge somebody on the top of Square Peak to some sort of sacrificial fire deal. I’m saying we should listen to what the Spirit is leading us to do and we should go for it with all of our hearts. We should be bold and courageous, whatever it might be, and God will show himself faithful.

First Kings chapter 2 is where we are going to begin, because First Kings chapter 1 is kind of a weird fight. It looks like in First Kings chapter 2, as we read this, that there was a peaceful transition of power, but actually in First Kings chapter 1 you realize it wasn’t that peaceful. Then if you keep reading in chapter 2 and3, it still wasn’t that peaceful. A lot of challenge for who wants the power there.

First Kings chapter 2:

When the time drew near for David to die, he gave a charge to Solomon his son.
2 “I am about to go the way of all the earth,” he said. “So be strong, act like a man, 3 and observe what the Lord your God requires: Walk in obedience to him, and keep his decrees and commands, his laws and regulations, as written in the Law of Moses. Do this so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you go 4 and that the Lord may keep his promise to me: ‘If your descendants watch how they live, and if they walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul, you will never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.’

So this is his charge as he’s telling Solomon, “Hey, I’m about done here. And I want you to become king.” He says to him, “I’m going to go the way of all the earth.” There’s a humility there, an understanding, this is the destiny of us all, that our strength is failing, our strength is not enough. And he says to him, “I want you to observe all that the Lord has commanded you. And I want you to walk in it. I want you to obey what the Lord has commanded you. Don’t just observe it. Don’t just be a hearer, but be a doer as well. Observe all the Lord has commanded you in the law of Moses, all the decrees, all the laws, all these things.”

And as you’re reading it, you just get more and more bored. All these words. These are the most boring words in the world: decrees, commands, laws, requirements, right? Ugh. And in the law of Moses? “Oh, Dad, don’t be talking about Moses again. Moses is so old.” This is probably about four hundred or five hundred years after Moses was around, that David is charging his son as king, “Follow the way of Moses. Remember all of those words, those laws, those decrees that are found in the book of Moses, in the Torah. Observe those. Learn those. Get them into your soul. And then walk them out.”

You can imagine a young man who has grown up his whole life in a palace. All he’s ever known of Israel is that it’s a world power. Prosperity galore. Victory over all the other nations. Immense popularity for his dad, the king. And here David’s telling him, “You need to keep real close watch to all of those old, old, old laws and decrees of Moses. And not only jus observe them, but do them. Walk in them. They will be a guide for you. They will bring you to prosperity.”

And obviously I hope you get what I’m getting at here. There is a real challenge right now in our society to say, “Those things, that Judeo-Christian ethic, that library of scriptures, that’s old news. That’s antiquated. In fact, that’s oppressive.” It’s the same thing that David was saying to Solomon. “Don’t listen to that. Don’t listen to that. Maintain these things. This is what will lead you to preparing.”

And I’ve said before the Judeo-Christian ethic that has been kind of the shaping of this nation and other nations, whenever the Judeo-Christian ethic is applied to a society, it creates the most freedom and the most flourishing. And yet, for some reason, we want to get rid of it.

And David is saying, “As for me and my house, we listen, we observe, we obey these things. We don’t consider them old and antiquated. And Solomon, if you will do this, you will experience prosperity.”

Now, I know for many of us in the church, we hear that word and that sounds great. We want to prosper. But we’ve got to be so careful to interpret prosperity through the New Testament and what God is actually saying. I’m not saying that God doesn’t want to give you riches, doesn’t want to help you with the American Dream and all those things, what God has. But the prosperity promised by God has a lot more to do with the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, meekness, gentleness and self-control. It has a lot more of being able to overcome the challenges that you face, than never having to face a challenge.

Please hear me, you guys. Following Christ does not get rid of all of the challenges, but it gives you the strength, by the power of the Spirit, to overcome the challenges. And then you wake up the next day and, guess what? New challenges. Because some people are starting to think, “If I really can’t seem to get free from this thing, then maybe God isn’t real and he doesn’t really love me.”

No. God sometimes will heal you and set you free from something completely, but oftentimes he gives you the strength that you need to overcome every single day. And for those who persevere, for those who hang on, there is the reward. But the prosperity is the strength that you need. The prosperity that he gives you is found in Psalm 23.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He leads me beside still waters and green pastures. He leads me and is with me in the valley of the shadow of death. It’s not that he doesn’t ever take us through those things. My cup runs over even in the midst of those situations.

One of the things that I think is the best gift of all that he can give to an American is peace, enough peace so they actually sleep at night. It just seems to be one of the biggest banes on our society. So many of our challenges and problems are because people can’t sleep anymore. They’re too stressed out. They’re too busy, too distracted. Their brains don’t know how to shut down so they can actually sleep. That’s part of the prosperity. The Bible actually says, “He gives his beloved sleep.” You get good sleep, all of a sudden it’s like, “Hey, life’s not that bad anymore.”

It’s one of the things we really found out with the homeless community. One of the best things we could do was give them a space where they could come take a nap. They’d wake up from that nap and they could think a little clearer, feel a little stronger. They’re more at peace. We were able to do that with that house over on the west side of the campus.

But these are the prosperities that God wants to bring. And the kind of prosperity, when you’re on your death bed and you look back and these are the things you’re really thankful for. What you did in your relationship with the people that you love. That’s the prosperity he gives us. Not even to mention what happens in the next life.

But this is the call of David. And he wants Solomon to be a man after God’s own heart. Seek God. Search God. Find out what makes him happy. Get a vision for the righteousness of God. And just so you know, the law of Moses is really helpful. But don’t just get a vision for it. Then walk in it. Be obedient to it. And it’s going to take faithfulness as he says down here:

If they’ll walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul. Faithfulness. Doing the things of God real consistently. I think this is what encourages me in the church at this time. It is the power that’s represented even in just this room. If all of us will just do the little things faithfully, that will be a lot of things that will make big impact.

So God right now is calling each of you, who is his bride, to do some things. To walk in some things faithfully. And if you’ll do that, the bride will show itself strong. That’s what David is trying to get Solomon to do, to be a man after God’s own heart.

To kind of recap that, David was a man after God’s own heart when he sought to do what was right in God’s eyes more than what was right in the eyes of the people around him, or in his own eyes. So David, it’s tricky. Because, when we say David was a man after God’s own heart, he also made a ton of mistakes. But this is when he was a man after God’s own heart. When he cared about what God wanted.

And there was a challenge. Think about that story, when he’s standing before Goliath, and all of the people, all of the army is there. And David walks up there. And he just knew in that moment what God was up to, what God was thinking. Everyone else there was either scared or unsure or confused. Even the king, Saul was just like, “I don’t know what to do here.” All of the people in the army were like, “I don’t know what to do.” David’s brothers were like, “David what do you think you’re going to do? You can’t take this guy on. You just want to be out here and get in the action. Spoiled brat.”

He was the youngest. I was the youngest of three boys. They always called me a spoiled brat. I might have been.

But nobody in that whole army, nobody in all of that was catching and willing to do what God was saying to do, except for this young man named David who just took off running down that valley, flinging his little slingshot, and defeated the giant. He caught what was in God’s heart in that moment.

And that was a great thing. That’s the way he started out. But if you remember, at one point David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then tried to cover it up by murdering Uriah, her husband. Definitely not after God’s own heart. He lost his way.

But then Nathan the prophet came to him and said, “What you’ve done is wrong.” And in that moment when David’s heart was pricked, when David realized that he had been busted, at that moment he wanted to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord and he confessed and he repented.

And then another time David was taking a census and it was kind of filling him up with pride. God had told him not to number the army. And he does this. And God’s against him and people are dying. And David catches it and figures out what to do. And then he knows he’s supposed to go buy this field and make a sacrifice and do all this type of stuff. And, as he’s about to buy the field, the guy’s like, “Dude, you can just take the field. You’re the king. You don’t have to give me any money for this field.”

And he says, “No, I want to pay full price for this field. I don’t want to skimp or compromise at all in what God is asking me to do.”

So there are all these moments when David was doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord. And those were the times when he was a man after God’s own heart. And for us, that’s what we need to be doing.

The world around us is claiming the high moral ground through its clever and cunning humanistic philosophies and ideologies. But they are just castles made of sand. We need a hunger for the vision for the righteousness of God so we can hold the line by observing what the Lord God requires and walking in obedience. That is where freedom and flourishing are found. Sorry, Cardi B. The best fruit isn’t always forbidden. It just feels that way because it’s only found through a lifetime of faithfulness to God and his ways.

So that was the first way that David was a man after God’s own heart. Now let’s read this strange next passage. Verse 5. So David gives this charge to Solomon and now he’s saying:

5 “Now you yourself know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me—what he did to the two commanders of Israel’s armies, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether. He killed them, shedding their blood in peacetime as if in battle, and with that blood he stained the belt around his waist and the sandals on his feet. 6 Deal with him according to your wisdom, but do not let his gray head go down to the grave in peace.
7 “But show kindness to the sons of Barzillai of Gilead and let them be among those who eat at your table. They stood by me when I fled from your brother Absalom.
8 “And remember, you have with you Shimei son of Gera, the Benjamite from Bahurim, who called down bitter curses on me the day I went to Mahanaim. When he came down to meet me at the Jordan, I swore to him by the Lord: ‘I will not put you to death by the sword.’ 9 But now, do not consider him innocent. You are a man of wisdom; you will know what to do to him. Bring his gray head down to the grave in blood.”
10 Then David rested with his ancestors and was buried in the City of David. 11 He had reigned forty years over Israel—seven years in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem. 12 So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David, and his rule was firmly established.

So here in this interesting thing, David is giving a charge to observe and obey the things of God. Do what is right in the eyes of God. Don’t fall prey to doing what’s right in the eyes of yourself or the people. Seek first what God is having you do.

And then the second thing that I think shows kind of another picture into the life of David. He was a man after God’s own heart because he was willing to deal with the little foxes that destroy the vineyard. That phrase actually comes from Song of Solomon. Solomon actually wrote these words about the little foxes that destroy t he vineyard. And here David is basically saying, “Okay, Solomon, when you come into power, when you have the authority, you’re going to have to consistently and constantly deal with insurrection. You’re gong to have to consistently and strongly deal with divisions. You’re going to have to constantly watch out for the little things and deal with them when they’re small so they don’t cause huge problems.”

Now David did not do this well in his own house. He didn’t deal with Absalom well. He didn’t deal with the rape that happened within his own children. He didn’t deal well even in this situation, with Adonijah and Solomon and their war. But he also did deal with things often. And this is a sign of him saying, “Solomon, when you come in, there are a few things you need to deal with right away so they don’t become massive problems.”

Now Joab was his general. Joab was the person in charge of all of David’s army. But Joab’s heart had turned, and David had seen it, but David hadn’t done anything about it. So he said, “Solomon, you’ve got to make sure and deal with Joab, or you’re going to have a big problem.”

And sure enough, as you read these passages, it happened. And David in his life, we know he tended his own soul. He was quick to repent when he found out the things that were wrong, both in his own life, and in the nation around him. Both when it was his fault or somebody else’s fault. David was quick to deal with the little foxes and not let them take root.

For us, we need to be those who are watching out for the little foxes trying to destroy the vineyard of our souls, our households, or the institutions that we’re a part of. It’s so easy for us to allow certain little compromises or hold on to different sins or weights that this world offers us. We can become dull and numb to the deceiver and the destroyer and not realize our hearts are being turned away from the things of God.

It was interesting this last summer. I felt like we were really all called to search ourselves and search our institutions to see if there was racism, or systemic racism there. That’s a good thing for us to have to do, to search our souls and search our hearts. And I know a lot of people have landed in different places. But I remember in that search I didn’t see a lot of racism in my own life and I didn’t see much racism or systemic racism in the institutions I’ve been a part of, not to say those things aren’t real and those things don’t exist; but what I did find very clearly was greed and pride. I found a lot of deception. And so I’ve really spent the rest of the time just saying, “Lord, okay, help us figure some of that stuff out.”

And greed, pride and deception can lead to all kinds of things, including racism and injustice in those regards. The scary thing was I started to see some of that stuff seep into the church, as well. And so part of the motivation for this is I want us to be able to kind of go though this time, as the kings saw this decline, as they saw the idolatry kind of come and take root, I want to be able, for us as a church, to be able to go into these times and really discover what is taking root in our lives. What idolatry have we allowed to come in? So that we can name it and we can get rid of it.

That’s our call as believers, to be consecrated, to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. We have to watch out for the little foxes that are trying to take root.

So, as we conclude I want to talk about what some of those little foxes might be for you and for me. Greed shows up in little ways, a little fudging on your taxes, a little skimping on your giving to the Lord. Relying on your savings and securities instead of trusting in the Lord.

The writer of 1 Kings wanted to really make sure and help us remember that it took Solomon seven years to build the temple for God, and it took him thirteen years to build his own palace. So when Solomon was weighed in the balance by Jeremiah the prophet, he saw something that wasn’t quite right.

What God wants us to do is to build his kingdom. The reason he’s given you a brain, the reason he’s given you a body, the reason he’s given you a beat and breath, the reason he’s given you resources, talent, treasure, time, is so that you would build his kingdom. But are we doing more building of our own kingdom? It’s real easy to check. If you look at your time, if you look at your talent, if you look at your treasure, and how those are invested, it’s pretty easy to see which way you’re weighted.

And I know it might seem like, Oh, tithing is such an old thing. The New Testament doesn’t even talk about it. It talks about giving, for sure, and it’s way more than a tithe, but these simple practices defeat the greed in our lives. They keep greed from being able to take root in our lives. And I’m serious, if you think this is me just trying to get you to give to this church, please don’t. But give somewhere. Give to some church or something somewhere. I think this is a really good place and I know the integrity is really strong here, but I just know how important it is for us to fight against greed, because we are sitting in a very prosperous situation.

And we know the love of money is the root of all evil, so we ask the question, do we love money? We don’t need to ask that question. We love money. You love it. I love it. And we just have to constantly watch out and make sure it doesn’t become a first love, a love above God.

And then pride. Pride shows up in an unforgiving spirit or an unwillingness to say, “Sorry.” Pride shows up in unhealthy ambition and striving. It shows up in seeking first your kingdom and satisfaction before God and others. It shows up in hatred or belittling of others. And even if it’s just small in your life, you’ve got to pay attention to it. You’ve got to take it before the Lord.

And what’s awesome about this is the Lord has given us practices to counteract these things. For instance, worship in the place of worry. It’s always a good place to start with the scriptures. Jesus said what chokes out the good seed, the weeds that choke it out are the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth. That’s what Jesus said,

And how do you counteract the worries of this life that we’re full of? Worship. Every time you feel worry coming on, you get to your knees and you start worshiping. You remember that the big challenges or the big struggle that you face, you take it and compare it to who God is and allow that thing to shrink and become what it’s supposed to be. Worship is a powerful thing. It’s a very powerful thing. And it doesn’t just have to do with singing songs, by the way.

In the place of greed we can give. And we talked a little bit about that. If you feel like you’re a little greedy or you’re a little unsure whether you’re greedy or not, it might be a good time to start giving generously or giving faithfully or giving sacrificially.

That was one thing, as our church, we mentioned before, we qualified for the PPP, but thanks to all the giving, we were able to pay for all of our staff and not tap into our reserves. So we went through this long process and the elders decided the only we could absolutely, 100% assure ourselves that there are no little greedy foxes at all is, let’s just give it all back. So we gave it all back. And I’m not saying everyone should do that. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, as for us, that was one way that we knew we could make sure that greed was not going to have a place in Living Streams. We need to take those assessments.

And one last thing is distractions. That was something that came up. And I know the Lord has kind of checked me a little about distractions. That Wordscape. Has anybody played that little app? Dude. I’m into it for some reason. It’s just like relaxing, but then it’s not. I get all stressed out because I’m like, “I don’t know what that one word is.” And the next I knew I was playing it a lot.

That’s one silly thing, but think about all the distractions at our fingertips these days. We really need to be those who are cultivating silence and solitude, just like Jesus did. And if we’re not actively cultivating those in our lives, we’re way too distracted.

Let’s pray:

Lord, we thank you for your word that doesn’t let us stay stuck, that doesn’t let us find our way back to slavery. And I pray that we would not just hear it, but that we would really receive it deep into the fibers of our being and we would walk in it, Lord. Thank you, Jesus.

We’re going to finish with communion. But everyone’s going to take it on their own. Just want to create a little time for you and Jesus to be one on one today. To remember his broken body. To remember his shed blood. To kind of recommit your life to him or, if this is the first time you’ve ever committed your life to him you can do that by receiving the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus in this way. But talk to him about whatever little foxes might be there. Confess those things and ask him to give you the strength to overcome them. If some shame has come in through something that’s been said today, remember the blood that cleanses you and forgives you, as we sing this last song, take this time with the Lord.

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Guest User 2/14/21 Guest User 2/14/21

Extravagantly, Relentlessly Loved

Series: As For Me and My House
February 14, 2021 - Don Worcester

And if you ever get introduced, make sure it’s Veronica introducing you. So a weird praise report, I found a gift card just the other day. I don’t know if that connects to anything here, but, Praise God! I’m going to go spend it this afternoon.

Welcome to our online community. Wish you were here. But some of you are in different time zones and different zip codes. Thank you for being with us and bless you, and I hope that we’re a blessing, too.

So this weekend, some couples did a Marriage & Go experience from Living Streams. Don and Renee Worcester put that together. It’s couple that I know. Here’s what Marriage & Go is. We’re hosting it. Living Streams is hosting it between — some folks did it this weekend, but it’s going to be live on the Living Streams website until February 28. So that’s two more weeks. Here’s the deal.

If you have a chance to get away somewhere, what the Marriage & Go is designed to do is: if you can get a little time and a little space, last spring we had a whole bunch of folks who we were going to get to be with in person, and then Covid changed everything. One of the pastors that we were going to be with said, “Hey, could you possibly put something together that would be fun, engaging and helpful, and you could package it?” And I just go, “Wow, I don’t think we can. But we’ll pray about it.”

So we prayed about it. We got some other people praying with us. We got a team around us. And we started putting together some different elements, kind of with an idea that we could deliver this kind of via the internet. So if you have an internet connection, if you have wifi, we put the whole package together. So there’s teaching in there. There are activities in there. There’s other engagement things for couples. And if you can get away, there are four major sessions and if you can get somewhere, that’s awesome. But we’ve had couples that have done Marriage & Go on their back patio after their kids went to bed, over the course of a couple of nights. You can decide. I had one couple that did it in their car because they have five kids and that’s the only place they could kind of get away from their kids.

It’s going to be on the website until the 28th. Here’s the thing. If you need a little wellness shot for your marriage, this just might be a little something to just affirm and confirm good things that are happening. If you’ve got a few things going on and you’re a little. Stuck, or a little sideways, we’re going to have some conversations that could really be helpful. And if you’re just stuck and going on the rails, maybe this would just kind of give you the beginning of a fresh start. Marriage & Go. It’s on the Living Streams website. If you take a look at it, see what you think.

Okay. It’s Valentine’s Day. I want to tell you that I remembered that today was Valentine’s Day. How many people here remembered that before today, that it is Valentine’s Day. Yes. God bless you. I see your hand. Not as many from the guys. But I will tell you, the very first year we were married—Renee and I have been married twenty-five years—and the first year we were married, I got to February 14th, and quite frankly, there’s a whole bunch of things I did that day, but it did not occur to me, maybe in the back of my brain, February 14th, what is that? I don’t know. But when I walked in the door at the end of the day, and Renee had this beautiful table set, it just looked lovely, and she looked lovely, and there was a Valentine’s card right there. And I walked in, and my ADD distracted brain goes, “It’s Valentine’s Day!” Okay? It’s hitting my brain just as I’m getting a hug from my amazing, beautiful, thoughtful wife. And I kind of panicked. Okay? I mean, so busted!

I’m just looking for anything to distract. I go, “Oh, you got me a card!. Yeah, I couldn’t find a recycled card that I thought would capture my feelings, so I just wanted to share them.” I am just making stuff up. I am so totally busted. I’ve got nothing, right? And she’s got dinner and she’s got the rest of it, and I go, “Okay, so I guess in your tradition, you celebrate Valentine’s Day on the actual day. Is that what you do? You know, we’ve never even talked about this. That’s so interesting. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with, if you want to do it today. I wish we’d talked bout it.”

I mean, I am just trying to not look like what I am—a totally clueless, brand-new husband who dropped the ball. And she was so gracious. You know, she goes, “Okay. Yeah. Did you want to keep running with this whole theme, or do you just want to have a nice dinner?”

I go, “Okay. I totally forgot everything.”

She goes, “Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty clear. Okay. I love you. I’ll bet you’ll do better next year. Let’s have dinner.”

So gracious. So kind to sort of kind of just invite me in in this gracious way. You know, there’s something gentle and good about the kind of love that draws us in, even when we drop the ball. Particularly when we drop the ball. Today is St. Valentine’s Day. So when David said, “Can you preach on February 14,” my brain now, many years later, goes, “That’s Valentine’s Day.”

So I do want you to know that there really is a St. Valentine. He lived in the third century in Rome. He was a member of the clergy at that time. Claudius II was really bent on building up his forces at that time. Claudius came to this observation that bachelors fought better than married men. And so, in an effort to kind of keep his military strong, he banned marriage. He said, “None of you guys can get married. We want to keep you focused on being a soldier. Marriage gets you all distracted.” So he banned it. It was illegal in Rome during Claudio II for people to marry.

As a member of the clergy, Valentine said, “Well, I’m going to continue to marry people. If they’re in love and they’re ready to make a commitment…” He was warned to not do that. This was really against the law and Claudius had been really clear about that. He continued. He would not repent. He would not relent. He was arrested and ultimately beheaded because he just wouldn’t back down.

Here’s the thing. It wasn’t that Valentine was in love with love. He was not. He wasn’t in love with love. He was in love with God. And he felt like he was walking out and working out the call of God on his life to say, “Two people that love each other and are committed, that is a good, holy thing. I’m going to continue to do that.” He wasn’t in love with love.

He was also kind of, not necessarily, I think he thought love was awesome, I don’t know if he would have a love is love tee shirt, but he would certainly say what John tells us, that God is love. However great love may be, that he would say, “God is love.” Right? It’s not that God is loving as a quality or characteristic, that he is the very source of love. He’s the very definition of love. It’s not a quality about him, it’s actually him. He is the definition, if we want to know what it is.

Valentine sort of had this foundation that motivated him and pulled him. Romance is great. Romance kind of really took off in Europe in the 1800’s, when there was a lot of industrial revolution going on, saying, “Life is all about work.” And the enlightenment was saying, “No, life is all about thinking.” This idea of going, “Yeah, but we have hearts and relationships.” So romanticism sort of emphasized those things, it was a pretty significant movement. There is part of that in our culture. Romanticism and tenderness and affection, those are really good features of a relationship. But they’re not always a sufficient foundation for a relationship. But they’re really good features, right?

In Revelation chapter 2, John is writing to the churches and he kind of says in writing to the church at Ephesus, “You’ve been really faithful. You’ve been consistent. You’ve served. But here’s the one thing. You’ve lost your first love.” And he doesn’t say, “No big deal. DOn’t worry about it.” He actually says, “You’ve lost your first love and that kind of affection and love and those elements,.”

He goes, “I don’t want that to be expendable in your relationship. I don’t want to have a church that loses that love. If I have a church that loses love, it’s not a church. I don’t want your relationships to just be like the church at Ephesus to go, ‘We’re faithful. We’re good roommates. We’re doing this”

He goes, “How’s your first love? How’s your tenderness? How’s your connection?” Those elements that he says, “Hey, you know what? Go back. Actually repent and reconnect to that.” Because there is something about our hearts being connected that God goes, “That’s essential. That’s good. Don’t be casual to that.”

Now Valentine also lived in a very secular culture. He was a spiritual man living in a secular culture. In the secular culture of first century Rome, and probably a lot of our experience as well, there aren’t sacred things. There aren’t spiritual things. There are just things. There are just bodies. There are just needs. There are just ideas. And whatever is real in the world is just whatever we can see right here. Just a material world. So meaning, or purpose, or sacred, is really just some outside concept that’s not real.

For Valentine, as a spiritual man in a secular world, those things are real. Right? The secular culture just says, “Hey, this is just a marketplace. Love and relationships and sexuality are just an open market. We shouldn’t restrict it. We shouldn’t restrain it. We should just let it happen. We should just buy and sell.” That’s what the Romans did.

And here’s the thing. When we take things and reduce them down to just this secular world, flesh, we lose so much. It’s a reduction of what God has. If we’re working in that small world where we have to go, “Hey, go out and prove your value. Go out and prove your beauty. Go out and prove your significance.” If we’re living in a secular wold that says we’ve got to earn it, we’ve got to prove it, we’ve got to win it, we’ve got to deserve it, that can be exhausting, on any given day, to prove that you’re beautiful or valuable or smart or funny or capable or athletic. That can be exhausting that we’re constantly working for love. That’s not enough. That’s not it. The word of Christ says you don’t work for love, you work from love.

I’m going to pull something out and I want you to guess where this came from. Anybody? Yeah. You know what? I hear a bunch of right answers. Nobody said a lemon factory. That’s weird. A lemon factory. Nobody said a lemon kit. Right? Like, everybody looked and said, “Oh, that’s a lemon. It came from a lemon tree.” Right? And here’s the thing. This lemon wasn’t manufactured by my tree. The lemon tree doesn’t have to prove it’s a lemon tree. It doesn’t have to be popular. As far as I know, my lemon tree has no followers on Facebook. I don’t know where it gets its self esteem. I mean, no followers on Facebook. Right?

But the lemon tree didn’t manufacture this. Here’s the thing. I’ve never heard my lemon tree kind of god, “Whew. I’m tired.” It does not appear to be exhausted from producing lemons. The lemons are coming out of something that’s alive inside of the tree. It’s the fruit of the tree, right?

And, as far as I can tell, my lemon tree doesn’t even need lemons. Like, what does a lemon tree need lemons for? It’s producing hundreds of them. It doesn’t need them, right? And here’s the thing. The fruitfulness that comes out of our lives, you know what? It’s not for us. God produces fruit out of our lives. You go, “Well, what do we need the fruit for?” Well, there’s other people that need fruit. We just get to give it away, to go on. And there’s seeds to grow another lemon tree inside.

I’d say the manufacturing of our value, the manufacturing of our work, it goes, “prove it, show it, win it, wow us,” that’s a kind of secular pressure that comes on us. That is not the good news. There’s something very different, but it doesn’t intuitively make sense to us because Paul tells us that it’s really not of this world. Beyond this romantic notion, and beyond this secular notion, there’s this other kind of relenting worldview, this relenting truth.

It’s hard to recognize this in our world, because it’s not from here. And in Galatians 1:11& 12, the church in Galatia was struggling with some of these same things. All these alternative gospels of where the good life is. So Galatians 1:11&12:

11 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

Paul is kind of saying, if you’re really going to embrace this gospel love, this relentless love, you need to know it’s not of human origin. It won’t make sense through the framework of this culture. Romantically, practically, intellectually. It won’t make sense. It’s not from here. If you’re going to be gripped by this bigger love, it’s going to feel a little alien, because it is. Because it’s not from here. Paul goes, nobody taught me this. This wasn’t handed down from a tradition. And he didn’t learn it.

When Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” They said, “Well, some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah.” And then, here’s the big question. He looks at them and goes, “Hey, who do you say that I am?”

I think everybody freezes for just a minute on that question. “Who do you say that I am?” And then, out from Peter, who’s kind of impulsive, he goes, “You’re the Messiah. The Son of God.” And then Jesus goes, “Peter, no man taught you that. You didn’t read a book on that. You’re not in a program on that. You didn’t go to a seminar on that. You didn’t educate yourself into that position. That wasn’t an observation. That’s not a speculation.” He goes, “My Father revealed it to you. He opened up your heart to something and showed you.”

And if God gives us a new revelation, that may be the beginning of a transformation. When God takes a truth and opens it up inside of us, that’s revelation. And that can open up spaces in us that can transform us from the inside out.

What is the gospel truth? What is this bigger truth that goes beyond romance and goes beyond a secular understand? Here’s the gospel truth. And here’s why the world goes a little sideways. The gospel truth, the gospel proclamation, declaration over all of us is this: We are each so completely broken, broken on the inside, broken. And we are completely, extravagantly, relentlessly loved and pursued by God.

Well, which one is it? And you go, “It’s both.” Unless we have both, we won’t have anything. It’s both. We’re really broken. And God wants to enter the brokenness and do something beyond what we can do. And that is, in this world and in our own lives, it’s hard to picture how we can connect to our brokenness and then connect to any kind of sense of love from God. And I think our culture kind of promotes that idea. You kind of go, “Hey, if you’re broken, you’ve got to go get cleaned up and then you can maybe qualify for something. Maybe you can put in a spiritual application somewhere and see what you can get.” And that’s not the gospel, that you can clean yourself up and do it.

My oldest son works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He supervises a salvage yard. It’s a very big, active yard. They buy scrap metals and other things from all over the state, and even around the United States. But here’s the basis of a salvage yard. Whatever value all of these things had, and it’s a wide collection of things, but whatever value they originally had, they’re broken. And now they’re going to a salvage yard. They’re going to get parted out. There’s something inside those computer boards. There’s some metals you can melt down and extract. It’s an airplane engine, but it’s got all kinds of precious metals if you take it apart and pull them out.

Here’s a broken thing that maybe has a part that’s valuable. I think, because we’re broken the world tells us, “You know your best option? Just part yourself out, because you’re broken. And you know what you’re hiding. Maybe there’s a part of you that you can trade out. Maybe there’s a part of you that someone wants, but just go ahead and part yourself out.”

People sell stuff cheap at the scrap yard. You know what? Some of us have given ourselves away or sold ourselves cheap, too. And God does not look at us that way. God doesn’t take that perspective. If you didn’t hear Alec Seekins’ message last week on enemy love, man. Do yourself a favor and listen to a message on enemy love. And listen to Alec’s story about what happens when relentless love catches up to the brokenness of people. Something not of this world, right? There’s a bigger, more powerful message.

When people are just parting themselves out, when people are being torn apart and literally scrapped, that is a lie of the culture. That is a lie sometimes of our own hearts. That’s the guilt and the shame inside of us. But this bigger truth, that Jesus comes and he goes, “You know what? I’m not trying to salvage some part of you.” The gospel is not about salvage. The gospel’s about salvation.

Salvage is about picking through a broken thing and finding something valuable. But salvation is about a healing of all of us. Right? Jesus says he’s the Messiah who’s come to bind up broken hearts, not scrap them. He’s come to open our eyes to see new things. He’s come to release us from the places that we’re hurt and hiding, and he’s got the key. And he’s come to go, “You know what? I’m going to give you your life back. We’re going to start again. I’m going to restore you.” That’s salvation, not salvage. It’s good news. But that’s God’s news to us. That’s not something we can generate for ourselves.

My youngest daughter, Abigail, turned eighteen recently. I was so sad and so excited about that, because I do not know how this little baby girl got to be eighteen, but she did. And I’m excited. She has collected snow globes when we go places, which is a very fun little tradition. This particular snow globe is from Nashville. There’s a really cool giant guitar that is bigger than the skyline of Nashville. It’s very cool. We got this back.

Here’s the thing about a snow globe. Every part of a snow globe is essential and important. The globe is critical in a snow globe. It kind of matters. You need the globe. The snow is critical in a snow globe. You’ve got to have snow in a snow globe. The water lets it kind of shimmer and float and do all that. So you need the water. And the really cool icon, the really cool image in the center, man, that’s cool. That’s Nashville, and apparently it’s snowing in Nashville right now. All of it is essential.

God is not interested in salvaging part of our lives, cracking us open and taking out the middle. God goes, “Man, I gave you a body. You know what? No matter what you’ve done with your body—guess what? It’s precious to me. And I gave you a heart and I want to restore and redeem and bind it up. It’s precious. And I gave you a mind, and how you think and how you understand matters to me. I want to engage you, and I want to help you understand and think. And I gave you a soul.”

And here’s the deal. Our souls are always hungry for the light. Our souls are always hungry for the light. And there’s a lie that tells us we’re supposed to conquer sin in the dark so we can somehow get to the light. And that is a lie from the pit of hell. Scripture never asked us to conquer sin in the dark, because we can’t. It’s a lie. We’re not designed to be in the dark conquering sin. We’re designed to confess sin in the light. That’s what we’re designed for. That’s what wholeness looks like. That’s what the good news, that’s what love looks like, the love that enters that.

In 1 John 1:7-9, it says this:

7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Part of what happens, when we bring that brokenness, when we say, “I’m not going to hide this. I’m not going to try to figure this out. I’m not going to be doing this on my own and working it out so I can somehow present myself. I’m going to just say, ‘God, I’m a mess. I’m just going to open the door to your love and your grace and your mercy.’”

When we do that, when we kind of acknowledge,”You know what, I’m not doing well. This is not working out. My heart is broken. I have been hiding this.” When we open that door and the love of God floods in, something really different can happen in our lives. And part of that something is healing. And part of that something is power. And part of that something is hope. But it brings us to a different presence. It makes us present to his presence. And when we get present to his presence—which is powerful and beautiful and capable—something on the inside can really also begin to heal. It can really also begin to believe. It can really also believe to be connected, to go, “God says all of who I am is important.”

If you’ve scrapped yourself out, I want you to know, God wants you back. If somebody took something from you, God purchased it and he’s giving it back. If you gave something away and you’re carrying guilt or shame, God goes, “You know what? I brought that back to you.” Because that’s who he is. And he wants you to know who you are.

The sin and the brokenness never has the last word. God has the last word. And if he buys you back, you’re bought back. And if he says you’re clear, you’re clear. And if he says you’re good, you’re good. And if he says you’re beautiful, no matter what you’ve heard or thought or what anyone else has said, he’s right. Letting that truth get to our hearts and our lives, letting our souls have that truth, man, that opens up something beautiful.

When our kids were young, it must have been fifteen years ago because Abigail was three. She was on my hip. We went on a hike in Colorado. And we hiked back a mile or two to this waterfall. And it was a pretty good waterfall. It was coming off of a glacier. But there was a relatively shallow pond that you could walk out towards the waterfall. So we initially were just going to take a picture of the waterfall. You know. Worcesters, waterfall, cool. But Jacob and Emma started taking their shoes off. They went into the water, you know. And then they started venturing closer to the waterfall. And so, the two fo them were heading out on the waterfall, and then Abigail wanted to go. So I put her on my hip and I went out. None of us planned on going in the water. We just had our regular clothes on, but still. The waterfall, there’s something compelling about a waterfall. Something sort of like draws you in.

So we’re being drawn into this waterfall. We get all the way out to it. Jacob and Emma are doing this thing where they’re starting to touch it. And it is cold and loud and thundering. And you can see this, “I’m excited and I’m scared. This is great.” All those things. And Jacob finally turns to me and goes, “Dad, can I go in?” And I go, “Do you want to go in?” And he kind of had this “Yeah. No. Yeah. I do. I…” He goes, “Will I be okay?” And I go, “Don’t know. I’ve never been in this waterfall.” Which is another I don’t know. Right? And Emma is right on his shoulder, behind him, and he’s still pausing. “I don’t know.” Something is going to happen. Right? And then he just turns and he goes, “I’m going in!” And he steps in.

I heard the scream and then he disappeared into the waterfall. And he’s inside the waterfall somewhere and everything else. And I don’t know that he was in a long time, but he came out of the waterfall and man, he was very present. He was very alive. He was still screaming, I think, when he came out. Emma only hesitated minute. “If he can do it, I can do it. I’m going in!” She went in, screams, disappeared. Giant waterfall going on.

Abigail, the three-year-old, is watching older brothers and sisters go in. And she’s looking, and she’s got this same kind of perplexed, and I’m going, “She’s three, and I really don’t know what will happen if we go in the waterfall.” But she’s kind of got the look. And I go, “Abigail, do you want to go in the waterfall?” And she just tightens up her grip on me. She said, “Yes.” She just holds me tight. I go, “Let’s go.” And we stepped into the waterfall.

If you haven’t stepped into a Colorado glacier waterfall in a while, it’s a little brisk. A little abrupt. I think I heard myself screaming, and I think I heard Abigail screaming. And the waterfall’s coming down. It’s cold. It’s pounding. Visually, you are underneath and it is flooding you. We’re screaming. But no one can hear us. I can feel her gripping me. She just got a good grip and said, “Yeah. Let’s go in.”

Maybe you have to hold on to God a little stronger to go, “Take me in.” But here’s what happens. That’s holiness. That’s holiness that hits us and rinses us and revives us and brings us back. It’s holiness. That’s not some abstract concept. Eugene Peterson, in his book The Jesus Way, talks about what a poor definition we have of holiness. What a horrible idea we have of holiness. That it’s bland. That its stiff. That it’s restrictive. And he says in his book The Jesus Way:

But holiness is in wild and furious opposition to all such blandness. The God life cannot be domesticated or used. It can only be entered on its own terms. Holiness does not make God smaller so that he can be used in convenient and manageable projects. It makes us larger so that God can live out through us extravagantly, spontaneously. The holy is an interior fire,…

And I think of a beautiful waterfall.

…a passion for living in and for God. A capacity for exuberance in the presence of God. Holiness is the most intense experience we can ever get out of sheer life, authentic, undiluted, firsthand living, not life looked at and enjoyed from a distance.

When God’s love captures and renovates our brokenness, we’re on holy ground. We’re in a waterfall of grace and love that washes us, cleanses us, revives us. And I’ll tell you what. Things heal on hot ground. Things restore on holy ground. Things connect on holy ground. And it’s not holy boring. It’s holy awesome.

When Isaiah had his encounter with the holy in Isaiah chapter 6, he has this event. He’s going in to sacrifice to God and then the whole temple is filled with the glory of God. So he has this up-close, personal encounter with God. In Isaiah 6:5, here’s what he says. When you get that close to the waterfall. When you get that close to holy:

5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.

Isaiah is in this situation. The revelation of the glory and holiness of God is there. And he goes, “I’m a dead man.” What happens when you touch the holy? What happens when you enter the waterfall? And then he has the angel with the live burning coal coming to touch his lips.

7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

I think Isaiah thinks that coal is going to burn him up. But when God touches us with holiness, it burns up the sin in us. It burns up the guilt. It burns up the fear. Maybe he thought the holiness was going to burn him out. But it didn’t. The holiness actually animates us. It burns out everything that’s not from God, which is all the stuff we don’t need and all the stuff that doesn’t make us alive. And then he says this:

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

The guy who was terrified and said, “I’m a dead man,” after he is touched by the furious love of God, he isn’t afraid of his sin anymore. Isn’t afraid of his capacity anymore. Isn’t afraid of going anymore. And when God says, “I wonder who should go,” there’s his hand up. “Send me. Not because I’m perfect, but I am broken. I’ve been bought back by a love that’s perfect. You can send me.”

If there’s a place that you’re hiding this morning, if there’s a place that you’re stuck, a place that you’ve given away, we’re gong to have people up. Man, don’t be fighting int he dark. You’re not meant for the dark. God welcomes us to the light. We don’t have to be afraid of his grace and mercy. We can come as we are, where we are and let him minister. If you’re hiding, don’t hide. If you’re hiding, let that love come and touch you.

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Guest User 2/9/21 Guest User 2/9/21

We Will Love Our Enemies

Series: As for Me and My House

Alec Seekins

My name is Alec Seekins. Living Streams has been my home since I was three years old. Like he said, he was my youth pastor when I was a wee laddie. I was as pudgy back then, so maybe “wee” is the wrong word. I’ve been here my whole life. Up until about year ago, I spent time volunteering or working in our youth ministry, hanging out with these guys quite a bit. I spent a chunk of that time as our mission pastor as well. Living Streams is the only church my wife has ever known. She came here and to the Lord a little bit later in life.

About a year ago we quit our jobs. We packed all of our extra stuff in our parents’ spare bedrooms in their houses. We went to an island in southeast Asia, where we didn’t have any friends and we didn’t know the language—just to the follow the Lord. And I kind of followed my wife into this ministry where we were working in anti-sex trafficking, trying to connect with women and build friendships and relationships, just to see what the Lord might do. If there were some women who were hoping to get out and to see if maybe we could help them make that happen.

When we showed up for that, I think we really were prepared to experience the love of God for the victims. That’s something we had seen enough of the lord taking people that have been kicked around little bit, people that people think are too scarred and too dirty. Sinners, people that are the lowest. We had really seen the Lord do some cool stuff with people who believe that they are lower than everyone else, people who everyone else believes are lower than them.

So we expected to build those kind of mutual friendships that the Lord so loves to use. Not those “I’m up here and you’re down there” kind fo relationships, but just like real friendships, laughing and sharing life together—those things that the Lord uses to bring healing and life and fullness to everyone involved. We expected to see that. And we were shocked to see how quickly we saw that. I was talking to someone last night.

And I don’t know how much of it was the culture of where we were or how much was the Holy Spirit going before us. But we didn’t find a lot of barriers to building relationships with these women very, very quickly and to calling them friends very quickly, to celebrating birthdays and sitting down and laughing with them and playing games with them. And also, just having serious conversations with them and sharing struggles and sharing joys with these women. Like I said, I think we really were prepared to experience the love of God for the victims when we got there.

What we were not prepared for was to experience the love of God for the violators. I don’t think we were ready for that at all. I don’t think we were ready to have pimps and traffickers that we called “friend.” I don’t think we were ready to have violators that have meaning to us, that we care for. I don’t think we were ready to celebrate birthdays and exchange gifts with people who were actively engaged in something I think we could all rightly call evil. But the love of God is a lot bigger than my heart. It’s just so much bigger.

The way I’ve been thinking about it is, like in my life, I don’t know when I’m going to used to the reality that God’s love is bigger than I think it is. It feels like, every once in a while I turn a corner and I see a new facet of his love and I’m like, “Whoa. Where did that come from? There’s no way that was there before.” But also, there’s no way it hasn’t been there forever. And then I think that’s it. I’ve seen the fullness of the love of God. That’s as big as it gets. There’s no way it could be bigger than that. Then I see there’s another corner and I turn it and it’s just bigger. Eventually I hope to just figure out that his love is just bigger. I hope to be amazed but not shocked at the greatness of his love and the power of his Holy Spirit.

I didn’t say this last service, but I just want to say this. If there’s nothing else that you hear me say today, I would just say, please figure out how to hear the voice of God and then just obey and follow. Whatever that means. If that’s crazy, if it’s mundane, there’s so much richness in following the Lord. I never thought I was going to see the things that I saw the Lord do this last year, and yet I’ve seen them and it’s amazing, and it’s beautiful.

In March, as we know, things got a little weird. And on this particular island where we were, about 60% of the economy is tourism. So, as you can imagine, it dried up real quick. And these women that we had come to love and call friends, there was this bitter sweet situation for them, and for us as we engaged in a relationship with them. On the one hand it was sweet, because these women we had come to love and call friends, they were no longer being purchased quite so frequently by men who didn’t know their true value. But it was bitter because they were no longer able to purchase food quite so frequently for themselves.

So the ministry we were working with over night decided to shift gears and try to figure out how to meet this immediate physical need and, in the course of it, continue to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones. So we pivoted and starting trying to bring food to these women. And I really want to thank Living Streams, because you guys funded about 80 to 90% of the project that came out of that. And for three months, 80 women, and whoever was peripheral to their lives, every single week got these giant bags of fruit and veggies and proteins and rice. And it opened doors that literally led to actual freedom, both physical and spiritual. And I think those doors are still being walked through. So there’s no way to really even count the impact that you guys had on the kingdom.

So there was this one particular brothel that we would go to, among all the brothels that we would go to on a weekly basis. And for some reason, there we just had a lot of favor. We had more and more and more significant relationships. And our relationships were growing deeper and deeper and we were even occasionally having conversations about Jesus and about freedom in this particular brothel.

And in this brothel, there was a pimp. And we’re going to just call her name Grace, which I know might be a little surprising, but actually there’s a significant minority of the pimps who are women. And Grace had the kind of presence that you might imagine from a pimp. She had a very oppressive and heavy and aggressive presence to her. When she walked in the room, you could see shoulders kind of tighten up, and when she walked out, you would see an emotional, almost spiritual sigh of relief when she wasn’t there anymore.

And Grace was personally responsible for deceiving, trafficking, capturing and pimping out a number of our friends. And I remember on one particular day when we were there—we would often play games with the women at this location. A lot of the kind of games that we would play with the youth like Ninja, and that weird water bottle game where you throw it around, and ultimate spoons and stuff like that. And we were playing this game where we throw a water bottle around and Grace decided she wanted to join the game. So, obviously, a good number of the women who were on the fence decided they no longer wanted to play the game.

As we were playing this game, I remember connecting with Grace. And I remember feeling like the Lord was saying, “Hey, I want you to really develop this connection here.” And I saw her laughing and having fun for the first time. And she was overjoyed when she won because we let her win. Yeah. It was definitely a “let the Wookie win” kind of a situation. I just remember feeling the weird dissonance in my heart, of loving this woman who was actively engaged in oppressing and violating friends of mine. But it was the love of God and there was nothing I could do about it. Because his love is just so much bigger than my heart.

And I even realized later that day that this is the same woman who had been kind of pushing against Colleen a little bit in a weird, passive-aggressive way, walking around saying, “This is my wife,” on a day when I wasn’t around. (Which is very upsetting to hear.) And, fortunately, my wife is strong and capable and knew how to say, “Huh-uh,” in a way that didn’t rock the boat too much. But there was nothing I could do about this love that was creeping up.

Let’s rewind a little way back. I remember before shut-down there was a prayer meeting we were having. We always had these long prayer meetings before any outreach. And I felt like the Lord started to tell me that he wanted me to begin praying for pimps that they would go from being captors to liberators. So I started praying that prayer on a regular basis. I prayed it for a few months. But I really need to be honest with you guys. It didn’t matter how boldly the words were coming out of my mouth every time I prayed that prayer, there wasn’t that much bold going on on the inside.

On a really good day, all that was happening in my mind and my heart was something like, “God, I know you can do this, but you’re not going to.” And on a bad day is was more like, “God, do you do this? Are you good enough? Strong enough? Powerful enough? Real enough to do this kind of stuff? I’ll just pray anyway.”

But Jesus wasn’t joking when he talked about mustard seeds. He knew what he was saying when he said, “Just a little bit of faith can move mountains into the oceans. And just a little bit of faith can take captors and turn them into liberators.” And I’m so grateful for that reality.

So fast forward back up a couple of weeks after that interaction, playing a game with Grace, and all of a sudden at that location, we hear something crazy is going on. And we don’t know. There was some drama and we’re concerned it might have had something to do with some conversations we might have had with someone about Jesus or freedom. So we thought maybe we need to lean back a little bit. And the next thing we know, Grace and about half the women from that brothel have disappeared.

No one is responding to text messages or phone calls, and we’re super concerned about it. And then, after a few days, we hear back from a couple of women who are saying, “Hey, Grace just took us all and we’re scared and we want to go home.” And we start to get a trickle in of conversation. On one particular night, maybe a couple of weeks after they had all initially disappeared, a few people from our ministry team started hearing back from Grace and all at the women with her at the same time. They were texting and they were saying, “Hey, we want to talk. We want to meet. Can we talk right now? Not tomorrow. Not in the morning. Right now. Where we can we meet? When can we meet? Where are we meeting?”

So our friends dropped their plans for that evening and they went to meet with Grace and these women and they found that what had happened was Grace had had some sort of a disagreement with one of the other pimps, and Grace said, “I’m going to take these women and I’m going to start my own brothel.”

So she took these women and she tried to start her own brothel, but then she failed. And she had this thought, “Maybe I need to be done.” And she knew that our ministry had been an off ramp for women in the past. She knew she couldn’t wait for the morning. Her resolve might change. So they reached out and they had this meeting. Our friends began to talk with them about what freedom might look like and what Jesus looks like and what freedom in Jesus might look like. Then they began to pray. They began to worship. And the Holy Spirit came down in that room and started moving in the hearts of these women who barely even knew his name.

And the Holy Spirit planted something in Grace’s heart that night that really took root. And that oppressive spirit began to be replaced with a joy and lightness. To make a long and beautiful story—that is still very much in process—short, we were able to find a place for these women to live. We were able to find legitimate income for them. Grace was actually able to get a job with a local pastor for a few months where she was working in his Corona side gig and getting bible study and discipleship every morning along with the rest of the staff. These women got hungry for the word of God.

Grace, when we would talk about the word of God, or when we would pray or worship, she would have this weird, goofy smile on her face, and would almost rock for the joy that was in her. And we knew that this was real, because the women around Grace were starting to relax around her, and starting to feel comfortable letting her know when they were leaving, instead of trying to slip out like they were before.

And then, eventually, they started inviting us into this home to do like a little mini church with them every week to worship and pray and talk about the things that they were giving over to Jesus this week. And I got to see the power of God in a way that I’ve never seen it before, because God gave us the love for an enemy.

In Matthew 5, Jesus says this,

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

I read this passage a couple of weeks ago as I was starting to prepare for this message. And all of a sudden, what Jesus is talking about, that reward that you get—it brought a whole new light for me. I’ve known for a long time it’s not this weird, flimsy theology of prosperity gospel that you do what Jesus asks and then boom there’s a bonus at work, or a raise, or you find a bunch of miracle money. I’ve actually, some of the few legitimate miracles that I’ve experienced in my life was miracle money. And the money itself was pretty lame. The promise that God gave was way more meaningful. And I’m still holding on to that. The money disappeared years ago. It didn’t last that long. Money tends to not last long. But that promise is still sticking around.

So I started thinking that, maybe the rewards that are eternal that the Bible talks about, maybe I could just imagine them like there’s this room that the Father’s preparing for me. In that room there’s this treasure chest that’s kind of closed. And every time the Lord’s like, “Here’s a gift for you,” he hides it in that treasure chest. And one day, after Jesus comes back, I’m going to go into that room, I’m going to pop open the treasure chest and be like, “Oh, that’s the reward you gave me on that day. Oh that’s so cool. What an awesome mystery that’s not a mystery anymore.”

But I don’t even think of it that way anymore. Because I feel like I’m holding some of those rewards in my hand today. I feel like those rewards are continuing to grow in value. And there’s going to be a day when their value is going to skyrocket. When Jesus comes back to say, “Behold, I make all things new.” And the value is going to be more significant of an increase than anybody who bought stock in GameStop last year. It’s a big deal. Jesus knows what he’s doing. He’s got some good rewards for us.

And Jesus says, “What reward, if you love those who love you? Maybe they’ll buy you lunch after you buy them lunch. Maybe you show up for them at a really hard time, and later in life they come into some money and they buy you a free car. That’s pretty cool.” But lunch is gone in a couple of minutes, if you’re a fatty like me. And a car is gone in a few years.

But I have this friendship with this amazing, redeemed woman that we’re calling Grace. And I got to see the power of God at work in an enemy, in a way that I never imagined I would see the power of God. Paul elsewhere says that our battle is not against flesh and blood, it’s against spirits and principalities. Usually when we read that verse, we read it as a spiritual call to arms. And it is that. But lately, I’ve been focused on our battle is not against flesh and blood. Our enemies are not really our enemies.

I think that, if we think we have enemies that have flesh and blood, I think it’s very likely that we’ve actually been deceived by the real enemy, that our enemies are just decoy enemies. That if we think people, any people, regardless of what evil they do, or what wrong things they believe, if we think they’re the enemy, I think we’ve been deceived by the very same enemy that deceived them into believing or doing the things that we find so reprehensible. We’re missing the real fight. If evil people are our enemies, it’s the spirits that are deceiving them.

And the way we fight the real enemy is not with fists or with Facebook, but it’s with enemy love. It’s with sacrifice. It’s with turning the other cheek. It’s with walking an extra mile with an oppressive authority who’s forced you to carry their burden for one. It’s with giving our shirt to people who would steal our coat. That’s how we fight the real enemy.

I think our enemies are actually like the redemptive power of God pressed into something like potential energy. Like a spring that’s been pressed down, waiting to be released so it can come into life. Or like a battery that’s been hiding in a drawer alone, waiting to be plugged into some device of God and bring it to life. Because God is wanting to take your enemies and show off his power and his goodness in the midst of their darkness.

One of the greatest joys, I think, of my life to date, is that I have another story to share with you this morning, of another captor turned liberator. We’re going to call him Bapok. That’s just a common honorific in this particular part of the world, on this island.

Bapok, he’s a really big, bad guy. Bapok is not just a pimp who owns a decent-sized brothel in the second largest red-light district that we know of. There’s usually about 150 women working there on any given night. Bapok is also part of the association of pimps in that area. Bapok is also part of the local mafia, and he’s also a low level government enforcer. You don’t mess with Bapok for good reason.

When we started going there, early on last year, we met Bapok and we met his wife. She was really hungry for something good and clean and right in her life. So she would invite us and chat with us longer than anyone else. We would talk with her for hours. It wasn’t long before she was inviting us in for meals. It wasn’t long before both of them were asking us to pray for them over and over and over again. I’ve never prayed for anyone more than this couple, because they continually asked for it. We built relationship and we were invited to birthday parties.

Then there came a point in our relationship where we trusted them so much, and felt the next step was actually to invite them to our home, where we sleep, for a meal. And we prayed about it. We talked together, me and Colleen, and we talked to our oversights in the ministry. And we felt like, yeah, this is where the Lord was leading. Because we just loved them that much and we just trusted them that much.

And we began to see the Lord change their hearts. And we began to see the way they interacted with the women who were under them changing and holding them with more of an open hand. Letting them leave if they wanted to leave. We learned about the fact that Bapok actually had cancer, has cancer. Because of at the state of health care over there, it’s just unclear whether he’s just got months or many more years to live.

There came a day where there was a woman from another brothel in that red light district who had upset her pimp somehow, so he kicked her out on the streets and blacklisted her. She ran to Bapok for safety. And Bapok harbored her at their place. Then that other pimp took Bapok to the association of pimps to bring his grievance before them, and said, “This man is harboring a woman that I blacklisted. Do something about it.”

And Bapok addressed the association of pimps and he said this. He said, “We have been living in sin our entire lives. I don’t know how much longer mine’s going to be. How am I going to get clean?” He said, “I don’t really care what you do or say. This woman’s going to be safe with me until she’s ready to go home.” And that was the end of the situation. That woman was safe with him until she was ready to go home.

Then, a little while later, Bapok and his wife made a really significant, earth shattering decision. They decided that they were going to enable all of their women to go home. As soon as they had all gone home, they were going to close down their doors, and they were going to reopen as a community center, where kids could come and hear about Jesus, and learn English, where they could get tutoring in the morning. There’s hopes this next year to put something like a little clinic in there.

And then, a week later, the boat started rocking. And Bapok’s wife had a dream in the night. And she heard a voice after that, saying, “I have medicine for your husband.” So she got up early in the morning before the sun was up. She didn’t tell her husband where she was going, and she went to a Hindu temple to pray for a day and a half. And then, as you can imagine, that upset him. It caused some issues between the two of them. Our whole team that was heavily involved in community with them was really concerned. What’s going on? She’s hearing from these other spirits right at that time when it felt like something really good was happening.

But I felt like the Holy Spirit was saying, “You know, this isn’t another spirit she’s hearing from. She just doesn’t understand what I’m saying.”

So we went to their house and I asked her, “Would you tell me about the dream you had?”

She said, “It wasn’t just a dream. I had a dream and then I woke up and I had a waking vision. Then I heard this audible voice.”

And I said, “The Holy Spirit, I think, is the one speaking to you. So would you tell me and I’ll ask the Holy Spirit what the meaning is?”

And the dream was essentially this vision of her, this dream of her on top of this giant, beautiful valley with waterfalls and rainbows and all this kind of stuff. And it was the Holy Spirit telling her, “I’m calling you into the kingdom fo heaven. This is the kingdom of heaven and I want you to enter into it.”

And then she woke up from that and she went outside. It was still dark, like two or three in the morning. And she saw a light that had no light source. And she went to the light, and as soon as she got to the light, it disappeared. And she didn’t see a light bulb or anything that made any sense. And she was so confused. And this was the Holy Spirit saying, “You’ve been pursuing me, but that’s not how it works. I pursue you. You surrender to Jesus. You let Jesus come after you and that’s how you enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

And then the voice that she said she heard said, “I have medicine for your husband.” That’s the Holy Spirit saying, “I have medicine but it’s not necessarily for his body. I have medicine that he really wants for his spirit to be cleaned.”

And a week later, they were both in the hospital. Him with complications from his ongoing condition, and her with typhoid. One of our friends from the ministry went to go visit them. In the course of that visit, Bapok’s wife gave her life to Jesus. Right after that, so did he. And a few weeks later, it was two days before Christmas, and that former brothel hosted a Christmas party. Sixty women from the surrounding community showed up. And they heard the story of the birth of Jesus, and they heard the gospel. And they heard the testimony of one our good friends about how Jesus saved her from the sex trade, and then he saved her from sin and death. And there was weeping in that former brothel, but the kind of tears that come from hope.

Jesus is pretty powerful. Jesus has a very different way of dealing with evil than our natural inclination. Our natural inclination, our best efforts on our own, they just fall short. And they’re just lame. And they tend to just make the problem worse. You hit me in the cheek, I’m not turning the other cheek. I’m hitting you back in the face. That’s what I want to do. You come at me with a sword, I’m coming back with a sword, or a gun, if I can find one. But Jesus didn’t fight with a sword. He fought with a sacrifice.

And I know that that is really controversial right now. But it’s not new. It’s always been offensive. It’s always offensive. It has always been offensive to love the enemy. It has always been hard to turn the other cheek. It has always felt like just lying down for evil. But we’ve seen Jesus’ way start to take root in some really powerful ways. Over the last couple of hundred years, for some reason or another, there have been more and more men and women who have followed Jesus in this way of enemy love. And it has made a marked difference on goodness, righteousness and justice here on earth.

We’ve seen men and women like Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu. People like Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce, Rosa Parks. And even people like Mahatma Ghandi, who don’t follow Jesus, but just take his words really seriously. And it has made a notable difference for goodness in the world. Because the way of Jesus is powerful. Because enemy love is tapping into the love of God. And he knows what he’s talking about. He’s not messing around when he says it’s time for us to turn the other cheek. It’s time for us to love our enemies.

I have been watching through my phone this last year and the last couple of weeks, as I’ve gotten here, as this strange divide is kind of welling up around us in our culture. I’m not here at all to say there isn’t truth and there isn’t a lie, that there isn’t good ideas and good ideologies, and bad ideas and bad ideologies. But I think if we’ve landed on either side of the strange divide, I think we’ve landed on the wrong side. Because Jesus has never been on the other side of his enemies.

When Jesus showed up in the Old Testament to talk to Joshua and Joshua said, “Are your on our side or on their side?” And Jesus said, “Nah. That’s not how it works.”

When the Pharisees would ask him, “Is it this or this?” And he would say, “No, it’s that.”

When the Scribes would say, “Is it this situation or is it like that?” He would say, “You just don’t get it.”

And we’re doing the same thing right now in our culture, saying, “Is it me? Or is it me?” And Jesus is saying, “No. If you’re on the other side of your enemy, you’ve missed it completely. You should be on the same side of your enemy. Not to say you agree with them or follow them in wickedness, but you should be standing next to your enemy and loving them, even if it hurts. Even if it costs you your life.”

And if God himself would reach across that strange divide of sin and death to love us, to save us, and to even die for us, then what are we doing drawing lines in the sand that end with anything else but us standing up and saying, “Neither do I condemn you.”

Jesus has laid out a very different way.

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Guest User 1/24/21 Guest User 1/24/21

Serve the Lord

Some of the things we’ve talked about, we’re longing for this hunger for this God. And whether it’s happened or not, I love what Meister Eckhart says. He says: The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love;… It’s true. It’s wonderful. That’s what we’re praying for. But then I love this. He says: …but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing.

Series: As for Me and My House

David Stockton

Some of the things we’ve talked about, we’re longing for this hunger for this God. And whether it’s happened or not, I love what Meister Eckhart says. He says:

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love;…

It’s true. It’s wonderful. That’s what we’re praying for. But then I love this. He says:

…but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God.

I love that. It’s a little bit of ease, a little bit of comfort a little bit of saying, “It’s okay, young one. It’s okay if don’t have it all figured out. Just come close. Draw near to the Lord and he will draw near to you.”

We talked about what John Tyson says:

The soil of secularism doesn’t have the nutrients for the human heart to flourish in environments like this. We need more for times like this than our culture has the capacity to give us.

And that’s something that’s been so evident and true and on grand display last year, 2020 in particular, how there was so much energy, effort and ideas being offered, and yet there was no real satisfaction in anything that was being offered to us by our culture. That’s why we need the Lord and his word.

Then Mark Sayers, a guy from Australia who’s kind of like a cultural prophet in some ways, he describes the progressive vision fo the word that’s been inundating us as:

We want the kingdom without the King. We want all of God’s blessings—without submitting to his loving rule and reign. We want progress—without His presence. We want justice—without His justification. We want the horizontal implications of the gospel for society—without the vertical reconciliation of sinners with God. We want society to conform to our standard of moral purity—without God’s standard of personal holiness.

So there are all of these visions of what righteousness looks like, what justice looks like in our world. We’ve been told over and over and over again by many different people, “This is what justice looks like,” Then we have people saying, “No, that’s wrong. This is what justice looks like. This is what righteousness looks like.”

So what we’re saying is we don’t want to hear anything else. We want to silence our own hearts. We want to silence the world around us, because we want God to speak. We want to hear what his vision of righteousness is. We want to be like Jesus said in the Beatitudes. We want to hunger and thirst for his righteousness. We want to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness; because that’s the only righteousness that comes with the promise that you will be filled.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’re just really jumping in there. I’ve already got our next two sermon series dialed in. It’s all going to push us further into getting that vision for the righteousness of God. I’m excited about that. I’m not a planner so this is really weird for me to have the next few months all planned out. But I feel like it’s because the Lord is guiding us.

This is more personally, and as a church, as a pastor I felt there were a few things the Lord wanted us to focus on first. They come from 1 Thessalonians 5. They are:

As for me and my house, we will cultivate gratitude. Something so necessary ad we’ll see that in the scripture. And we talked about that two weeks ago.

As for me and my house, we will consecrate ourselves. We see that in Thessalonians 5. We talked about it last week. It was kind of a serious message. I had to shave my mustache because I didn’t feel like I could preach that message with a mustache. It just didn’t seem to fit for me. I’m weird, I know.

And then, today we’re going to be, As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

So 1 Thessalonians 5, let’s jump in there:

12 Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. 13 Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 14 And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. 15 Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

And then he says in this next section, what we talked about two weeks ago, cultivating gratitude:

16 Rejoice always,
Anybody joyful today? Well, you all have to be, because the Bible says.
17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances;
Does he say that because things were great in Thessalonica? No. He says that because they needed a reminder because the circumstances were rough.
for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil.
23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

Again, that last part we talked bout last week. The sanctification, what that means, the being blameless, the testing everything, avoiding evil, clinging to what is good; and then the beautiful promise at the end there is at the end of the day you’re going to fail, but you’ve connected your life to someone who is faithful beyond measure and he will do it. He will do it. It’s such a relief to fall always into the hands of God’s grace.

Now we’re going to look at this first section. Serving the Lord. This is what Paul is writing again to the people of Thessalonica. He didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them, so I think he was a little nervous as a father in the faith, as a pastor. He wanted to give them some final instructions at the end of this letter to try to help them. This is how you keep going. This is what you put into practice after what we’ve experienced together. And in this first part, he says, “Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you.”

Now some of this might be coming because t he people that were put over the people in Thessalonica were pretty new. Paul, as far as we know, only got to spend a a few months in Thessalonica. As he was doing his missionary travels, he would go to a town, he would go to a synagogue, he would preach the gospel. And everyone int he synagogue would get all fired up and half of the people would be like, “We want to hear more.” Half of the people would be like, “We want to kill you.”

He would talk to the people who want to hear more and he would kind of form a little bit of a fellowship. And they would meet regularly. In that time, over time, getting to know the people, he would recognize who had authority, or who was really getting the gospel in clarity and he would appoint them as elders or deacons in those fellowships. And they were supposed to continue on in the Lord. And then Paul would move on. But he would be able to write back letters. They would be able to interact and he would be able to support them from afar. That was kind of the rhythm he was in.

So when Paul is saying this to the people in Thessalonica, he’s probably going, “Hey, you know those two people I put in charge? You need to be okay with them. They might be new. They might not get it right. They might not be perfect, but I’m putting them in charge over you and I want you to respect those who work hard among you. I want you to respect those who admonish you.”

Now, this is a very anti-American thing, where we have to set ourselves aside and be able to live into the kingdom culture described in the scriptures. Because we rebel, right? No taxation without representation, man! Give me some tea, we’re going to throw that in the river. We have this rebel spirit. It’s been a good thing. We have this rugged individualism. In some ways it’s served us well, but in some ways it’s really, really served us poorly.

Because, if someone, especially nowadays—and I’m sorry millennials, but this is true of you—if someone was to admonish you, you would react very interestingly. You would “unfriend” them or something. It’s true within all of us, though. If someone wants to admonish us, if someone sees something that is lacking in us and brings that to attention, whether they do it in the right way or the wrong way, in our culture these days, we don’t receive any correction at all. We just rebel about it. We make excuses for it. Or we call them some sort of bad person. Or we find fault in them and we say therefore everything they say doesn’t count. It’s an absolutely foolish way to live.

Paul is saying, “You guys need to be receptive of those admonitions, those challenges that come to you.”

Then he says, “Hold them in high regard because of their work.” So the people who are working for you. You can think about this. The leaders. Whether those are church leaders—hey! —or civic leaders or you know, people within your organization. Your bosses, those type of things, employers. This is a consistent theme throughout scripture. Whether they’re getting it right or wrong, you still honor them.

One of the key commandments in the Ten Commandments, the ten boundaries that God gave his people, right at the core of the Judeo-Christian ethic is “honor your father and mother.” And then there’s a caveat: if they get it right. No, that’s not in there. It’s not. It’s just honor your father and mother.

Now, honor, obviously you have to define. It’s not do everything they tell you to do even if it’s going against God’s law. No. Absolutely not. But even if you had to go in a different direction from them, you would do it in an honorable way. We’re supposed to honor those in authority over us. There’s a lot of humility necessary for that. And we don’t do it necessarily to make those people feel good about themselves. We do it because we love Jesus. We do it because he’s worthy and he’s asked us to do it. It’s a way that we can serve the Lord.

It’s important in our day and age, right now while there’s so much animosity built up and there’s so much frustration built up. And I’m not saying that everything our leaders have been doing and saying is right. Please. No way. But we still need to figure out how to be that alternative community, that kingdom culture, that finds a way to honor those in authority over us.

Then he goes on to say, “Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.”

I asked Dan Riccio, our resident scholar to kind of unpack these things. He said these really come out to disciplining the ones who do anything unhelpful and also the ones who aren’t doing anything that is helpful. Right? You have both kinds of unhelpful. Ones who don’t do anything. But also the ones who are doing things that are unhelpful and damaging. And we need to admonish them. We need to give them a piece of our mind. There’s a time and a place for that. We need to speak out against, stand against, bring correction and discipline. It’s absolutely true.

But then he goes on to say we need to encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure nobody pays back wrong for wrong. Try to be kind to each other and everyone else. There’s this moment of, yes, we need to give people a piece of our mind, but then he almost goes into a much fuller and longer exhortation that we need to give people a piece of our shoulder.

And what I mean by that is, so often we come to people and we see some of the struggles they have, we see some of the things that they’re doing wrong and we’ll just kind of blast them. And though there is a time and a place for that, I think what overarchingly you see in the scriptures, and even in this little passage, you see what God really wants us to do is lend people our shoulder, to figure out what’s really hard for them, what burden they’re carrying. Instead of just saying, “Why are you doing that?” Or “Why is that so bad? What decisions have you made to bring you to this place?” Instead to just come alongside of them and say, “Can you put some of that burden on my shoulder and we could walk to gather for a little while?”

So there’s that little imagery. Serving the Lord, yes. There is a time to give people a piece of your mind, to give them the truth. But so often it’s much more important to give people a piece of your shoulder, to get your shoulder under the burden they’re carrying. Because then, over time, you’ll start to realize things. Walk a mile in their shoes and then you’re admonishing, or your piece of mind might change, and how you might change what you would speak to them.

That’s 1 Thessalonians talking to us about serving the Lord. Some practical things from Paul there. We have a whole Bible that’s always continuing to challenge us and call us to serve the Lord. Actually, the phrase, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” comes from way back in the Old Testament, where Joshua had led the people into the Promised Land. He formed them into a nation. It’s carrying on the work of Moses, delivering the people who were slaves into a nation. At the end of it he says for them blessings and curses. He says, “If you follow the Lord and do these things you’ll be blessed. If you don’t follow the Lord and do these things, you’ll be cursed.” So he said, “I set these things before you. But as for me and my house, we’re going to serve the Lord. We’re going to serve the Lord.”

Then you have all this time through the scriptures. Basically, think about the very beginning. What did it mean to serve the Lord for Adam and Eve, who were basically gardening. Right? Gardening and then not eating of that one tree, which didn’t work out so good.

But then you have the very next story that we kind of come across. You have a guy who’s serving the Lord, building a big boat. I guess for his family, serving the Lord was not thinking their dad or husband was an absolute fool, but kind of joining in the work.

Then you have a guy that serving the Lord for him meant leaving his father and mother’s household and the ways that would worship, and going to a place and becoming a sojourner. In some ways Abraham was the first missionary, just going to wander around and helping people know what it looked like to have a relationship with this God that he knew very little about.

And you continue on. And you have Moses. Serving the Lord meant going back to face past demons and helping to set slaves free and lead them into a Promised Land. And on and on it goes. All these different ways. The reason I’m saying this is because serving the Lord has so much creativity. There’s so much diversity. God has made you and fashioned you as a specific tool, unlike anyone else in the world. And, what the scripture tells us in Ephesians 2, he’s also formed works for you to walk in. He’s formed opportunities. He’s set things up in your life that you’re going to stumble into. And you’re going to realize you’re the only person that has been uniquely designed to actually serve in this way. God loves to see those moments when you are able to serve him in the way that he’s created you to serve.

But I can’t get up here and say that, if you really want to serve the Lord, you’ll become one of the singers. And sometimes that’s the way we feel. If you really wanted to serve the Lord, you’d be up on this platform preaching. The rest of you are just kind of so-so servers. In the scripture, the preachers? Usually not doing so well. Usually God’s having to yell at them. But each one of us is called to serve the Lord. And each one of us has to find what the Lord’s calling us to do. It’s actually a very exciting thing, a very wonderful thing.

Isaiah 58, right here in the middle of the Old Testament, we have this passage in the Message (MSG) Translation. I think this is really helpful to help us understand the heart behind serving the Lord. He says:

1-3 “Shout! A full-throated shout!
    Hold nothing back—a trumpet-blast shout!
Tell my people what’s wrong with their lives,
    face my family Jacob with their sins!
They’re busy, busy, busy at worship,
    and love studying all about me.
To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people—
    law-abiding, God-honoring.
They ask me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’
    and love having me on their side.
But they also complain,
    ‘Why do we fast and you don’t look our way?
    Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?’
    “Well, here’s why:
“The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit.

Basically, you’re seeking the Lord as kind of a genie. You kind of rubbing the lamp with your fast to get what you want instead of really submitting to the Lord.
You drive your employees much too hard.

You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
    You fast, but you swing a mean fist.
The kind of fasting you do
    won’t get your prayers off the ground.
Do you think this is the kind of fast day I’m after:
    a day to show off humility?
To put on a pious long face
    and parade around solemnly in black?
Do you call that fasting,
    a fast day that I, God, would like?
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
    to break the chains of injustice,
    get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
    free the oppressed,
    cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
    sharing your food with the hungry,
    inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
    putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
    being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on
    and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
    The God of glory will secure your passage.
Then when you pray, God will answer.
You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

That’s the kind of fast that God is after, that he longs to see us. You get on to the New Testament. You have Jesus, who comes on the scene, representing the perfect reality of what it looks like if God were to be here and to walk among us and to serve. He said he came to seek and serve. And what he says is the Spirit of the Lord was upon him and because he had anointed him to proclaim good news to the poor. He said, “He sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for he blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. “

That sounds like a lot of shoulder work to me. A lot more so than giving people a piece of his mind. And guess what? He saw clearly. And he did. He definitely stood against. He definitely spoke out against. He gave people the truth. But he got his shoulder underneath the burden of the people he walked with. It’s so amazing.

One of the most fascinating things about Jesus, I think, is when it says that the common people heard him gladly. It was like the people that have their stuff together, the people that weren’t educated, they really liked to be around him. And I think that’s fascinating because Jesus is God, totally. He knows everything. If they really could see who he was in some ways they should shudder in fear. But instead, the way he came off, full of grace and truth, it caused people to just want to be around him. I think that’s the way Christians should be, too. People that others really want to be around.

And then, James 1:27. James, the brother of Jesus, kind of sums up for us real simply what it looks like to serve the Lord, as far as he’s concerned. He says:

27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

This is kind of a joke I always say in our Explore Class—that’s a big part of what our Explore Class is—just so you know, it’s coming up soon—is to kind of help people move through a process where ultimately they’re done with those weeks and they know what God is calling them to do at this point of their life. They know what gifting the Lord has given them, and they know, maybe, how they can put those into play right now in 2021 at this church, or in this city, or whatever situation they’re in. So, if you’re not quite sure, if you have some of those questions, it would be a great class to go to.

But in there I always talk about how, at the end of this class, if you’re still not quite sure, just find some orphans and some widows and start there. Literally. I mean you’re just not going to go wrong if you go there. And if you need help finding those, we can help, for sure. But I mean, at least you could start there and you know you’re getting it right. It might be that God has something else for you, or something more specific, but that’s a great place to start. It’s a great place to start.

So, with all that being said, that’s the biblical perspective of this. The way that this has been kind of fleshed out in my life really comes down to these three words. When I think about what it means to serve the Lord, what I’ve discovered serving the Lord is, the first one is sacrifice. We actually kind of played with changing the title from “As For Me and My House We Will Serve the Lord” to “As For Me and My House We Will Figure Out What It Means to Do Sacrificial Love” but it’s a real long title. But sacrificial love is really something that we need to think about when we talk about what it means to serve the Lord. Then support. That’s when we’ll talk a little more about the shoulder. And then faithfulness. Faithfulness.

So when it comes to serving the Lord, sacrifice. That was a big deal for me. Because all of my life, growing up, until I was about eighteen years old, I was really important to myself. I mean, I still am, more so than I want, but I was one of the most arrogant, condescending individuals you could ever meet. My brothers, I have two older brothers, and they called me The Tyrant. Which is a little strange, right? Because I was small and weak. They were big and strong. And yet, still they would call me the tyrant. Because I had a lot of confidence. I had a lot of arrogance. I thought I was better and what I thought I wanted was more important than everybody else.

I had one friend. I won’t mention his name. But all my life I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him because every time we would hang out, he would start to get so uncomfortable in all these situations. But I realized, literally, what I thought was wrong with him, was actually him uncomfortable with me being so arrogant and condescending everywhere we would go. And I never realized it until later on. So, anyway… enough about me.

That was a huge shift. When I gave my life to the Lord and said, “Okay, Jesus, I want to follow you,” that was the salvation that came to my life. All of a sudden I actually was aware of others. Now, again, I know this sounds so ridiculous and horrible—and it really was. But it was like, all of a sudden, someone else’s pain mattered to me. And I cared about it.

Here, this super arrogant, self-centered, condescending individually, Jesus came and totally took over my life. I look back and this is so silly, but every Friday night when I should go try and hang out with my friends, or go and try to meet a girl or something, all I wanted to do was I wanted to go hang out with thees like fourth through sixth grade. I was working at this church and I was in charge of the fourth through sixth graders. And I just wanted them to make sure they had the funnest Friday night they could.

So I would go round up like ten of them. We’d go to Peter Piper Pizza and we’d go out there. And I thought it was so fun. I was loving it. To try to help these kids have this wonderful time. And on and on it went. I just wanted to give my life away. I just wanted to prop somebody else up. It was like this salvation had come. I just wanted to serve the Lord. And whatever they were going through was more important than what I was going through. I really did happen. This shift. And now sacrificial love was now a joy for me. I did want to decrease so the Lord could increase. It was fascinating. It was cool.

Yesterday I was watching some basketball. And I don’t know if you follow college basketball, but Baylor is like number two in the country. They’re undefeated and they’re really good and all that. They were doing an interview with one of the main guys. He’s going to go NBA and he’s going to make millions of dollars. He’s amazing. They were doing an interview with him. One of the questions this guy asked him was, “Hey, you know, we heard that on Sundays you do something very different and interesting.”

And he was like, “Yeah, yeah. I’m glad you brought that up.” What he does is, he goes and works at his church. He teaches the second and third graders every Sunday at his church. It was just so shocking for me to be sitting there and being like, “Oh, this guy. He’s so cool. This guy is so big time.” And he’s just talking about how he loves Sundays, how he just learns so much from those kids. It is just so cool to be able to do that. He feels like it’s the biggest gift in his life.

And I’m just like, “Yeah! He’s serving the Lord!” He’s actually going to have a challenge because he’s going to have a lot of other opportunities to do things. So he’s going to need to stay grounded. But he’s serving the lord. He’s serving the Lord in the face of all of those other things, which is so beautiful to see.

I remember one story too, that was so interesting when this was happening. So I had gotten serious about serving the Lord, and, like I said, I was up in Oregon, I was like a worship leader. That’s what I did all the time. Down in Phoenix, they’re like, “You’re not very good at it so we don’t want you.” But that was cool. It’s cool. So I remember I had signed up to go, they asked me at the college I was at if I would lead this concert of prayer. They needed music at this concert of prayer. And I knew it was going to be. It was basically like senior citizens, kind of going there and doing that. And I was like, “Yeah, I want to serve the Lord.”

I didn’t realize that it was Valentine’s Day. And I was invited to this party where this girl that I liked was going to be at. I didn’t know her very well, but I had been trying to get to know her. So it was this opportunity. Valentine’s Day party. And guess what? You know—same time. You know, like, am I going to go lead this concert of prayer for the senior citizens or am I going to go to this party with this girl that I wanted to get to know more?

So I decided I was going to go for the concert of prayer. And I was walking across campus and—just to add insult to injury—I was walking across campus and we crossed paths, as she was going to the party and I was going to—just randomly crossed paths. And I was like, “What the heck are you doing here?” And it was so funny just to go through that experience. But just fast forward a couple thousand years—I’m married to Brittany and I like her so much. And guess when her birthday is? Valentine’s Day! So it all worked out great for me. So now the Lord’s like, “Hmm? I got you, man. I got you.” So it was kind of fun serving the Lord.

Because, you know, when you’re young, you’re like, “If I serve the Lord he’s going to give me everything I want.” And it is true, but it’s just way down the road, way down the road. So, anyway, so sacrifice. That’s sacrifice. Think that.

If it doesn’t break your heart, it isn’t love. If it doesn’t cost you something it’s not worship. Those are important things to remember.

Support. This book, Tatoos on the Heart was super helpful for my wife and then she taught me and I read the book. Here’s what he says about serving the Lord:

Here’s what we seek. A compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry, rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

So this is that concept. He’s just realized. He works with gangsters in L.A. He calls them home boys. And he realized that, really what they needed—more than someone to tell them they’re bad and doing it wrong, which they were already very aware of—what they needed was someone to just get their shoulder under their burden and feel what it was like to be loved in that way. Then they could see life change.

Then the last thing is faithfulness. Faithfulness. 1 Corinthians 4:2 says the one thing God requires of his servants is they be found faithful. And moms and dads, what your kids need more than anything else from you is they need you to be faithful. What a friend needs more than anything else is someone who’ll be faithful. Faithfulness.

It doesn’t count as faithfulness until it goes against your desires or will. If I went to the Valentine’s party instead of the prayer service no one would have described me as super faithful. But when you’re tired of doing something and you keep doing it, that’s when it becomes faithfulness. When you’re afraid of doing something, but you do it anyway, that’s when it’s called faithfulness. When you won’t gain anything and maybe even be criticized or ridiculed for doing something, but you do it anyway, that’s faithfulness.

And as Jesus said that when we live and die seeking God’s will and his desires to be done instead of our own will and desires, one day we’re going to stand before him, and he’s going to look us in the eyes and he’s going to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your rest.”

Whether or not that’s a big deal to you now, to be able to hear those words from Jesus, I promise you, please understand that there will be a day where you will stand before Jesus and that will be the thing you long to hear more than anything you’ve ever heard before. When you stand before your Maker, who loves you so much that he served you, he gave himself to you, he sacrificed, he shows support, he’s faithful to you. And on that day, for the first time in your whole life, everything will make sense, and you will long to hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And you won’t regret one sacrifice that you made. You’ll be so thankful for every time you denied yourself for his name’s sake. Every time you got your shoulder under someone else’s burden and walked with them. Every time you served the Lord.

Just to share a little bit of a vision with you—we have a lot of opportunities for you to serve here at the church. We’re going to be laying those things out more and more. But if the Lord is stirring your heart and you know you’re not really serving the Lord, but you’d like to, please let us know. Please contact us. And we can help you. We won’t just throw you out there, but we can help you get to a place where you feel like you are serving the Lord. But also don’t need us. You can pray and see what the Lord would lead.

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Consecration

We’re going to continue in 1 Thessalonians 5. We’re in the middle of a twenty-one day season of fasting and praying for God to light a fire in our hearts that creates a hunger and a thirst for God as well as a hunger and a thirst for his righteousness. We’re doing this because Jesus promised that, if we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we’ll be filled.

Series: As For Me and My House

David Stockton

The message today that we’re going to be talking about is consecrating ourselves. I was so impressed by the Lord—and I want to say this now because we’re going to say a lot of things over the next four hours of being together (that’s a joke)—but I don’t want to miss this. Some people, I think, have forgotten that maybe ninety percent of our Christianity, ninety percent of what it means to follow is Jesus is denying yourself. It’s acknowledging that you have disordered desires that you have to say no to every single day of your life.

Jesus said, “If anyone wants to follow me, come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” It is so easy—I mean I feel like I forgot this last year, and many of us have—it’s so hard in the culture we’re living in to remember that you shouldn’t just “do you.” That will lead you to selfishness and emptiness. But you should do what Jesus is asking you to do and be who Jesus knows you can be.

It’s this challenging thing that we’re in, but denying ourselves is a huge part of our relationship with God for now. So, this message has a little bit to do with that. So, again, you should leave right now if that doesn’t super exciting to you.

I will say, denying yourself is not just a matter of God wanting you to be miserable. Denying yourself is actually a sign of your love for him. So he receives that as love for him. It’s a beautiful thing. He is worthy of that. And also, denying yourself gets you into the place where you’re going to be able to be with him forevermore. And every single thing that you’ve denied in this life will count as a reward in the life to come. And the glory that shall be revealed to be worthy to be compared with the sufferings that we go through now. These verses are in the Bible for a reason, because denying ourself is such a huge part of our relationship with God.

We’re trying to cultivate this hunger. We’re trying to stir up this hunger. I heard someone say recently, that challenged me a bunch—when the prodigal was hungry, remember the prodigal son who took all of his father’s stuff and spoiled it on licentious living, then he got to a place where he was hungry? When he was hungry, he went to the pigs. But when he was starving, he went back to the father. When I say we’re praying for a hunger, I’m not just praying for a hunger that will get us back to the pigs, I’m praying for a kind of hunger that will actually get us to go home to the father, because we’ve all gone astray.

And our world is full of counterfeit righteousness. Tables have been set before us, full of humanistic ideologies and popular political propaganda claiming to have the high moral ground, claiming that they can satisfy the hunger and solve the problems. But communism, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, progressivism—and all of their friends—have left us high and dry just like all of the societies who looked to them before us. They will never, can never satisfy the human soul and solve any of the problems that we have. Though we try to satisfy our souls with many things, we only truly live, grow and progress by feeding on God’s nutrient-rich word.

Amen? Amen? Scream ‘amen’ kind of deal I think is the only way I think we’re going to counteract the marketing and the propaganda and the populism of our day. In case that happens again, you can scream it.

Augustine said:

“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

Pascal, who liked to follow science, said:

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

And Ronald Rolheiser, who is a Catholic priests who wrote about longing, said:

“There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. Spiritualty is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.”

We have appetites. We have hunger. We have deceptive ideas in our world that play to disordered desires within us that are normalized and even celebrated in our central society. The challenge is great. The way Mark Sayers says this:

Mark Sayers describes the progressive vision of the world as “the kingdom without the King.” We want all of God’s blessings—without submitting to his loving rule and reign. We want progress—without his presence. We want justice—with his justification. We want the horizontal implications of the gospel for society—with the vertical reconciliation of sinners with God. We want society to conform to our standard of moral purity—without God’s standard of personal holiness.

Yes. That’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at. It’s a problem. It’s a challenge. And those who deny it or try to ignore it will succumb to it. We're called to consecrate ourselves.

So what do we do with the dis-ease and unquenchable desires that we have within us? Well, 1 Thessalonians 5 is Paul, who spent just a few months with these people in Thessalonica, and God did something so supernatural and wonderful that it like stoked a fire in their hearts. And they all decided that they wanted God instead of what the world offered them. They all came together as a community and Paul was teaching them. But, because of persecution, Paul had to leave.

So this young church was just a few months old and Paul had to go on to the next town. But he wrote this letter, 1 Thessalonians, to help encourage them and give them what they need so they could go forward. He tried to give them the nutrients of God’s word so they could go forward and navigate the challenges of life. And these are some final instructions as he’s kind of summing up.

He says this in 1 Thessalonians 5:

12 Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. 13 Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 14 And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. 15 Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

Then, as we talked about last week, we’re supposed to cultivate gratitude.

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil. 23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

We’ve broken this section into three weeks. Last week we talked about how to cultivate gratitude and how that can help stoke the fire within us, the hunger within us. This week we’re going to focus on verse 20 through 24, the last part, as this is some way that we can continue to make sure the Spirit is not quenched within us. And we’re going to talk about what consecration means. Then, next week, we’ll look at verse 12 through 15 and talk about what we’re going to do to serve the Lord.

So we’ve kind of housed this all as As for Me and My House. Going into 2021, we will cultivate gratitude. As for Me and My House, we will consecrate ourselves. We’ll figure out what that means for us in 2021. And As for Me and My House, we’ll serve the Lord. We’ll talk about that next week.

So, consecrate ourselves. This is one of the things that we have to do to make sure that the Spirit’s fire is not quenched within us and within the ones that God has given us. Ultimately, God has called you not to change America and make sure all the laws of the land are perfect. I’m not saying that’s a bad work. I’m not saying we shouldn’t put effort there. But what I am saying is that what God has called us to do is take care of the ones that he has given us.

Remember Jesus? Jesus came to this earth and had a big job. And yet, he was extremely small town. Extremely small town. And in the end, when he prayed in John 17, he said, “Father, I have kept the ones you have given me.” And that’s ultimately what God is calling you and me to do. And we are so connected, supposedly, with all of the federalists, nationalistic and even global situations that are in the world—and again, I’m not saying that’s wrong or that’s bad. But sometimes it can make us feel like that’s what we’re supposed to be engaging in. And we spend all our effort doing that and we get discouraged when we don’t see things go our way. We forget to do the really most important work, just to take care of the ones the Lord has given you, that are right there in your own house.

That’s why Jesus didn’t say, “Love everyone.” He said, “Love your neighbor.” And if everyone would just love their neighbor, guess what? Everyone gets the love of Christ.

So we’ve got to take care of the ones the Lord has given us. Start there and that will make a huge difference.

Just look at Jesus’ life. He took care of the ones the Lord had given him. And Christianity’s done pretty well the world over, yeah? He just took care of the ones the Lord gave him and — bam— the single most dominant force for good the world has ever seen in every area, every season of time, every age, every nationality, every language. It has been the single most dominant force for good in the world. It’s encouraging. So, if we can do that, we can take hope that God will take that and use it to make something great.

But here we have, “Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test them all.” This is something we learned last year, for sure. There were all these people claiming to speak the truth or speak what was right. And we learned how important it is for us to hold on a minute and test these things. We all got duped. We all got fooled quite a bit last year by very powerful marketing campaigns that really housed something that was more poisonous and toxic. And we had to do some research. We had to test everything. We had to develop our filters so that we could hold on to the good and reject what is evil. That’s something that we need to continue. We need to develop our filters.

How do you develop a filter so that you will not be fooled? You get to know the word of God. It’s that simple. I mean, some people say you’ve got to climb up the mountain and stare at your belly button for a little while. You could try it. I don’t know. But I know this will work. This right here will work. It’s served a lot of people for a lot of time that were in much more dire situations than us. It withstood the test of time. It’s trustworthy. It’s true. And it can help us so much filter out what is not good and what is not right. The Bible actually describes itself as a sword that can cut through joint and marrow and really get to the heart of everything. So we’ve got to know the word of God, absolutely.

“May God himself, the God of peace sanctify you through and through.” I love what Paul is saying to these people. He’s not saying, “You need to go and sanctify yourselves.” He’s saying, “I pray that God will sanctify you.” Just like when Jesus said to his disciples, “If you follow me, I will make you into fishers of men. All you have to do is stay close to me. I will do the work to make you into the person that you’re supposed to be.”

So sanctification is an important process of consecration. We need to be set apart. We need to be holy. We need to be other. We need to be alternative. We need to realize that following Jesus is going to require us to go against the grain. And it may require that more and more and more, depending on how our society goes. But that’s what we’re called to be, a peculiar people.

Then, lastly, he says, “May your whole spirit, body and soul be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus.” All of those matter. Body, soul and spirit are all extremely important. Your whole being is to be kept blameless.

Now this is tricky, because we think, “How am I going to be blameless? You don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know what I’m dealing with.” It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to God because your unrighteousness will never be more powerful than his righteousness. And through the blood of Jesus Christ, his righteousness is applied to you. How about some good news right there? The blood of Jesus, applied to your life washes out, cancels out everything. In fact, now when God sees you, he sees you as blameless, he sees you robed in the righteousness of Christ when we come to him.

And his whole goal, the work of the Spirit, the work of the word of God in our lives is to get us to the day when we go stand before Jesus, we are presented as a spotless bride. I know it’s a little weird for some of us guys, but just take the analogy. A spotless bride. Blameless. It’s what God’s plan for your life is, if you’ll hold on to him. So this is what Paul was encouraging them with.

So I want to kind of unpack consecration a little bit more. We’re going to do three things. We’re going to think biblically, which is so important for us these days. Think biblically. Think theologically. We’ve got a lot of help. A lot of people have fought some of these battles and sorted through some of this chaos before, and they’ve got some good things to say to us. And we’re going to think practically, because it’s 2021 and we’ve got to leave this place. I mean, leave the church, that’s all I’m saying. You have to walk out of this place. Not like, whoa, leave this place. Not being crazy. Test those prophecies, you know? Whatever. But think biblically, think theologically, and think practically.

First of all, biblically. It’s so important for us to be thinking biblically these days. The Bible has a lot to say about consecration. First of all—brace yourself—when I say consecration, thinking biblically, you should be thinking about circumcision. Now, it’s very rare times where any pastor is going to tell you you should be thinking about circumcision. But if you think about what God was doing in his people, he said to Abraham, “I want you to circumcise every male in your household, and this is going to be a sign that you belong to me. This is going to be a sign of my relationship with you. This is going to be part of your consecration. This is going to be part of your sanctification. I’m calling you out. I’m calling you to be different than all the other nations. The reason I’m doing it is because I want you to be an example of what it’s like to be in a relationship with me, for all of the other nations.”

So Abraham circumcised everybody, including himself. Whoa. And that circumcision carried on as a sign of God’s covenant with the nation of Israel. And there are all kinds of ramifications you can make, but absolutely, one of them is sexual. God wanted his people to be very different sexually than every other nation. Because every other nation didn’t have any boundaries as far as sexuality. Even in their worship of their gods, there was often a sexual element. But God said, “My people are going to be very different sexually.”

Sexuality is a hugely important reality for the flourishing of human society or the demise. When God created the world and there was nothing but goodness, what he did to make sure that goodness could be maintained was he created something in his image and he called it male and female, nothing else. And as soon as we start messing with male and female, we lose the greatest picture of the image of God that he gave us. And then he said that male and female, to even take this further, “I’m going to put them together in some sort of sacred, holy covenant of marriage, where they’re going to become one. And they’re going to produce family. And if everyone will just take care of their own family, then everyone will be taken care of and the goodness can be maintained.” It’s that simple.

Yet, we’re moving the boundaries. We’re wanting to change what God has set in order for our greatest freedom and our greatest flourishing. So he calls his people to consecrate themselves in what seems like very radical, even challenging, self-denial, sacrificial ways, but it’s not because he doesn’t love us. It’s because he’s creating the boundaries that we need for the greatest freedom and the greatest human floushing.

So not only think about circumcision—we’ll move on—think about Samson. Samson was called to be different, to be set apart. So he had this Nazarite vow in the scriptures, which was, he wasn’t supposed to cut his hair, he wasn’t supposed to go near any dead thing, and he wasn’t supposed to —anyone? Anyone? I’m saying that because I can’t remember the third one right now. I remembered it first service. No alcohol! He wasn’t supposed to go near any fermented thing. Whew. Almost had to quit the message right in the middle there. Just kidding. Samson. Nazarite vow.

Think about Daniel. Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego. They’re taken from their place. They’re young men. They’re pulled into Babylon and they’re getting to see what basically, you know, total indulgence looks like. Babylonian culture was powerful, luxurious, all of those things. And these young men just felt this need to consecrate themselves. They said, “We will not eat the king’s meat and we will not drink his wine.” And they consecrated themselves against all the others. And, in the end, they were shown to be wiser, stronger and faster, but they had that call to consecrate themselves. They understood the need, in that moment, that they would be completely overcome by the power and persuasion of that culture if they didn’t real quickly figure out how to cultivate hunger for God. They consecrated themselves.

In the Old Testament, think about Sabbath. Think about tithing. These were things that set apart that community, that they would give a tenth of everything that they made. They would just go and give it to the priest. They would give it to the community at large. That was so bizarre, so different. And that carried on.

And Sabbath. Every once in a while, one day a week they would just chill, and just rejoice and thank God for all that’s been given to them. And there were times where those lines were blurred in Israel’s society and it ended up causing them to go into exile. God was very serious about those things. God considered it robbery when they would not give him a tenth of what they had produced. These were things that would set them apart.

Now go to the New Testament. In the New Testament, the best thing, I think to do is to think about the book of Acts community. And, again, if this is hard for you to understand, you need to read your Bible more. I know I’m going through these things quickly, but you should be reading your Bible. You should be cultivating that in your life, so that when we talk about these things, you’re, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I know what you’re talking about. The book of Acts community.” This is basically the first church, and they were set apart. There was one time where it says that all the people around that first church were in awe and in fear of them, and none of them dared join them. I know that sounds a little weird. They weren’t saying that no one was joining them. They’re saying that people were a little unsure of what to do about them. And daily the Lord was adding to their number those that were being saved.

They were such an alternative community. They were a city on the hill. They were the salt and the light in their communities. It was tangible and evident. And the four things that stuck out were, they would gather together, all of them. And it wasn’t just gathering together that was so fascinating. What was fascinating is that they would gather together as rich and poor and everybody felt the same. They would gather together as Jew and Gentile. But they would love each other. They would gather together, though they all had different political backgrounds or ideologies, but it was no problem when they met together, because there was something that was stronger than all of those. That was the bond of the Spirit and the unity of Christ. And it was remarkable to everybody else who couldn’t get along. Can I get an amen here? You see how this is working out, right?

So the second things was they shared everything in common. Again, a further explanation of this tithing idea. They constantly brought things in together to make sure everybody was okay. They were generous. They were kind. They were not greedy. And it was a puzzle. It was confusing to all those who were trying to get ahead and get rich. And they cared for the sick and the poor. Like, literally, they would go and take care of lepers, even though, at that time they thought leprosy was contagious and could kill them, it didn’t stop them. When the plagues would hit and those type of things, they would go and get the dead and bury them, risking all of that danger. To where Roman writers were saying, basically, “Those Christians are taking better care of the Roman dead, poor and sick than we are, and we’re the empire.” Amen? Amen? Amen?

And then the last thing, and probably the most fascinating to everybody at that point that caused them to be so set apart and so different was the concept of enemy love. When the experienced persecution, hatred, disadvantage, whatever it was, they would respond with love. They would respond with the good news of Jesus Christ. Enemy love. Picture better than anywhere else when Stephen is being martyred and the religious leaders are throwing rocks at him. And they will keep throwing rocks until he’s not breathing anymore. And as the rocks are hitting them, he just cries out, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” He’s full of love for them.

It was radical. It was beautiful. It was alternative. It was different. It was set apart. It was consecrated. And it’s our inheritance. It’s our heritage to live up and into that. It’s so necessary for us to figure out consecration.

So that’s thinking biblically. Now let’s think theologically. This might be a little bit painful, but hopefully not. Theologically. Basically, when we talk about soteriology, that’s the study of salvation, we know that Jesus is the Savior. He came. To save us. But the salvation that is unpacked in the scriptures anymore through theology has three different aspects to it. Salvation that we experience with Jesus first of all is justification.

That’s what we receive. When we receive Jesus, when we confess our sins and say, “Jesus, I need you,” and we call on his name, we are saved. But the first step is justification, which basically, now God looks as you just as if you never sinned at all. His righteousness, the blood of Jesus is that powerful, that it completely wipes out all debt, all sin forevermore. Even to the extent where, if you sin in the future, bam, his price that he paid is counted for that as well. And so you are justified, you are seated in heavenly places. It’s done. Your names in the book. Over. Justification. It’s one of the greatest things to unpack and understand.

But when I hang out with you, I don’t see you that way. There is a reality. We all know inside of us, though we have been justified, though we are saved, though we know our place is in heaven, we’re all good to go with God, we look in the mirror and say, “There’s still some things wrong.” I hang out with you a little while and I’m like, “There’s some things wrong.” You get to know me and you’re like, disappointed.

Because there is another aspect to our salvation that is called sanctification. And sanctification is the journey. It’s the work of God every day in the life of a believer to renew them, renew them back into their original design, to get them back into the image of who God wants them to be. Ultimately, the image of Christ. And it’s this daily work. Sanctification. Sanctification. Where God is renewing, he’s setting us apart, he’s making us holy. And that’s the work that God does every day.

The way the Westminster Catechism says it, again, a theological document. It says sanctification is…

“…the work of God’s free grace,…”

Hallelujah! God didn’t make us figure this out. He said, “You’re not going to figure it out, so let me send my Son to do it.

…whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God,…

I just explained some of that. And catch this, this is so important:

…and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”

This is where what I said in the beginning comes into play. Ultimately, the goal of the work of the Spirit of God, yes, it’s to get you to be able to live beautifully and wonderfully and experience all that God has for you; but one of the main things that the work of the Spirit in your life is supposed to do is hep you win the battle with your disordered desires. It’s to help you deny yourself so that you’re not overcome by the sinful nature and desires that are housed still within you until the day you die or Jesus comes back.

I mean, that’s good/bad news, right? It’s bad news because the truth of the Scripture is, until the day we die we’re going to have some of these desires. We’re going to have some of these things within us that long for the things that will kill us and destroy our relationship with God.

But the good news is, you’re not alone. The good news is God puts his Spirit inside you, puts his community around you. He puts his words in you to help you combat those things so that you don’t have to succumb to those things.

And just because you have some of those disordered desires does not disqualify you from living under righteousness and being extremely fruitful in your life. And, somehow, even those disordered desires, the only reason the Lord leaves them there is because he knows they’re going to work in you a dependency on him and a sympathy for those around you, or an empathy for those around you, that’s going to be very, very fruitful.

But you’ve got to understand, there are deceptive ideas in our world that play to disordered desires within us that are normalized and being even celebrated in our sinful society. And we need that sanctification process.

The really great news is there’s one more aspect to the soteriology, the salvation, is glorification. You’ve got justification, sanctification, glorification. Glorification, summed up real easy, is when Jesus comes back or we go to be with him, no more sinful nature. No more disordered desires. We are free forevermore to just live into the righteousness and goodness of God. Amen? Amen.

Lastly, thinking practically, I’m just going to give you a little illustration here of thinking practically about consecration. Where I live, some of you have been over at my house, by where I live, there are thirteen humans, including me. Most of them are smaller. There are twelve chickens. There are two little goats. There are two giant tortoises. I think they’re still there. They’ve been underground for a while lately. There’s a bearded dragon. I don’t see him very much, but I guess he’s there.

One of the things we’ve had to do is we’ve had to build some pens, right? Chicken coop, a goat pen, built some fencing around. And we’ve done this because we’ve had animals before that haven’t made it. They haven’t made it because we have coyotes and we have bobcats and we have raccoons. They’ve got to eat too, you know?

One of the things that I’ve had to do is I’ve had to get really good at building these coops and these pens to make sure the bad guys don’t get in there to get the animals, right? And I build them, and that’s fine and all, but raccoons are smart. They’ve got opposable thumbs and they’re like, rrrrr rrrr, little by little, rrrr, rrrr, and so I have to go and do boundary maintenance. I have to continue to mend the fences. I have to continue to check and see where the holes are and build those things back up.

And I also have to do something else. I had to get a German Shepherd. It’s actually my daughter’s dog. His name is Lucky. And I leave him out there at night. He wants a job. He’s a German Shepherd. He loves jobs. And he goes out there at night and he sits in a chair. Literally, this big comfy chairs and he just sits there and watches. It’s a cartoon, but it’s my life. And we’ve got no problems. If I’ll mend the fences, if I’ll do the boundary maintenance and I’ll keep Lucky out there, we don’t have any problems. And what we’re supposed to do for our own souls and four the people that the Lord has given us, is we’re supposed to be people who do boundary maintenance.

And our society now is wanting to completely erase all of the boundaries. They think that freedom is “no boundaries.” They think that, if we really loved the chickens and the goats, we would get rid of all of those things that are holding them in. And what has happened to every society before us who’s done that, who’s tried to throw off the old, archaic, oppressive word of God and biblical boundaries—they get decimated. They get destroyed. God knows what he’s doing. He has set the boundaries in a place, not to limit our joy, but to give us the most freedom possible in this life, and to set up the greatest chance for human flourishing. But the boundaries are important.

And we, as people of God, are to be about boundary maintenance. I don’t know how to legislate righteousness. I don’t know how to vote in this or that. I mean, obviously the Democrat and Republican parties are both lost. Neither of them house the word of God. You might think one does more than another. But go ahead and talk to another Christian, and they’re going to convince you another way. We’re not building that. We’re building the Kingdom of God. And I think we should fight the federalist and nationalistic battles. We should fight for Arizona. We should fight for the things we believe in, absolutely. But, at the end of the day, what we’re measured on is what we’ve done with the ones that the Lord’s give us.

As for me and my house, we will consecrate ourselves. We will do boundary maintenance. As for me and role as a father, I will let my daughter have a phone. And I will do boundary maintenance every half hour for the rest of her life. And I do. Because there are coyotes. There are raccoons. There are bobcats. And way worse.

And it’s not that I just create these boundaries and suffocate her. But I have to figure out how to create boundaries and do boundary maintenance, and then teach her to do that for her own soul. Because, at some point, she’s gone. And if I haven’t helped her learn how to do boundary maintenance and see the beauty and wonder of it all, it doesn’t matter what I said or didn’t. And that’s what we need to be doing.

Just to unpack it a little bit more, as we’re thinking practically here. Ten Commandments. Start there. Start there. But not in King James Version. Like, start with “You shall have no other Gods before me,” and figure out what that means. “Remember the Sabbath.” Figure out what that means for you right now. “Honor your father and mother.” And on and on. Unpack those things. Those are boundaries that God has given us for human flourishing. And, ultimately, those things have become the Judeo-Christian ethic.

And the Judeo-Christian ethic is the best thing that has ever been given to a society. Wherever the Judeo-Christian ethic has been applied and embraced as a society, you have experienced freedom and human flourishing. Ever heard of Israel? Against all the opposition and challenge that they have experienced, if you go there, there is flourishing and there is freedom. And the American experiment was that same thing. Let’s apply the Judeo-Christian ethic in a Constitutional governmental form. And what has it caused? It has caused freedom and flourishing, no doubt about it.

And yet, we want to get rid of it. We want to throw it off as oppressive, abusive and archaic, and call it progressivism. As for this house, Living Streams Church, as long as I have breath in me, no. It will not live here. I don’t care if there’s two people left in this church, it will not live here. I don’t care if they shut us down. I don’t care what happens, that’s not going to happen here. We’re going to be about boundary maintenance. And we have really good boundaries, and a really kind God, who knows how to get us where we need to be. And I’m so thankful that, ultimately, I’m going to lose the breath in my lungs. And, ultimately, I can talk big, but I’m nothing. But the last verse in this section says, “The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”

So, in my daughter’s life, ultimately, I can try, but it’s a promise of my father that he’s going to do it. And it’s a promise of the father that, if you let him, he will do it.

If you’re working ninety hours a week in pursuit of the almighty dollar, understand that you move the boundaries. The boundaries in your life are in the wrong place. There may an underlying issue that’s driving you to move the boundaries in the wrong place. So boundary maintenance would involved moving the boundary back to the right place, as well as addressing the underlying heart issues that drive you to move the boundary to the wrong place.

If someone has a sexual partner outside the boundaries of scripture, the covenant of marriage, one man, one woman, then boundary maintenance would be to end the out-of-boundary relationship, deal with the issues driving you to engage in that behavior, and do the ministering of healing the heart of everyone affected by the moving of those boundaries.

None of this disqualifies you. It’s not like God said, “Hey, you moved the boundary. Sorry.” It’s just a matter of coming home. It’s just a matter of returning to the Father, and he’ll say, “Okay, let’s get the boundaries back in place. Let’s start doing the healing. Let’s get back on track.” And here we go. That’s the good news of Jesus.

Let’s pray. Let’s just bow our heads and listen in as we close. And as you’re trying to hear from the Lord, I want to read this verse and just see if something pops out as maybe the Spirit is highlighting this. It’s Galatians 5 [paraphrase]:

The things your sinful old self want is sexual sins, sinful desires, wild living, worshiping false gods, witchcraft, hating, fighting, being jealous, being angry, arguing, dividing into little groups and thinking the other groups are wrong, false teachings, wanting something someone else has, killing other people, using strong drink and wild parties, and all things like this. I told you before and I’m telling you again that those who do these things have no place in the holy nation of God. But the fruit that comes from having the Holy Spirit in our lives is love, joy, peace, not giving up, being kind, being good, having faith, being gentle and being the boss over our own desires.

Jesus, we are undone before you. As we hear this, we are reminded of how weak and frail we are against the challenges in our lives. But Lord, we don’t lose heart. We don’t despair because you, you are able and you are willing and you are for us and you are with us, no matter what we’ve done. So restore unto us the joy of our salvation and renew a right spirit within us. Create in us a clean heart, God. And show us where we’ve allowed the boundaries to be moved and help us put them back in place, Lord. We pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen.

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Guest User 1/10/21 Guest User 1/10/21

Cultivate Gratitude

We’re gong to be in Psalm chapter 42, if you want to turn there. We are going, as a church, into January fasting season for the last ten years we’ve kicked off our year with a season of fasting. Not because we hate ourselves or we’re some sort of weird-o’s. But we really believed it’s cultivated some good things in us.

Series: As For Me and My House

David Stockton

There are four questions we’re trying to answer in this season. The first is :

1. What do you want Jesus to do for you? What do you want God to do for you? You can write that down as we go through the service.

2. What are you going to do to limit the “junk food”?

If you don’t know what that’s talking about, we talked about that last week. We put up a list of things like social media, tv, news, friend group, if you’ve got a boyfriend that’s junk food you should probably take a break from that for a while, or forever.

3. What are you going to do to eliminate hurry from your life and create space?

Sometimes we just try and jam more good or Christian or self-help type stuff in there. But the point of this is to actually create more empty space for the presence of God to move in. In that regard, we talked about dedicate your lunch hour to quiet yourself before God. Quit your job. Quit the extra hours at your job. Dedicate an hour before bed. Dedicate your drive time to be silent before the Lord. Some things like that.

4. Who will you spend time with that is hungry?

If there’s somebody you know that seems to have a hunger for God, intentionally spend some time with them. Or if it’s someone that you know is in a dry spot, or actually is hungry physically or in a hurting situation. It’s amazing when you link your life with somebody like that how your prayer life or your hunger for God goes up quite a bit as you’re trying to call out to God on their behalf, not just your own behalf.

Write some things down. I think it would be a good practice for us to engage in. Then please, above all that, join us on Wednesday nights. We want to be a praying church. I know a lot of times we say, “Hey come to the church and we’re going to pray,” and you didn’t even hear me when I said that; or it didn’t sound good because there’s nothing sexy about it, there’s nothing cool about it. “Go pray at the church.” But I really think that it’s an important time. I think it’s something that blesses the Lord’s heart. And it’s good for us to be together in that way. So we’re going to be live-streaming it and we’re also going to be doing it in person. Fast on Wednesday. It just means don’t eat food. And then come pray together. Make sense? Everything else is online too, if you want to find out more details on that.

1 Thessalonians 5. We’ll start out with this little intro. There have been a lot of Sundays this past year where I’ve walked up these little stairs knowing I need to say something about some troubling news or some disturbing event that has happened during the week. I mean, 2020, so many times I walked up those stairs, going, “uh…here we go.” I’m supposed to say something that makes us all feel better after we saw something really hard or challenging. And I was hoping that was just a 2020 thing.

But this is a new year and this week brought about the same type of things. COVID is still going strong. Our political unrest erupted into troubling and disturbing violence at the Capitol building. And for us, on a personal note at Living Streams a big change is upon us with Jay launching out. So there’s some heaviness.

It was neat because, as we were downstairs praying, one of the guys was like, “If you feel like the Lord’s speaking something to you, why don’t you just say it and pray it.” Everyone was saying and praying so much, I never got to say mine. It’s true. I felt like the Lord said something to me about Nathan, the guy who’s going to be hanging out with us for a while. It was just that he has a humility, a joy and kind of this light touch that he brings into a heavy room. I was like, “Wow, that’s so encouraging.” Because I am feeling like I wanted to bring some of that into a potentially heavy room. And it’s not all up to me because now the Lord is bringing somebody who’s going to help with that.

Then, as we were worshiping, I got the sense that, “Hey, wait a second. There’s a lot of people in this room that have been doing a lot of work this week to find their own soul in a place where they’re feeling light, they’re feeling joy in the Lord, they’ve been doing that work.” Then all of a sudden, the burden was gone. It’s not up to me. It never is. I’m thankful that a lot of you are already doing this work. You’re already seeking and finding the Lord and actually sharing that.

With all that being said, I want to offer something that I know has withstood the test of time, has seen many situations like we’re experiencing, as well as much worse, and has always been reliable, helpful, relevant, solid and stabilizing. It’s God’s word. God’s word is what we need to hear right now. God’s word has been there, done that for a long time. God’s word spoke the world into existence. It took the “to-hu va-vo-hu,” the “without form and void” chaos of the world, and brought about beauty and light and order. It’s God’s word that we need in our own souls and in our city and in our country these days. And God’s word is thankfully found in the library of scripture that we’re turning to.

This guy, Jon Tyson, said this about our society, which I think is so good.

The soil of secularism [progressivism, progressive Christianity, all these things] don’t have the nutrients for the human heart to flourish in environments like this. We need more for times like this than our culture as the capacity to give us.

Can everyone say ‘amen’? I mean, if you haven’t figured out that by now, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say to you. Our world is lost. We have blind leading blind. No doubt about it. Yet, we have before us the scriptures. In 1 Peter 2 (MSG), Peter is writing to the people he cares about, the people of God he’s connected to. He says this:

13-17 Make the Master proud of you by being good citizens. Respect the authorities, whatever their level; they are God’s emissaries for keeping order. It is God’s will that by doing good, you might cure the ignorance of the fools who think you’re a danger to society. Exercise your freedom by serving God, not by breaking the rules. Treat everyone you meet with dignity. Love your spiritual family. Revere God. Respect the government.

I know there are a thousand different emotions that might stir up in you when you hear that, but guess what. Let God win. Let his word win. Submit yourself to his word. Don’t make his word submit to you. There is such a temptation in our day to do the wrong thing in this regard. God’s word. Peter is not talking to people to have it easy and rosy. They were dealing with Roman emperors and extreme persecution. And yet this is what he writes. So let’s let the word of God rule in our hearts and minds.

Then we have Paul, who is writing to this town of Thessolonica and this little church that he had helped form there. These are some final instructions he gives them. We’re going to unpack them in the next three weeks. But let’s read it right now.

1 Thessalonians 5

12 Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. 13 Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work.

Seems a little self-serving there, right? We won’t focus on this part today.

Live in peace with each other. 14 And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. 15 Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.
16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil.
23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

So in this section, I see three different things that we’re going to bring up over the next three Sundays. The first one is cultivate gratitude, so we’re going to focus on that today. Next week we’re going to focus on what it means to consecrate ourselves. It’s going to get serious. Don’t come to church next week. It’s going to be serious. If you want to just keep doing life the way you’re doing it and not have to make any changes, don’t come to church next week. Because it’s going to be serious. It’s going to be good. The last week we’re going to talk about what it means to serve the Lord in our day and age. So we’re going to unpack those things on Wednesday nights as well. This actually goes along with all of that.

Cultivate gratitude. I want to focus on verse 16, 17, 18 and 19. So “be joyful always” is what Paul is admonishing the Thessalonians to do. To be joyful always. Does anybody know what “always” in the Greek is? Always. It’s not that complicated. He’s saying, “Be joyful always.” And then he says, “and pray continually.” It’s both and. There are always going to be situations where you need to be praying. But no matter how heavy the situation is, you need to be rejoicing. Rejoicing in the Lord always.

And Paul’s not talking to a people that, again, have it made in the shade. In the Thessalonian church, there was a bustling city, it was a happening place, but the Christians were being persecuted. Ray Stedman writes in his intro to Thessalonians:

The pagans of Thessolonica were severely persecuting the Christians, threatening them and taking away their property. So these early Christians were called upon to endure hard things for the cause of Christ. In that city, sexual promiscuity was common, was even regarded as a religious rite. To live a life of chastity was to be regarded as a freak. Therefore, as is the case today, there was great pressure upon these new Christians to fall into line with the common practices of their day.

So there was a challenge to their way of life. There was a challenge to the way of the gospel, to the way of Christ. Following Jesus was difficult and persecuted. It actually cost them something in the natural and in the practical. Yet Paul says to them, “I just want you to remember to rejoice in all things.”

And Paul, who’s writing these words, we know his situation. He’s been beaten. He’s been flogged. He’s been imprisoned unjustly. He’s constantly ridiculed, even by the Christians, as being not one who should be listened to because he wasn’t one of the twelve apostles. Yet he felt called by God to be this apostle and to speak in that way. In all of his trials and troubles, he’s a person who has realized it’s so important to rejoice always. We’ve got to figure out how to cultivate gratitude in this time, in this time of challenge in our world.

And another reason, if you look through the whole of scripture, gratitude and thankfulness is such an important thing. Actually it says that we access God’s presence, we enter his gates with thanksgiving. That’s how important thanksgiving is. The Bible talks about the joy of the Lord is our strength. If we can figure out how to find the joy in the presence of the Lord, we’ll be able to rejoice and that joy somehow becomes strength for us as we go into life and go into challenge and go into heaviness and despair.

If we’re not learning to rejoice in the Lord, we’re going to be kind of working off of our own joy. And our own joy is so fleeting. It’s so conditional. Which means our strength will be fleeting and conditional, as well.

If you look into the life of Jonah. You know the guy. "Go to Nineveh and preach forty days in judgment.” And he’s like, “That’s cool. No, I’m going the opposite way to Tarsus.” He’s down in Tarsus and he’s all, “Let’s get on a boat.” And, bam. A fish and he’s inside. He’s inside this fish. In Jonah chapter 2, he kind of goes into this kind of prophetic, poetic utterance. The way it starts out, “I cried out to you from the depths of Sheol.” Basically, Jonah thought he went to hell. Based on his understanding at that day and age of what hell was. It was darkness, it was burning, it was all those things that Jesus kind of unpacked a little bit more. And where is he? He’s inside a fish, so it’s dark. He’s inside a fish, there’s a little burning. It’s called stomach acid, but he didn’t know that. He thought he had died. He thought it was over.

Yet in that place, as he goes on, he ultimately gets to the end of this poetic, prophetic utterance. He says, “Then I offered to you thanksgiving.” And like the very next verse says, “And the Lord commanded the fish to spit him out.” Somehow when his heart began to turn towards gratitude, it moved God in a way that to him right where he needed to be.

And you think about Paul. Same thing. Before he went to Thessalonica to plant this church, he was in a place called Philippi. And he had been arrested and put in prison. He and Silas were in locks and stocks and they were in the prison. They are just kind of lying there all tangled up. It says at midnight, what did they do? They started singing. “Way Maker, Miracle Worker, Promise Keeper, Light in the Darkness.” They probably sang a different song. But they started singing it out, filling the whole jail with gratitude and thanksgiving for all that God had done for them. For who Jesus was, with them right at that moment.

And what happened? An earthquake. Everything started shaking and the stocks and the locks came off and the prison doors opened. And they just kept singing. They kept singing until the Philippian jailer was about to kill himself. And they’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill out, man! We’re all still here!” And then he ends up giving his whole life to the Lord, and his family, as well.

So Paul is coming off of this. He knows the power of gratitude. He’s seen it in action. So he’s calling to the Thessalonians, “Hey I know you’re going through hard times. I know I didn’t get to spend time with you long enough. I know you’re new in faith. I know you’re new in the Lord and not sure what to do in the face of all these challenges.” But he said, “Here’s some final things. Rejoice always and pray continually.”

And then he takes it a little deeper. He says, “Give thanks in all circumstances. Just in case you weren’t sure what ‘rejoice always’ means, give thanks in all circumstances. All circumstances.” Paul is not naive. He’s not ignorant. He’s saying, “all circumstances,” because he knows some circumstances suck horribly. Give thanks in those circumstances. This is what the people of God do. This is what the followers of Christ do. They give thanks in all those circumstances.

Then, to take it even further, “for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” It’s very rare that you see that. We’re always, “God, what’s your will for my life?” There are a few times in scripture where it actually spells it out. This is God’s will for you. This is one of them. 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Give thanks in all circumstances. God’s will for you.

1 Thessalonians 4, just a chapter earlier, it says, “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified; that you should avoid sexual immorality;” Bam. Next week. Can’t talk about it now. Consecration. It’s all there. Coming at you.

1 Peter 2:15 “For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.” We read that verse already in light of all the chaos.

Then 2 Peter 3:9, it says, “It’s God’s will that no one should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” This is God’s will for us.

One of the things that is God’s will is that we are thankful. I know it seems silly. I know it seems almost New Age-y or something. There are all kinds of psychological, sociological studies that you can do that show the benefit of your own soul if you can cultivate gratitude and thanksgiving, if you can dwell on the good and think about those things. But it’s deeper than just some sort of self-help in this regard.

This is what he’s saying. Then what’s so interesting, and I think verse 19 is kind of the key to this whole section. Basically, I look at verse 19, “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire.” It’s like, if we do the things from 12 through 24, then we’ll find ourselves stoking the Spirit’s fire within us. But if we neglect these things, we’ll find the Spirit dwindling and diminishing.

That’s our hope this whole fasting season. We’re wanting to develop a hunger for God. A hunger for righteousness. We want to see the Spirit of God stoked into a bigger flame than it’s ever been in our hearts, as we go into another year that might have all headwind against us again.

Somehow, when we cultivate gratitude in our own soul, cultivate gratitude in our marriages or in our households. Yeah, I’m talking about your roommates or your friends. “Let’s take time to give thanks.” Cultivate gratitude. Stopping before you eat. Cultivating gratitude. Giving thanks. All of these things are beneficial practices. Ultimately, in our world, if we could figure out how to cultivate gratitude instead of standing against and fighting and adding to the noise—be a beautiful contribution that the church would be making to do this type of stuff.

I’ve been unpacking this. I talked about it last week a little bit. It’s a lesson that’s ongoing in my life, so I’m sorry if it seems a little confusing or redundant. Last week I talked about how my wife sat us down for prayer. My daughter, Bella, said she saw 2020 as a ship in a storm, but then 2021 she saw flowers everywhere. I was like, “Oh, that’s a nice thought.” I made some jokes about it.

But then I went home and this guy emailed me and said, “Hey, your daughter’s not just blowing smoke there. It’s actually the Bible says that, as well.” He sent me Song of Songs 2. And I can read it to you.

10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
    “Arise, my darling,
    my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
   the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
    the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
    is heard in our land.

I just know, because I’ve watched the Lord interact with my daughter, and I know this was just like a confirmation, making me realize that it wasn’t just a sentiment from an 11-year-old daughter, but it’s actually the Lord wanting to speak to this. It was so encouraging to get that. I need to put this everywhere. I need to put this in my office, in my houses, this verse, because it’s confirming.

But then Wednesday happened. I was playing basketball with these guys and they kept showing me, “Check this out, check this out.” And I was like, “That doesn’t look like flowers.” Some of those guys did not look like flowers. And you know, it was this crash between, “Maybe the Lord wasn’t really saying that. Maybe I got it wrong.” Or, “Maybe the Lord was saying that and it’s coming.”

I was wrestling this through, but then I started thinking about my daughter, Bella. And it made perfect sense to me. My daughter, Bella, when she wakes up, she doesn’t see flowers. You know what she sees when she wakes up? She sees a wheelchair. And she jumps in that thing and goes through life. Her life is full of flowers, if you ask her, though.

And then, I’ve been on dates with my daughter. So I’ll get in a wheelchair and we’ll go together. A wheelchair date. It’s kind of fun. And I’ll get to see the way people see us, the way people see her. So many people, when they see my daughter, Bella, what they see is a wheelchair. And they are the stupidest idiots in t he world. Because that is such a miniscule part of her life. She’s a chef. She has been a cheerleader. She gets up on the stage at our Christmas plays and just like, bam, steals the show. She can memorize lines. It is so crazy. I wouldn’t get in front of anybody, ever, when I was a kid. She’s been a Disney model. She’s a great swimmer. She’s a total goofball. She’s hilarious. She’s great at telling stories. And she is the sweetest, most comforting thing that you have ever met in your life.

The other day, it’s a weird other story, but we have these two goats. And I don’t know what was going on, but they were just screaming so much. And they usually don’t do that. But this day they were just screaming all the time. And I was like, I said, “Bella, could you go hang out with the goats for a little bit. I think if I go out there, it won’t help.” And she was like, “Yeah.” Because she knows. We named her Bella Rapha, which is beautiful healer. Because, although she needs healing, we know she’s going to give healing to the world. And we’ve seen it time and time again. So she went out there and I didn’t hear the goats anymore.

And we watch football. She can’t watch football games with us, at least not to the end. Because she knows one team’s going to lose. And she’s like, “They just put the camera on them for so long and I just can’t…” She can’t take it when she sees a team lose. This is who she is. And if you miss that, you’re an idiot. And it’s the same thing. She has to cultivate gratitude. When God says there’s going to be flowers everywhere, Bella believes there’s going to be flowers everywhere. It doesn’t mean that everything’s going to change for her. She’s still got challenges. But the flowers are there for those who will find it. I love that in Song of Songs. It says, “Arise and come with me.” It’s like you need to come up out of the situation you’re in and let me show you the flowers.

And I think about when Jesus said to his disciples, “Hey, guys. You’re going to go through hard times. I know you are not Romans, so you have no rights. You have oppression. I know you’re not well-to-do Jews. You’re kind of the lower class, the worthless. And you’ve left all you have to follow me. And you basically have nothing at all.” But he said, “I want you to, every once in a while, when it’s feeling really heavy, I want you to look and see the flowers.”

The best way to do that, and we’re going to finish with this, is right here. The word eucharist describes this moment, this bread and this cup. The word eucharist actually means thanksgiving. I’m not sure if you knew that. I forget it all the time, and I’m like, “I think it might,” and I look it up and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, it does.”

What we’re going to do is to cultivate some gratitude that’s not based in wishful thinking or some sort of hopeful sentiment. But this is historical reality. That God sent his Son into the world because he knew the world was stuck and lost and confused. And not only that, but we were trapped in our trespasses and sins. So Jesus came and he lived a sinless life. And this bread represents his body. Perfect. And yet it was broken. It was broken by our sin. It was broken by the anger and corruption in the world. It was broken by the attack of the devil. It was broken for us.

And as we remember this, we do remember the horrors of that day, but what we remember is that Jesus did it because he loved us. And he did it so that we could be made whole. So with a grateful heart, let’s take this bread.

Jesus, we do. We take this and we remember what you did for us. And we are grateful.

And he didn’t just make us whole through his broken body, but he allowed his blood to flow, to wash us clean, so that we could stand before the Father without any fear, without any shame, and know we would be received.

So Jesus, we remember with gratitude, with joy, with thankfulness, that you have washed us clean of all of our sins.

Let’s take the cup.

And now, this is a time for you to spend some more time with Jesus. You can sing to him, if that’s what you want to do. You can sit down and write some of the commitments you want to make to him. You can come forward for prayer. We’ll have some people up here for prayer. But don’t leave this place without really pressing in to the Lord and see what he has for you.

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Guest User 1/3/21 Guest User 1/3/21

What Are You Hungry For?

Series: As For Me and My House

David Stockton

We’re gong to be in Psalm chapter 42, if you want to turn there. We are going, as a church, into January fasting season. For the last ten years we’ve kicked off our year with a season of fasting. Not because we hate ourselves or we’re some sort of weird-o’s. But we really believed it’s cultivated some good things in us.

So what we’re going to do going into this next year, is we’re going to focus the whole month of January, I’m kind of giving some vision and perspective for it today. But then next Sunday we’re going to start 21 days of a fasting season. So, for sure, what we want everybody to do is join us on Sundays. And I’m going to be helping us get a real vision for the righteousness of God, and kind of what God’s been putting on my heart.

We’ve got these booklets that are going to guide us. You can pick one up on the way out today. Twenty-one days of just kind of some thoughts broken up into three sections. The messages for the next three weeks, I’m going to start with January 10, talking about, “As for me and my house, we will cultivate gratitude.” We’re going to try to cultivate gratitude as we go forward. We have some biblical backing for that, why we would pick that.

The next thing will be, “As for me and my house, we’re going to consecrate ourselves this year.” So we’re going to talk about what it means to consecrate ourselves in the bliblical perspective and narrative, as well as hopefully bring in some application to today.

And the third thing we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Again, biblical backing for that and what that could mean for us going forward, so that we can kind of start off with some sure footing on some solid ground as we go into the rest of the year.

In addition to the Sunday mornings, on Wednesday nights we’re going to be gathering everyone in person who is healthy and comfortable with that. We’re going to be broadcasting over a livestream for some prayer nights. So, on Wednesday, we’re asking everyone who’s a part of Living Streams’ family—it’s probably the worst way to start out the year if you’re trying to grow a church, but we’re trying to grow the church, not necessarily grow a church—we’re going to start off, Wednesdays we’re going to ask everybody to fast from food all day and then join us here on Wednesday nights. We’re going to have some soup at 6:00 and at 7:00 we’re going to have a prayer time. We’re going to pray further into each of these things that we’re discussing. It should be a good time.

So, Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, no eating on Wednesdays, if you want to do that, if you’re able to do that. If not, talk to me and we can figure some things out. But also, as you’ll see at the end of this message, for those twenty-one days, we’re asking you to think about some other things that you could adapt into your life that would be considered some sort of fasting or whatever, as we go forward, so we can cultivate a hunger for God. That’s our goal through all of this, to become hungry for God.

So what are you hungry for in 2021? It’s not third service, so it shouldn’t be food quite yet. What are you hungry for in 2021? A new job because you lost your job? Are you hungry for some healing or a vaccination? Are you hungry for some Acai bowls? Because I’ve been eating those lately. Those are good. They’re like forty dollars a pop, but they are delicious and you feel so good.

Are you hungry for some pad Thai? Anybody seen that new Postmates commercial … besides me? It’s like some elderly living community commercial but then they’re just joking. They’re like, “Wouldn’t you like to come and live here and have some Pad Thai?” And they just kind of subliminally put …. It’s hilarious. I love pad Thai too. Or how about nacho fries? Come on, you’ve seen that one. Yeah? You craving those nacho fries?

Or maybe it’s better to frame this, what are you longing for after 2020? Maybe you’re not even ready to really think about what you want 2021, but what are you longing for? Maybe it’s some good news, some safety, security, some peace, release of the tension, maybe some stock in toilet paper or something like that. Or, as you’re considering your appetites, your longings, your desires going into this new year, do you have desires you wish would go away? That would quit bothering you? Enslaving you? Desires that you’re ashamed of?

Would you say that your appetites at this point are in control? Or out of control? What we’re going to do is talk about longings, appetites, desires, as we go into this new year.

There’s a guy, Ronald Rolheiser, who wrote a book about longing. He’s says:

“There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul.”

He’s basically talking about there’s something within us, and whether it’s our sinful nature, whether it’s just the reality that we’re not made for this world, whatever it might be, the Bible kind of speaks to different realities to it. He says the desire is there and it’s strong.

… Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire.

It’s an answer. It’s a guide to how to navigate the reality of this desire or the desires within us.

“What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain…”

When they go unsatisfied for too long…

"…and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality." – Ronald Rolheiser

That really is the sum total of how we’re getting along in the world. Ultimately the Bible makes it very clear that God has put some sort of longing, he’s put eternity in our hearts. So there is always this longing that ultimately can only be satisfied by him. No matter how hard we try in this world, we will never be satisfied, because, ultimately, God is trying to draw us back to himself.

James chapter 4. James, who’s kind of the big jerk of the Bible. I shouldn’t really say that but it’s funny because he’s really intense. James chapter 4 says this about desires:

1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.

James is just saying all of the tension in the world is because you have these desires that are being unmet and you just take it out on everybody else. Desires are a big deal in our lives. They’re driving forces. Our appetites really do add up to what our life does, or what our life is. It’s important for us to talk about these.

Psalm 42 (ESV) , this is what I want us to kind of take away. This picture of the writer of Psalms here, and as he’s writing this Psalm, this is what’s in his soul. This is what he’s speaking out. This is what he’s singing out.

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
    so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
    for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?[b]
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
    “Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
    as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
    and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
    a multitude keeping festival.

This writer is basically describing how he’s so hungry for God. He pictures it as a deer who’s thirsty and is trying to find water. He’s thirsty for God. He’s longing for God. And where does this longing come from? It’s coming from hard times. Tears have been his food day and night. He’s fasting. Maybe because he doesn’t have food. Maybe because he’s so unsatisfied by food. Maybe he’s so troubled he can’t even eat. But what it has cultivated in him is this longing for God.

The people around him are saying, “Where is your God?” He’s going through hard times. And then, it’s interesting, after coming out of 2020, he says,

“how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God”

There are many among us, those online especially, who used to, in these times of uncertainty or trouble, they used to come to this place to come be with then people of God, to come be in a place where the praises of God are sung. And they’ve been deprived of that for whatever reason, because of health concerns or health concerns of people they love. And yet, they find themself in this trying time. My hope is that they are hungry for God, hungrier than ever for God.

And then, if you’re not feeling hungry for God, if that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I ask what you are hungry for; I like this from a guy named Meister Eckhart. He said:

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love; …

It’s good and right. We need to cultivate this longing.

…but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God. – Mesiter Eckhart

That’s a relief right there, huh? I love that because I don’t know if I can say that right now I’m longing, hungering for God like I want to, or like the Psalmist is describing. But I love that he says, “it’s okay, it’s okay, child, to long for the longing is a good start.” That’s what I really hope happens as we go through this month. I want us to at least get to a place where we are longing for the longing. We are hungering to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Because I think that’s a prayer that God would love to answer. That’s a promise given to us in the Beatitudes. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they will be filled.

Hungering and thirsting for righteousness and we will be filled. God loves to fill the hungry with every good thing. So it’s important for us to allow that hunger to be there, and actually to cultivate that hunger, but make sure it’s pointed in the right direction.

A picture in my mind is the garden. Where God said to Adam, “You can eat of all the trees,” but there were two special trees in the garden. Two special trees, right? There were all the trees that were good for food. And they could eat of all of them except for one. The two special trees were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The one tree they were not supposed to eat from: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But every other tree they were allowed to eat from.

And the picture in my mind is of Adam and Eve, they had access to the tree of life. They could eat from the tree of life, the sustenance, the life of God. But if all they ever did was eat of the other trees, they would have been missing out on the tree of life. And we have before us in our world—God has given us so many wonderful things to enjoy. But if we forget to really enjoy him, we’re really missing out. Really missing out.

A picture that I always go to about this kind of longing for God, a place I want so badly for my own soul; I talk about this story a lot. So if you’re sick of it—sorry, it’s in the Bible. But it’s Moses on that mountain in Exodus 33. He has gone through life where, at first he was hungry for the full authority and power of the Egyptian empire, right? He was raised that way. But then, at some point, he had this desire, this longing, this conviction of some sort, rise up within him to see his people not be oppressed or abused. It even got him to a point, where James says, he killed a man, literally.

After that, he was hungry to get away from it all because now he felt guilty. So he ran to the land of Midian just to kind of forget it all, to get away from it all, to start over, to not be known, to hide, to be at peace, hopefully. But then he met this burning bush, and the burning bush began to talk to him about his own deep challenges and problems and past and longings. Now he had this longing to set God’s people free and lead them to the Promised Land. That was the desire that was ignited in him.

And he brought them out of Egypt. He brought them across the Red Sea. Now they’re camped around this mountain called Sinai. And he’s called up into the mountain, and he goes up there. For forty days and forty nights, he’s got no food or water that we know of, yet he is completely sustained by the presence of God.

Then, in Exodus 33, Moses says something so interesting. He says, “God, don’t send us to the Promised Land if you won’t go with us.” A big shift happened in his heart. No longer was he hungry for the Promised Land, although that still might have been there, he was now more hungry for the presence of God. He had realized that the presence of God was everything. Whether he would have to go back to Egypt, stay in the wilderness, or go to the Promised Land, he didn’t care, as long as he could be with God’s presence. That’s what he truly longed for.

And that’s our goal. To find that place where we are longing for God’s presence, satisfied with God’s presence so it doesn’t really matter what place we find ourselves in. Again, if that’s challenging and you’re like, “Oh, no!” Go back to Mesiter Eckhart. It’s okay to just long for this. It’s a good place to start.

Ultimately, that’s what the Bible teaches us. That our primary existence, everything that we have is ultimately so that we can know God. The reason you have a brain inside your head is not so that you can make a lot of money. It’s so that you can know God. The reason that you have emotions and a heart and a soul and all of these things is not so that you can feel good all the time. It’s so that you can feel what God feels. The reason that you have a voice is not so you can tell everybody else what to do or get a lot of followers. It’s so that you can communicate with God what’s in your heart, and sing his praises and tell others about him.

I’m not saying that we need to become some sort of weird, stoic people that never smile ever again. God made all the trees for our enjoyment. We can enjoy all the things in life. That’s great. No problem. But it has to be subsequent, it has to be submitted to, it has to be prioritized underneath knowing God. Like the Westminster catechism says, “The chief end of mankind is to know him and enjoy him forever.” Ultimately, that’s what worship is. It’s enjoying God. Just taking time to enjoy God, however you do that. That’s what worship is. Finding his presence and enjoying his presence, and letting your longings get back in line like his.

Now that we’ve talked about this need to cultivate a hunger for God; and we’ve talked a little about our plan going forward, how we’re going to do this practically as a church, I want to talk about a couple of things for us to think about practically that could maybe help us in the process. And I say ‘maybe’ on purpose; because God is not a genie. You can’t just rub the lamp and get what you want. But there are practices within the scriptures and with church history that help us get into the places where we can see the grace of God revealed. If that makes sense. So God’s the one that gets to decide what kind of hunger is best for you to have. But there are certain things that can get us in the place where we can find ourselves hungry for God.

So there are three things I want to talk about. The first is: We need to limit our intake of junk food. Limit the junk food. You can all hear your mom right now, saying, “Don’t eat that. You’ll spoil your dinner.” Right? It’s just this common, simple thing that, if we want to be hungry for the good food, we’ve got to make sure we’re not nibbling all the time at the junk food.

The second thing is: We need to eliminate hurry from our lives. We’ll unpack that a little bit.

Then another thing that is important for us to do is to spend time with the hungry. That can go a couple of different ways. We’ll talk about that.

First. Limit the junk food. Yeah. This is not fun. My kids hate it when I limit their junk food. Yet, this world is so full of junk food. It’s just that same picture of all those trees. Adam and Eve could have been satisfied by all the other trees and never eaten of the tree of life. And here in our world, God has given us so many good things, so many things to enjoy. Each other. Cardinals (sometimes). Maybe. I don’t know. Basketball. It’s given to us to enjoy. Nacho fries. Acai bowls. There are so many things that we can enjoy. And all those things are good and right. It’s good to enjoy those things. But we’ve got to make sure that we don’t get so satisfied with all of those things that we never have any hunger for the real things.

John Piper tells it like it is sometimes. He says this in a book called A Hunger for God:

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It’s not the x-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality that we drink in every night. … The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.
–John Piper, A Hunger for God

Amen? Amen? It’s hitting home. You can admit it. I’m admitting it. In the world that we’ve created as Americans too, the convenience of all of these pleasures, our ability and our voracious, consumeristic idolatry is absolutely unfathomable to generations before us. Prime now! Not Prime three days from now. Remember that? How horrible that was? You had to wait three days for something. Prime now. It is unbelievable how consumeristic we are. And yet, we’re made to enjoy things. Absolutely. And that’s fine. But we can find ourselves so satisfied our counterfeitly satisfied by the things of this earth, that we are never really hungry for God.

The way John puts it in 1 John 2, he says:

15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Now again, this can go a couple of different ways. But, basically, he’s connecting, if we love the world we’ve lost the love of God. That means we’re not receiving the love of God, the love of God is not cultivating a hunger for the love of God, the love of God is not in us cultivating a love for others. And the people around us, when they come hungry for the love of God, we don’t have anything to offer them, if we find ourselves endlessly nibbling at the table of the world. So we’ve got to check those things.

My hope and prayer is that, at least as we get out of January, we’ll know some of the idols that we have picked up. Not whether or not you have idols that have stuck in you. But you’ll know how to name the ones that you have. Because it’s so easy for us to let things in this world get a grip on us. Like Mario Kart on Switch. Love it. Trying not to love it so much.

So that’s the first thing. Limiting the junk food. The second thing, we’ve got to eliminate hurry. You are too busy. Who am I talking to? All of you! All of you. I’m talking to every single one of you. You’re American. If you’re not American, you’re still too busy. I don’t know. We’re just busy. We’re way too busy. We’ve got to slow down.

The tyranny of the urgent. You guys have probably seen this. We’ve got a little graph to help. But basically it’s real simple. It’s the concept that we find ourselves filling all of our time answering what is urgent and not what is important. Basically this is the ding on the phone, the incessant emails in your inbox. It’s all of the things that are constantly clamoring for your attention that are urgent, but aren’t meaningful, aren’t important. Yet we find ourselves constantly there, trying to check the emails and never getting to the things that we really need to do—the important things. And our world is full of this. Our world is trying to get our attention and is so good at it, better maybe than ever before with the access that we’re given to it. And we forget times for what’s important.

I’ve had to get to a time in my life where, literally, I schedule every week my times with God. My times to study and get ready for Sunday. I’ve blocked them in. When people say, “Hey, can we meet at this time?” I’m like, “Uh, I have an appointment.” I’m not lying, but I am. I have a meeting scheduled in there that cannot change. It’s locked. I’m meeting with God. And that’s fun to do. Because then they’re like, “Well, who are you meeting with?” If they feel like I’m being a little fishy. I’m like, “I’m meeting with God.” Then they’re like, “Oh.” And then everybody’s mad at each other and there’s ore emails and things like that.

But no. We’ve got to get to what’s important. And if you are not intentional and violent with the urgent, you will never get to the important. I think there should be a lot more amens going on right now. If I’m missing it, that’s one thing. But if I’m hitting it, throw out an amen because it’s hitting me big time. We’ve got to slow down.

John Ortberg wrote a book called Eternity is Now in Session and he kind of popularized this idea from Dallas Willard, who then John Mark Comer wrote a book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, but I love it. This is so important for us. It’s basically this conversation that John Ortberg had with Dallas Willard. He was stressed out. He was wound up. He couldn’t get straight. He was hungry for God but he was feeling no hunger at all. He said to Dallas Willard, “What do I do?” And Dallas Willard thought for a minute and he said, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” He was like, “Okay, what else? What else? How do I get hungry for God? How do I grow and development in my spiritual formation?” Dallas Willard thought again and said, “That’s it. Just ruthlessly eliminate hurry,” and walked away. John Ortberg was like, “What? What?” But then he started thinking about it.

Really, the biggest obstacle to our spiritual formation, the biggest obstacle to our longing for God is that we’re too busy. It’s funny because we as Christians, or we as Americans, are like, “All right. I need to long for God. The pastor guy said, ‘long for God,’ so I’m going to long for God. So I’m just going to add that to the list of all the other things I’m doing. I’m going to jam a little longing for God in there.” It’s like, open up the closet and “Where am I going to put this longing for God. There’s a hole. Boom. Jam it in there.” And we can’t figure out why we never long for God. We’ve got to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.

Remember what Jesus did? It says, often he withdrew to a quiet place. Jesus was someone who was hungry for God. In fact, the night before he went to the cross, he went away to a quiet place to pray and to cultivate a hunger for God. It was so strong that, even there in all of his agony on the cross, what did he cry out? “I thirst!” He wasn’t thirsty for the vinegar sponge that they offered him. No one’s ever thirsty for that. He was thirsty to do the will of God and complete the job that God had given him. He was thirsty to do what his Father wanted him to do.

We’ve got to find ways to stop, to be still. God has promised us he will speak to us in a whisper. And the only way he could get our attention is if he screamed and freaked out. But he promised us he won’t do that. He’s going to keep speaking to you in a whisper until you finally quiet yourself enough to hear what he has to say. This is our opportunity to ruthlessly eliminate that hurry and find a hunger for God welling up inside of us.

The last thing is to spend time with the hungry. Again, this can go two ways. You could find people who are hungry for God and go spend time with them. Tell them what your secret is and they’ll say, “Eliminate the junk food. Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” And you’re going to think, Man that pastor guy’s always saying that. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But you can spend time with them. That’s something that can happen.

The disciples spent time with Jesus. We just described it. He was hungry for the will of God. He hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and his disciples were totally consumed with that hunger. They did not look at the world at all in the same way. They were not satisfied by fishing anymore. And the other things they did. They were satisfied by God and his presence and doing the will of the One that had sent them into the world.

For me, there’s this guy, Jim Wright, who I remember, right after high school I had a lot of different ambitions and hungers, and he was this guy that took me to Mexico on a mission trip and then signed me up for this school of ministry. I just remember him as someone that was hungry for God. He was kind of goofy, but when it came to the things of the Lord, he was so intense. He was so resolute and focused and hungry for God. It just compelled me to be hungry for God.

Another way that this can go is spending time who are hungry for God, but then, honestly, just spending time with people who are hungry. When you engage in society’s pain, when you go and sit with someone who’s in pain, what happens is you find yourself wanting to cry out to God more than you ever did before. After spending time with all those people, those kids in Belize, and seeing what their pain was, and what they were going through, my prayers changed drastically from what I was praying before. It became a lot less selfish prayers.

When you’re with people who are hurting, people who are struggling, people who are hungry, there becomes a desperation for God to move. It takes you to the Beatitudes, right? Jesus said basically you’re in the right place, you’re ready for what the Lord has for you if you’re poor in spirit or you’re with the people who are poor in spirit. If you’re standing with the people who are mourning or persecuted or meek; or if you’re with those who are hungry or thirsting for righteousness because they’ve experienced so much injustice or unrighteousness in their life, then you’ll find yourselves hungering. And the promise of the Lord is, if you’re hungry for righteousness, he’s going to get you filled. It’s a prayer the Lord loves to answer. So, by spending time in those places, we can cultivate that hunger, as well.

I want to just kind of go through some things, a little bit of practical stuff now, so if you’ve got a pen and paper you can write this down and pray about these later, that’s fine. As we go into this 21 days—you can start now or you can start next Sunday, either way—I want us to kind of think through, under each of these categories, here are some practical ideas of things that maybe you could apply, in addition to your Sunday mornings and your Wednesday food fasts and all of those things, here are some things that you could do.

Limit the junk food intake of your life.

You could think about your social media, your apps, your games, etc. You could think about your news intake. You could think about tv, Netflix, Prime, Hulu, videos.
You could think about your friend group. Maybe there’s a group of friends that you’re spending time with and it’s just junk food all the way.
Maybe there’s a boyfriend or a girlfriend that’s total junk food for you. Now I’m going to get email. “Hey my girlfriend broke up with me because you told her to.” I’ll be like, “Well, quit being junk food, man.” I am trying to get more mercy this year. That’s one of the things the Lord’s been trying to do in my heart. So I’ll try to be more merciful. But don’t be junk food.
Music. The music we listen to really does have a big impact on us, whether you listen to the words or not. Whatever.

Eliminating hurry.

You could dedicate your lunch hour to quiet yourself before the Lord.
You could quit your job. I mean, it might be the problem. You’re losing your soul and you know it. Quit it. Or at least quit the extra hours you’re working at your job, thinking you’re getting ahead.
Dedicate an hour before bed to be still before the Lord. And try and stay awake.
Dedicate all drive time. When you’re in the car driving maybe that’s the time you just say, “All right This is all your time now, Lord. I’m just going to be silent before you.” Find ways to eliminate hurry from your life.

Spend time with the hungry.

Take someone who seems hungry for the Lord out to lunch. Not on Wednesdays, but some other day.
Volunteer with a ministry agency. We can get you connected. There are tons of great places. If you’re having trouble connecting with someone who’s in one of those places, we can find someone.
Spend some time with someone you know is hurting.
Serve in a soup kitchen.
Become friends with someone who is homeless.
Get involved with foster care. Those foster kids are so hungry for righteousness. Because it has not been their experience in a lot of those cases. And as you join your heart with theirs, you find yourself hungering for righteousness on their behalf, let alone your behalf.

Let’s pray:

Jesus, we thank you that you love us enough to forgive us, but you love us enough also to grow us, to move us forward, to shape us, to form us. And we just really ask that you would, Lord. I pray that this would become one of the hungriest churches in all the world. Hungry for you, Lord. And it would show up in our prayer lives, it would show up in our evangelistic endeavors, it would show up in the way that we treat our spouses and families, it would show up in our worship times, it would show up in our church times, it would show up in our life groups, it would show up everywhere, Lord. But we know that it’s you that can cultivate this hunger and we pray that you would. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Guest User 12/27/20 Guest User 12/27/20

How to Be Hungry for God

David told me I could talk about anything I wanted to today. I could share about Christmas. I could share what I thought the Lord wanted to do in this coming year. Anything that was in my heart. I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights, trying to think of what in the world I would want to say.

December 27, 2020 - Faith Cummings

I remember when I was in seminary, when I had to give my first sermon, I was working full time and going to school. I was so busy, I didn’t know which end was up. So I was trying to find a text really fast. And I’m going through my Bible, and I said, “I can’t find anything. There’s nothing in here!” I think the Lord must have gotten a chuckle about that. But he said, “Just pick a text, any text, and I’ll help you with it.”

What I settled on for today is not so much a teaching, although it will sound like that, as it is the sharing of my life passion. It’s found in Philippians 3:7-14. Paul has been speaking of all that he once had been. He’s talking about his breeding, his reputation in the Jewish community, what he had poured his life into in order to accomplish. But then he says:

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Let’s pray:

Father, I pray that this morning you will reveal to the hearts of these that are listening the great worth of knowing Jesus. Lord, it is way past my ability to explain, but, Lord, I pray that you will put it in our hearts and make us hungry for you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

So this morning we are going to look at four things. First, letting go of what we once valued and seeing those things as a loss. Second, what does it actually mean to know Christ, and why is that worth more than everything else. Number three, why would I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. And four, I’m not there yet, so what do I do?

Before we let go of what we once valued, we have to know what that was. For Paul, we often assume that it was just attaining righteousness through the law. Which it might have been, to a degree. But was that really all that he was after? What was it that Paul could earn in this First Century Jewish community that, through strict obedience to the law, that we can earn in our Twenty-First Century American society in other ways? Last I knew, strict obedience to the law doesn’t earn any points in our society. For Paul, it would have meant major success in his chosen field. The Pharisees, along with the Sadducees, were the ones who made up the ruling party over Israel, the Sanhedrin. So it would have meant power. It would have also meant financial security, respect, a sense of making a significant contribution to his community. There’s nothing wrong with any of these goals. They’re all things that are looked on as a strong plus. Not only in Paul’s society, but ours, as well.

So why would Paul consider it all a loss? And in truth, he did lose all these things when he became an outspoken believer in Christ. Instead of being highly respected, he became hated by the Jewish leadership, who eventually tried to kill him. Instead of being a leader in the community, he worked as a tent maker, in order to provide for himself while he shared the gospel.

Yet Paul states that he considered everything he had before a loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. So what does Paul mean by the phrase, “Knowing Christ”? Surely it has to be more than simply having placed his faith in Jesus. Because he says here at the very end of his life that he is still “pressing on to know.”

I remember how thrilled I was when I was brand new in Christ that I would never have to face God’s wrath. That I had a for-sure place in heaven. If you haven’t made that kind of a choice yet, if you haven’t come to that place in your life, I would strongly encourage you to do so this morning. But my greatest joy, what really astonished me, was that God actually talked to me; that we had two-way conversations. He was the one that taught me what faith is.

I remember him giving me verses to help me get going in my brand-new life with him. And they were awesome verses. Finally I said, “Man, I’ve got to look these up so that I don’t forget them.” And I went to my concordance and I began to look them up. Every single one of them was from the same chapter, Psalm 103. I was so excited that I would wake up in the middle of the night with praise songs going through my head. Why would the all-powerful, holy God choose to talk to, choose to teach me? But, in truth, that first encounter is more like just getting acquainted.

David and Bella met the Pope when they were in Rome, and I believe that the Pope prayed for Bella. But I don’t think that David would go around saying, “Yeah, I know Frances.” He might. But it would be a gross exaggeration.

What Paul is talking about here is a knowing that goes beyond the assurance of salvation. The Greek word here speaks of a knowing through experiencing. It’s a knowing that grows through years of relationship, years of conversations, years of seeing what the other thinks, what they love, what they hate, what stirs their passions. It’s the difference between knowing somebody that you’ve just met through a dating site and knowing that person after fifty years of marriage.

Many of us, including me, have studied for years to know more about God, to learn what the scriptures tell us about him. We know and believe that he is omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful. Some know in theory, and others by experience that God answers prayer. We know that he hates sin. And some of us know what sin is. We know that he’s holy, that he’s righteous, that he’s loving.

But do we define God’s love by what we think love is? Do we define his holiness by what we think holiness must look like? Or do we know God’s love and holiness through our interactions with him?

I can clearly remember in my early days with the Lord, saying, “God would never do that.” And then he did. And I had to go back to him and ask for an understanding of who he is. Through the years he’s taught me not only who he is, but also who I should be. Not just how to avoid sin, but even how to become emotionally healthy.

As we experience and pay attention to God’s moving in our lives and that of others, as we talk out with him who he is, our knowing stops being a knowing of facts and becomes the knowing of a friend and more.

Some may ask if it’s really possible to know God like this. But all of scripture teaches that it is. First of all, it’s promised to us in the New Covenant. Jeremiah 31:33 says:

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
Again, in Jeremiah 9:23-24, we read:
23 This is what the Lord says:
“Let not the wise boast of their wisdom
    or the strong boast of their strength
    or the rich boast of their riches,
24 but let the one who boasts boast about this:
    that they have the understanding to know me,
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
    justice and righteousness on earth
    for in these I delight,”
declares the Lord.

It’s true that, at this point, we only know in part. But there is so much to know. In Ephesians 1:17, Paul says:

17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation…

What for? So that we can know the future? So that we can know things about ourselves or about other people? I really value that. But that’s not the “what for.” The “what for” is so that you may know him.

But the way Paul describes this knowing in our passage this morning can seem either too out of reach or too scary. First, he says that he wants to know Christ in the power of the resurrection. In Ephesians 1:19, Paul prays that they will know Christ’s …

…incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand …

Because Jesus died with the weight of the whole world through all of the millennia on his shoulders, we know that the power of the resurrection has to be really great power. Paul had experienced much of that power, first of all in his own salvation changing him from a murderer into someone who loved Jesus; but also through miracles of healing and deliverance, when just a handkerchief would touch him and then touch someone who needed that deliverance or that healing—they were healed.

I was very excited a few years ago when I prayed with somebody who had a really bad toothache and they didn’t have the money to go to the dentist, and God actually healed her. That doesn’t compare to Paul.

Some of us have seen God deliver people from demonic oppression and heal their broken lives. But many times, if we’re honest, we pray with very little faith that what we ask we’ll actually receive. It may be that when we most wanted God to heal, he didn’t—at least not in the way that we had hoped for. So we no longer pursue faith.

It may be that we think that power is just for those who are more holy, or more spiritual than us. So we go to them for prayer rather than pursuing knowing God for ourselves. But Paul says that experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection is a part of knowing him and available to those who believe. So we need to ask God to teach us.

This isn’t a matter of just gritting our teeth and saying, like the little girl in “Miracle on 34th Street,” “I believe, I believe.” It’s coming to God and asking him to teach us how to know him better, asking him to teach us how our faith needs to change; or maybe even how our prayers need to change. We need to spend time listening to what God wants to do with that great power he has given us, so our faith and our prayers are in line with his purposes—not just with what we want. What we must not do is quit pursuing Christ and the power of his resurrection.

Next, Paul says he wants to know Christ in the participation of his sufferings. Now, I get why many of us might want to know Christ in the power of his resurrection. In participation of his sufferings? Not so much. “I thought Jesus did all that so I wouldn’t have to.” The truth is that Jesus did suffer the just punishment for our sin so we will never have to suffer that. However, there is a very real suffering that often goes along with saying no to temptation, that we might not want to acknowledge, or we might just say, “Well, my sin’s been paid for. I’m just going to go ahead and do it.” Remember, however, that Jesus told the churches of Revelation that the rewards go to those who overcome.

Some, it seems, have had lives where doing what was right was just the norm. But many of us have struggled through the pain of saying no to temptation. We may have experienced rejection, hidden desires, addiction, heartbreak. Learning to say no to temptation when it would satisfy at least a temporary nagging need can be really painful. Some jus have to learn to overcome the weight of indifference to God’s call to really press in to know.

You might ask what that has to do with participation in Jesus’ sufferings. But I believe that Jesus’ temptations were very real and caused him real struggle. Jesus said no to the enemy’s offer to an easy way to gain back the kingdoms of earth without going to the cross. That choice would have been painful. Loving and supporting Judas throughout Jesus’ ministry, knowing that one day Judas would betray him would have caused suffering.

To not participate in the sufferings of Jesus is to take the easy route and give in to temptation instead of the difficult route of getting to know Jesus and letting him teach you how to overcome.

Participation in Jesus’ sufferings may also, like Paul, include loss of reputation, loss of respect, even at times loss of work opportunities. What makes it worth the suffering is the challenging but awesome process of getting to know Jesus better, learning to know his heart, why he suffered and why he would ask us at times to do the same.

Finally, Paul says, we get to know Jesus by becoming like him in his death. How am I to do that? In John 14:30-31, just before his crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples:

30 I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, 31 but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.

Becoming like Jesus in his death may or may not include our own death. What it for certain will include is doing exactly what our Father has commanded us. It’s the death to my own will, my own desires for what I want my life to look like, and submitting everything to the will of the Father. This isn’t just saying no to sin. It’s getting to know Jesus by becoming like him and one to death to self.

So what in the world would make something this hard worth it? Frankly, there’s no way to really find out without the pressing in to know.

I remember reading in Romans that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. And I thought, and I probably said, “Paul has it all mixed up. Suffering doesn’t end in hope. Hope carries us through suffering.” But then I walked through suffering and I discovered what hope really is on the other side. Choosing to know Christ better requires faith that Jesus will make it worth it; that knowing him will be worth everything.

Much of the joy simply comes in the discovery. The learning of who he is. The learning of his love that is so much deeper, so much greater than what I first thought when I first met him. It’s the learning to know the sweet kindness, the sweet tenderness of his voice when I’m walking through challenges.

So the last question for this morning is the hardest. If I’m honest, I have to say I’m not there yet. I’m not even as far along as Paul was, who was pressing in to know Christ. So what do I do? Here are a few suggestions. They’re not definition answers. They’re just the suggestions that I have for what has helped me come to know Jesus better.

1. Be all in. Know what you want, why you want it, and give everything to get there.

2. Know the word. Don’t just look for what you’re supposed to do or not do, or for some promise that you can twist God’s arm with, where you can make him do what you want him to do. Look to learn who Jesus is and put into practice what he says. I’m talking about, for example, when God tells me to be strong and very courageous, I begin to try to learn to practice that and walk that out with Jesus’ help.

3. Spend time meditation on his characteristics. As you read scripture, you find out what God is like. Meditate on that. For example, I learned that Jesus was humble. What in the world would the all-powerful, all-holy God need to be humble for? What does that look like for God? What does it look like for God to be humble? What does it look like for me to be humble?

4. Spend time listening. For those of you who might be a little ADHD like me, this can be the hardest one. But bring your questions and your thoughts to God and give him time to talk back. I would strongly suggest that you write down the things that he says. But this develops an interactive relationship with him that’s critical in knowing him.

5. Pray in the Spirit. God will reveal things to your spirit through his.

6. Walk in obedience. One of the greatest lessons I learned from God in doing this was how precious and how costly his faithfulness is. I learned through choosing the obedience of faithfulness when unfaithfulness was what I was living with. Think about it. How many times have you and I been unfaithful to God? And yet he has remained faithful. Walking that out myself taught me so much about his love.

7. Believe what he says. I’m not talking about just that he’s your Savior. That is the "getting acquainted” phrase. But believe what he says. When he says that you can ask anything in his name and he will do it, believe him. And if it’s not happening, go to him for “what I need to change.” Do I need to learn something about his character so I can ask in his name? Do I need to take time to hear what he wants to do in this situation? What we must not do is walk away without getting to know him through believing him.

8. Worship, worship, worship.

9. Finally, do the daily walk of getting to know him through experience. When I worked in a family practice office up in Prescott, I had a call one day from one of the pharmacists. He said, “Did you call in ‘such and such’ a narcotic for this particular patient.” And I said, no, I hadn’t. And he said, “I didn’t think so. But she called in a prescription for herself.” But because we had had repeated interactions, he knew my voice and he knew that it wasn’t me that called it in.

Spend so much time with God, so much time seeking, listening, walking with him that you know and can immediately recognize when he speaks and what he wants to do.

Let’s pray:

Father, we know well that we haven’t come to know all that you are. What we have come to know is so beyond anything that I ever imagined that you would be, and has just increased my love for you throughout the years. Father, I pray in Jesus’ name that we who are part of your Body will come to value and to press in to know you, no matter what the cost is, no matter what the joys are. Lord, I pray that you will be our first love, that you will be our first joy, that we will know you in all of your glory. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Good News About Evil

Series: The Arrival

David Stockton

We’re all looking for good news these days. And all you have to do is turn on your tv and go to CNN and Fox and find all the good news you want, right? No. Yet we Christians have the best news of all. First, we have the best news because it has been verified by years of prophecies fulfilled, years of lives transformed, years of unmatched historicity and mountains and mountains of proof that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin, crucified for the sins of the world, and rose from the dead in order to set humanity free from the curse of sin and death. That’s just the first reason we have the best news of all. And second, because of the news of the deeply gripping and wonderfully coherent future that Christianity present.

We’re going to dive into that a little bit today. We’re going to dive into it a little in our Christmas Eve service. But there’s something about the promise of what’s to come in Christianity that is very different from all the other promises. It’s deeply, deeply coherent with the reality of humanity’s pain. It doesn’t just wave a magic wand over it. It doesn’t just talk about an escape from it all. And sometimes we can fall into thinking that, but that’s not what the gospel presents. That’s not the good news. It’s way deeper than that, way more wonderful than that.

So we’re going to dive into some of that today as we talk about the first advent, as Jesus came, also knowing that Jesus promised to come again. So since we’ve spent five and a half months looking at the Apostle John’s account looking at Jesus’ life in the flesh, I thought it would be good to look at another of John’s writings where he helps us see Jesus in a whole other light. The book called Revelation.

So let’s read basically another depiction of the Christmas story from John in his apocalyptic book called the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

12:1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.

So Christmasy, right? This is awesome.

3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.

Merry Christmas! It took a little turn there.

5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

Okay, so, it’s a little bit more Christmasy. Not much.

7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
    and the kingdom of our God,
    and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
    who accuses them before our God day and night,
    has been hurled down.

Again, starting to sound like good news. Starting to sound pretty positive. The Book of Revelation trying to give us this insight. Now, John, as he was writing this was living in a time where the world that he lived in was not very wholesome. It was not right. Roman oppression, Roman domination, Roman leadership had become absolutely horrific in many different ways. The persecution that had come to the Jews and to the Christians was prolific. Many were being killed. It was a really dark time, a really twisted time in a lot of ways. So John is writing to encourage other believers.

He’s writing to encourage Christians, but he’s not using promises like, “Hey, it’s going to be all right.” Because many of them were being killed in horrific ways. He wasn’t writing to them to just say, “You know, keep on singing, keep on praying and the Lord will keep you from all pain and agony.” Because that wasn’t what was taking place at all.

So what he was writing to them was trying to help them see a little bit bigger, broader picture of what God could do, what God was willing to do.

There’s a guy named Michael Kruger. And I like the way he wrote a little bit about eschatology. Eschatology is basically the study of final things. He wrote:

Christian eschatology recognizes that there is currently something very wrong with the world. It is a place that is filled with sadness, cursed by sin, groaning as it awaits its redemption, and in the final consummation, those sad things will be made untrue. The curse will be rolled back. The world will be changed.
Eschatology is not so much about millennial positions or the structure of Revelation, but is primarily about…how one deals with the sad things in the world.
And at the Christian worldview, I believe, has a compelling and coherent eschatology. It can explain why the world is the way it is (the Fall), it can provide a definition of evil (violation of God’s law), and it can provide a real hope for the future (God will destroy evil and set all things right).
For this reason, eschatology is not a topic that should be reserved for theologians or scholars. It is a topic for every Christian, and, for that matter, every person. We all live in a dark world, and there is no message more relevant to those living in a dark world than a message about how that world will one day be changed.
—Michael J. Kruger, N.T. Professor

So when we have this book of Revelation, I know we’re reading this and even me, I mean I spent a lot of time just trying to say, “Okay, Revelation 12, where does this happen in the timeline of eschatology? How does this fit in with everything? Is this really a depiction of what was taking place in Bethlehem that night? Is it much broader than that? Is it actually this kind of second thing that will happen later on? What is going on?”

Again, all of that can be a fun study, but, ultimately, what John is trying to do is he’s trying to remind us that God is in control, and that the devil is at work, and yet, God can thwart the plans of the devil.

We’ll get into some more of this. But, actually, in this time, what he’s saying here is, “Now has come the salvation, and the power of the kingdom of God, and the authority of Christ. Because the accuser of the brethren has been hurled down.”

There’s going to be this time where there’s kind of this rising of evil, but it will always be followed with the mercy and victory of Christ. The rising of evil, any time it comes it will always be overcome by the authority and power and glory of Christ. You kind of see this in Revelation, these ebbs and these flows going on.

One thing we need to see here in verse 11 is how they overcame him:

11 They triumphed over him
    by the blood of the Lamb
    and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
    as to shrink from death.

So this is really good news about God dealing with unrighteousness. It’s really good news about the salvation of the Lord coming. But for the people of God, the way that they overcome all of these things is through the blood of the Lamb, which we sing about at this point as a beautiful, wonderful thing; but at first, it was a cross. And it was wounds, and it was pain, and it was agony.

And then they share their testimony. The word of their testimony, which is basically how God has shown up and helped them overcome things in their lives. So even in there you have the pain of the way things were, and the joy of the way things are. And on this side you can have that joy and rejoice, but on that side it just feels a lot like pain and things are wrong.

And they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Basically these were people that sought the Lord not for their comfort and ease, but they sought the Lord for his glory and the salvation of the people around them.

I was very nervous as I was studying this week, because I ultimately realized that the message I’m going to share today is probably not going to be well received by people who are seeking the Lord for comfort and ease. And I’m a little nervous sometimes, being an American and knowing my own heart, and living among Americans and knowing their hearts, that sometimes our whole Christianity is just about seeking the Lord for comfort and ease. If that’s what we stick with, Christianity is going to be very disappointing for us. And even more so, Jesus is going to be very disappointing.

But if we’re seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness, if we’re seeking the Lord for his glory and the salvation of the world around us, Christianity will be very fulfilling.

12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens
    and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
    because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
    because he knows that his time is short.”
13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.

And then it goes on to talk a little bit more about the dragon. And we’ll get to maybe some of that in the weeks to come. But basically what I want to see here is that there’s a lot of good news in this depiction from Revelation 12. The three things I want us to draw out here, we’re going to spend our time on these things:

1. The devil cannot thwart the plans of God concerning you.

The devil is at work. He is an adversary. The word Satan means adversary. The word devil means accuser. All the accusation and all the adverse things you experience in your life, the devil is at work in the world. He was at work in Jesus’ day. Even calling himself the god of this world who could give all the kingdoms of the world to Jesus. He said in this, “to lead the whole world astray.” And you can see the works of the devil everywhere in these days. The deception, the pride, the evil, the injustice. The devil has great influence in the world today. However, no matter how great his influence, God has a way. He always provides a way of escape.

Here you see in here the dragon tries to destroy the baby but fails. He tries to destroy heaven but fails. He tries to destroy the woman but fails. He tries to destroy the woman’s offspring, but if you read ahead beyond this chapter, this doesn’t work either. When we apply this to where this could be speaking of Jesus’ birth there in Bethlehem, we can see the devil tried to get Jesus to be killed by influencing Herod, as he did a massacre of all the two-year-old baby boys and yet failed. And he meets Jesus in that wilderness to try to tempt him after he hasn’t eaten for forty days. He tries to influence him and yet he fails. And then there on that cross he influences the Romans, he influences the Jews, and they turn against the. Savior of the world and they have him crucified, thinking to get rid of him forever. But even that failed.

If Jesus went through that kind of difficulty, if he went through that kind of hatred, if he went through that kind of adversarial reality, we have to know that that’s going to be us, too, who follow after him. But we can take heart. We can rejoice in the good news that, just like all the times in the past, nothing is going to change. No weapon formed against you shall prosper, in the name of Jesus.This is very good news for us, especially as we see evil seem to be on the rise, and the confusion and deceit. And people instead of, in moments like this, turning to the Lord, they turn further into humanistic ideologies. We can rejoice. Like 2 Peter 2:9 says:

…the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials…

The second thing that is really good news in here is

2. Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end.

So here, when it says about this man child that was born. That she gave birth to a male child who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. This kind of harkens back to this first time when there was a woman in a garden. Then there appeared a serpent in that garden. And there was this interaction, right? Just like there was here. It’s kind of like John is basically, and I heard this from Dan Riccio. He was talking about how in Revelation, John is using the colors of the Old Testament to paint this apocalyptic prophecy. You have this stuff woven in so much. Here you have the same thing. In that moment, once again, there was this curse that was laid upon humanity; but even in that curse, God said to the woman that “Your offspring is going to crush the head of the serpent.”

Here is this promise that the one who was born was going to rule with an iron scepter. The picture of that iron scepter is basically that, “This one will rule forever.” That iron is something that can’t be destroyed. That iron is something that can’t be challenged. Ultimate authority. Everlasting authority. And it’s going to be so refreshing when Jesus finally takes command of everything and crushes the serpent head and becomes that unbreakable, everlasting King. Not a king who will die someday or be defeated; not a king who can be bribed, corrupted or deceived; but an everlasting King.

I love this. In 2 Thessalonians 2:8, it says:

8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.

Sometimes we think that there’s this rivalry between God and Satan going on. Like, who’s really going to win, you know? What’s really going to happen? But there is no rivalry between God and Satan. Satan is a created being, and God is eternal, unlimited, sovereign over everything.

So in 2 Thessalonians, we’re told that, when Jesus does appear, when he returns, he’s going to destroy the lawless one. He’s going to destroy all evil with the breath of his mouth and the splendor of his coming. Again, I just think about Kung Fu Panda every time. He just fights so many battles with just his majesty. It’s just like, “Bing” and everybody’s done.

But it’s true. When Jesus shows up, it’s not going to be a battle. It’s just going to be over. So we can rejoice in the good news that Jesus Christ has conquered everything and can never be conquered. It’s just a matter of time.

And then the last thing that we really can see in here, and this is a little deeper. It’s going to take a little brainwork for 8:00 am service.

3. Where sin and evil abound, God’s grace and goodness abound much more.

This is a consistent theme throughout the scriptures, and especially in the book of Revelation. That when you see evil on the rise, you shouldn’t be afraid. In fact, when you see a lot of evil, don’t think evil is winning, just remember the devil is raging because his days are numbered. When you see a lot of evil, don’t think evil is winning, but know God is purging the world of all unrighteousness. He’s waking up the nation Israel. He’s shaking up the heathen so they can know him. He’s making up a kingdom of priests out of those who follow Jesus.

And when you see a lot of evil, don’t think evil is winning, but rejoice because God can turn evil into something really good. If God can undo death, what else is he planning to undo? If God can make something beautiful and triumphant out of a cross, what beauty and triumph will he make out of my pains and agony? This is where our minds are supposed to go as believers, when sin and evil abound. We can know that grace is on the verge of abounding much more.

I think about this with my daughter, Bella. I remember this moment in her life where she was learning how to swim. My daughter, Bella, if you don’t know, she has really no feeling or function from her knees down. She has something called Spina Bifida. She’s in a wheelchair and she can’t walk. She can’t do a lot of things. So when she was first learning to swim, she just thought this was something she couldn’t do. Then little by little, she was learning more and more and more. And then she could swim. It was so funny to see this kind of trigger happen in her mind, where all of a sudden, she was like, “If this thing I couldn’t do is something I can do, then what else out there I can’t I do that I actually can do?”

It was just this moment of confidence. It was this shift that happened in her little heart. And all of a sudden the world wasn’t full of so much doom, dread and disappointment. But now it was full of stuff that, “I just need to overcome.” There was a massive shift in her heart and mind. I’ve seen her overcome so many other things now.

I think that’s what John is trying to get through to us. Because it’s very easy to see the evil. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed and think, how are we going to see any good change out there in our world, and our government, in our society and then, if we’re honest, right here in our own hearts and souls?

But then that’s where we look at Jesus and we look at his life, and we look at what he’s done and what he can do. Then we look at the others around us, or in the scriptures, or even around us today, and we start to see what God can do. And we think, well, if he can do it there, maybe, just maybe, he could do it right here.

That’s the hope that’s supposed to give rise. That’s the good news of the gospel, that where sin and evil abound, God is not turning away. He’s not saying, “Forget it.” He’s actually making a plan to show and reveal that his grace can abound much more.

So there’s this illustration I want to share with you guys that’s been helpful for me in unpacking this concept. I’ve said things like, “Everything sad will come untrue,” which is as quote from Lord of the Rings. It’s a nice thought about everything sad coming untrue. And I do believe that the gospel declares that in a lot of ways. But there’s only one little problem with that. It’s funny, my wife was telling me, “I don’t like when you say that.” I was like, “I say that all the time. Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

But the whole idea of coming untrue, and I do think you give us enough time on the other side, that we really won’t even remember the really horrible things that happen to us here. So in that sense, yes, but what the gospel does is, it’s not trying to just make those things untrue. So here’s the illustration:

I heard a pastor talk about this stool that he had. It was kind of like a family heirloom, this wooden stool that they had. It was a special thing and he put it in a special place in his house. He came one day and his son had taken nails and nailed them into the stool, a whole bunch of nails into the stool. And he was upset about it. When the kid saw how upset he was, and realized what he had done, this kid was crying. So he took the kid and he said, “It’s okay. We can pull the nails out.”

He was using this illustration to say you can pull the nails out, but the scars of sin still remain. And though that is absolutely true, what you sew you will reap, I’ve always just kind of played with this analogy in all of my theological thinking and said, “Okay, God what is the good news of the gospel? Is it just that you can remove nails and then we’re left with the consequences the rest of our life, staring us in the face? Or is your gospel, is your forgiveness so deep that it actually pulls out the nails and, in time, removes the scars? Is that what your gospel is trying to say?”

And I think in some ways there is some of that. There is healing. There is recovery. But even then, I think that’s still way too cheap of an understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because, ultimately, what God does is different. And we see this in the life of Christ. Jesus was pierced like that stool was. And Jesus, when he rose from the dead, he was the first fruits of this New Creation. He was now in this glorified state. We talked about it last week, maybe? A couples of weeks ago? Resurrection. We talked about it two weeks ago—resurrection. Jesus rose and he was glorified. His body wasn’t in the tomb. So somehow his glorification incorporated his body, but it was something different, obviously, because they couldn’t quite recognize him. But then they could recognize him. But if you remember, he still had the scars. He still had the scars.

So the glorification, the resurrection life that he entered into, wasn’t something where all the scars were gone. But those scars no longer represented what they used to represent. When he was given those scars, it represented pain and agony and sin, because he died for our sin and evil because he was crucified as an innocent person. That’s what they represented.

But in this glorified situation, now what those things represented was the New Covenant. They represented how much God really loves us. We sing about those scars. We sing about the cross now. Not in the same way that we would have back then. We sing about it as this beautiful thing, as this meaningful thing, as this demonstration of God’s love. Those scars were redeemed.

Not only that, but those scars actually meant something very significant to Thomas, who was locked up in fear and doubt and confusion. And those scars, instead of getting rid of those scars, those scars became a useful thing to help Thomas finally get free and to get forward in his relationship with God.

Then in Revelation, time and time again, when we see Jesus, we see him as the Lamb that was slain. Somehow the most horrific moment in human history, the most evil injustice that was ever done, is the way that we see Jesus in the end.

I think the reason for that is because, when we see Jesus and we see those scars, we’re never going to have to wonder where we stand with him. Those scars are actually going to become the most important sign in all of heaven, that we belong, that we are welcome. It’s like whenever my wife sees my ring or I see the ring on her finger, I know where we stand.

This is applied into my life, a number of times. Whenever someone comes to me and asks me to meet with them because they have suicidal thoughts, or they have a loved one that is. And you would think that’s a little weird, except that for I’m a pastor. But that’s not why they’re asking me, because I’m a pastor, because I seem so wise. They’re asking me because my dad took his life when I was twenty years old.

And in those moments, it’s so interesting to sit before someone and they’re like, “Hey, could you relive all your pain for me?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah.” They’re not really asking that. They don’t know what they’re asking. They’re just hurting and they’re saying, “Hey, I could use some help.”

And I remember, I always have this conversation with the Lord. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to kind of like pull the scab off and start bleeding again.” But Jesus just asked me if I will. And I see the scars on his hands and I say, “I’m happy to, Jesus.”

So Jesus takes those scars, those things that are so horrific, and he actually can turn them into something so meaningful and helpful for the people around us. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s not some magic wand that just kind of erases. It’s way deeper than that. It’s a deeper magic from the dawn of time, as C.S. Lewis would say.

And if you will give your life—the good, the bad and the ugly—to Jesus; and you will let him work day after day, month after month, year after year, he will remove the things, remove the sin that is causing all of the pain. He will bring healing to what needs healing. But even better than all of that, he will use your scars. He will use your hurts to bring him glory, which is what we were made to do; and to help others know his love, which will change their forever.

That’s the power of the gospel. That’s the good news of Jesus Christ. That’s why Jesus came into this world. Not just to give us a nice Christmas story, but to defeat the dragon. To break the curse and make it possible for us to be glorified forevermore. Let’s pray:

Jesus, we thank you so much that it’s just not surface-y, it’s not some sort of like magical or done-up-with-a-bow type thing that you came to give us; but you gave us something so deep, so profound, so rich, that for many, it’s hard to believe. But for those that you are saving, Lord, it is everlasting life. And so, Lord, I pray that you would help us this morning to believe. You would help us to offer you every part of our lives, to not hide anything from you.
And I pray that, somehow, your good news, your gospel, your love would penetrate deeper into our souls, Lord. And I do pray you would teach us, Lord, teach us how to use the hurts and the scars and the pains to bring you glory. Thank you, Lord. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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