David Stockton 4/25/21 David Stockton 4/25/21

Fulfilling God's Law

So this morning we are going to be talking about the law. And before some of you get up and run, just know that Jesus talked about the Law. So we’re talking about it because Jesus talked about it. And also, if there is one man from the scripture that we would want to grab some advice from in regards to

Series: The Sermon on the Mount
April 25, 2021 - Kenny Welch

Good morning. Let’s pray:

Father in heaven, we just come before you this morning, Lord, as your humble servants. We just have a great desire to hear from you today, Lord, to learn from you. We give you great thanks for all the things you’re doing in our lives, for all the things you’re doing through us, in us and around us. We just ask Holy Spirit that you would come in right now, that you be teaching our hearts, that you would be circumcising our hearts to make us more and more like the character of Jesus Christ. It is in his name that we ask these things. Amen.

This is what King David had to say about the Law of God. In Psalm 19:7-11, it says:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
    making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
    rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
    enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
    enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
    and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
    even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
   and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.

If we could see and understand this, the world around us would be a far better place. To get our souls revived, to be made wise, to keep the heart rejoicing, to enlighten our eyes, to warn and be rewarded all comes from the law of the Lord. This is what King David had to say.

Now, I know this might raise some questions as we have people in here who like to challenge things a bit. You might be thinking, Well what about all the Levitical laws, and ceremonial laws, and all those things? So, here is what we’re going to do with those concerns. While they will not be addressed right here today, I want you to take all your questions that you have about all those and just flood the inbox of every pastor on campus. Just email everybody all the questions you have in one day. They’ll answer them. Or, if it makes you feel better, you can always come visit me in Belize and we can talk about it. Right? So you choose which one you want to do.

We have before us this morning, as we continue to go through the Sermon on the Mount, we land in Matthew 5:17-20. That’s where we are at this morning. So if you have a Bible, pull it out, if not, put it on your phone, your tablet, whatever it is you have, and open your app to Matthew 5:17-20.

It reads as follows:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now, given the time that we have, I would like to draw your attention here to three important things as stated by Jesus here in this section of scripture. Three important things, and also three groups of people that Jesus is talking about. Our focus this morning, as you hear the words the law of God, I want you to keep in mind that we’re talking about God’s moral law, his standard for morality in our lives and the lives of the people around us. As I said before, the Levitical law, the ceremonial law, the questions you have about those, send it to every pastor and they’ll deal with that. So when you hear law, or God’s Law this morning, think about God’s standard for morality. Right? His moral laws.

Now, Jesus, right off the bat, as soon as he got to this section of scripture, he said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.” In that, we see Jesus is saying that the Law of God is important. And you and I, for as much as we know that we need to make sure that this sinks in. It is important. The entire scripture as we have it, or as they had it, Jesus talking to his disciples and the other people who were standing around, it is important.

Now we would ask, Why would Jesus be specific about this? Why would he draw their attention to this? As we look at what is going on right here in the surrounding sphere of Jesus. Jesus was very different. He was almost as if a new type of human being to the people around him. He didn’t talk the same as the religious leaders. He didn’t walk the same. He didn’t interact. He didn’t live with people the same way the religious leaders lived with people. He was so different than they all were.

As a result, the people who were around, as they flooded to Jesus, they were probably thinking in their mind, This guy is going to come because he’s so different, so he’s going to come and he’s going to give us new things. He’s going to remove all these old yoke and burden that we have had and he’s going to give us some new things. He’s maybe even going to institute some kind of new commandment for us to live by.

So before they could even get to that, even if it was their expectation, Jesus just kind of popped the brakes on them for a minute. He said, “I’m not here to abolish. I’m not here to dissolve the Law. All the word of the Law that you have, it is God’s Law and it stands. But guess what? I am going to fulfill this Law.”

You see, people back then, just like us, for a long time had been moved from what the true intent of the Law of God was to what their leaders taught it should be. This is why they were always looking to the scribes and the Pharisees to see, you know, what’s next. What should we do in regards to this? In regards to that? How are we supposed to perform? So they were moved from the true intent.

When the scribes and the Pharisees would law on them all these external requirements for the Law, the people were never able to keep them. And so, as a result, they were probably happy that this Jesus guy is now on the scene, who is so different from everybody else, and thinking he is probably going to bring us something new. He’s probably going to give us new instructions.

I mean, not even the scribes and the Pharisees were able to keep the very laws that they had produced to the people. You know? But they presented themselves to the people in such a way that the people looked at them and said, “These guys have it all together. We will never be able to get to where these guys are. But maybe if we follow this Jesus guy, he’s going to give us something more easy to follow, something more easy to live up to.” You know? They were done, sick and tired of the heavy burden that they had, because this old physical image that they constantly had to be putting on was never the true intent of the Law for the people.

As Jesus gets ready to give them what the true intent of the Law was, he’s setting them up to receive his information in a way that is going to help them to understand the Law of God. We are going to see as the Sermon on the Mount continues to go, Jesus in multiple instances he’s going to say it to them, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, but I say to you…” In large degree, as soon as you hear words like that, the first thing that comes to mind is, “Oh, he’s changing it. He’s removing what was said and now he’s giving us something new.” But that is not it at all.

So Jesus starts off by making sure that they understand, “We’re not throwing away these things that were said of old. But what I am doing is I am helping you to understand, because you have drifted so far away from the true intent. I am helping you understand what the true intention was in these things that were said of old.” Right?

So Jesus is getting them ready to receive the information that he’s going to give to them. So we often look at the actions of Jesus and what he did for us on the cross. We look at all the prophecies that he fulfilled and we see that is how he fulfills the law. But we look at the Lamb that was slain, we look at the One who is our true Passover, the One who is the true righteousness, who is the substitute for us. And we can go on and on about all the things that he is, and say that is how he fulfilled it.

For as much as that is true — and that is a huge bulk of the fulfillment of the Law — we need to also see that an important aspect of Jesus fulfilling the Law is Jesus giving you and I in the scripture the true intent of the Law. Not only in what he’s doing, but in what he’s given to us. The true intent of the Law. It is Jesus pointing us and leading us to a place where we understand that in our righteousness is an important, more so than the outward profession of our faith. He’s pointing us to the fact that, if we are righteous, if we become righteous and holy on the inside, then that will lead to an external profession of what true holiness and righteousness is.

Because Jesus is here to fulfill — or we may see it to be the fulfillment of this Law — we need to know that none of us is able to follow the Law as God lays it all for us. None of us is able to follow it in a way that it was intended to be followed apart from Jesus Christ. If we are not in Christ, we will never be able to follow and be obedient to the Law the way God designed for us to be obedient to the Law.

So for those of you who are probably thinking, Yeah, I am more of a New Testament person, you know, so I don’t worry about the Old Testament laws — guess what? Jesus is saying, “Hey, this Law is important. The standard for morality that has been given to you and I from the olden days, it still stands. It is important.”

He said, “For I say to you,” in verse 18, “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

Now, the last time I checked, heaven and earth hasn’t passed away yet. At least not in my neck of the woods. I don’t know about around here. Things look weird around here, so this might be new. Right? But it hasn’t. So what Jesus is saying, it still stands, this standard for morality, you know, is given to us for moral living, still stands.

In Galatians, Paul tells us that this Law that is given to you and I, it works. It operates as schoolmaster that drives us to Christ. So if we see it done away with, then what are we going to have to help steer people towards Christ when we minister to them? It’s the purpose of the Law. It’s right here. It’s still useful. Right now. Today. Still useful. Still has its function. Jesus says the Law is important.

The next thing he pointed out to them in verse 19 is that our obedience to the Law and what you and I teaches about the Law is important. So he said in verse 19, “Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Now when it comes to the laws, especially the law of the land, I am the guy who likes to say, “I wonder what is going to happen if we do exactly what they tell us not to do.” Right? That’s just how I operate inside. Now you guys can be dishonest and say you don’t think that way. But that’s just me. Right? I am the guy that asks, “I wonder what would happen.”

Just for example, my family and I have been visiting some stores while we’ve been here and, of course, everybody has a big sign that says “Masks are required for entering this store.” And I always go, “What are they going to do if I walk in without a mask?” You know? Like, what’s going to happen.

So we visited the zoo one time back home in Belize, and, you know, nice place, just feels like you’re in the jungle while you’re in the zoo. I met a guy the other night, he said that none of the enclosures seem fit for the animals that they have in the zoo, as if they’re just going to run right out.

So we were walking by where they have these crocodiles, and it’s probably only like a two foot fence or whatever near the kids. Keep in mind these are fourteen- fifteen-foot crocodiles laying around near the pond. And of course there’s a big sign that says, “Don’t play with the animals.” “Don’t poke the animals.” So, being the guy that I am, I go, “I wonder what would happen if I do poke the crocodile.” Right? And — true story, my wife’s right here, I’m not lying — I got a stick and I leaned over. Because, in my mind, I’m thinking, we watch movies all the time. They say that these crocodiles are fast. I don’t believe they are. There is no way something that big can be that fast. Right?

So I got this stick, leaned over, and I poked the crocodile. This is, like, the movies are not real. This thing wasn’t just fast. This thing was lightning fast. There is no way something that big should be able to spin around that fast. I poked the crocodile. It was like, “whap!” Of course I learned my lesson. It just flashed through my mind. Read the headlines. “Pastor got eaten by a crocodile at the zoo.” Right?

But that is just where I am at. I look at rules and laws, especially some of the ridiculous ones they’ve been passing these days. And I go, “I wonder what will happen if I do exactly what they’re saying not to do.” Right?

But thanks be to God, when it come to his Laws, when it comes to what we find in the Bible, I’ve learned to not live my life that way. I’ve learned to not say, “I wonder what will happen if I do exactly what God said I should not do.” Because then that would be bad.

Jesus said because this is the Law of God, which stands forever, if you and I would relax any of it, if you and I would make it as if it is unimportant, if we would treat it like it’s no big deal or, worse yet, if we would be teaching other people to look at his laws that way, you will be least in the kingdom. And for every single person, there is a temptation here that we face to mess around with the moral Laws of God when it suits us best.

Now you might say, “Well, lying isn’t that bad. Don’t beat up yourself about lying. But murdering someone is bad so beat up yourself about that.” Or you might say, “Coveting isn’t that bad. Don’t beat up yourself about that. But if you’re committing adultery, then that’s bad. Beat up yourself about that.” There’s always this temptation for us to mess around with it, for us to kind of, what Jesus said here, relax some of the laws that we feel like, these moral laws that we think it’s not that big a deal. And Jesus said if you do that, or worse yet, if you’re teaching teaching other people to do that as well, you will be called least in the kingdom.

Now, there’s also something interesting in this section of scripture today that we’re going through. Jesus said that you’d be placed in one of two categories. He actually introduced us to three different types of people here. Right? The first two, we can see right here that there’s those who are great in the kingdom and there’s those who are least in the kingdom, which I find weird. Because we’re thinking heaven one big happy family. Everybody’s on the same page. But Jesus seems to be saying something different here. How you interact with the Law and how you teach others to do the same is going to determine whether or not you are great in the kingdom or least in the kingdom.

Now, the least in the kingdom, Jesus said, are those of who like to relax the Law. Those of us who teach other people to relax the Law, who look at certain portions of the moral Law as no big deal. Jesus says, for that you are least. But for the person who obeys the Law, who looks at it as if it is as important as David says it is important, and you teach other people to uphold God’s moral Law as important, Jesus says, you will be great in the kingdom. Now I don’t think this is hard for us to understand, these two sections of people that Jesus puts before us. Right?

It is plain that, of course, Jesus is not celebrating any kind of mediocrity. He’s not telling you and I to settle for any portion of it. He’s not saying, “Oh, be the least if you want to be the least.” No, his desire, his heart is that you and I would be great in the kingdo, is that you and I would not dare to relax any of the Law or dare to teach anyone to relax the Law, but that we would be those who would stand firm, stand steady in the fear. Those who recognize that the Law stands and we surrender to the One who can bring us into the true obedience of the Law. And that is you and I surrendering to Jesus Christ.

Now, the third thing that he points out to us here is that your righteousness is important. Just in case you were thinking, Nah, it’s not that important. Jesus said yes, it is. “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now those are strong words. Sounds like he’s judging you from back then.

Jesus said if your righteousness does not surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom. Now here we have, back in his time, two sets of leaders that the people were looking up to. If there was anyone who could figure it out or get it right, it would be these guys.

We have the scribes. These were those who were the most noted teachers of the Law during Jesus’ time. And then we have the Pharisees, who were said to be the most celebrated professors of the Law during Jesus’ time. So one group was very good at teaching it and thinking it through. And then the other groups was very good at living out for everybody to see. So, between the two of them, you would say we have just what we need in order for us to live a life obedient to the Laws of God.

And Jesus said you have to be more right than these guys if you want to make it in. That’s as plain as he’s saying, “Hey, look, these guys that you have that you uphold so high, these guys that have it all together, they’re not even coming into the kingdom.”

And to this, you might say some of the people were nodding with hopeless, saying, “Well, if these guys who have it all together are not going to get in, what chance do we have? We look to them as though they are the standard for living right and living the way God wants us to live. And if they’re not going to make it in, how are we supposed to make it in?”

See, Jesus looked right at them and said, “Unless you are more right, unless your righteousness exceeds their righteousness, you won’t make it into the kingdom of heaven.” Now, are they doomed or not? We have many people among us that live this way. They needed to realize the same thing that you and I need to realize right now, which is the only way for our righteousness to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is for you and I to be found in Jesus. That is the only way for us to be more righteous than them. Right?

This brings us face to face with the third group of people that Jesus introduces. Those who won’t make it into the kingdom. We have people like this around us on a daily basis. They are people who think that you have to live your live based on, it’s a checklist, you know? We have a heavenly report card and I figure out all the do’s and don’t’s and when I check them off I’m good to go.

We look at the world and we make an honest assessment and we say there are terrible people who we don’t think are going to make it in. There are people whose lives look like they are rejecting Jesus. We don’t think they are going to make it in. But then there are nice people. They have a chance. There are very kind people over here. They might make it in. And guess what? Jesus is saying, “No. No. No.” It is not based solely on what you do. See, this is what the scribes and the Pharisees have turned the people’s attention to. Only external things. Do, do and do. They know Jesus existed, but they had no intentions of getting to know Jesus on a personal level.

And we have people like that among us today. They know about the Savior, but they have no intentions of getting to know the Savior personally. And you might have in your community, you know, your neighborhood, wherever you live, you might have some of the nicest people on earth, but they have no relationship with Jesus whatsoever. And them being such good and great people is not going to get them into the kingdom. But them knowing Jesus is going to get them into the kingdom.

This is where you come in. Helping to carry out this Law that Jesus said is important. As I said before, in Galatians it tells us that the purpose of the Law is to point people towards Christ. You come in to say, “Hey, look. I know you’ve been trying as hard as you can to follow this standard of morality that has been given to you. But the only way for you to accomplish that is if you would surrender to Jesus Christ.”

See, I’ve come to a place where, personally, I’ve seen and understand how important it is to be obedient to the Laws of God. I grew up in a home where I didn’t have a physical dad to teach me obedience to the Law, to teach me obedience to the standard of morality that God has placed for us to follow. But when I got saved, I came to realize that it is only through Jesus and following these instructions we may see that he laid out for us that we can truly, truly be in a place where we feel just like King David. In a place where our souls are revived. In a place where, for as much as I’m a simple person, I’m also wise. In a place where our heart can continually be rejoicing. In a place where our eyes are enlightened. A place where we are warned because we follow the Laws of God, and we will be rewarded one day because we are obedient to it and we teach others to do so.

For as much as the culture right now, and the society that you are in seems completely different to the things that you are called to do, if you really want to know what life is like, feeling revived, being wise, having a heart that’s rejoicing all the time, being enlightened — if you truly want to know what it feels like to be that way, or what it’s like to feel that, however the saying goes, then you need to submit and surrender to Jesus Christ. It is the only way for you to have this true experience. It is the only way for you to continue to delight in this Law of God that he has set over you.

And that’s my encouragement for you this morning. That you would run after Jesus with all that you are. Like David reminded when us he came up today, he said it earlier this week in the staff meeting, that sometimes we might be chasing righteousness over here. We might go chase holiness over here. We seek for peace in that direction. And we’re looking, spreading ourselves thin trying to find all these things. But guess what? If you would only come to Jesus and pursue him, you will have all those things. You won’t need to be searching in multiple directions. You need to come to Jesus. He is the one that has all these things for our lives. Only though him will be able to enjoy following the Law of God. Only through him will we be able to completely be obedient to the Law of God.

Father, we just thank you this morning, Lord, for your words. We thank you, Jesus, for speaking to us about the importance of your Law. We ask Holy Spirit that you would come, in. That you would be stirring our hearts. That you would move us to a place where we would not only see, but also experience the joy that comes from being obedient to the Law of God. The joy that comes from teaching others to be obedient to the Law of God. We ask for your guidance, your blessings, your protection over us. Holy Spirit, go before us as we leave here. We pray all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Ryan Romeo 4/18/21 Ryan Romeo 4/18/21

Salt and Light

We’re diving into the Sermon on the Mount series. Matthew 5:13 is where we are at today. We’re continuing from David Stockton, who kicked us off really great last week. He talked about the Beatitudes…

Series: The Sermon on the Mount

April 18, 2021 - Ryan Romeo

We’re diving into the Sermon on the Mount series. Matthew 5:13 is where we are at today. We’re continuing from David Stockton, who kicked us off really great last week. He talked about the Beatitudes. If you missed that sermon, you should go check it out because it was really, really good.

He talked about the Beatitudes representing this attitude, not just what we should strive to be, or if we find ourselves happening to be in that place, what we should be aware of, the blessedness that we have, really, David was saying Jesus was explaining himself when he was talking about blessed are the meek, blessed are poor in spirit. This is Jesus. Jesus was a man of sorrows. Yes, he was a man that conquered death and he is coming back on the clouds. It’s going to be amazing. But he was also a man that was acquainted with death and sorrow just like we are. He’s not aloof and separate from us.

The story of Jesus coming is this beautiful story. And the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest sermon ever preached. I know that’s a bold statement. But this is the greatest sermon ever preached. We’ve been studying it for a very long time and we still have more to gain from it this morning.

I love it because David talked about how it started, but then he talked about how this sermon ended. In Matthew 7, when Jesus is wrapping up this Sermon on the Mount with his followers, he says, “Blessed are you if you build your life upon my teaching.” And he said it’s like those who build their house on a sure rock foundation. The people afterward were amazed by Jesus. Why? Because he was so handsome and eloquent? Because he had so many Instagram followers? No. They were impressed by Jesus because he taught with such authority. It said the people went away amazed because of at the authority that Jesus preached with.

If you pay attention to the wording in there, he’s going, “If you build your life on my words, you are on a sure foundation.” That is a bold statement. Jesus is coming at it with authority. He’s going, “Hey, I’m not just giving you a really nice sermon, or another way to think about the law, I’m giving you something that will hold you steady and it will be way abetter than the person who builds their house on the sand, the shifting sands of culture or governmental authorities, whatever it is. If you’re trying to build your house on anything else, it will shift. It will change. But my words are the rock.” And how much do we ned that right now.

For those of us building our house or tempted to build our house on the shifting sands of culture, we’re going to find ourselves very confused, very fearful, very stressed out. But Jesus is going, “Come to me. Put your anchor into me and I will give you sure footing.” So Jesus is coming with authority.

With that as a backdrop, let’s turn to Matthew 5:13. I’m reading out of the ESV translation:

13 You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.
14 You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

I’m going to read the exact same passage again, but I’m going to read it out of the Message. The Message is just a paraphrased translation, but I love the way the author puts it. Matthew 5:13 in the Message (MSG) says:

13 “Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.
14-16 “Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.

Amen. I could just read that over and over, I feel like, for us this morning. Jesus is saying something that’s bolder than just, “Hey, this is a good idea about us.” Jesus doesn’t say, “Hey, work really hard to be salt.” Or, “Maybe if you memorize enough scripture, you’ll be light.” Jesus is saying something about our identity as followers of him. He said, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

He’s giving us this sort of identity anchor — something for us again in the tumultuous seasons of life that come and go in our society — he’s giving us something that we can anchor ourselves into. He’s saying, “Anchor into this value that I’m placing on you,” saying, “You are salt and light.”

Now, if we’re being honest, when we hear this we go, “Okay, you’re the salt of the world,” it’s kind of like Jesus saying, “You’re the paprika of the world.” I guess if we’re the flavor of the world, it’s kind of nice. The habanero of the world, yeah, I like that. Jesus isn’t just talking about this spice that we could go, in our society, we could just go to the dollar store and get a collar worth of salt that’s probably like this big. It’s no big deal for us. We use salt all the time. We get it. We have access to it all over the place.

But in this time, things were really different. Historians say there were times in the Roman Empire where salt was more valuable than gold. Salt was one of those things that was given out to people as payment for their work. So Roman soldiers that put in their two weeks, and they would go get their bag of salt — I don’t know if they got paid every two weeks. I’m just making that up. They would get paid in salt. They’d get a digital deposit of salt into their bank account. They would go get a bag of salt. This is the payment that they would be getting, they would receive for the work they put in. Salt is valuable.

Jesus is saying, “You are the salt of the earth.” He’s not saying you’re this thing that you can go to the 99 cent store and get a bunch of. He’s saying, “No, you are very, very valuable.” In fact, the word salary that we use right now, that first part sal comes from the root of salt. So we’re still getting paid in salt. Our salary still harkens back to the time where salt was so valuable.

And Jesus is saying, “You are the salt of the earth.” You carry a lot of value, much more than you understand. The thing about salt, it was valuable, but it was very useful too. If you were carrying gold around and you were starving, or you needed to preserve food or do something, gold didn’t do anything for you. It looked pretty, but it was pretty heavy to carry around. Salt was really different.

Salt was used as a preservative for the time. They would use it as a preservative for meat. So they would have the family animal out back. Maybe they would slaughter old Bessie out back. They probably didn’t have a cow. Maybe they had Frank the goat that they slaughtered out back. They would eat like half of it as a family, and there would be this other half of the meat left over. They couldn’t just put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in their freezer like we do. They had to either let it rot or they would put salt on it. Salt was very useful.

If you had an animal and it was very expensive and you slaughtered it to feed your family, you didn’t want it to just feed your family for one night and then throw the rest out and let it rot. You needed it to sustain you longer. When people put salt on meat, it pushed back against the decay. It created a barrier against decay and rot of the meat.

We are salt. We are called to push back on the decay of culture. Whether culture knows it or not — and most of the time they don’t — the church has this value of holding things fast and preserving things that would get lost otherwise. If you look at the history of the world, you can see so many times, so many different major players in the world, when morality started to decline, it signaled the decline of that society. We could look at history and it happened over and over again.

We know, as the church we are here to preserve certain things. We’re preserving the word of God. We’re preserving church. We’re preserving the gathering together of the saints and worshiping together. There are certain things that we are holding our ground on and going, “This is so important.” Whether society knows it or not, we are helping a lot. Whether you know it or not, we’re helping a lot.

One of the things that, when you read this passage though, you know you hear this, “We’re preservative. We’re valuable,” and all of that. But one of the things that is so important when we’re reading scripture is, what does it actually say, too? So there’s the reading between the lines, absolutely. But what does Jesus actually say? He says, “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?”

We are that God flavoring. I love the way the Message puts it. We are to be “the salt seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth.” Whether the world knows it or not, the things that they are trotting out as brand new is not brand new. It’s been trotted out many, many times over the years. It’s something that, when you pay attention to it, you go, “This is the exact same thing that we’ve heard.” And if you want to know the roots of all of it, go back to Genesis 3 and hear what the serpent said to Eve. He said, “Did God really say…? Did God really say not to do that? Did God really say that?” He’s putting this second guess into the nature of God, going, “Did God really way that? Does he really have your best interests at heart?” Then he throws in this other thing and says, “God knows that if you ate of that fruit that you would be like him.”

And the root of everything that we’re seeing in our society is not brand new. I don’t care if it’s just posted on TikTok or now it’s internet based. That doesn’t matter. That tool is interesting, but the prescriptions that the world is trotting out is bland and predictable. It is the same over and over and over again. And we are that salt flavoring to the world.

I went to art school, surprisingly. I went to UofA because it’s better than ASU. I would say I’m joking, but I’m not. I went to art school at UofA. It is not a normal thing for a Christian to be in art school. I’m just throwing this out. I sat in art classes and there were many people that found out I was a Christian and they were like, “What? Christians don’t make art. Christians are boring.” You know? “They just sit around and read the Bible and judge everybody.” I mean, that’s what they think we’re all about.

I found myself —not that I’m judging other people’s hearts, but I am judging just a little bit — they would trot out these same ideas, like the same, basically, you would start to see the root of it in this idea that, “I am God. I’m in control. The Christians are bad. The people that talk about morality are just trying to judge you.” It was like this same thing over and over and over. I had moments where I would look around the class going, “Does anybody else see this?” It’s kind of the same thing, you know.

We are the God-flavoring of the world. There is something the world is missing. It is bland without us. We don’t hold on to that very often. A lot of times, when you watch pop culture, you don’t feel like that. But we are adding flavoring to the world. We are adding this God-flavoring to the world that everybody’s hungry for. Without it, the world is bland.

We see this with Jesus when he comes onto the scene. You look at the Beatitudes. This attitude that Jesus brought to us was so different. He was not the kind of leader that we’re used to seeing. He didn’t lord it over everybody. He didn’t beat it over anyone’s head. He was lowly. He was humble. He met with the people he shouldn’t have. This was Jesus. He did everything against the social norms. And we are called to walk in that same path. We are salt and light in our community. We are called to be a separate community. There is something about us that should stick out in the world around us.

As I was looking at it, I started to see, you know, what are some of the things the world says, and some of the things that are impacting us right now. You know, they kind of trot out the same prescriptions over and over again. But I see the world saying this right now and saying it over and over again in history. The antidote to injustice is vengeance. The antidote to fear is control. The antidote for shame is justification of behavior.

You see injustice and people are not just saying, “Hey let’s try to make it right.” They’re going, ”Let’s get even. We’ve got to get even.” And I’m a huge fan of the Count of Monte Cristo. I get it. It feels really good to have vengeance. But what did Jesus do in the face of injustice? He was lowly. He didn’t open his mouth. He was murdered completely unjustly. And he took it on his shoulders as a servant. Serving people. Loving them. Doing the exact opposite of what anybody thought he would do.

The antidote for fear is control. We see this in the world all the time. And if you and I are honest, we exercise this in our private life all the time. When we feel fear, when we come up against something that we can’t control, we try to grab control as much as we can. Maybe we hear something about financial trouble, so we start checking on our 401k , or start saying, “Maybe we should pull money out.” You’re trying to traverse everything as much as you can. You’re hearing things in the world that are going wrong and you’re like, “Maybe I need to pay attention more to the news to find out what’s happening.” We’re trying to grab control. We’re white-knuckling things that we really have no business white-knuckling.

Jesus. What did he do in the face of fear? Because he felt that in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was faithful. The antidote for fear is faith. The antidote for fear of going, “Okay, I’m completely out of control, but Lord, I am going to pour myself deeper into prayer. I’m going to pour myself deeper into understanding that I’m not in control. And I’m going to relinquish it to you.”

The antidote for shame is justification of behavior. This is one of those things that is not new. I’m sorry. 2021 did not invent the justification of wrong behavior. When we walk in shame, and shame is kind of the darker version of feeling this sense of like, “Okay, I did something wrong.” But it’s repentance. That is the antidote. Repent. Turn away and go, “Hey, I get it. This is not right and this is not good for me. I’m going to turn away.”

Again, over and over society tells us that’s an old idea. “That is no good. It doesn’t matter anymore. We don’t need to do that. We need to take control of our lives. We need to take control.” We should see it for what it is. It’s a Genesis 3 lie. It’s been around for a long time. But as Christians, we are called to be salt and light.

Jesus says this interesting phrase. He says, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?” Jesus is giving us a bit of a warning here, saying, “Hey, you can lose that salty flavor. Though your identity is salt, you can lose your flavor as that granule of salt.”

I saw this in two different ways. One, I think we can dilute our saltiness by living a flavorless life that just echoes the world. We’re just bringing in the philosophies of the world. It’s so interesting when Jesus says, “If it loses its saltiness,” the word that he uses in there is this word moraino and it’s the root for the word moron. If you have lost your flavoring…I read that and I thought Man, I don’t know if I’ll ever read that passage the same! It’s like don’t be foolish. There’s this sense of like you’re trading something of such value for something that’s so foolish.

It’s sad to see this happen over and over. There are a lot of people I know that are following Jesus and they’re going, “You know what? I’m going to just kind of add a little bit this and add a little bit of that.” Pretty soon they’re not salty. They’re not living a life that’s separate at all from anybody else. At some point they just completely exchange their life in Jesus for what the world is telling them is life. We know it’s foolish. We know it’s not going to fill. Yet, we see people doing that all the time.

If we’re being honest, we’re tempted to do that all the time too. “Did God really say that?” “Do I have to really do that?” How many of you today are going, “I didn’t even really want to come to church.” Or, “I argued with my kids on the way here.” I’ll just say it was me, too. I was like, “I don’t know if I really want to come to church today.” But we are pushing back against the entropy of the world. We are pushing back against the decay of the world in our own spheres and our own lives, and going, “No. I’m not going to lose my saltiness.”

So you could dilute it by bringing in things of the world. You can dilute by bringing in old trotted out philosophies that don’t line up with scriptures, that don’t line up with the teachings of Jesus. But you could go the opposite direction, too. You could lose your saltiness from self-righteousness. Now, later on in this passage it hit me really hard. Later on when he says, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” and he says, “In the same way let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” I started going, Okay, we’re not saved by works, I get that. But seeing our good works and glorifying our Father in heaven felt a little contrary to the next chapter.

If you turn over to Matthew 6, the very beginning he says, “Beware of practicing righteousness in front of other people like then Pharisees do, because you’ll get no reward at all.” I started going, “Okay, well, you do want people to see our good works, Jesus. But you don’t want us to be walking in righteousness just to be viewed by other people. So what is the difference here?”

I think if you’re walking in self-righteousness, practicing righteousness just to be seen by other people, you’re doing it on a heart level for different motivations than you would for good works. With everything Jesus says, it’s all about heart posture. It’s all about understanding the heart behind this.

Practicing righteousness in front of other people is to be noticed. You’re acting superior, so you’re doing it in a way to be noticed and to gain leverage and superiority over people around you. If you find yourself trying to memorize Bible verses to make sure you’re the sharpest one in the room so that you’re impressing people – you’re not. That is operating in this sense of “I’m going to practice righteousness to make everybody think I’m doing great.” At the end of the day, it’s not bringing glory to God. It’s bringing glory to yourself. So don’t do that. Jesus is going, “Don’t do that. Don’t fall into that trap of trying to practice righteousness.”

But he does say, “Let your good works shine in front of other people.” So what are good works? What does that mean? What is the difference there? Well, the heart posture for good works are to genuinely impact people’s lives. You’re coming to the table and going, “I just want to make a difference here.” Maybe my neighbor is going through something hard and I want to bring him a meal. Maybe there’s a neighbor that hasn’t been around people for a long time and I’m going to give him a call and see how they’re doing.

These small acts or big acts, these things that are, “I just want to make an impact for the kingdom,” and it’s coming from this heart posture of displaying humility and love. You want to come to the table and go, “I’m not a big deal. I’m not coming to you because I have everything sorted out and I’m perfect. I’m coming to you because I love you and I want to display the love of Jesus to you who was perfect. He lived the perfect life and I just want to tell you about him.”

At the end of the day, good works give glory to God, not to you. At the end of the day good works are one of those things that you walk in, and people don’t go, “Wow. Wasn’t that person amazing?” They go, “Wow. Wasn’t God amazing?” This is what it means to be salt. This is what it means to be light. This is what it means to walk that out in the community around us.

But I have some encouragement for us this morning, as we’re looking around and we’re seeing the world. As the world gets darker, our light shines brighter. I’m going to say that again, because I feel like that needs to sink in. As the world gets darker, our light shines brighter. It becomes easier and easier to walk in the ways of God when the darkness around us is so palpable and so different. When we’re living a simply different life than other people, it’s easier to become a light.

In 2005, I think, we spent a few years before that doing missions work. In 2005 we went to Cambodia. The last time I spoke I talked about the first time I went to Cambodia right out of high school in 2000. It was real war torn. I saw the red light district of Cambodia. It was a kind of oppressive darkness that I couldn’t really handle. It seemed that it felt so dirty, I just, honestly, on an emotional level, “Lord, I can’t even handle the darkness of what’s going on here.”

A few laters later, five years later, we felt like the Lord was calling us to go back to Cambodia. So my wife and I led a team. We were in Phnom Penh. We started working with a church. And the think you notice about the Cambodian people, there are so many things about the culture that are beautiful. I really do love Cambodian culture. But there is this sort of sense of darkness and lost-ness that is very, very evident. You just see the people walking around with their heads down. There is just this deep sadness. They’ve gone through things that you and I would never understand. I mean, there are parents selling their kids into the sex trade. Things that we just really don’t understand, can’t wrap our head around, and they feel the darkness of that. Even if they didn’t experience it, chances are half of their friends experienced it. And they have this weight and this darkness as they’re walking around. And you just see it in the people. Their heads are down, their eyes are not bright. There’s just this utter helplessness.

I remember the first church that we went to in Cambodia, and you showed up and it was just like, “Wow, something’s really different here.” And the worship was really different. They all sang in Khmer. I had no idea what was going on. It was probably like three steps higher than I could sing. I didn’t know what was going on. Lots of symbols clashing. It was completely different in terms of style. I had no idea what the sermon was about; because, again, it was in Khmer. My wife and I just sat there for an hour and a half, just not really understanding.

But there was something that we did understand when we looked around at the people. There was this difference in them. They were so different. And the biggest thing that was different about them was that they smiled. They just smiled. And they were hearing a sermon. I’ll bet more than half the people in the room couldn’t even read or write. Nobody had a theology degree. Nobody had the pedigree to quote due ministry. But there was this movement of the Spirit that was so palpable in the room. You’re going, “The Spirit of God is in this place.” And being a light was really, really simple. They didn’t need to be experts. They didn’t need to be the smartest people in the room. They sat at the feet of Jesus. They sat in community with each other. And they worshiped God. And it brought such a difference to them.

And, church, as the world gets darker, it’s going to become a lot easier for you to shine your light. It really will be. It will be easier when you sit down. I started writing some things down, going, “What does it meant to be salt and light? What are the things that we can do?” And it’s so simple:

Put yourself under the authority of Jesus. We’re hearing all sorts of people tell themselves and each other, “Hey, put yourself under this authority.” Or “Listen to this new book.” Or “Check out this new show.” Or “Listen to this new YouTube channel,” or whatever. At the end of the day, the only voice that has authority in our life to give us stability in unstable times is the voice of Jesus. We have to understand it. We have to put ourselves under his authority and go, “No matter what the world tells us, Jesus, I trust you. If you’re the last one I can trust, Jesus, I trust you.” Put yourself under the authority of Jesus.
Anchor your hope in him. Have a hope that doesn’t make sense, like Paul said. It absolutely makes no sense to be walking around with hope. But we need to be the people that are smiling. We need to be the people that, when we’re burying ourselves under the news, and when we’re burying ourselves under all the hopelessness of what we see in the world, trying to get a grasp on it, we have to push back occasionally. We have to go sit with our kids, sit with our family, sit with our friends, slow down and remember the hope that we have in Jesus that is surpassing anything else that the world would give us.
This is the most important thing: Spend time with him and spend time in community. The second one is a lot like the first one. Spend time with Jesus and spend time in community, because iron sharpens iron. We need people around us that don’t think exactly like us. We need to show the sort of crazy unity under the lordship of Jesus where we could hear from each other and push back against each other and bring out new ideas of scripture with one another. We need community. If 2020 taught us one thing, it was this. Community is beautiful and it’s not to be taken for granted. Even as I stand in front of you today, I think, God, what if this is the last time we stand in front of our church? What if this is the last time we get together? What are we going to say to each other? What are we going to spur one another on? That’s the gift of 2020 that I feel like I’ll carry the rest of my life. Community is not something we take for granted. And spending time with Jesus every morning. It’s not something to take for granted.

So church, we are called to be salt and light. But it’s a lot easier than you and I think. Jesus said his yoke is easy, his burden is light. There’s something so beautiful about sitting under the teachings of Jesus and just receiving. Let’s pray:

Jesus, we thank you that you call us salt and light. Thank you that we didn’t earn it, Jesus. You earned it for us on the cross. Thank you that there’s one mediator between God and man, and that is you, Jesus.
Holy Spirit, we thank you that you guide us in our life. We thank you that you’re that dove on our shoulder, leading us, guiding us, speaking to us.
And God, we want to be salt and light. We want to be a city on a hill. We want to be a culture that is counter to the culture that we’re seeing in this world. God, not from a distant, judgmental way, but, Lord, as salt flavoring that brings out the God-flavors of the world around us. Lord, help us to be set apart for you.
We pray for more of what we’re seeing in our church, more of what we’re seeing in our church and other churches, God. More of a move of your Spirit. More of a move of worship. More of a move of your gospel, of putting ourselves under the authority of your teaching, Jesus. Right now we just repent. We’re sorry, Lord. Anything that we’ve put ourselves under this week — any authority that we’ve put ourselves under this week, Lord, we’re sorry. Right now we put ourselves under the authority of your word, under the authority of your teaching. And we sit at the feet of the beautiful, joyful, hopeful King that is one day coming back in splendor and power, and it’s going to split the sky in two and, in one moment it’s going to be so clear. So strengthen us before that day, Jesus.

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

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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Guest User 12/13/20 Guest User 12/13/20

You Don't Have to Stay in That Pit

Series: John

John 21 - David Stockton

John was written by John. I figured that out all by myself. John was a human. John was writing toward the end of his life. So John was a guy who spent time with Jesus in the flesh. He was there three years. He spent time with Jesus in the flesh every day. Then after that, Jesus ascended into heaven. And John spent the next sixty years of his life hanging out with Jesus in the Spirit. To some of you, that might sound crazy or whatever. But we’ll explain more about that. But for those three years in the flesh he got to be with Jesus.

After spending sixty years being with Jesus in the Spirit, he’s about ninety years old or so, and he decides it’s time for him to write about his experiences for those three years with Jesus in the flesh. That’s what he’s doing.

In the book of John he doesn’t use his name, he just says that he’s the one that Jesus loved. Not saying that he’s the only one that Jesus loved. But that’s what he really felt. He really felt Jesus’ love. He’s the one that leaned against Jesus chest at at the last supper.

John is the only male disciple of Jesus who was there when Jesus was on the cross. At one point we know Jesus had about one hundred and twenty people who called themselves disciples. At one point there were seventy and he sent them out. At one point he said, “Eat my body and drink my blood,” and then he only had twelve. That was kind of an eliminator there. That’s funny, right?

Then he had twelve. But even those twelve didn’t all pan out quite right. But John was the only one out of all of those who was at the cross. There were some women because they figured things out better than men, but John was the only male disciple at the cross.

John has written all of these, he told us, so that we would believe in Jesus. So if you get to John 21 and you haven’t been encouraged to believe in Jesus, you didn’t believe it right. Maybe I didn’t teach it right.

He wants you to believe in Jesus. And when John says the word believe it’s different than Paul. Paul kind of uses the word belief or faith as kind of a pledge of allegiance. John uses it more as trust over time. He is basically telling us the story how one day he met this guy named Jesus and he began to trust him a little bit. And Jesus proved himself trustworthy so he began to trust him more. Jesus proved himself trustworthy so he began to him more.

At one point he turned water into wine and John said at this point the disciples began to believe in him, they began to trust more in him. Then they saw him heal people from diseases that couldn’t be healed and they trusted him a little more. They saw him walk on water, saw him feed five thousand, all these different things. They heard some of the things he said and they began to trust him a little bit more.

So John, at the end of Jesus’ life on earth, at the end of his life, he’s just saying he completely trusts in Jesus. And as he writes, what is happening is that we’ll begin to trust more and more in Jesus, so that we’ll begin to sing out songs of faith from the places that used to be so full of despair, fear, pain and doubt. We’ll sing that old song, “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust you. How I’ve proved you over and over.” If you’re going to kind of say what hymn you would attach to what apostle - it’s a weird Christian game that no one’s ever played before. I just made it up. But whatever. I think that would be the song that John would love to sing. “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust you. How I’ve proved you over and over.”

So, in John 21:1. You ready? Man, there is like nobody here today. But there are so many people here. Who’s ready? We’re in church, man. There’s a lot of people here. It should be fun!

1 After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way. 2 Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. 3 Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

A lot of events have transpired. A lot of stuff is going on in the disciples lives. And Peter is just like, “Forget it man. I’m going fishing.”

4 Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. 5 Jesus said to them, “Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.” 6 He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the quantity of fish. 7 That disciple whom Jesus loved therefore said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea. 8 The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off.
9 When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place…

Because, you know, grilling with propane is not really grilling. They’re going to keep coming, you know? So you might as well just get used to it.

…with fish laid out on it, and bread. 10 Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” 11 So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn. 12 Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. 13 Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. 14 This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

Awesome story. Jesus shows up on the shore. His guys are out in the boat. Peter, that’s where he found Peter the first time was on the boat. He said, “Cast your net on the other side.” Peter was like, “Psh. You’re some like rabbi guy. I’m a fisherman. Don’t tell me what to do. All right. Whatever. I’ll do it.” He catches a bunch of fish.

So Jesus is there once again on the shore. John and Peter and the other disciples are in the boat. They caught nothing. They’re frustrated because they caught nothing. They’re frustrated because they’re totally confused. They’re frustrated because Jesus is not there in the flesh anymore. They’re confused about all the stories they’re hearing. Jesus has shown up to them twice already, mind you. This is the third time. And they see this guy on the shore. He’s made a fire and he calls out to them, “Cast your net on the other side.” There’s probably something inside them that says, “Maybe.”

They cast the net on the other side and catch all the fish. And they’re like, “Maybe?” And John was like, ‘Yeah. It’s the Lord.” So Peter jumps in and runs over there. And they have this little time with Jesus around the fire.

There are a couple of things I want us to draw out of this chapter. The third one is the most important. We’ll spend the most time there.

I want us to understand resurrected life. It’s a very, very important thing. This is one of the tenants of the Christian faith. We believe in the resurrection life. And resurrection life is not kind of like life that you get back. So Lazarus, when he rose from the dead, did not get resurrection life. He resurrected to normal life. He didn’t resurrect to resurrection life. Which means that he died again. It’s not like a cat, you get nine lives. You keep dying, or like re-spawning in a video game or whatever.

Resurrection life is different than that. Jesus is the first fruits of resurrection life. He is the first one to enter into resurrection life. It’s life that is not limited anymore. Not limited by the laws of nature. Not limited by sin and the battle there. Not limited by the curse that sin has brought. Not limited by death. It’s not that, if you die again you rise again. No. It’s that you don’t die anymore.

So we get to see this little glimpse into what that’s like for us. It’s little and it’s small, for sure. But Jesus, when he rose from the dead, his body was not in the tomb. His physical body was somehow part of his glorified state. So much so that these people, when they see him, they see him as human. They’re not like, “Is that an alien on the shore?” They see him and see it’s a person, but they don’t recognize that it’s Jesus until they recognize that it’s Jesus. Do you get how confusing this is?

There’s something so unique about this resurrection state. First of all, freedom from all the limitations, which is so awesome. But then also there’s this uniqueness to it where, you’re still recognizable as you do the things you do or say the things you say, but you’re not really recognizable because you look different.

So you have the disciples sitting there with Jesus around the fire. They just caught the fish. They know it’s him. John says it’s him. And they’re all sitting there going, “Somebody needs to ask. Is it him? Is it really him?”

I don’t know if that’s more that they’re so challenged with the reality that Jesus died and how he can be sitting here with fish? It’s just so hard for their mind to get around that. Or if Jesus just actually looked different enough that they’re like, “I think it’s him. But I don’t know it’s him.”

So they’re just sitting there like the disciples always did, thinking among themselves, It’s got to be him. Is it him? No, we shouldn’t ask. We should ask. Is it okay to ask? I don’t know if it’s okay. That’s what they’re doing because that’s the state.

But one of the things that is also important about resurrected life—and this is one of my favorite things about it—is that every time you see Jesus, he’s eating. Right? That’s good news. So the eating game will continue past this. You can eat fish. You can still catch fish. I like fishing, so those are big deals for me. It’s usually fish and bread, so I’m hoping that that’s just all they had. That’s not all we will have. But whatever. I’m sure it will taste good at that point.

The next thing. So that’s resurrected life, glorified life, something to look forward to. It’s a hope that we have. It’s beautiful. It’s awesome. I love songs that sing about it as well.

So the other thing we have is a transitioning between the covenants. So here, for the Bible students in the room, if you love this type of stuff, basically we have the old covenant, Old Testament. We have the new covenant, New Testament. They are all the same covenant. It’s all God wanting to bring salvation to people through justification by faith. So the Old Testament, basically what they were supposed to do was believe that God would provide a sacrifice for sin, that God himself would provide a sacrifice for sin. It’s actually words that Abraham spoke to his own son. So they believed that God would. Now, the new covenant, we just believe the same thing. We just believe that God has, if that makes sense. It’s the same.

I actually wrote an essay in seminary, in bible college. I called it the Covenant Mountain. It’s all the same substance. It’s all the same mountain - justification by faith. Same God, same people, same problems, all of that. And the same solution is Jesus. It’s always Jesus. It always will be Jesus. He’s the solution.

Now here’s the trick. When does the covenant reach its pinnacle of the old and begin the new? That’s not such an easy question. You think the cross, right? Jesus purchased the new covenant. He purchased with his blood the new covenant, he said. So you think the cross is where that happens, we’re beginning a new covenant. But without the resurrection, the cross really is meaningless. It’s just another guy dying. So then he resurrection becomes super significant, so maybe it’s the resurrection. But without the resurrection, Jesus said there was something else so important, when the Spirit would come.

So in Acts 2, the Spirit comes. And when the Spirit comes, that’s the guarantee of the new covenant. Now we have proof that the new covenant has come. Some of you are like, “What is he talking about?” That’s fine. Don’t worry. This is extra credit stuff. It won’t be on the test.

But basically what we’re experiencing in John 20 and 21 all the way through to Acts 2, we’re experiencing these 40 days of plateau on top of the mountain. I didn’t say this in my paper because I didn’t know this yet, but if I was going to rewrite the paper I’d write it this way. I don’t remember what I said, I was trying to fill up space so I could get enough words or something like that. But anyway, the top of this mountain is like this forty day plateau from when Jesus died on the cross to when he ascended and the Spirit came. It’s basically this transition between the covenants. It’s the time between the times.

And Jesus is showing up not in the flesh, he’s showing up in the resurrected state in between the time where he was in the flesh and the Spirit comes. So it’s just interesting, fascinating thing. Not a lot to draw out there, just want you to be ahead of that. Basically the Father gave the Son, and the Son gives the Spirit, and then the Spirit gives us the love that we need and the power that we need to love God and people the way we’re supposed to.

So the last thing I want to emphasize is the redemption of Peter, the restoration of Peter, the reinstating of Peter. We get this in this next chunk, starting with verse 15:

15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”

Another good question for bible students is what is the word these? What’s he referring to? Is he talking about the other disciples? Is he talking about the fish? Is he talking about, “Do you love me more than these other disciples love me?”

He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17 He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?”

Because Peter, real fresh in his mind is that in John 19, Peter denied Jesus three times at Jesus’ real moment of truth.

and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” 19 (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.”

The very first words that he said to Peter. “Follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.” It’s a really important moment that John makes sure. The other gospel writers didn’t include this. John is saying, ‘Hey you’ve got to know about this story.” The story where Jesus showed up to Peter.

What he gave us in chapter 20—I loved what Ryan shared last week on chapter 20. But basically Jesus shows up to Mary and Mary was locked up in this frustration and anger at injustice. Mary basically was so upset she was distraught. Because they had taken the body of Jesus and she was yelling at the gardener and yelling, “Who took him? Where have you taken him?”

She was once again stung with that pain of powerful men and what they have taken from her. We don’t know all the details of her story, but we know that she ended up being a prostitute. And how you get to that point, and Ryan talked a little bit about that. How powerful men had stolen from her enough to where now she found herself as a prostitute and even demon-possessed. And then the most powerful man comes along, Jesus, and he calls out to her and saves her. And healing has begun. And yet, now powerful men have killed Jesus and not only that, but they have taken his body. And she’s so distraught because it once again reopens all of that wound.

Yet there, in that moment, she sees the gardener, not knowing, not recognizing that it’s Jesus, and she says, “Where have you taken him?” And the garden, Jesus, says, “Mary!” And she hears that same voice. That same name spoken in his tone and, all of a sudden, she’s undone once again. The healing gets a little deeper into her soul.

Then the very next thing John tells us is don’t forget about when he showed up the first time to the disciples. It literally says they were shut up in fear. They were locked up in a room. They were locked up in fear. And Jesus meets them in that space and says, “Do not fear.” And he actually breathes on them. He does something so personal, so tangible. And that would be weird if I breathed on you. I won’t do that. Don’t worry about that. But if Jesus does it it’s super cool. He breathed on them and they received some peace.

Then shortly after that he shows up again to the disciples, because Thomas wasn’t in that group. And Thomas was saying, “Yeah, that’s great. I’m glad you guys all had this experience. But I’ve always thought you guys were a little weird. So I’m not taking your word for it. I need to see his wounds. I need to touch him. I need to put my hand into his side if I’m going to believe.”

So Jesus shows up a second time to the disciples and Thomas is in the room. He looks around and he says, “Hey, Thomas.” Thomas is like, “Me?” And he’s like, “Yeah, Thomas, you. Come here.” So Thomas comes up and he says, “Go ahead. Go ahead, Thomas.”

And Jesus is giving them something so supernatural, but so natural. He’s meeting them right where they are, locked up in these things. Thomas is locked up in doubt and confusion and Jesus comes in and he gives him something tangible, something practical, something in the natural to help him get released and unlocked.

Now we have this story where Jesus is doing the same thing. But now he’s calling out Peter. And John doesn’t want us to miss it. So Jesus calls out to him and says, “Peter, do you love me?”

In the Greek there’s a little trick in here. Basically it’s, “Peter do you agape me?” It’s, “Do you sacrificially love me? Do you unconditionally love me?” And Peter, knowing what he had just done, still feeling the shame now of sitting with Jesus after he denied him and heard that rooster crow, he says, “I phileo you.” He doesn’t say, “I agape you.” He says, “I love you like a friend, like a brother, and it’s very conditional and I’m sorry.”

Then he says, “But Peter, that’s good enough for me. Will you feed my sheep?” Then Jesus says to him, “Do you agape me?” And Peter says, “You know that I love you. You know that I phileo you.” And Jesus says, “Then feed my sheep.” Then the last time, a third time, Jesus says to Peter, “Peter do you phileo me?”

And Peter is hurt. All that shame of what he had just done, of how often he had failed in all of his life is weighing so heavy upon him as Jesus asks him a third time, “Peter do you love me?” Peter says, “Lord, you know everything. You know I phileo you.” And Jesus says, “That’s good enough for me, Peter. Feed my sheep.” Then he begins to tell Peter all of the hard, hard things he’s going to go through. Basically, “Peter, if you thought that was hard, it’s now your turn to go to the cross. And all I’m asking is that you k eep following me because I’m the one who’s going to make you a fisher of men. Will you follow me?”

And Peter’s response is so beautiful.

20 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who also had leaned back against him during the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?” 21 When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?”

Jesus is having this moment. He’s drawing Peter in. He’s saying, “Peter, we can do this. Take my hand. Follow me. Feed my sheep. I’ve got a massive calling for you. And if you let shame take it away from you right now you’re going to miss everything. But I’m here Peter and I’m praying for you. The devil desires to sift you like wheat. But I’m praying for you. And Peter, I’m here giving you fish!” Saying, “I want you to do something for me, Peter. I want you to represent me, Peter. I’m going to give all the people, on you I’m going to build the church. All of the little lambs are going to need you, Peter. I want you to fight for them. I want you to care for them. I want you to tend them.”

Peter’s like, “Well, what about John? What about John?”

Then John kind of inserts a little bit of his own thing:

22 Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” 23 So the saying spread abroad among the brothers that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”
24 This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.
25 Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

So John is here just kind of putting his seal, his signature on the end of this thing, saying that this is what it said. And John is now maybe wondering that, Did Jesus mean that I would be alive, that I wouldn’t die? But now he’s ninety years old and he’s going, “Nah. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. Pretty sure I’m going to die and that’s okay, because that’s not really what Jesus said,”

But in this moment I want us to really pay attention to what Jesus is doing here. And what John is wanting us to see. That Jesus was meeting with all of these people individually, in a very practical way. He was giving them something to hold on to. He was reinstating them. He was reconnecting with them. He was doing it in a very supernaturally natural way—not in a supernatural wild way. But in a supernatural way that made perfect sense to them personally.

Honestly, that’s what I think the Lord wants to do right now for each of us. We had a really. Neat time first service. We had a lot of people come forward for prayer and get to hear a rhema word—a word from heaven about their earthly situation.

What I sensed as I was preparing this message was that this message was just a setup. It wasn’t really something to stand alone. It was just to set up what we’re going to do right now. We’re going to have a time of waiting on the Lord to see if he would meet us who are locked up in despair, anger at all of the injustice and disappointments. He wants to meet us who are locked up in fear after a year of constant uncertainty, where we can feel our feet begin to slip, and our relationship with the Lord begin to waver. To free those who are locked up in doubt and confusion, who just can’t seem to get their mind around why God would allow certain things to happen. What they really need to do is to touch his scars and feel his heart.

We’re going to spend some time praying for those who might have become so identified with all of their weakness and shame that they don’t even know what God is calling them to. Or maybe they’ve forgotten what God has called them to. Or maybe they’ve stopped really believing that God could be calling them to anything, and they’ve disqualified themselves like Peter.

Those things are not supposed to go with you from this room. Those chains, those things that are binding you up.

As Jesus is talking to Peter it reminds me of this song that a guy named Jon Foreman wrote. This song hit me the first time I was listening to it because I was in Dangriga, Belize, because I was working with a bunch of kids with my wife. And these kids all came from real broken homes, real troubled situations.

I remember we were trying to do church one night, and a fight broke out, which was not that uncommon. It was an interesting church time we were having. And these two kids, they were probably twelve years old and they were going at each other. I didn’t know what was going to happen. My default move in that regard was to go, “Oh, look how much they love each other!” Then it usually is enough of a little embarrassment that they go, “I don’t love him!” And they stop fighting. So that’s kind of my trick.

So it worked and I was like, “Oh and he loves me, too!” And I just kind of hugged one of them, which was again, just trying to get them out of the situation and kind of deflect some of the anger of the moment. I was hugging this kid and he was hugging me and I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I started to release. And when I started to release, he grabbed me so much tighter. And then I looked down and he was just weeping. He was totally weeping and I was thinking about these words and how this kid doesn’t want to be like this.

The more I got to know this kid, he was sweet and he was kind. But he had been taught that this was the way he had to go, this is the way he had to live, this was the only thing he could do when he was in those situation. These words so powerful at that time. It says this:

We learn to wear these masks so young
Like a prison that keeps joy from gettin’ through
And an angry silence grips our tongues
These weapons and our walls become our tombs
Yes, we’re the kids who’ve seen the darkness
Always looking for the light
You fall in love and then the rains come down
And only part of you survives
Come surrender your hidden scars
Leave your weapons where they are
You’ve been hiding
But I know your wounded heart
And you don’t know how beautiful you are
–by Jon Foreman, from “You Don’t Know How Beautiful You Are” (Switchfoot)

And then this guy, Galway Kinnell was writing about St. Francis of Assisi and what he was able to do with the people around him.

Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely
until it flowers again from within
–by Galway Kinnell, from “Saint Francis and the Sow

And this is what Jesus is trying to do. And I don’t know your stories, I don’t know your situation. I don’t. And I don’t really care that much because I know what God is telling me, what your Father in heaven is telling me he wants to do for you right now. If we’re faithful to do our part—just surrender and show up—he’ll be faithful to do his part.

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Guest User 9/8/19 Guest User 9/8/19

Don't Get Distracted

David Stockton:

Rob Capaldi (www.capaldi.life)
Series: Ephesians

David Stockton:

He is apostolic. He has traveled the continents sharing the word of God, trying to spread God’s word and strengthen churches. He’s here to share his gift and his calling with us—his story. He’s been in Ecuador. He’s been in Canada. He’s been in the U.S. and now he’s currently living in Italy, trying to build the church there. I’m so excited to tell his stories. I told him he can’t speak in Spanish, he can’t speak in Italian. He has to speak in English. He could do any of those. He could probably speak Canadian, too, but nobody wants to hear that. What’s up, Roy? Here you go, Rob. Let ‘em have it.

Rob Capaldi:

Thank you, David, for that amazing introduction. I feel like I could just do a mic drop after that and just walk away. See, now, that’s why I wanted a handheld. You can’t mic drop an earpiece. That’s not right.

Thank you so much. I will do like Paul has done in some of the books of the Bible:

Italy brings its greetings to you.

That is definitely true for us today.

Now, for those who do not know me, which is most of you, I am a second-generation missionary. When I was six years old, my parents decided to sell everything, put some of their stuff in a container and move to Ecuador. I obviously didn’t have much say in this because I was six years old. We lived there for a while, church was growing and everything was going great.

But a little less than three years ago, with my family—I’ve been married fourteen years now, to my beautiful wife that is with me this morning, Karina. My oldest son is Robby, he’s twelve, and Angelina, she’s going to be seven, and my last daughter, Alia, she is four years old—we decided to move as missionaries, as David said, to Italy. I’ll be telling you a little about that story as we advance.

Something interesting happened to me when we were leaving Ecuador to go to Italy. There is this really popular Bible verse that people use when they are going to go somewhere else. You’ve probably heard it before. This verse is Acts 1:8. It’s one you know:

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere: in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

Have you heard that before? Yeah. You’ve heard that, right? So, obviously, we were using that verse when we were leaving Ecuador. “We’ve got to go to the ends of the earth. This is our Jerusalem. We’ve got to go to the ends of the earth. So that’s where we’re going. We’re going to the other side of the world to the ends of the earth.” For us that is Italy.

We get to Italy and the church that received us there, were actually on this missions topic as well. And guess what? They put that verse up and they’re talking about that. And they’re saying, “We need to have a vision to send people to the ends of the earth.”

And I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. The ends of the … this is the ends of the earth! I just came from Jerusalem. This is the ends of the earth!”

And then it dawned on me. I just realized something. Now, I’m assuming none of you are flat earth believers. But I realized, “Oh my gosh. There is no ‘ends of the earth.’ The earth is round! So, if there is no ‘ends of the earth’—I’m coming to the ends of the earth—you’re gong to the ends of the earth and we’re crossing. Wouldn’t it just be cheaper and easier if everyone just stayed put?”

It’s funny though, because, you see, we all know when Jesus finished his ministry he left. He left the earth. And at that moment, I think that’s one of the coolest moments in the Bible, the disciples are there and they are watching Jesus leave. He’s gone on a cloud. He’s leaving and they’re just watching him. After a little while, he’s actually gone. But you know what the disciples are doing? They’re still just looking up into the sky. Then, all of a sudden, this angel appears among them and he says, “Uh, guys. What are you doing? Why are you looking up in the clouds? It’s time to pick up shop. Let’s go. It’s up to you now.”

If this angel was Italian, he would have said, “Hey, guys, salt in the salt shaker does nothing to the pasta. You’ve got to spread out that salt. You’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to go all around.”

That is God’s heart for us. No, we do not have to stay put. Yes, we have to go all around the world telling everybody about God’s love and everything that he has for us. That has to sound in every tongue, in every ethnicity, in every kind of person. It’s amazing when you hear it from different people around the world in the same place. We’ve really got to grasp that God is not just our God, here let’s say in Phoenix, but he is God of the whole world. So when we have people together speaking in Italian, in Portuguese, in Spanish, and they’re all talking about the same God. That is really power.

[A few sentences in Italian and then Spanish]

Okay, I’ll talk English. I’m sorry, David. Plus, I’m starting to sound a little like the candidates in the Presidential debates. We won’t get into politics this morning.

The point is, Jesus’ Body, he left, right? But his Body is still here. The Church, we are the living, breathing Body of Christ, amen? And Jesus still is serving everyone. He wants to do that through us. And now it is up to us to go all around the world. I am a witness, as David said. I’ve been around. Thank God. That is such a blessing. I’ve been to Spain. I’ve been to Switzerland. I’ve been to Italy. I’ve been to Canada. I’ve been all around. And you know what? God is everywhere!

Don’t believe the news. Don’t believe whatever you hear about Christianity. Let me tell you something. And I can tell you because I’ve been there. God is doing things all around the world.

If you could leave here this morning with just one thing, please let it be this: Do not get distracted. Do not get distracted from Christ’s love. Bear in mind, English is my first language, but it is actually the language that I use the least. It is a little rusty. So if I say anything stupid, please do not get distracted.

I would like to bring our attention to Ephesians now. Ephesians 3. Paul, in Ephesians, is giving us this amazing vision of what the church looks like in the future. He’s teaching the Church how it needs to act, and also the individual, how it needs to act in this broken world. But in Ephesians are also these amazing golden nuggets that Paul does. And he does something amazing. He pauses for a second from his teachings, and he says he gets on his knees and he prays for the church in Ephesians. This is what he says in Ephesians 3:14. I’m reading from the New Living Translation. Listen to this. You might be able to receive this as a prayer, because this was Paul’s prayer for the Church, and we are part of this.

14 When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, 15 the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. 16 I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. 17 Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.

Let me repeat that:

Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.

18 And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. 19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Amen. What makes us complete? What makes us complete in him? It’s experiencing God’s love. And may we never, ever get distracted from that one thing: God’s love through Christ. Christ’s love in us. That’s what makes our roots grow deep and keeps us strong.

Before I got married, when we were about to get married, we went with my mother and father in-law to do some errands. Karina and I were in the back seat. My future mother in-law was driving, my father in-law was in the passenger seat. We were downtown and there was a lot of traffic. We were running some errands. So he jumps out to run some errands and my mother in-law was going to drive around the block to pick him up after he could do something quick.

So we’re in the back and she’s driving. Then, all of a sudden, as she was driving, somebody screams out, “Hey, be careful! Fire! Fire!” Like underneath the car. So she stops the car and jumps out. I also jump out because, you know, I have to show that I’m a responsible person, right? I hope that’s what she thought and that I wasn’t jumping out to save my life. So I jump out and I’m looking under the car and I don’t see anything. I’m like, “There’s nothing here.”

Then this guy comes around and taps me on the shoulder and says, “No, no. It’s in the back. Come and see!” And he touches my shoulder, he pushes me down a little and he says, “Look, look, look!”

So I’m looking at the exhaust pipe. I’m looking around. I don’t see anything. My mother in-law and I were both in the back of the car just looking like that and the guy says, “No, No. Look down. See? See? See?”

And after we’re looking a while, this girl comes up to us and says, “Hey, guys.” And I’m still looking, you know. “They just stole your purse.”

And I’m thinking, “What an idiot!” And so I get up and I’m like, “This can’t be. They just stole my future mother in-law’s purse. I’ve got to do something!”

So I start running. Right? I’m running and running and running. And then, as I’m running, I’m thinking, “What an idiot! Who are you running after? I don’t know what this person looks like. I don’t know where they went. I don’t even know what the purse looks like. I didn’t pay attention.”

And so I stopped and I turned around. I’m bummed out and walking back. And as I’m walking back, because I ran about a block and this is the longest block to walk back. As I’m walking back, I’m thinking to myself, “Wait a second. I saw the thief. I didn’t just see the thief, at least one of them, he touched me! The guy that was tapping on my shoulder, showing me where to look, pushing me down, he wasn’t trying to help me. He was distracting me. He was distracting me, making me look down so that I wouldn’t realize what was actually going on. That guy was in on it. That guy was the thief.”

That sometimes happens to us. We get distracted from what is really going on. We get distracted from what God really wants for our lives and for what God really wants for your life. Let’s not get distracted. You know what? Sometimes we think those distractions are going to be bad things, evil things. No, no, no. This guy was trying to help me, right? That’s why I was listening to him. He was trying to help me. Right? That’s why I was listening to him, because he was trying to help me. But it wasn’t true. So sometimes it can be apparently good things in our lives, but if they distract us from the love Christ has for us, then it’s not necessarily a good thing.

This reminded me of something in Matthew 13. I’m just going to mention it, you don’t have to go there. There’s a parable that Jesus was teaching. You’ve definitely heard it before. The parable about the farmer planting seeds. The farmer casts out all these seeds everywhere. All these seeds fall on all these different types of soil.

That’s a teaching in itself. That really shows us the Father’s heart. He’s going to throw seed everywhere. That sounds like a terrible farmer, actually. A good farmer would just throw seed where it’s going to grow. This farmer just throws it everywhere. It doesn’t matter if it lands on stone, if it lands on wherever it lands. But that’s God’s heart. He gives everyone an opportunity. And you might think, “Man, I’m not really good soil. But you know what? He’s throwing seeds at you because he wants you to grow.”

So these seeds fall on different kinds of soil. The first soil wasn’t soil at all. It was just stone. The sun came out and the seed didn’t have anywhere to grow. It burns right up. The second one has a little bit of soil. It starts to grow, but can’t put its roots anywhere. Dries right up, as well.

And then there’s the third soil. This is the one I want to talk about. This third soil terrifies me. At the same time that I’ve traveled everywhere, I’ve seen this third soil around the world, as well, and it terrifies me. There’s a reason why it terrifies me. I’m going to read directly from Matthew 13:22 (NLT):

22 The seed that fell among the thorns represents those who hear God’s word, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the worries of this life and the lure of wealth, so no fruit is produced.

Why does this terrify me so much? Because this seed that grows, it doesn’t die. No. The soil is good. It starts growing, but it does not die. It grows among thorns and the thorns let it grow, but it kind of grows bad. It’s not growing properly, so no fruit is produced. You may think, “Thorns, those are like bad people in my life. That’s what those thorns must represent.”

But that’s not the truth. Thorns are just distractions. Thorns are things you worry about. Or thorns are things you really want, like wealth and riches or to be prosperous or whatever. Just distractions.

You know what happens when you have too many distractions in your life? You forget about the essential thing, which is Christ’s love for you and being in that love. When we lose that, our roots cannot grow deep to where they should be, and we will not produce fruit. We do not want that in our lives. We want to be good soil without these distractions.

What happens then? We can produce thirty, sixty, a hundred times that. It doesn’t matter if you’re thirty, sixty or a hundred. The important thing is that everything that is growing and is healthy will keep on growing and will produce fruit.

I thought I wasn’t a person that would get distracted from these kind of things. In 2016, my life was actually going pretty well. It was going really well, actually. I was super happy with my life. I had my own business. It took a long time to get that thing running, like years. But it was finally up and running. My family was growing. I had a beautiful family. The church—I was ordained pastor a few years prior. The ministry was growing. My ministry was growing. Man, I was loving it. It was going great.

So we decided to purchase a piece of property. So we bought this piece of property and we paid it off. It’s easy to buy things. It’s the paying off part that’s hard to do. So we paid off the property. So we decided to build. Oh yeah. This is like our all-time dream. We’re going to build our own house. That’s like a thing in Ecuador to buy land and build your home. That was our vision. That’s what we want to do. We were living temporarily—which was actually like ten years—in my father in-law’s house. They did not live there, so that was a good thing. That’s when a blessing starts to become a curse, right? When you’re overdoing it. So we were building our own house. This was going to be amazing.

So we start this amazing project. We were on Pinterest, checking out what the rooms were going to be like. We were putting this project together to give to the architect. So the week we had to do all that, it was a Monday morning, I was having breakfast with my wife. We were going over the last details so I could hand this over to the architect. And as we’re going over the details, having breakfast, talking, this idea just flashes through my mind. It gives me goosebumps. The idea was, “Is this the will of God?”

I’m thinking, “Well, come on. I mean, it’s the logical thing to do. We’re advancing in life. We’re supposed to be doing this.” And I’m thinking, and I ask my wife, “Honey, did we pray about this? Because this is a long term project.”

And she’s like, “No, I don’t think we have.”

I’m like, “Man, I don’t feel good right now. Let’s just pray about this.”

So I say a real simple prayer. I say, “Lord, I’m really sorry we haven’t put this into your plans first, but if this is what you want us to do, bless this. If it’s not, just let us know so we can do something else. Just let us know kind of soon, okay? Amen.”
It was as simple as that. Five minutes later—I am not joking—five minutes later I receive a phone call. It was my dad on the phone. And he says, “Son, I was just praying and meditating right now and this thought came to my mind. I’m just going to land it on you. Do whatever you think—but this might be a great time for you to go somewhere else as a missionary.”

“Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it.”

So I hang up and I look at my wife. She’s like, “What’s going on?”

And I’m like, “How about instead of building our dream house, we sell everything and go somewhere else as missionaries?”

See, I warned her before we got married that I was going to do that someday. So she had to say, “Yes.” But she was surprised because she thought it was after we’d retire, or something like that.

That is exactly what we did. We sold everything. We took six months to really get the confirmation. It wasn’t just from that phone call. So don’t go do anything crazy if you receive one phone call. It took us six months to decide where we were going and all that, and then six months to sell everything and prepare everything. So exactly that same date that we received that phone call and prayed about it, we arrived in Italy one year later.

You know, the thing is that I realize in my life that sometimes we just go into autopilot, you know? It was obvious. I was supposed to advance in life. I was supposed to build a house. That’s true. They are all good things. But they are also distractions. You never know what the Lord wants to put in your path. You’ve got to just give it a second and let him talk to you. Maybe the life he has for you is slightly different than the one you are imagining for yourself.

You might be saying, “Rob, I hear you, but come on. Where do I start this kind of a life that just really trusts in God, that really loves Christ, that understands…? I just don’t know where to start so I just keep going back into autopilot.” If you don’t know what to do, don’t let that distract you from Christ’s love, either.

When we went to Italy, we actually didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We had no idea. I knew I was supposed to leave and that was about it. It was not like I had this five year plan of where am I going to be in five years? We didn’t not know what we were going to do. But the Lord put this verse in my heart that really got me through hard times. Genesis 12:1

The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you.

All right. That sounds pretty basic, right? But wait a minute. Listen to that verse. There’s something kind of secret there. This is when you realize Abraham truly was the father of the faith. He had to leave his father’s home to a land that God was going to show him. So, he actually had to leave to somewhere and he did not know where he was supposed to go. You know what that is? Those are steps of faith?

In your life, take steps of faith. They don’t have to start with huge steps of faith. Take small steps of faith. But start putting your faith in action. Because when you need to put your faith in action, you start churching Christ’s love for your life. When your faith is not in action, you don’t really need God’s love. You can do church life. You can do Christian life without Christ’s love. That’s the crazy thing. But you know what that is? That’s a plant growing with thorns around him. That isn’t producing fruit. You’re doing the thing. You’re living the life, but it’s not to its fullest. God does not want that life for you. He wants you to grow to that full plant, tree, whatever, that has tons of fruit. And we need Christ to do that.

You can start with small things, basic things. Ephesians tells us all about it. Start with your own life. Start living good. Get your act together. Start being a testimony for different people, just by the way you live. You don’t have to be a mega evangelist to do that. Just get your act together. Start with that. It takes faith. And it takes love in Christ to really be able to do that. Or serve in any way possible. There’s always something to do at church. Believe me, there’s always something to do in God’s kingdom. It doesn’t matter if it’s sweeping the floor. One door opens the next. You’ve got to start somewhere. Sometimes we only want to start if it’s something big. No, no, no. Start with something small. One thing will lead to the next.

This wise person told me something that really helped me throughout my life. He said, “If you only want to go in one direction, follow your vision. That’s it. There’s only one direction for your vision. But if you’re willing to serve someone else’s vision, the whole world will open up to you.”

That’s a profound statement. But you know what? That is true. Sometimes in periods, seasons of our lives, we need to be open to follow someone else’s vision. But one door will open up to the next and the Lord will use us.

Support God’s kingdom. Support a missionary, how about that? I can give you a few names, if you want. At the end of the service, my email and website will be there. Snap a picture, send me an email, say I want to be on your newsletter. We’ll be happy to do that. That’s not the purpose why I’m here. I want to talk about Christ’s love and don’t get distracted from that.

Don’t get distracted even when you’re in a desert. That’s going to come around one time or another. The Israelites were really surprised when that desert came around. They thought, “Promised Land,” but there was a dessert first. Things are going to happen in your life, but don’t let that distract you from Christ’s life.

Our time in Italy was rough at the beginning. I have never been at the hospital so many times. It wasn’t even for myself. It was for my children, for all these different things, so many things I can’t get into it. But it’s amazing how many problems you can get into when you’re loving Christ. It’s a strange thing. But you know what? He warned us about it. And in that desert, that’s not the time to complain, That’s the time to trust in God.

I woke up the other day with something in my heart that I just wanted to say: You are not your desert. Do not make that your identity. The identity of the Israelites was the “People of God.” It was not “Desert People.” And that’s the same for us. You are not your financial problems. You are not your confusions. You are not your troubles and your problems. That is not you. You are God’s son and daughter. That is your identity. Always go back to that identity. Because we are not our deserts.

Don’t get distracted from Christ’s love even when the Promised Land, that life that God has for you, looks a little bit different from what you imagined it to be. Those Israelites were surprised when they saw the Promised Land. You know why? Because they thought it was going to be flowing with milk and honey. And that’s true. It was. But there was also another surprise there. A little problem. Spies came back and they said, “Guess what? In this Promised Land, there’s giants!”

There are going to be giants in our Promised Land. It might look a little bit different. When we went to Italy, oh man, I thought this red rug was going to come out from the airplane when we walked down and everybody would coming running up, “Tell me about Jesus!” And when we got there, it was like, “What are you doing here?”

It looks a little different sometimes than what we imagine. And that’s okay.

Christ’s love. We should never get distracted from it. And that’s one of the reasons we do communion. And we and start passing that through. The reason we do communion is to remember the most important things in our lives. That is Christ’s sacrifice for us. Remember the love that he has because it is that love, Christ’s love for us, that is what is going to make our roots grow deep and keep us strong. That’s what it is.

As we pass out the elements, just let God start to talk to your heart for a second. What thorns do you have in your life? What thorns do you need to remove? What distractions do you need to remove? Are you on autopilot, my friend? I think God has a more adventurous life for you than just to worry about bills at the end of the month. Those are all part of our life. That’s okay. But I believe God has so much more for each and every one of us.

As we pass the bread and wine, we remember about what Christ has done for us. I want to say one last thing about these distractions. Don’t get distracted from Christ’s love, even when you mess up. You know, sometimes a relationship with God seems like this mountain. It’s a huge mountain. We’re building up, climbing up this mountain and, sometimes we feel great. “I’m on top of the mountain. This is awesome!” And then we mess up.

And we go and do it again. It takes us a while. We’re like, “Great! I’m back in this relationship. Yes!” And then we mess up.

And then next time, we kind of look at the mountain and say, “Meh. Maybe in a few years.”

Can I tell you something? That mountain doesn’t exist. Ephesians 3:12:

12 Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God’s presence.

You know, God’s mercy is new every day. You’ve heard about that? You know what that means in our lives? It’s like when we mess up and we say, “God, I’m sorry I messed up.” And then the next day we mess up again. And we go back and say, “God, I’m sorry I messed up again.” And God says, “Again? What do you mean again?”

You see, God’s mercy is new every day. It’s like the first time every time. That’s too big of a love to comprehend. That’s what Paul’s trying to explain. It’s just too big of a love to comprehend. And you are righteous people. You know what righteous people do? Proverbs 24:16:

The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again.

If you’ve fell, you’ve messed up in your life in any way, get back up. The ground is not a place for you. It’s also just a distraction. It’s the thief trying to get you to look at the ground instead of looking up to see what’s really happening. And you know what’s always happening? Christ’s love for you. And that is why we get back up.

And speaking about getting back up, let us all stand, please.

Father, we want to remember right now, Lord, all the goodness that you have for us. Most importantly, the love that you have for us, Father.

For I pass onto you what I have received from the Lord himself, on the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” I thank you, Father. I thank you, Jesus, for your body. You were the last sacrifice. Thank you for that love that you’ve had for us. In the name of Jesus. Let us eat the bread.

In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, “This cup is a new covenant between God and his people, in agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as oft as you drink it. For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again.

We thank you, Lord, for this new covenant. A better covenant, m Father. Not by law, but by your grace, filled with your love. May we remember this every time we drink this cup. That it is your love that we seek. It is your love that keeps us strong, and may we remember that in the darkest times of our life, and also in the happiest, Lord. May we never be distracted and always come back to your feet, Father, and receive that love. Let’s drink the wine.

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Scripture is taken from Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

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Church as the Bride

We’re going to be in Ephesians. We’re looking at Paul’s vision of the church. He didn’t have a vision for Living Streams Church. Living Streams is just an organization that has men and women who are leading it. And the Church that Jesus Christ gave birth to by his blood and the vision that Paul had is the Church organism. It is the thing that lives on beyond Living Streams. It is the thing that was there before Living Streams or whatever other church you might be a part of.

David Stockton
Series: Ephesians

Good morning. College football has started! But I’m an Oregon fan. It was a rough night for me.

But it’s good to be with you guys this morning. We’ve got baptism this morning—both services. About ten people getting baptized today, which is super exciting and fun. And we’re going to be working through Ephesians again. Ephesians 5.

Life Groups. Life Groups. Life Groups. Maybe it’s weird phrase: Life Groups. But it is small groups of people trying to get together outside of the Sunday morning context to check in on each other, pray for each other. The four things we’re dreaming and praying for you is that you’ll get raw authenticity and the healing that comes with that. You’ll get relentless encouragement from each other because we definitely need that. You’ll get Biblical counsel in those small groups. And you’ll get some genuine friendship. Not the online kind but the face-to-face kind. Online is cool. You can do that, too. But face-to-face is important, as well.

We actually have over 200 people that have signed up since last Sunday. Yeah. There’s a lot of “whoo-ing” going on around here. We think it’s really important. We are not trying to build a Sunday morning show. That’s the last thing we’re trying to build around here—where people come for an hour, watch a show and then go. We are not in that business. We’re trying to build a church. And it is so important that the church has more than Sunday morning to stand on.

I don’t care if you find life groups in another church. You’ve got to find ways to get together with people in smaller settings, where you can be known and you can impart the wisdom God is speaking to you and you can be supported.

Did I mention Life Groups? It’s very easy. You go online, livingstreams.org and we’ve got a whole list of them. They’ve got times, locations, what’s happening there. We’re asking everyone in our church—everyone—if this is your first Sunday—hey—you’re in. You came. It’s your fault.—to at least sign up for six weeks, starting September 15. We have leaders, we have groups, we have everything ready. We even gave the leaders their first snacks for the first night. We’re serious about this thing. And we’re serious about snacks, too.

Just give it at least six weeks. The leaders are going to be there and they’re ready to run past six weeks, but we just really want you guys to give it a shot and see what the Lord can do. We don’t want to miss anything that God has in store for us.

All right. We’re going to be in Ephesians. We’re looking at Paul’s vision of the church. He didn’t have a vision for Living Streams Church. Living Streams is just an organization that has men and women who are leading it. And the Church that Jesus Christ gave birth to by his blood and the vision that Paul had is the Church organism. It is the thing that lives on beyond Living Streams. It is the thing that was there before Living Streams or whatever other church you might be a part of.

And we’ve built these organizations, these churches that are hopefully going to help that organism prosper and thrive within it. But YOU are the Church if you are called by Jesus’ name. You are the Church. And the Church is the single most dominant force for good that the world has ever seen. Any era. Any age. Any place. No one can deny the power of what the Church, the true Church has done.

At the same time, no one can deny that there have been real good seasons and real bad seasons for the organization aspect of the Church. There have been horrible seasons when we look at the organization of the Church. But Jesus is not the head of the organizations. We do our best to make sure he is in control of this place, but at the end of the day, it’s got to go through people like me. And it’s going to come out a little squirrly. But he is and always will be the head of the Church, which is his Body here on earth. And everyone of you has a part to play.

So Paul is trying to impart to us this vision, this grand vision, this vision that, when he got it, he did not want it. But when he got it, he changed every single thing in his life. He threw away everything he had ever known and become—position, power, money, self-righteousness, pride. He threw it all away and said, “I just want to live into this vision.” And he spent the rest of his life traveling the world to tell Gentiles (people who are not Jews) about this vision that God has for them.

In Ephesians he tries to piece it all together in this letter that he was writing. And it’s so ridiculous. If you were to get this letter back in Paul’s day, you would think the guy is insane. You would think he’s absolutely crazy. Because, what he is putting forth in this vision, and what was in reality at that time of the Church are so far apart. If you get nothing else in our time in the book of Ephesians, I just want you to get this. That Paul was declaring something that had no chance of becoming a reality. The Church at that time was scattered, was living in caves and dens, was persecuted and dominated. It was a laughing stock. It was pitiful. And yet Paul could see something that Marty Caldwell gets to see all the time as he travels around. That other people—we have someone speaking next week who’s been around the world seeing the Church in action in all different continents. He’s going to share a little bit of the strength and beauty these days.

If Paul could see the Church today, he would do an old man backflip. Which is kind of like rolling over, I think, or falling down, maybe. What the Church has become, there is no way Paul could actually have believed that it would be what it is today. She is so beautiful. But Paul could see a vision. We talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., as he speaks to that crowd right before he was killed and he said, “I have no worries. For I have been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the other side. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I know we’re going to get there.”

And that’s basically what Paul is saying in his day and age. He’s saying, “I’ve seen the vision. Jesus has given me the vision. And now I’m living into the vision. And I’m going to see us grow from this tiny, little, infant baby that is not even having a chance to live, forsaken in every way—it’s going to become the most powerful thing the world has ever seen.

It’s awesome what we are reading right now. And I’m hoping it will get in us. I’ve had a couple of visions in my life. When I first gave my life to Jesus, I was about eighteen years old. When I first gave my life to Jesus. I had received Jesus prior to that, but there was a big difference when I turned seventeen and eighteen, right in there, where I think Jesus was saying, “Okay. Now I’m going to ask something from you.”

And I went for it. Immediately (Mike, you can attest to this) I just, for some reason starting thinking about Ireland all the time. I had actually gotten to go to Ireland with my family right after I graduated, so I just thought that’s all that it was. And yet, this idea of going to Ireland and starting a camp, like a summer camp, and then also starting a church and having a school there kind of all on the same property. This vision just started coming.

Again, I had been to Ireland. My grandmother was Irish. I do have Irish citizenship—I have dual citizenship through her. So, I started thinking, “Maybe there’s something here.” And I just had a compelling vision of going to Ireland and getting rid of all the snakes. Not really. That was somebody else’s vision. But going to Ireland, trying to see the Lord do something. So I graduated college and I talked to some friends who were crazy enough to say, “Let’s do it.”

We came up with a plan. We were all going to go for three months. We bought a three month ticket. That was the entirety of the plan. And we were going to just see what the Lord would do. And I’m here in Arizona now. Right? Working here, you know.

But we did go there. We got to see the Lord do really great things. It was very strengthening for our faith. Within three days we had jobs and a place to live. And our names were being sent to all these different ministry clubs in Northern Ireland. We got to go two or three times a week. We’d get on a bus and say, “Can you take us to this place and do ministry?” And at the end of it, though, we were like, “Well, we should go home.” It was a great time. It was building my faith, but then we came back.

Then I had another vision. I was sitting right down here one time by Mark Buckley as he was about to preach. And we were singing the song, “For the sake of the world, burn like a fire in me.” And I can’t tell you how clear it was. I saw a vision of a bunch of Belizeans. My wife and I had lived in Belize a little before, so it wasn’t that far off. But I saw a room full of Belizeans and they were singing, “For the sake of Belize, burn like a fire in me.” And it was real clear. And it was a vision.

I remember talking to Mark about it and the elders, and saying, “You know, my wife and I are thinking maybe we should go to Belize again.” And Mark said, “Okay. Okay. Let’s figure this out.” And, sure enough, we ended up going to Belize for a little more than a year with our family. And step by step, we started a Friday Night Fire, is what they wanted to call it. Except, in Belize, it’s called “Friday Night Fi-yah.”

We started a little worship night. And my wife and I were doing music, which is not that impressive. We started using that song to close every one of the Friday nights that we had. We changed the word, I don’t know if we’re allowed to, but it was in Belize where you can get away with anything. We changed the words and I thought, “Wow, this amazing.” Little by little, the room started to fill up. And people were singing that song. And the Lord, just to make it so clear that I didn’t miss it, there was one night when it was totally jam-packed. This was probably about one hundred or so Belizeans. It was a small room so it was jam-packed.

We were singing that song and it was a great night. We were really leaning in to the Lord. And, all of a sudden the power went out completely. When the power goes out in Belize, it was dark. It was so dark you couldn’t see anything inside this room. And it was very hot. Yet, the power goes out, our mics, everything is gone, and everyone just kept singing. And we’re just at the part where we sing, “For the sake of Belize, burn like a fire in me.” And I just stepped back from the mic for just a second and just went, “Oh, my goodness!” It was like the Lord was saying, “No, no, no. We’re making a point of this. Exclamation point. Boom!”

There are these visions that the Lord gives us. Paul was so compelled by this vision of what he was going to see. I don’t know if he ever got to a point where he felt that he got to see it. I think he probably saw little pieces of it. But again, Ephesians is this grand vision that he’s trying to lay out for all of us.

He starts out giving a vision of the Church as a family—that we’ve been adopted into God’s heart. So the Church is one of the ways we can see this vision. One of the ways Paul saw it as it’s like the family of God. We’ve got the name of God on our jerseys, on the back. We walk around and are learning how to live according to his family rules and culture.

And then he goes on to talk about how the Church is the dwelling place of God. That somehow his Spirit is in all of us and, as we go about the world, God’s presence goes into all the world, and it’s a picture of what God can do. When people come and get to know us, it’s like coming over to God’s house and hanging out for a while.

Then we talked last week about how the Church is a body. That we’re this body. We’re trying to grow into this full stature, this amazing, powerful force that God has in mind for us to be. And we start at one point and try to grow into it so that we can be strong enough to withstand the winds of every deceitful scheme that comes our way. That we won’t be tossed to and fro by the waves. And that’s the dream that we have.

Today we’re going to talk about the Church as a bride. So all the girls are like, “Oh, yeah, that’s cool.” And all the guys are like, “College football, man. College football.”

So Ephesians Chapter 5. You’ve got to deal with it. It’s in the Bible so get ready. Get your wedding dresses out.

5:1 Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

So there you have fragrance, right? We’re already getting girly. But Jesus loved us and he gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering. And then he says:

3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.

Or, for God’s bride. Right? Skip down to verse 21:

21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

And then Paul says this as a little bit of a hesitation caveat:

32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

So all this stuff about submission, all this stuff about two becoming one, he’s saying, “Now, I need you to pay attention here. I’m not trying to be weird. But somehow this is a mystery. All of this stuff that I’m talking about is actually about Christ and his Church—his bride—the people who follow him

33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Paul opens up this whole can of worms. He’s basically saying, “Now another way I want you to picture the Church is as the Bride of Christ.”

It is the people he has chosen. The people he has give his life for and will forevermore. The people that he is actually trying to love so well that they actually form into all the beauty that they can form into. He’s talking about how Christ and His Body are to become one in lovingkindness and mutual respect.

Again, John 17 is a prayer that, if Jesus didn’t pray it, I would never really teach it. is prayer is that those who believe in him would become one with him, just like he and the Father are one. It’s not saying that we’re going to become gods. But somehow we’re going to be included into the trinitarian love and oneness as we follow him.

It’s a profound mystery. And I’m not going to talk about it anymore because I no idea what else to say about it. One day I’m just going to die and—bam—in it. I can just call it a profound mystery,

We’re talking about this love. We’re talking about the romance. We’re talking about how God in Christ romanced us. Reckless love. However you want to talk about it. He wooed us. Romeo and Juliet. All of the stuff you want to say here.

It’s fun for me to talk to guys when we go on men’s retreats or Belize retreat. To get to know them, I love to just ask the question, “Do you have a girlfriend?” (if they’re not married.) And it’s so funny because, immediately, I feel like—bam—you are in. Unless they’re like, “No. Don’t talk to me about that. I don’t know you.”

But if they start to answer that question at all, they can’t help it. Their heart is coming right out of their mouth. You get to see their heart right away, whether it’s good, bad or whatever. Because that’s a big part of where their life is flowing out of. It’s that part of their heart that longs for that companionship.

And then I love to ask guys on our men’s retreat—we were in Belize and last time I asked the guys, “All right. What we’re going to do tonight as a kind of debrief, I want everyone to tell us how you got engaged.”

You could see all the guys were like, “What do you mean?” And then they’d start telling it. And they would be struggling, trying to make it not a big deal. But then as they would start telling the story they would start gushing a bit. It’s like, “Oh, you’re sappy! Yeah, you are a romantic guy! Look at you! Ha ha! We got you! Busted.”

But as they would tell the story, it comes out. And it’s so precious and beautiful. Even the guys who are like so tough, when they start telling about getting engaged, it’s just an awesome, awesome thing.

For me, I fell in love with this girl named Brit. And she and I were dating and hanging out. (This is my wife, by the way.) Yet, at the same time, I knew she also loved another. It was the kids in South Africa. She loved them a lot. She knew that she needed to go to them. So we started dating and we were hanging out and I was like, “Yeah, we love each other. But I know you love these little kids in Africa.”

So, we knew she had to go. And so she went. A big thing was, she was going to see. She loved the Lord above it all and she wanted to go where God was leading her. So she went for a few months to Africa. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Would she love me more than Africa? Would God put our paths back together at some point? It was a real moment of truth.

I remember talking to her while she was there. At one point it was pretty clear that what she was saying was that she loved me more than Africa. That was a big deal for my life. I was like, “I’ve got all of Africa beat! Yeah!” I was thrilled.

So knowing that, I ended up getting on a plane and flying to London where she was going to be flying back. I surprised her by being in London. She didn’t know I was going to be there. And I surprised her by looking like this (photo of David with long hair and beard). She was going and I said, “I’m not going to cut my hair while you’re gone.” I didn’t think about this part. So she was like, “Oh, hey! Oh, heyyyy!”

And I surprised her one more. I got on one knee and asked her to marry me. She said, “Yes.” It’s been almost fifteen years. It’s been a pretty cool deal.

I’m saying all of this because Jesus loves you in this way, if you can receive it. He loves you and wants so badly for you to love him. Not only for his own good. Somehow, mystery of mysteries, if you love Jesus, his heart is full. If you don’t, his heart is broken. God of the universe, Creator of everything, has somehow made his heart dependent on your love.

If you choose to love him, you will be loved well. There are some verses in Ephesians that bring this out. I want to go through these and I want you to maybe grab a couple of things out of these. Maybe write them down. Maybe just hide them in your heart.

There are some phrases that are key as we go through. Ephesians 2: I’m going to read this out of the Message translation. I like the way the Message says it:

1-6 It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.

You weren’t anything that special.

You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.

That’s powerful imagery.

We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. We loved a lot of other things. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.

He walked right up to our filthiness, our rebellion, and our anger, and he hugged us. He pulled us close to him and stole it all away.

He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
7-10 Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.

That is what Jesus is longing to do. To bring you closer to him. To shower you with lovingkindness both in this world and in the next. And just so you know, there won’t be pain in the next. Here you get both.

Next is Ephesians 2:11-13 in the NIV.

11 Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision”

(Those who are feeling like the upper class and you were called the lower class by them.)

(which is done in the body by human hands)— 12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

All the way into his arms. Pressed against his own chest. Covered by his love. Never needing to fear or worry again. Perfect redeeming love is wrapped around you in Christ Jesus.

I defined it a little bit like this, the way that God treats us as his bride: Lovingly, romantically, faithfully, kindly. What happens is our vulnerability is met with his passionate, wholehearted, generous covering. He finds us naked and ashamed, and he covers us with his righteousness and love. His love really does redeem.

Ephesians 5:1-3.

1 Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity…

Why is the Bible so serious about sexuality? Why is the world disparaging and rebelling against the Scriptures right now because it’s too harsh or hard? Well, because the writers of the Bible are trying to help us understand that there are really two images that God has given us outside of Christ incarnate that teach us about him better than anything else.

Genesis 1 makes it very clear that God created male and female in his image. So if we get male and female right, then the world gets to see God. If we screw up or twist up male and female, we lose one of our most powerful demonstrations of who God is in full. God is not male. Never has been. Never will be. God is not female. He is somehow the fullness of both of those when we get it right. That’s why there’s a big attack right now. But it’s not the first time. We got through this attack generation after generation, where the devil tries to destroy our image of God found in maleness and femaleness.

We do need to sit back and weather the storm with love and kindness. But we also need to make sure people understand God put the fence there for a reason. If you move the fence, you’re going to find the lions, the tigers, the bears ready to devour you. Which we see over and over again. That’s why the world and society has never really been able to move on to this total free love thing. Because, ultimately, the consequences show up and we go back. This isn’t a new thing. This is just the latest wrong version of “woke,” that we’re going to have to wake up from with consequences all around us. The Bible is the only thing woke.

Not only that, but he also says that the second thing that is the best image of God is marriage. Marriage is the second best image of God. I’m talking about Christ and the Church. You want to learn about Christ and the Church, go look at someone’s marriage. That’s how you’re going to learn about the love of God. The faithfulness, the stick-to-it-ativeness, the patience, the kindness. That’s the way God loves you, except that he’s perfect and totally trustworthy.

So why would the enemy want to destroy marriage? Why would he want to get rid of that or call it crazy or too hard? Because he doesn’t want people to see the image of Christ and his Church. Because they might fall in love with him and experience his love.

The last thing I want to read as we close is Ephesians 5:21-33. The same passage, but I want to read it in the Message translation. I want to highlight a couple of things. I ask again that you try to grasp a couple of things for your own heart right now.

21 Out of respect for Christ, be courteously reverent to one another.
22-24 Wives, understand and support your husbands in ways that show your support for Christ. The husband provides leadership to his wife the way Christ does to his church, not by domineering but by cherishing. So just as the church submits to Christ as he exercises such leadership, wives should likewise submit to their husbands.
25-28 Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives,

Be extravagant like Jesus was.

…exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ’s love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness. And that is how husbands ought to love their wives. They’re really doing themselves a favor—since they’re already “one” in marriage.

And we’ll just finish with that. I love some of those phrases. That this is the love that Christ has for us. It’s the love that we’re supposed to show toward our spouses, toward our kids, toward our friends, toward our enemies, toward our neighbors. This kind of love that is marked by giving, not getting. The kind of love that makes the person that we’re loving more whole. It doesn’t point out their deficiencies, but it actually begins to fill those things, cover those things until they have a chance to grow in those things. And their words evoke their beauty.

I want to love my wife like that. And I’m so bad at it. I want to love my kids like that. And I know I fall short. I want to love you guys like that. It’s a beautiful love that Jesus has for us. It’s a life-changing, redeeming love. It’s a love that feels like vulnerability met with passionate, wholehearted, generous covering.

As I was worshiping downstairs with the team, there was a moment where I saw this picture of some people who are feeling pretty vulnerable, pretty gross, pretty bad themselves, pretty unsure, pretty weak—whatever it might be. And Jesus comes and actually covers you with his robes of righteousness, of love. He wraps this covering around you. And then, when you look in the mirror, you’re like, “Wow. I didn’t know I could like this.” But the story wasn’t over, because, at one point, that robe was removed, and no longer was there something disgusting underneath. Now it was like you had your own form of beauty. You had your own form of strength. It was Christ in you, that hope of glory. So the covering doesn’t just cover up your sickness and make you feel better for a moment. That covering actually redeems everything underneath the covering, stirs up, evokes the beauty that he made for you to be. His innocent love causes that kind of change.

It’s hard to abide in Christ. It’s hard to keep absorbing that love from time to time. But that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to love like him. We can’t do it in our strength. Never can. Never will. But Jesus knows that. So if we will set aside time to go sit in his presence and allow him to robe us once again—if we can put on Jesus Christ, be robed in his righteousness, we will absorb that love. It will reform us and fill us so that we can then go and clothe others in this world. That’s a beautiful vision of Christ and his Church. Christ and his Bride. You are the Bride of Christ.

Let’s pray:

Jesus, we do thank you so much that you love us, that you gave yourself for us in ways beyond what we can imagine. I pray, Lord, that once again we would allow you to cover us so that you can cleanse us and transform us and fill us, so that we can go into this world and we can cover others with that same love. Thank you.

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

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