The Righteousness of God
Series: Kinetic Righteousness
Alec Seekins
Good morning, Living Streams, how are you guys doing today? Really? That bad, huh? You guys doing all right? OK, OK. Still waiting for the coffee to kick in. First service, I feel like gets that excuse. Second service? I don't know. It's wearing off. You guys should be a little more awake.
Well, if you haven't noticed, I'm not David Stockton. He's a little bit less hairy than me. David Stockton is at home. He wasn't feeling so good earlier this week. Don't worry, he's doing just fine. But he'll be back with us as soon as he can and as as soon as it's just, you know, responsible to do so.
But my name is Alec Seekins. For those of you who don't know me, I've been around here for a little while — since I was about three years old. Living Streams has been my home about as long as I can remember. I spent some years here as one of the youth pastors, and then last year, with some really good timing, Living Streams kicked me and my wife out of the country and sent us to Southeast Asia for all of 2020.
So we missed the good stuff. Just kidding. It was pretty awesome. There was a little bit, it felt like maybe that was horrible timing. And then we started seeing the news and we started thinking, Oh, I think this is good timing and it's good, good to be in another country right now.
We spent 2020 in Southeast Asia working with a ministry. And I got to share a bunch about this right when we came back. We were working with an anti-trafficking ministry, and we got to see the Lord do some absolutely mind-blowing things. We saw a bunch of women come out of the sex trade and move into a different type of lifestyle. We saw women coming to the Lord. We saw even a couple of pimps leave that lifestyle and come to the Lord.
There's a brothel — or what was once the brothel — that’s now a community center where people get to hear about Jesus on a pretty regular basis there. And we got to see even a couple of women who came into a year of discipleship out of prostitution, with really not enough strength to continue on in their own life. And they left with surplus strength, that they're now on staff and they're able to give that surplus strength to other women to help them have a hope for coming out of slavery into the freedom that can only be found in Jesus. And it's a beautiful thing.
And we're moving into the season of “Kinetic,” right? We're kind of in it, where we’ve been doing this series called Kinetic Righteousness. And really that’s, I think, what my wife and I, what we experienced last year is what we're hoping that we as a family can experience. Seeing the power of God at work in ways that we did not expect has messed both of us up in some really good ways, because we were so excited. Because it's like like Netflix just doesn't do it for me anymore. I find myself constantly looking around and seeing God. Where is the place where I can beg your power to show up in a way I haven't seen before. I want to see more of this. And I don't think I could live a content life with just kind of the normal “par for the course” situation without seeing the power of God on display in some significant ways.
And I'm praying this over you guys. And that's what we're hoping to do with this kinetic season. Please, please, please. I know if David were here, he would be begging you guys to just show up on Wednesday night. Connect with us, engage with us. We're hoping that this won't just be a season — that this will be something that will mess with the rest of your life.
I mean, it starts with some community. It starts with some training. It starts with some conversation about how do we get kinetic, how do we get active watching the righteousness of God come through us. So please show up this Wednesday at six o'clock. There's going to be food, there's going to be community. And it's the beginning of three Wednesdays where we're going to figure out as a community, how do we get to see the power of God at work and then through our lives in a way that will not allow us to remain the same moving forward. We’ll be engaging and connecting with ministries all over the Valley, just hoping to see God move in a really cool way. And I think you really will. Yeah.
So that was a beautiful year and at this point in time, my wife and I are back here and I'm working as an online pastor. So online, folks, good to see you guys. I see you all the time. You'll see videos of me before and after. You'll get way too much of me if you're online today. But for those of you guys here, it's good to see you.
But yeah, so I don't know about you guys, but I've watched a fair share of movies and TV in my life, probably more than is healthy. And there's these number of tropes, right. That we see over and over and over again — these cliches that start to get kind of annoying. And if you've watched any hero movies, or read any hero books, or played any video games with the hero/villain dynamic, there's this one scene that always plays out.
You guys know the scene so very well. It’s when the villain finally has a hero in his clutches, when the bad guy finally has the good guy captive. Right now, he starts telling them about all of his evil plans and he unveils the fact that, “Oh, it was me who murdered your parents, it was me who blew up the building, and it's me who's going to take over the world and do all this thing and all these bad things and steal your girlfriend,” and da da da da da da da da da, da, da, right.
And somewhere in this scene, the bad guy starts laughing, because he just revels in his own wickedness. Right. He just says, “Man, I love doing bad things. I am the villain. It's so great.” And this is bad storytelling.
Really. I mean, I think we all roll our eyes when we see the scene coming, for so many reasons. Right? Like one of the reasons is bad storytelling is because the writers, they were just too lazy to show you the tension and the danger. So they just did this kind of cop-out and had the bad guy tell you, “Oh, everything is dangerous, I'm going to do bad things.” Right? And it's not just bad storytelling because of that. It’s not just bad storytelling because like it's predictable and we've seen it happen over and over and over again. And you know the bad guy is going to tell his plans and then the good guy is going to get out, and he's going to use that information to stop the bad guy’s plans. Right? And it's not just bad storytelling, because you're telling me this evil genius is smart enough to come up with some machine that can blow up the universe. But he's not smart enough to know that you shouldn't tell the hero your plans.
But but I think the more subtle reason — I mean, all those are good reasons why this is bad storytelling. But I think the more subtle reason that this is bad storytelling is because — I don't know about you, but I've never met a villain like that in my life, who believes that they're doing what's wrong, and they enjoy that it's wrong, and they think that they shouldn't do it, and they just love doing the things that they think they shouldn't do. I haven't met that guy. Maybe that guy exists, but I've yet to meet him if he does.
In my experience, it is very difficult for human beings to simultaneously acknowledge this is wrong and to revel in the wrongness of it. In my own life, I have to kind of shut that off, if I'm going to enjoy something that's sinful. I have to ignore the fact that I think it's sinful for a little bit, or maybe I have to even convince myself that it's right.
And I think this is true of the villains and life, of the worst human beings. I've met some people who've done some pretty despicable things that I could fairly and easily call evil, and I've never heard them say, “I just like doing things that make me feel bad. I just like doing things that are wrong.”
Why is it that there's this thing in our hearts that has to justify it? I think God maybe put this this, like this governor in our hearts. That we can't go too fast into wickedness without trying to convince ourselves that it's righteousness.
If you've ever tried to hit like 130 in your car — which I promise I've never done, definitely not in a rental or anything like that — and you try to hit 130 or whatever; wherever the governor is at, and you get to like 129 and the car just goes bloop.
I think our hearts do the same thing if we're trying to go too deep in the sand. Something about our hearts just kind of says, “I can't do that anymore.” And so we have to kind of like hack our way around it and convince ourselves that what we're doing isn't evil, it’s actually good. It's righteous.
Why do we have philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche who fueled some of the greatest atrocities of the last century? When you summarize their philosophies, it always comes down to something like “Might Makes Right,” as opposed to, "Because I'm strong, I can do what I know is wrong.” We have to convince ourselves that it's OK.
And you can look back in history and you could say, “Clearly history has good examples of the bad guy, or the villain who loves doing what's wrong because he knows it's wrong.”
But when you get into the lives of people like Hitler, or Stalin, or Genghis Khan, or Mao Zedong, when you get into their lives, it doesn't seem that they really believed what they were doing was wrong. It seemed like they really believed, “Hey, I'm doing the right thing. This is righteousness.”
Hitler, believed, “If I can just get rid of everybody I don't like, everybody that I think is weaker than me and the world will be a better place.”
Stalin believed, “Hey, if I can just create this new world order, everything will be more fair underneath me.”
And that should be a little bit scary for us, because when we reel that back, when we look into the microcosms of this that are happening every single day in our lives. I don't see any camps that fly the flag that says "We're the bad guys and we know it, clap your hands.” Everybody seems to say, “We're the good guys.”
And there are these lines that are drawn all over the place — in society, in politics, in the world at large, in our families, in our relationships, in our marriages, at work — over issues big and small. We have these lines drawn all over the place on every side, on either side of those lines, every single one of them. There seems to be a person or group of people who are pointing their finger across the line to the other people on the other side saying, “I'm right. You're wrong. I'm righteous. You’re wicked. I'm good. You’re bad.”
But then there's someone on the very other side of that same line pointing back at them, saying, “No, I'm right and you're wrong. I'm good and you're bad. I'm righteous and you're wicked.”
And lately, it feels like we've been having this shift in our culture, where some of those lines, it used to feel like we all existed on the same side of the line. And we'd say, "Hey, it looks like we all agree that this is the side of the line to be on.”
But recently it seems like a number of people have been changing to other sides of the lines and saying, "No, no, no, no, no. You've been wrong all this time.” And it feels to me like we're getting pointed at and saying, “Hey, what you have always believed to be righteousness is in fact wickedness.”
And I don't know about you guys, but I have experiences in my own life, people that I've looked up to, people that I've admired, people that I love very much, people in my own family who draw lines and point across the line to me and say, “What you believe is righteous I call wicked, I call abusive.”
And it is profoundly disorienting. I don't know about you guys, but I feel sometimes like I'm just in an ocean, getting just tossed around by these waves as they smash into me. Because things that once once felt solid, I now have to ask myself, Is this solid ground? How do we know what righteousness is?
I wish the world were divided into two camps of people that said, "We are unrighteous and we love it,” and other people who said, “We're righteous.” It would be so easy. I could do that. Well, I'm going to be in the camp that says we're righteous. Those guys are telling me that they're wrong. Why would I follow them?
But it isn't. And it's disorienting. Where do we go for this? Where do we go to find out what real righteousness is?
There is this beautiful poem that was written a long time ago, and this poem has in it the seeds of change for humanity. It's covered in rhythm. It's dripping in imagery and meaning. This poem has influenced all of human history. It has sowed the seeds that it actually carries in it, the first commissioned to mankind to take care of the environment. It has sown the seeds that time and time and time again in little windows of history has allowed women who have been oppressed to kind of pop up over the men who are just lording over the fact that they're physically stronger than them. And to come in and see something of beauty and equality between the two of them.
It is literally the poem in which we find the seeds that, when they germinated, they turned into the end of legal slavery in the entire world. And it's the poem that begins the Bible, the book of Genesis. This introductory poem of God creating. And like I said, it is dripping with meaning.
And we could talk for this poem for a year. But one of the rhythms that we see in this poem is that God creates something, or he orders something. And then when he's done, he steps back at the end of the day, and he says, “Oh, it's good.” And then he creates something else and he orders something else, and he steps back and he says, “Oh, it's good, this is good.”
And then he makes man, and he sees man, and he sees that he's alone. And he says, “I don't know that a bachelor is a good thing.” If you're a bachelor, I'm just kidding. God recognizes you're awesome. But then he makes woman and he says, “Man, I've made this partner, this ally, this friend, this wife, this other half.” And he says, “It's very good.”
And so we see this rhythm where it's God who is seeing, and who is saying, and who is defining what is good, what is good, what is not good, what is very good. Right?
And then God places this tree in the middle of the garden where the man and where the woman, where they live, and it's called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And things are wonderful and they're beautiful and they're good, and God says, “Hey, just leave that tree alone.”
And then things start to get sticky one day when the man and his wife, when they're on a stroll. And she sees the fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and she says, “This looks good to eat.”
So it was God who was always saying what's good and what's good and what's not good and what's very good. And now, all of a sudden Eve is thinking, “This seems good to me.”
And so the woman and the man they take of the fruit and they bite, and say, “I think this tastes good.” And all of a sudden something shifts, something changes in their minds, in their hearts. And the reality of their being that shifted in humanity from that day till this, where all of a sudden humanity has just enough knowledge of good and evil to sometimes get it right on our own. And just enough brokenness to sometimes get it wrong. Enter the human condition. The tension in every story that has been told from that day to this, the tension that will fill the pages of history from this day moving forward, as well as moving backwards.
How do we know what's good when sometimes we can get it right? God was always meant to be the one that we leaned on to know what is good and what is bad. And things get really messy when we step in and think, That looks good to me.
And this is a theme that you can see stretch across the entire body of the scriptures, and we see it most beautifully, I think, in the book of Judges. It comes up again with another rhythm of words, another poem, another repetition that happens, kind of stretched across the entirety of the book of Judges.
When the author of the book of judges — If you know that book — it’s a downward spiral of the people of Israel as they turn to the Lord, and then they turn away from the Lord and things get bad. And they turn to the Lord and things are good and they turn away and things get bad. And every time they turn away, every time things are really bad and dark and depraved, the author says this, you know, kind of throws in this beat and the author says, “And everyone did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord.”
And then they turn back to God and he delivers them and everything's great. And then they turn away and everyone does what is evil in the eyes of God. And they turn back and things are great. And they turn away and everyone does what was evil in the eyes of the Lord.
And then, towards the end of the book, right when the context, when things get the darkest, arguably, that they ever get in any story in the scriptures, the author changes the refrain. He changes the beat, and instead of saying “They did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord,” he says, “And everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
And in the context of the story, we see sexual assault, we see murder, we see a dead body literally butchered and sent in the mail across the nation. We see civil war. We see two counts of what we could easily call genocide, and we see human trafficking, and those are just the highlights of this story. When everyone did what was right in their own eyes, all the people who did all of those things that I just listed off, they were doing what was right in their own eyes. It got real dangerous when the Lord stopped being the reference point for what is good and what is evil.
And I think the words of God have something to say towards what is good. I think we can look in history and we can see what they have produced and we can say there is a righteousness, there is good, there is fruit out of this. It tends towards human thriving both for individuals and society if we commit ourselves to figure out what is God saying — and not “what do I think is good”.
One of the places in scripture that we can go and we can get some really practical meat for what is good is the book of James. There's a lot to say on that. When I was more youth-y than I am today, David Stockton was my youth pastor. I'm not that old yet, but I don't get to count as a youth anymore, I don't think. And I remember hearing David say that — and I think I've heard him say on this platform a couple of times — that righteousness is not just doing the right thing. It's doing the right thing at the right time in the right way in the right place. And that's always been really helpful for me to realize that righteousness is more than just a default, that you can just apply to every decision you make. It is more complex than that.
But then we get a layer beneath that definition of righteousness. And we're still left a little confused, because how do I know what the right thing is? How do I know what the right way is, what the right place is, what the right time is? Where do I figure that out? Because I always try to do what seems right to me, what seems good to me, what I want to do sometimes. Is that what's right? I don't know. And it seems to make a mess.
We know that saying, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.” That's wonderful and beautiful, but if you come across a starving man, you can't just say, “Well, get your fishing rod, let's go get some food." You give him a fish first, get some calories in the guy. And then when he's got some calories and he's recovered, you pick up and you go together and you teach him how to fish.
And the Bible is very concerned with both of these approaches. It tells us, hey, fishing is going to God. Fishing is figuring out how to get in the water. That's what the Bible is here for, so that we can fish for the word of God as we learn how to hear from God directly, as we learn to hear from God just in our quiet time, as we learn to hear from God, as we look at nature and all the things around us, and listen to the traditions of the church and listen to the community that we're in right now and how God is speaking to us through those. But as we listen to those things, we can get a fish.
I mean, Jesus literally gave people fish at one point in time. We get something practical that we need for now because it's hard sometimes to hear from God. It's hard sometimes for us to tune in and to get rid of distractions, to figure out what God is saying.
And James, does this a lot. The book of James will hit a number of times as we go through this series on Kinetic Righteousness. Because James is very much an authority on practical righteousness. James was such an authority on righteousness that the early church, at some point in time, they started calling him “James the Just” because he just had a desire and a burn for justice and goodness and righteousness in his heart, that it just didn't feel right for people to call him James anymore.
I would love to have that happen in my life. I would love to so beautifully fulfill the character of God that people felt like they couldn't just call me Alec anymore, that they had to call me by some attribute of the goodness and holiness of God. That it would just seem like it was such a part of my identity, I hope, when I'm an old man, that that's the case.
James was also the half-brother of Jesus. At any point in James's life, if he didn't know what righteousness was, he could close his eyes and recall the literal face of righteousness himself. His older brother, Jesus. He could think of Jesus at 15, at 20, 25, at 30, or hanging on a tree at 33, with blood that is the righteousness of you and me. That was way more rhyme-y than I meant it to be. But I'll go with it. Or he could think of Jesus after the resurrection. He could picture a call to memory the face of righteousness and say, “Yeah, that's what righteousness would look like in this situation.”
James, we're told, was so devoted to prayer on his knees that his knees began to look like camel's knees — cracked and dried and calloused. Which just makes me think, can someone get the man like an Ultra gift card? I'm pretty sure my wife has some creams and things that could do something for that.
But what a beautiful thing that he was so devoted to that ,tradition tells us. And he was so devoted to the righteousness of God, to the law of God, that it actually confused the Pharisees into thinking that he was one of them. And one day when they realized that he wasn't one of them, they shoved him off the top of the temple to try to kill him. And when he landed on the ground, he wasn't quite dead. His body was broken and he got up on those camel knees and began to pray for the crowd that was swarming in around him, “God, would you forgive them? They don't know what they're doing.” (The same prayer that his half brother Jesus prayed as he was being crucified.)
I think James the Just has some words to listen to about what is righteousness. I think he's an authority on the subject, more so than the people that we follow on Instagram. And so, James, he's going to offer us a number of fish.
And in James chapter 1:19, here's the first one that he gives us today. He says:
My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.
James’ first little practical bit of how do we figure out what God is saying, is a warning. Hey, when you're angry, you are at risk for leaning on whatever it is we may or may not have gained from eating of that fruit. You're at risk for leaning on your own understanding of what is good and what is evil, and not realizing that God has something else to say. He says when you're angry, try to connect with what God is telling you to do and not what your anger is telling you to do.
Now, I really believe, and my guess would be that James probably believed as well, that there is such a thing as righteous anger. But I also think that righteous anger still falls under the umbrella of what James is saying here, that it doesn't matter if you're angry because you're wrong or you're angry because you are being wronged. Your anger does not produce the righteousness of God.
And I know that there are so many of us in this room who are very familiar with righteous anger. Maybe you are experiencing it right now. Maybe you've been experiencing righteous anger for so long that it's turned into bitterness. Because your spouse cheated on you. Because your parents left you. Because your friends abandoned you. Because your boss is just not a good person. Because you've been abused, you've been hurt, you've been wronged. You've been the recipient of bigotry, of hatred. Feeling the injustice.
And it makes you righteously angry, and my guess is it makes God even more angry. And yet even that righteous anger still will not produce the righteousness of God in the moment when you're feeling that righteous anger. What I would encourage you to do is to stop and to go to God and say, “God, what do I do with this anger? This anger is telling me something. But what are you telling me to do with it? How do I move forward from here in a way that will produce your righteousness and not my false righteousness?”
I think one of the most beautiful examples of this in recent history is the civil rights movement, where you have tons and tons, thousands upon thousands, if not millions of men and women who have been witnessing and experiencing firsthand some profound injustice. And they are righteously angry. And they could have done what people have done since the beginning of time and taken that anger and tried to get justice the way their anger tells them to get justice — but instead they went and they listened to the Lord and they listened to men and women who are listening to the Lord, and they said, “God, what are you telling us to do?”
And so they responded in what they came to call civil disobedience and put themselves in the face of that injustice, put themselves in the face of the things that were stirring up their righteous anger. And they received more and more of the injustice, more of the hate, more of the violence. And it changed the world in a way the world has rarely been changed before. Because they responded not out of their righteous anger, but they responded out of the peace of God.
And my guess is that if you and I could learn to find our anger and in that moment to let the anger be a trigger for us, that tells us, “Wait a minute, hold up. I'm angry. I need to go to God, not to my anger.”
And if we could do that in our relationship with our spouses, with our kids, with our friends, with our bosses, with our families, our brothers and sisters, our parents, our coworkers, the people we disagree with on social media, or in society — if we could do that, I think we would see our relationships with those people changed in a way that they have rarely been changed before, perhaps changed in a way that they have never been changed before.
The next thing that James has to give us, the next little fish he offers us is in verse 26 of Chapter one. It says,
Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
There's so much we could talk about in there, but I'm just going to home in on what he's talking about when he talks about the orphans and the widows.
David, as recently, I think a few months ago, I heard him using the terminology sins of commission and sins of omission. And for me, the terminology like passive and active sins help a little bit more. The active sins are the ones that are easier to see, the sins of commission, the things that you commit. Right? They're easier to see there when you break one of the rules. You know, the don't murder, don't lie, don't cheat. Don't steal it. Well, you did that and it was an act of sin. And those are a little easy to wrap your mind around.
But James is pointing out to us that there are also these these passive sins, the sins of omission, these things that are sins, not because you did, but because you didn't do.
Jesus tells a parable about a man who was condemned by God because he allowed another man to live on his doorstep in suffering. Now, the condemned man wasn't the cause of the man's suffering. He just didn't do anything about it. That's scary. I think James would say that if you lived your entire life keeping yourself unstained from the world, which is a good thing, which he encourages in this very sentence, if you lived your entire life keeping yourself unstained from the world, then you stayed at home praying and worshiping. You would still be living a very sinful life because you were committing all of these passive sins: not going out, not being kinetic, doing the things that God has called you to. You are disobeying God as much by your inactivity as you might be by your sinful activity.
And that's a little sobering for me, because I only can do kind of one thing at a time. How do I make sure that the thing I'm doing is the righteous thing, and thank God we have his mercy and his grace, and he forgives our active and our passive sins as we stumble our way through life, trying to figure out what his righteousness is. But I want to live in his righteousness. I don't want to take advantage of his mercy. I want to be fueled by his mercy.
And he's talking about these people, as David talked about the other week, who are, you know, downstream from us when he talks about the orphans and the widows — the people in society, of the people in your life who can only take more than they're able to give because they just don't have much to give. I think it's natural for us to want to associate with the people who can give more than they take. Whether it's because they're wealthier than us or more influential or because they have more followers, or whatever. But James here is saying, “No, no, no, associate with the lowly.” That's the righteousness that God wants.
I want to tell you about one of the literal best days of my life. It sits on a plateau with just a handful of days as a beautiful moment. And I hope all of you have maybe a couple that you could pull out of your pocket and say, “Oh, this is a beautiful, beautiful day,” or “I saw the Lord do something so beautiful.”
But last year, about halfway through the year, there was this one particular brothel where a team had gotten really, really close to these women, had really connected with them, built friendship that, you know, the women on the team, they would often take them out to the beach or to to dinner to get some coffee or to hang out or something like that. And our relationship with them had grown so close that even some of the men on the team, we started to know these women because they started to feel safe around us.
And one day, one of the women on our team, she had this idea, "What if we could take these women out for a retreat just to hang out to love on them, to have fun, to get out of it for a little bit?” And with some prayer and some favor that the Lord gave us with their pimps, we got permission to take them out for the weekend and hang out with them.
So we rented out this beautiful, gorgeous villa that was like not far from the beach, and it was kind of in the woods and all alone. And there were dogs around that would keep us safe. And it was just gorgeous, there was a pool and we hung out for the whole weekend. And we ate more food than human beings are supposed to eat. I felt like a cow constantly grazing on all this food. We taught these women who live in Southeast Asia, and have never seen a taco before. We taught them how to make tortillas and tacos. It was hilarious because they thought the tortilla was like the paper you put it on, like a disposable plate to eat off of. And they were so confused, like they were eating the insides of the taco out like this.
We took him to the beach and there was music and we did some karaoke. And then at the end of the last night of this weekend, and just hanging out with them and blessing them and loving them and laughing with them and eating way too much with them, we had a time of worship. And these women who didn't know Jesus yet, they still are so excited to connect with God.
And then, when we were done with that time of worship, we had this time of just connecting with them and talking with them and sharing our hearts and letting them share their hearts.
And I remember listening to my friend Sinta on our ministry team, and she said to these women, “You know, we just really wanted to love you this week.” She said, “We know that so many people, that most people in society think that you guys are way down there and they're way up here,; and we really don't believe that. We really believe that you are the same as us.”
And these women, they know their price better than you and I hopefully ever will. They know to the dollar what an hour of them is worth, and they know to the dollar what their life is worth as they look at the debt that hangs over their life, that holds them and the lifestyle they're stuck in. But as my friend Sinta said this to them, it was clear that they did not know their value.
There's something that happens when we try to put a metric on something that is priceless, when we try to put a price on the priceless, it obscures its real value. Right? Can you imagine if I told you I'm going to charge you a million dollars to see this sunset? It would still cheapen the sunset. It's not meant to have a price because it has a value that is greater than anything that one person can get from it or anything that a thousand people can get from it.
The value of human beings is not in what you and I get from them. And to us, to human beings, it seems right. It seems good to associate with those who have more than us in one way, shape or form. But to God, when we do that, we are obscuring the value of his children, who he made in his image — his greatest work of art.
And so what is the righteousness that is acceptable to God? It's to do away with our flimsy righteousness of building our own kingdom and hanging out with the more influential and the more wealthy, and the more beautiful, and the more — fill in the blank. It's getting in line with the way God made the world, that we would recognize the inherent value and beauty of absolutely every one of his children, even if in the secret place in your heart they feel like a burden to you. Because, you know, they're going to take more than they give.
And so, in this season of kinetic righteousness, one of the things that I am praying happens for all of us is that we learn to to not say, “Hey, I'm better than you, I'm up here and you're down here and I'm going to pull you out of the muck.” But we learn to just sit in the muck with people. Then we learn to just hang out with them the way God just hangs out with us and all of our yuck. And we go into those places and we communicate to people that, “You are valuable. It's not that you have a high price, it's that you have a high value.”
And I hope for you, honestly, my my dare to you, is if you're not already doing this over and over and over, if your life isn't already saturated with these kind of people, I dare you to find some people, in this next season of life, who feel like a burden, if you're honest. And to stare at them long enough that you see the image of God in them and you recognize the real value, and that you love them as friends, as peers, as brothers and sisters made in the image of the same God. I dare you to let that mess your life up.
And I'm telling you, it will cause some disruption. I think the disruption is profoundly worth it. And if you're all lost in this and you don't know where to take any of this or what to do with any of this message or any of these fish that that James is handing us, that they just feel strange to you, I would just say come this Wednesday, please, please, please, please. We're a family and this is what we're doing. If you at all can, please show up for it. We're going to do community and we're going to talk about and we're going to figure out and we're going to stop talking and we're going to start doing kinetic. We're going to start doing the righteousness of God.
Let's pray:
Jesus, we love you so much and we worship you and we thank you. And God, this this this message. It's hard to swallow because it disrupts our comfort and our convenience. And Lord, let us not swing too far that we forget your mercy and your grace and your forgiveness that carries us through. That is the place where we find salvation, Lord Jesus. But may we live a righteous life that reflects you well. As individuals and as a community Lord Jesus, may we see some kinetic righteousness, your goodness working through us. Amen.
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