January 30, 2009, at 11:37, a nurse at Palomar Hospital handed me a baby. My baby! Ethan–6 pounds, 10 ounces, little tiny guy, but as she handed him to me, I had this overwhelming feeling that my life would never be the same. I’d fallen in love in a way I never knew I could and I also sensed that although he weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces, he actually weighed a little bit more than that on my heart and my life. We put him in the car seat a few days later, after those few glorious days where the nurses changed his diapers and made sure that we didn’t kill him. It was wonderful. We got in the car, strapped him in the car seat, started driving home. The drive home where you are going 10 mph in a 35 mph zone and you’re wondering why everybody else is in such a hurry. I’m driving along and going my speed (slow) and people are honking at me and waving at me with only one finger. We walked over the threshold of the door; I helped Kelly get into the house. I had Ethan under my arm. When we closed the door behind us, the silence was almost deafening. It was as though sirens should have been going off somewhere in the universe to alert people that we had absolutely no clue what we were doing. I had this feeling like is this a joke. Is somebody going to come through the door and say we know you have no clue?! I can remember holding this little kid—he weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces—and he might as well weighed 1000 pounds. The weight I felt in that moment was just…..it redefined the way that I looked at life.

Here’s the truth of the matter, friends. We all carry weight. Some of it’s really good and beautiful. Some of it’s really dark and difficult. But every single one of us….we walk in these doors today carrying a weight. Some of us carry the weight of a painful past. We look back at it and go I don’t know how I could ever climb out from under the weight of my past. It sits on our shoulders, doesn’t it? We replay those things over and over in our mind. If I could just go back and redo that. Some of us carry the pain literally in our body. Our body’s breaking down, doctors don’t know what’s going on or they know what’s going on, but they can’t do anything about it. Or maybe you just woke up this morning and have one more ache in a place you didn’t usually have an ache and it’s just that ever present reminder that you’re getting older. Maybe you turn on the news and see the insanity in our world. Just this week in Brussels was the terrorist attack. That adds a little bit of weight. In a room this size, there’s probably people who had a fight in the car on the way here and you’re sitting next to somebody and you’re all smiles, but deep down inside……you’re carrying the weight. There’s things that you carry, there’s things that I carry…all of us…. The weight that we carry determines the way that we walk. The more weight we have on our shoulders the more it feels imposing and it feels like we’ll never get out from under it. This isn’t just a condition for some people, this is a condition for all people. All of us have this. We’ve all experienced this. The question we wrestle with as human beings is what are we suppose to do with the things that weigh us down because the weight that we carry determines the way that we walk. Some of you are here today and you have kids that you love and that you’ve poured into—-you knew that same weight that I knew when they handed them to you—-and they’re not sitting next to you today for a number of different reasons, but it’s a weight that you carry. The weight that we carry determines the way that we walk. For all of us.

As followers of Jesus, we have this conviction about this weight. We have a conviction about the way that we walk and the weight that we carry. In fact, our conviction is pretty simple. It’s because of the reality that Jesus walked out of the grave that we can walk in newness of life. That’s our conviction. Let me show it to you from the Scriptures. If you have a Bible, open to Romans 6:4-5. Listen to the Apostle Paul as he writes to the church at Rome. He wants to write to encourage them as they walk with Jesus. He wants to write to spur them on to live in the faith that they hold so dear. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Here’s Paul’s conviction—-it’s a conviction I want to say over all of us today—-we can walk in newness of life because Jesus walked out of the grave. The early followers of Christ had this sorta crazy conviction. Their conviction was if Christ walked out of the grave, then everything changed. And if he didn’t, then they should be looked at as the most foolish people who walked the face of the planet. Here’s what we do today. It’s not like well, we could take it or leave it or maybe I’ll believe or maybe I won’t. Early followers of Christ were convinced that if Christ had not been raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:14) then their preaching is in vain and their faith is in vain. Paul’s going to go on to say listen, we should be pitied above all people….we’re morons….if he didn’t walk out of the grave. There’s a lot of people in this room today—some of you are followers of Jesus, some of you aren’t. If you’re not, my guess is you’re looking at me going so Paulson, you want me to base my life around an event that we can read about that happened in the Bible. You want me to base my whole life on that one event? What I want to say to you is yes, but not just because it says it in the Bible. Sure, it does say it in the Bible and it paints this picture of Jesus walking out of the grave in beautiful fashion, but did you know that’s not the only place we can look to find the conviction that that, in fact, did happen 2000+ years ago.

Let me give you a few other reasons you could believe that Jesus walked out of the grave. One, 10 out of 11 of his disciples give their life because they’re convinced that Jesus walked out of the grave. Second, there’s no other good explanation for why Christianity survived the first century if Christ did not rise from the grave. It is fable and folklore, it is not history, if he didn’t walk out of the grave. We wouldn’t be gathered here today. Third, Jesus’ own brother bows down and worships Him. Now, if you have a sibling……I just want to throw it out there! How far would they have to go to convince you that they were worthy of worship?! I have a brother and a sister and I don’t have a prayer of that! James, in 62 A.D., about 60 years after his brother goes to the cross, gives his life—stoned in the streets for the one conviction–my brother walked out of the grave. Just the fact that we gather here on a SUNDAY should be a flag that we wave. Every time we wake on a Sunday and have the day off, you should thank Jesus He walked out of the grave. For 320 years, followers of Christ met on a Sunday and it was a work day. They got up before anybody else did; they gathered in homes, they gathered in public spaces, they broke bread, they worshipped, they prayed, they learned from the Scriptures, then they went to work. But they worshipped on a Sunday; they switched their day of worship from a Saturday to a Sunday because their conviction was—our Lord walked out of the grave on a Sunday, so we’re going to worship on that day. Did you know that you don’t need to go only to the Bible to believe that Jesus walked out of the grave? I could point you to four or five secular historians around the time of Jesus, who recount the same truth that the Scriptures show. These are people who don’t have faith! They’re just telling the history of what happened. Listen to Flavius Josephus: “Now, there was about this time Jesus… He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those who loved him did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.” Oh, man!! That’s awesome! Not a believer, just a historian. He just wants to tell you what happened. {Will you look up at me a second.} It’s the hinge point of history. Whether or not Jesus walked out of the grave is the hinge point of history. It’s the hinge point of history and it’s the hinge point of our stories as followers of Jesus, because we don’t just look back at what happened 2000 years ago, we look down today at the ground we stand on. The ground we stand on is shaped and defined by that moment. As Paul writes to the church (we’ll read it again)—that we can ‘walk in newness of life’ because He walked out of the grave.

You may be asking Paulson, how does that happen and what does that look like? I’m so glad you asked that! Two things — one, if we’re going to walk in this newness of life, we need to follow the PATTERN of Jesus and we need to follow and embrace the POWER of Jesus. Romans 6:4 says: We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death….. So new life starts with admitting there’s some things going on in our life that are difficult, that are hard. As followers of Jesus, we don’t try to escape reality. That’s not the goal here at all. In fact, we want to step into it all the more with the conviction that Jesus is good. Here’s how we start. The start of the Christian life is God, I surrender to you. I can’t do it on my own; I’ve tried and I cannot earn my way to you, I cannot get to you, I cannot do enough good to get to you. God, I surrender. It’s the invitation that Jesus gives to those who would follow Him. You may be here just checking Christianity out. Listen to what Jesus would invite you to: And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. {That sounds like ‘death’ language, doesn’t it?} For whoever would save his life will lose, it but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. (Mark 8:34-35) He says the beginning of life is the surrender of ourselves.

I love going out to sushi. It’s one of my favorite things. I love going out to All-You-Can-Eat-Sushi. Whenever I go out to All-You-Can-Eat-Sushi, I always have in mind how much I’m paying for the meal. I count in my wife going with me, so I have a total in my mind. I know how much I would have paid for the meal if I hadn’t done all-you-can-eat. Has anybody done this? Whenever I order, I’m keeping track of if I’m going to get the good end of the deal, right? So I have a goal when I enter in. No, I have a commitment when I enter in……that I will get the better end of that deal. So I order my first round like a normal person; I order what I would normally eat. {I’m keeping totals in my head.} I order round two and my wife looks at me and says, “You’re on your own!” I look up at her and say, “Look up at me! Baby, we’re in this together!” I order enough to get the better end of the deal. At the end of every single time we go to all-you-can-eat sushi, we’re rolling out and I say to her, “Why in the world did you let me do that to myself?” Every single time I walk out of there, I feel like I just ate, not a raw salmon, but a raw whale. And I nailed the whole thing!! It was this prideful, arrogance — I gotta get the better end of the deal!

I think that’s how we feel about life a lot of the time. Have you ever walked out of a conversation with somebody going man, I won and I was right but it wasn’t worth it. A relationship that was broken because of words you said and you were right, but winning the argument wasn’t worth losing the friendship. The same is true of life. We can try to hold on and we can try to win and we can try to get our way, but the teaching of Jesus would say that even if you feel like you’re winning in that instance, you will lose. The way to really win is to surrender. The way to really win in life—to find our life, is the way Jesus would say it—is to say I can’t, but I trust that you can. And when we surrender, when we raise our arms to say I can’t, we actually open ourselves to the glory of God. But if we say I’ve got to, God says you’re on your own and good luck with all this. You know that feeling; I know that feeling.

It starts with following the pattern and the pattern is surrender, but listen to where the power comes from. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Have you ever wondered about the mechanics of how God raised Jesus from the dead? Have you ever wondered about how that happened? Paul wants to tell the church at Rome, here’s how it happened. God laid all of his glory on the dead body of his Son and, in doing so, awakened him to life. That word ‘glory’ is a weird word. It’s a difficult word. In the Greek it’s the word ‘doxa’ and in Hebrew it’s the word ‘kabod.’ The word is used over 375 times in the Bible. God’s glory is displayed in all of creation, the book of Psalms would say (Psalm 19:1). You and I were created for God’s glory, the prophet Isaiah would say (Isaiah 43:7). Paul, in the book of Romans (11:33-36), would say that everything is designed to point to and about the glory of God. So what is the glory of God? It’s all of who God is. It’s his majesty. It’s his beauty. It’s his power. It’s his love. It’s his grace. It’s his mercy. But in one word, here’s what it is — the glory of God is the WEIGHT of God. Literally in the Greek; it would be the weightiness of his splendor and his majesty. So, the weight of God is poured out onto Jesus and it raises Him from the dead! Well, Romans says not just that that weight raised Jesus from the dead, but we die in order to have that weight rest on our lives too. That glory rest on our lives too. Here’s the deal — you will carry weight in life. Nobody escapes it. The question is: will you live under a weight that crushes you? The pain, the sorrow…..man, things are going downhill in this world really, really fast. The person that you lost that isn’t sitting next to you that you’re just thinking about the whole time because it’s Easter. You can live under that weight and that’s completely human and natural to do. But friends, there’s a better invitation out there for you. It’s what we celebrate in Easter — That the glory of God raised Christ from the dead. Here’s the deal — the glory of God can raise YOU to walk in newness of life today too! It’s the picture of Easter. That He was raised up because the weight of God hit him. The invitation for you today is you can choose to live under the weight of everything that’s gone wrong — of the pain, of the perspectives, of the past, of all the stuff that you’re carrying in this room today — or you can allow the weight of the Resurrection, the glory of God, to rest on you and change you and awaken you to new life. God never promises to take away sorrow and pain. If anybody has told you that He does, they’ve lied to you. What He promises to do is to outweigh all the pain and all the sorrow and all the regret and all the shame with the weight of His glory! He doesn’t promise to take it away, He just promises to offset it with who He is and the beauty of what He’s done on your behalf. Here’s the way I’d summarize it: walking in new life is not about how much weight we can release, it’s about how much glory we can receive. You and I know we can play this game all day. We can try to improve ourself. We can try to go back and have the relationship work out, but we still know it’s never going to be enough to turn the scales.

Here’s what Paul writes to the church of Corinth (2 Corinthians 4:16-18): So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. So instead of trying to repair all the things that have gone wrong, here’s the invitation: I want to invite you to compare what He’s done, because you will walk under weight in life. The question is will you walk under weight that crushes you or will you walk under the weight of glory that shapes you, defines you and releases you to newness of life?! I’m praying that some of you are going to come to Jesus today and say back to him I want this new life. I want to walk in the fresh, unbridled, passionate life that you’ve designed me for. You might be asking what it looks like. I’m glad you asked that. Paul’s way ahead of you. He’s going to tell you what it looks like in Romans 6:7 and I just want to define what this weight of glory feels like in the life of the believer: For one who has died has been set free from sin. He’ll go on to say in Romans 6 that you are no longer a slave to sin, but because of what Jesus has done on the cross and through the Resurrection, you are free from the power and the punishment of sin. This is the good news, friends, that you have been moved from captivity to liberty. That liberty has overwhelmed captivity; it’s overcome!

Some of you walked into this space this morning and you’re carrying shame from some of the things that have gone on in the past. Some of the decisions that you’ve made. Some of the roads that you’ve walked. You’re going how can I ever get out from under this? Here’s what Peter would say; remember that Peter denied Jesus three times, so he may have wrestled with shame. He says: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24) There’s some of you here this morning that walked in with this cloud over your head and this conviction that whatever “it” is that’s going on in your life, it will never change. I just want to tell you that the empty tomb wants to speak a better word over your life this morning. That where there is captivity, there can be liberty. Where there is shame, there can be salvation. Where there is guilt, there can be grace. This is the gospel. Here’s the beauty of it — we’re so used to trying to alleviate the weight on this side of the teeter-totter that we lose sight of the way that we actually become free. In Romans 6:14, Paul tells us how it happens: For sin will have no dominion (power) over you, {Why? Because you’re really awesome now? Because you’ve worked on yourself and you’ve made some really good self-improvement? Because you’re not struggling with the stuff that you were struggling with at one time? NO!!} ….since you are not under law but under grace. It’s this beautiful waterfall of grace that allows us to walk in the freedom that Jesus purchased for us on the cross. It’s NOT because you try harder and do more. It’s because you open yourself up to say I just want to receive glory! It’s my only hope! It’s my only conviction! God’s restless, amazing grace is my only hope. If you’re holding out for something better, may I invite you to reconsider this morning. His grace is our only hope!

Here’s how Brennan Manning puts it: “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” Man! Paul continues in verse 5: For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. Listen to what Paul’s really saying. He’s saying the victory that we have is not because we make amends over here, it’s because of who we’re united TO; that we are IN Christ. Friends, this is the gospel. It’s not that you become more useful and it’s not that you become more lovable, it’s that He takes you in all of your guilt and all of your shame and all of your dirt and all of your messiness and He brings you to Jesus. Did you know that this term ‘in Christ’ was used 164 times by Paul alone in the New Testament letters? In Christ or in the Lord or in Jesus — 164 times. By contrast, the word ‘Christian’ is only used three times. Early followers of Christ had this conviction that they were IN Him, that the blessing that He earned, they stood in. The grace that He purchased was theirs alone. The holiness that Christ earned was given to them because they were united with Him. They were one with Him. We live in a culture where our value is based on what we can produce. Even in good marriages and good churches and good homes and neighborhoods and job places, our value is typically based on what we can do. But for early followers of Christ, they said no, no, no, no, no. Our value and who we are at the deepest soul-level is based on the reality that we are in Him and that He conquered death and conquered the grave. Here’s the deal — if that’s true, Jesus cannot be a nice amendment to your life. That might be the bad news for you this morning. If it’s true that by faith we’re united to Christ, He can’t just be a nice footnote, He can’t be a hood ornament on the front of your car or a bumper sticker on the back……oh please, Jesus, NO, right? He has to be your whole life. How silly is it, friends, that we want to make the Creator of the vast universe a part of our story rather than submitting to His? If we’re in Christ, if we’re united with Him, we give up the ability to say back to God — hey, God, do you want to be a part of my life? He’s like oh, that’s cute; that’s wonderful. See, I was wondering if you wanted to be a part of MY story? That’s way better, friends. Here’s what the Bible would say about those who are in Christ: That the far off have been brought near because they’re in Christ (Ephesians 2:13). That those who walked in the door this morning going there’s no way God could ever love me because I’ve done this, this, this and this and I’ve got so much baggage and I’ve got so much weight and there’s no way a holy, precious God could ever love me, I would say you were right if Jesus didn’t exist. But He does! And by His blood you have been brought near if you are in Him. If you are in Him, you are a new creation! (2 Corinthians 5:17) And not only that, but you are a perfect creation in Him — There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1). In Christ Jesus, you stand pure, holy, spotless, blameless right now! Can we stop fooling around here and start dwelling on the reality that we live under the weight of the same glory that raised Jesus from the dead!! Oh man!! When we get that it changes everything!

You may be going, Paulson, how do I do that? I’m so glad you asked. Here’s what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches there is a heaven and that there is a hell. The Bible teaches that if we say “no” to God, He’s a gentleman and He will allow us to say no for all of eternity. But the Bible also teaches that it’s by faith that we step into a relationship with Jesus. When we step into a relationship with Jesus, it not only changes our TOday, but it changes our ETERNITY. Look at the way Paul writes it to the church at Philippi: …..and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law {It’s not because we’re perfect or even good. We get ‘in him’ when we surrender and say I can’t, but I know that you can.} ….but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Phil. 3:9) Being made right with God happens on the basis of faith. So maybe you’re here today and you’re going, alright, that’s the step I need to take. I need to surrender so that I can receive. I need to surrender my life so that I can receive His. We’ll give you a chance at the end of the service, but if you’re feeling that God’s already done that work in you. We step into relationship with Jesus by faith.

Finally, when we receive the weight of glory, the hope of the Resurrection, here’s what it does in our lives — verse 5: For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. You see, early followers of Jesus had this conviction that they looked back at the Resurrection and they saw what Jesus did in stepping out of the tomb and it changed everything for them on a daily basis. Paul would say that you could walk in newness of life because it’s true. A new day is dawning because it’s true. But they didn’t stop there. The Resurrection points back and looks down into the present moment, but it also looks forward. If we have given our life to Jesus, if we’ve died with Him, then we also will one day be resurrected just like He was!! That is the destiny of followers of Jesus and that is the hope that we have—that destiny overpowers death. Jesus (the Scriptures say) is the first fruits (He’s the prototype) of what you and I will one day experience. So one day…..right now we get to live under the weight of glory, but one day He will call our name and we will rise!!! We will know the hope to which we have been called. Friends, the hope of following Jesus is not disembodied floating spirits in heaven. It is a resurrected reality here on earth where Jesus breathes new life into dead bones. And as Tim Keller so beautifully puts it, it changes everything. “For the early Christians, the resurrection transformed their worldview. They had a resurrection-centered view of reality. They believed that the future resurrection had already begun in Jesus. Jesus’ resurrection guarantees our resurrection and brings some of the future new life into our hearts now.”

If I didn’t believe that, I don’t know what I’d do, to be honest with you. A lot of you know my story — two and a half years ago my mom passed away. She had a debilitating brain disease that slowly crippled her body and her mind. Over a year and a half, we watched as she grew sicker and sicker, where she was able to engage less and less. We slowly, over a year and half, watched her lose her life. Our story isn’t unique. You’ve walked something similar, I’m sure. If you haven’t, I hate to break the news to you, but you will. The statistics on death are staggering! But I watched as she slowly went from being able to speak to unable to speak. I watched as she went from being able to care for herself to being unable to care for herself. I watched as she went from being able to walk to unable to walk. My heart was just torn up! But as much sorrow as I had and as much pain as I carried (some of you are here right now), as hard as that was, underneath it all was this conviction that we live in a world that is drenched in God’s glory and that one day, she too will rise. I’m convinced, with every fiber of my being, that her hands aren’t shriveled anymore, that her knees aren’t gnarled anymore, that her muscles aren’t atrophied anymore…..that she’s singing, that she’s dancing, that she’s bowing at the throne of Jesus. I am convinced that she is more alive today than any of us are!!!! And, friends, that is our story!! We could echo with Paul and say: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? {We celebrate the death of death today!} O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55-57) “Death in vain forbids him rise, Christ hath opened paradise!” (Charles Wesley) To every person that would put their faith in Him, He says: your reality today is new life and your destiny forever is new life eternal! It is your reality, friends.

There’s a conference coming up in Denver where a number of Christian leaders are going to get together and they’re going to talk about the impact of Christianity of culture. And they’re going to talk about ethics. They’re going to talk about influence. It is an expensive conference and I looked at by budget and went I don’t have enough money to go. I was talking to my friend about this conference and he said, “Oh, oh! Wait! Wait! I know a guy!” Do you have any friends who are just ‘I-know-a-guy’ friends? Who are these people?? He’s like I know a guy! He texts me this week and says hey, I got us tickets for a quarter of the price to go to the conference. I’m like are you kidding me?? He’s like yeah, yeah, I know a guy…..!! And I thought to myself, “Well, evidently, so do I!” I think the entire Christian life could be built around that phrase: I know a guy. I know a guy who looked death in the face and said, “You’re not going to take me down!” I know a guy who looked at sin and said, “I will conquer you with my own blood!” I know a guy who looked evil in the face and who spoke good over it. I know a guy who looked hate in the face and He conquered it with love. I know a guy who was dead in the grave and three days later walked out with a check that said “paid in full.” Your life is purchased, my life is purchased. We can walk new because of Him. Friends, I know a guy…..and His name is Jesus!!! We celebrate Him today!

Would you close your eyes in prayer with me? (I know a guy.) I want to invite a response from you. Some of you are here and maybe it’s been a long time since you’ve been in a church or maybe it’s the first time. Or maybe you’re here and you go Ryan, that’s me…I’ve been carrying weight and I just need to unload that today. If that’s you….if you go yeah, this message is for me….I just want to invite you to stand up right where you’re at. (This is between you and God.) You go, yeah, God, that’s me. I’ve been carrying this weight around and God, I need new life spoken over me. If that’s you, stand up. I’m going to pray for you in just a moment, but before we do that, if there’s anybody here and you’re saying listen, I have never given my life to Jesus, but today is my day. Today is the day of salvation; I want to put my faith in Him. I’m going to invite you to stand up right where you are. So Jesus, I pray over my friends that are standing up right now. They’re saying Lord, I need that new life and you know the situation that they’re walking through and you know the weight that they’re carrying. I pray, Lord, that you would just invade the spaces of their soul with Resurrection power! Please! Would you speak a good word over them? A word of blessing over them? Would you remind them of your power? Would you remind them of the liberty from sin that’s found in you from the unity that we enter into with you and the reality that our destiny triumphs over death? Please. Lord, for my friends that are standing in this room today and they’re saying to you, “I’m giving my life to you.” If that’s you, I’d invite you to pray: Lord, I give everything that I know of me to everything that I know of you. I turn from my sin. I repent of it. I change my mind about the way that I’ve been walking and I turn and I run to you. I accept the sacrifice that you made on my behalf. I believe in my heart that you are the Messiah and I confess with my mouth that you are Lord of my life. The Bible says that if you make that confession of faith, that He is faithful to keep what you’ve entrusted to Him. Lord, for all of us, I pray…may the truth and the reality of the Resurrection change the way that we walk. May we walk under the weight of glory, of love, of grace, of beauty, of majesty, of your power and your goodness and may the pains and the perspectives and the past and the things that we carry so heavy on our shoulders, may they pale in comparison to how good and amazing you are! We pray it in Jesus’ name and all God’s people said…..Amen.

March 20th 2016

listen to last Sunday’s worship set.

The year was 1720, the date June 21st.  The pirate, Bartholomew Roberts, was just about to sail in to the Trepassey Bay in Newfoundland, the easternmost part of the United States of America.  As he got ready to enter that bay, he noticed that there were twenty-two merchant ships lined up around the coast of the bay.  In that day, merchant ships often carried artillery because there were others, like Black Bart, sailing the open seas, ready to take them down and take them for all that they were worth.  Black Bart, or Bartholomew Roberts, was one of the pirates who came up with, what we know now to be, the “Jolly Roger” flag.  It was a way to send a message that the pirates used.  They would simply hoist up this flag and it was an invitation to any ships that could see it “hey, if you’re willing to hoist up your white flag and surrender, we’re willing to not kill you.”   They were trying to negotiate.  Bartholomew Roberts and his crew pulled into the Trepassey Bay in Newfoundland, June 21, 1720, surrounded by 22 ships in this bay and they, slowly but surely, hoisted the “Jolly Roger” flag. And every single one of the twenty-two ships in that bay, slowly but surely, hoisted up their white flag of surrender. Every single one.  The ironic part is that if you go back and read about this account, together for sure, but even independently, many of those ships that gave up without a fight had enough resources onboard to give the good pirate, Black Bart, a run for his money.  But they refused to even fight the battle.  They had enough to win and yet refused to fight.

Fast forward a few hundred years, last February, the New England Patriots were playing the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl.  It was a choose-your-poison Super Bowl, in my personal, correct opinion.  The New England Patriots were up by four points, but the Seattle Seahawks had the ball.  They drove down the field and they had 26 seconds left on the clock.  It was second down and they had one timeout in their back pocket.  They had one of the best quarterbacks, but they had, arguably, THE best running back in the backfield.  Russell Wilson was in the shotgun.  26 seconds left, down by four, if they score a touchdown they win.  He’s in the shotgun, receives the snap, takes one step back……does not hand it off.  Throws to a spot.  The receiver is beat to the spot by a cornerback who intercepts the pass and goes out to the four yard line and effectively ends the game.  Boo!  If only they could have tied for a lost!  After the game, Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, had one glaring question he had to answer:  Why in the world would you throw the ball on the one-and-a-half yard line when you have, what many consider to be, the BEST short-yardage running back in football??  You had everything you needed to win and yet, you gave the game away.  What were you thinking??  And Pete Carroll, to this day, hasn’t come up with a good answer!

Before we’re too hard on them, I wonder how many of us live lives of perpetual defeat with every resource we need to be victorious.  I started to wrestle with that as I thought through this passage in the Lord’s Prayer.  I started to think through this invitation from Jesus to pray “and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”   I started to think of all the times I’ve fallen to temptation.  I don’t know if you’ve ever had that happen to you, but I’ll stand here as your pastor and say it’s happened more than once to me.  Welcome to the party. And I started to think through what did I miss?  Was it just that the temptation was too much or did I miss a resource that was in my backfield that I just didn’t know existed or didn’t tap into?  I started to wonder God, is there a way….I see so many people who walk in defeat.  I see so many people who walk in anxiety and stress and depression.  I see so many people who walk in broken relationships and the wake of those just haunts them time and time again.  I see so many people, followers of Jesus and non-followers of Jesus alike, who are just shackled by the chains of fear.  I just started to wonder, as I prayed this prayer and I’ve taught through this prayer, is there a better way?  Are we surrendering, are we putting up, hoisting the white flag, when we have everything we need to win and everything we need to be victorious?   So I want to talk to two types of people this morning.  I want to talk to the person who feels like life is just beating you down.  I want to invite you to imagine a new day on the horizon, because of a new resource that you acknowledge is in your corner — number one.  But number two, I want to talk to the person in this room who has weathered the storms of life and has done it beautifully.  And I want to help uncover—-maybe you know this or maybe you don’t—-what it’s been that’s allowed you to walk in victory.

Matthew 6:13.  We’ve been walking through a series on the Lord’s Prayer where Jesus is asked by his disciples—will you teach us how to pray?    We’ve noted that it’s interesting that Jesus’ disciples never asked him how to preach.  They didn’t ask him how to start a church.  They didn’t ask him…..they didn’t ask him a lot of things, but one thing they did ask him was will you teach us how to pray?  They recognized that prayer was the bedrock under which He stood to do everything that they saw Him do.  We’ve been asking through this series how do we become the type of people that have this type of heart in prayer, so we started out by saying prayer is defined, first and foremost, by whom we are interacting with and whom we’re praying to.  That God is our Father and He’s a good father and you’re loved by Him.  We said, in tension to that, that God is holy.  He’s completely different, He’s other, He’s set apart.  We also said that we want to pray God, that your kingdom would come and that your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.  That’s an audacious prayer, is it not?  That’s a prayer (if you started to pray this) that’s hard to pray sitting on your hands, is it not?  You start to see ways that God might be inviting you to engage this world you’re praying for.  We went on to say that “give us this day our daily bread”…..that God wants to provide for our daily needs and indeed, for many of us in this room, He has. And not only our physical needs, but our spiritual needs and so we prayed along with Jesus “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”  Notice what Jesus does.  He moves from praying about or inviting us to pray for our physical needs or daily bread to pray for our spiritual needs, that we would be people who receive the forgiveness that we so desperately need because of the sin that has defined us and separated us from the King of kings and the Lord of lords.  He deals with, in prayer, our past sin and then invites us to be the type of people that don’t just celebrate a victory over sin in the past, but who walk in victory over sin in the present. It’s people who have been justified (made right with God) who don’t just stop with celebrating the past, but who pray and anticipate about the day on the horizon in the future.  And so we pray:  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  

I thought, at the forefront of teaching the Lord’s Prayer, that this was going to be one of the easier stanzas to address, until I actually thought about what we were saying.    Lead us not into temptation.  Should we be afraid that God would lead us into temptation?  Is that his M.O.?  Does he often do that?  Is He a good father or is he the type of father that leads us into temptation?  What are we actually praying when we pray “lead us not into temptation?”  I’m glad you asked that because I want to address that with you and, in doing so, I actually want to invite you a little bit deeper into the fog than we already are.  James 1:12-13.  We’re going to interact with this word “temptation.”  It’s the same root Greek word for “trial.”  This passage is going to use it as trial and as temptation.  Listen to what James writes to the churches:  Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.  {That’s good news!  That those who cling to the cross in the midst of trial will receive the crown of life.}  Let no one say when he is tempted, {Same root word.  Trial can be great for us.  We are refined by it, matured by it.  We have more joy through it.}  “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.    We’ve got ourselves a little bit of a quandary on our hands, don’t we? Because God doesn’t tempt anyone and yet, God uses trials to shape us and make us and mold us.  What are we praying when we pray “lead us not into temptation?”  Chrysostom, the great early church father, is right when he says:  “This particular petition is the most natural appeal of human weakness.”   It’s an admittance—lead us not into temptation—that oftentimes what starts out as a trial and something that’s a difficult season in life can turn into a temptation, one where we’re at the precipice of losing our faith and the things that we hold so dear.  So to pray “lead us not into temptation” is to pray Lord, if you can spare me from this trial, do it, but if I have to go through the trial then deliver me from the evil potential that is there.  Don’t let trial turn into a temptation.    It could also be phrased Lord, don’t ever lead us into a trial which will present to us such temptation that we will not be able to resist it.  God, protect me from that space—don’t lead me to that space.  Or, Lord, stop us before Satan can turn your test into his temptation.  Or to put it succinctly and simply—Lord, don’t ever let us walk into something that we can’t handle by your grace.  Kenneth Bailey says: “The phrase in the Lord’s Prayer expresses the confidence of an earthly pilgrim traveling with a divine guide.”  God, shape us.  God, make us.  God, mold us and God, lead us.

Isn’t it fascinating how much prominence Jesus places in prayer?  Think of the temptations we’ve walked into. Think about the things that have stirred up in our soul that’s robbed us of joy.  Is it potentially possible that we could have avoided the temptations or been victorious over them if we had been more diligent in our prayers? I’ll say it another way — are we refusing to use or neglecting the greatest resource at our fingertips and in so doing, walking into defeat when Jesus has already purchased victory for us?  What Jesus teaches in the Lord’s Prayer and elsewhere is that when we, as his followers, kneel in prayer…..when the disposition of our heart and our soul is God, I’m in need and God, I don’t know how to do it and God, I’m an earthly pilgrim who needs a divine guide because if left to my own devices there’s no way I lead this life into flourishing and vitality and goodness; I need you.   When we kneel in prayer we walk in victory!  The opposite side of that coin is true, also.  When we neglect prayer we experience defeat when Jesus has already purchased for us victory.  It’s very possible and probable that many of our lives live hoisting up the flag of surrender when on the decks of our ship are everything we need, not only to fight the battle, but to win it.   But as Martyn Lloyd-Jones so aptly put it: “Everything in the Christian life is easier than prayer.”    Because I am so driven by the bottom line.  I am so driven by what works and what’s practical and what stirs up fruit in my life.  I think the reason that everything is easier than prayer is because prayer is hard to measure when it comes to its effectiveness.  Sometimes we see God explicitly and miraculously answer prayer.  {Anybody ever be a part of that?}  Sometimes we don’t see Him explicitly and miraculously answer prayer and yet, prayer is so powerful and profitable in the life of the believer.  I want to show you today, from the Scriptures, why and how.

Matthew 26:36-46.  I want to read a story from the life of Christ that illustrates the reality that when we kneel in prayer we walk in victory.  Jesus has just celebrated the Passover feast with his disciples and He is marching towards Golgotha and his death where He will atone for the sin of the world, where He will take our guilt and our shame and He will purchase for us His righteousness.  He’s going to step into the Garden of Gethsemane….this is the journey from Gethsemane to Golgotha where Jesus is going to teach his disciples about the prominence and power of prayer.   Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.”  And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled.  {So the picture is the eight disciples are off to the side and these three are with Jesus.  These are the three that He’s built his life and his ministry into.  These are the three that he’s spent the most time with of anybody in his earthly ministry and He’s asking them to pray with him.}  Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me.”  And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”  And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping.  And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour?”  {So he approaches Peter and Jesus is in the moment of the most need that he’s ever been in in his earthly life.  He’s at this precipice of pain and hurt and anguish and he has one request of his disciples —- one.  Come with me and pray.  Come with me and stay awake and pray.  He comes back and finds them sleeping.  If I were Jesus, I’d be like “SERIOUSLY?!  You’re sleeping?? I’m sweating blood and you’re sleeping!?”  As soon as I say that God just sorta holds up the mirror to me and goes yeah, SERIOUSLY?!}  Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.  The spirit indeed willing, but the flesh is weak.”  Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”  And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy.  So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again.  Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Sleep and take your rest later on.  See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.  Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.”  

We’ll step away from the story a second.  As we journey towards Easter in the next week, I just want to point out some of the beauty of this gospel account of this night in Jesus’ life, in regards to an apologetic for why we believe in the Resurrection.  If you’re going to write this account of Jesus and your goal, as a follower of Christ, is to paint a picture of Jesus that would be easy to cause people to bow and worship, he’s done a terrible job. This is one of the passages that beautifully illustrates Jesus’ humanity.  We start off with Jesus being sorrowful and troubled.  His soul is just being ripped out in anguish.  He falls down on his face praying, so intensely occupied by the thought of walking to the cross for the redemption of sins.  We see him pray—if there’s another way, Father, let’s talk about that way.   If you’re trying to paint Jesus as the hero, if you’re trying to paint Jesus as somebody who beats his chest and courageously says follow me into the darkest season I’ll ever walk into, he doesn’t do a great job, does he?  It is beautiful history and terrible fiction.  If you want to create a document 30-40 years after the life of Christ that’s going to evoke worship of Him, this is not the way you go.  Especially if you just want to make it up.  Luckily for us, the gospel accounts aren’t just things people wanted to make up about Jesus.  They invite us into the humanity of the Messiah, where he says I’m sorrowful to the point of death.  I am consumed with pain thinking about what goes in front of me.  I am on my face praying, begging God, if there is another way.  If your job is to write an account about Jesus that paints Him in great light, they didn’t do all that good of a job, number one.  If their job or motive was to paint a picture of themselves in good light, they failed also, right?  These are the dudes who the people after them are called to listen to.  Peter’s the preacher, right?  Someone in the crowd could go hey, Peter, tell us more about how you fell asleep the night of the most need Jesus was ever in!  Tell us more about that!   Imbedded in the story is this invitation to victory that we often ignore.  We not only see the humanity of Jesus and we see the honesty of the gospel writers, but we also see this high place that prayer is held up to.  The high place, the prominence, that’s put on prayer in the life of the follower of Jesus.  That when we kneel in prayer, we walk in victory.

I was a junior at Colorado State University.  I always sat in the front row.  I was a front row guy because I figured that even if I was in a lecture hall of 200, if I was in the front row it would make no difference to me.  I was sitting in the front row of a lecture in Psychology.  I was opening at Starbucks in the morning and I was working with Young Life in the evenings and I was exhausted.  I was sitting in the front row of a Psychology lecture on “Sleep Deprivation!”  I can remember her putting the slide up—“Sleep Deprivation”—and going oh no, I’m going down!  It was about 15 minutes into an hour and a half long lecture and……this is back when we took notes on paper…….I woke up at the end of that lecture and the only note I had was this note—-your pen makes one straight line off the edge of the paper.  I can remember waking up going, “What did I miss?!  What did I miss?!”  The dude sitting next to me goes, “EVERYTHING!”  As I read this, I wondered Father, in the North American church how many of us are just sleeping through what you long to do??  When the antidote is so clear in front of us that we just need to recapture a vision for what it looks like to be people of prayer.  The victory’s already won and how do we step into it?  Well, we engage with our Father who’s purchased the victory.  Instead of just having our best resources sit on the bench….I don’t know, friends, I want to become the type of person that walks in the victory because I kneel in prayer.

Here’s how Jesus invites his disciples and us, as his followers, to do that.  The question becomes—how does prayer lead us to the victory that Jesus has purchased for us.  How does prayer lead us to be the type of people who are lead NOT into temptation, but delivered from evil?  Look at the way Jesus says it in Matthew 26:41: Watch and pray {That’s what he tells his disciples as he goes away to pray.  He tells them to pause, stop, watch and pray.  This word “watch,” in the Greek, means to be “conscientious” or to “be engaged” actively in the things going on around you.  It’s one of the things prayer does.  It’s one of the things we miss that prayer does.  Prayer awakens us to the spiritual battle that surrounds us.  If we are not prayerful, we are unaware.  If prayer has been a neglect in your life, I don’t want to heap guilt on you at all today because I know that doesn’t work and I know that every time we talk about prayer, you feel like you don’t pray enough, so I just want to say that there’s no guilt here today, but if we have neglected prayer, it means that we are unaware.  That’s just a reality.  When you stop to pray, two things happen—one, your pace of life slows down dramatically.  You’re able to breathe a little bit.  You’re able to think through everything that’s going on—–I’m not talking about prayer where we come with our list.  That’s great, that’s good, that’s needed.  I’m talking about prayer where we simply sit with the conviction that the Holy Spirit lives inside of us and that it is our hope of glory.  So, sitting with our Father and trying to hear his voice, we slow the pace of our lives down, number one, and we become aware.  Anybody been there?  Where you sit down to pray and just commune with the Father and immediately you have tons of thoughts flowing through your head.  So many that if you had a net out to try to catch them, there’s no way that you could do it.  Did you know that that’s not unique when you pray?  It’s not like when you pray you sit down and those things start to happen.  That’s running in the background of the operating system of your mind at all times.  Prayer is a way to simply be aware, to slow down the pace and, here’s the key word, to be present.   To be present…..with the thoughts, with the fears, with the anxieties, with the feelings and then to push them back to our Father.  It’s a way to say God, I have this deep and abiding conviction that there’s more going on in this world than I can see.  Would you open my eyes?  Think of how valuable that would have been for Peter, James and John.  Open our eyes, Lord.  Prayer sharpens one’s spiritual eyes to see what’s going on all around them.  It got me thinking what am I sleeping through?  What am I just totally unaware of?  What am I sleeping through?  Are there things going on in my life that I need to become more aware and more engaged with?  Are there patterns and rhythms of my soul that are evil and wicked that maybe in prayer I’d be able to see are simply just fear and that God, would you help me address those with the hope of the gospel.  God, are there things that I’m angry at?   We all know people who have fallen into temptation.  We all know people who have lost marriages because of temptation.  We know people who have lost jobs because of temptation.  We know people who have lost homes because of temptation.  We know a lot of people that have fallen because they weren’t awake to the battle that was raging all around them.  If you hear nothing else today, friend, know that you live in a battle zone.  But along with the evil that is present in the world and hey, deliver us from evil—there is evil to be delivered from, is there not?  Yes!   There’s also opportunity to have our eyes opened to.  On one side of the coin is the evil, on the other side is thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Open our eyes, Lord!!

He goes on.  Same verse.  Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.  The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.   Jesus is challenging us through prayer to remember that we are dependent beings and when we are dependent we are more powerful than when we try to pull up our bootstraps and say that we can do it on our own.  You read through Peter’s story, even in just this passage.  In verse 35, Peter says to Jesus: Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!    Hey, how’d that turn out for him?  Not great, right? You wonder if his disposition would have been more like Jesus’—lying flat on his face, saying Father, I need you—-how it might have turned out for him.  Victory, for you and I, the victory that Jesus has purchased for us, the victory that we walk in is birthed in humility.  One of the greatest enemies of your joy is your pride.  Let me say that again — One of the greatest enemies of your joy is your pride and pride is one of the greatest enemies of prayer.  In prayer we say, you lead me, God.  It’s an admittance.  Listen, I’m completely incapable of leading myself, except off a cliff.  That I can do.  Been there, done that.  Charles Spurgeon puts beautifully the invitation: “The tail feathers of pride should be pulled out of our prayers, for our prayers need only the wing feathers of faith.”  That’s awesome.

We also give up control when we pray.  We give up the illusion that we can actually do a better job leading our lives than God can.  AND we give up the worry that so often surrounds us.  We can either release things to God in prayer or we can hold onto things in our hearts in worry, but it’s really hard to do both.  You know, if you’ve tried.  You can either pray or you can worry, but you can’t do both.  Because in prayer, we surrender to a God who says I will lead you not into temptation and when you find yourself in the midst of evil, I will provide a way out for you.  Here’s the crux of the message:  Jesus says to his disciples watch and pray…..and if you have your own Bible, circle the word “that.”  He’s going to tie a result to an initiative.  When we pray…..watch and pray that or so that you may not enter into temptation.   Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.  The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.  Pray.  Pray because there’s trials coming in life.  Pray because there’s difficulties coming in life.  Pray because your God has given you, by His Holy Spirit working in you when you’re dependent on Him, everything you need to be victorious.

Prayer empowers us to overcome temptation.  If we’re falling to temptation, friends, we’re failing in prayer. Too much of the time we address the issue right in front of us instead of the issue that’s underneath all of us. What’s our relationship like with our Father?  Because God has given us everything we need to be victorious.  I just want to point out, in the Scriptures, what it looks like to be victorious.  I think John Calvin hit the nail on the head when he said: “A sure remedy is set before us, which is not far to seek, nor sought in vain.  Christ promises that people earnest in prayer, who carefully put away the idleness of their flesh, will be victorious.”  WILL BE.  So what does the victory look like?  In the Scriptures, there’s a few different ways that God says we’re victorious over temptation.  Let me give you three of them.  One is we avoid temptation.  Look at the way that Paul writes to the church at Corinth:  Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. {That sounds a lot like remembering our dependence, yes?}  No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.  God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.  {What a great promise! There’s nothing that’s going to come at us in our life that God will not give us the resources to be victorious over! AMEN!  Then he tells you how to be victorious in this instance.}  Therefore, my beloved, FLEE from idolatry. (1 Corin. 10:12-14)    Here’s the game plan for victory in this instance:  RUN!  Flee!  Did you know it’s easier to resist and fight temptation before it gets there than when it’s at your doorstep?  It’s easier to wage the war against lust and pornography before you’re tempted by it than it is in the moment.  It’s easier to fight the war against bitterness and anger before it comes at you than when you find yourself there in the moment.  It’s easier, friends, in marriages and relationships and friendships to choose to live as a person of peace before the argument than during it.  There’s some things we just need to set up hedges around our life with the conviction that sin is crouching at our door and would love to destroy us.

So we avoid it.  Second, we resist.  The devil, your enemy, is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for somebody to devour. {So Peter writes to the church…}  Resist him, firm in your faith…  (1 Peter 5:8-9)   Do you know how you resist temptation?  You feed yourself with the glories of the gospel.  That’s what you do.  To stir the heart of faith is to remember the sacrifice of Jesus, to remember that we were people in desperate need and that God made a great provision.  To remember that we stand daily under the waterfall of his grace and his mercy; that we are pure and holy and spotless and blameless and when the Enemy comes at us like a roaring lion, we need to be down on our knees like dependent children saying God, remind me who I am and who you are.  That’s how we resist.  We don’t resist by going….bring it on!  We resist by going listen, but for the grace of God….and praise God for his grace.  We stir the heart of faith.

So, we avoid, we resist and then….you know this, friends.  There’s seasons in your life when avoiding doesn’t work and resisting doesn’t work and you just simply have to endure.  You just gotta walk through it.  The valley of the shadow of death.  The Scripture never shies away from the fact that we will walk through the valley of the shadow of death, it only says that He will walk with us and that we will walk out the other end victorious. If you’re in the valley of the shadow of death, don’t set up camp.  Keep going.  Keep enduring.  Jesus says to his disciples: I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep {protect, guard, walk with them} them from the evil one.  There are times when God delivers you from evil.  And the more you pray “deliver us from evil,” the more you start to see that God is answering that prayer.  You (God) are buoying me up.  You’re strengthening me that I don’t fall to this trial, that it doesn’t turn into a temptation.  Thank you, Lord.  The more you pray it, the more you see He answers that prayer.  There are times that God delivers us from evil, but then there are also times when God sustains us through it.  It simply means that He has something better for us than keeping us out of trial.  There’s a work he does in us through it.  So we prayerfully endure, confident that trials shape us towards maturity.

The story ends with Jesus saying to his disciples—he wakes them up:  Sleep and take your rest later on.  See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.  Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.   Here’s an interesting exercise—when you get home today, go through Matthew 26 and look at the way that prayer moves the mission of God in the heart of Jesus forward.  He begins this endeavor, this evening, on his face sorrowful to the point of death.  He prays:  Father, if you can take this cup from me. Let’s do it that way.  We’re looking for a loophole here, God.  He then prays: If there’s no other way, I’m drinking the cup.  As if to say I see in prayer that this is the journey you’re leading me on.  Finally he says alright, it’s time to walk to the cross.  This is the way that prayer works in the heart of the believer.  This is the way that we walk in victory when we kneel in prayer.  Through prayer God emboldens us to embrace His will. It’s no accident that Peter sleeps and picks up the sword and that Jesus prays and drinks the cup.  No accident. Prayer is the linchpin of us walking in the heart of our Father with the view of His kingdom and the prayer “God, would you do a great work in and through us.”  When I’m not prayerful, I’m more like Peter and I want to defend myself.  And I want revenge.  And I want the kingdom to come, but I want it to come through violence and power and coercion.  What prayer does is softens us to the way of Jesus that says no, my kingdom comes through self-sacrificial love.  Would you lay down your life for your friends in the same way that He laid down His life for you?  The hard part is that when I just have my eyes, His leading towards blessing often feels like a journey towards temptation.  It often feels like it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be difficult.  The cross—we know it didn’t look like a lot of fun to Jesus, but because of prayer He saw the joy that was set before him and he walked that road.

June 21, 1720.  Black Bart sailed in to Trepassey Bay, loaded up with cannons, but facing 22 other ships that were well stocked and ready to fight.  He hoisted up his flag inviting them to surrender and every single one of those ships decided not to engage in a battle that they could have easily won.  They decided to surrender because they didn’t know what they had.  Friends, I’m praying for a day when followers of Jesus will take His invitation to be people of prayer seriously.  When followers of Jesus would get tired….a holy exhaustion….of being beaten down by sin. That’s what I’m praying for.  That we’d just get tired of getting beat up.  Tired enough to go to our knees and say, “Father, open our eyes.  Father, teach us we can’t do it on our own, but with you we have every resource that we need.  Father, teach us how to be victorious.  What does this situation at this time demand—do I avoid, do I resist, do I endure?  How do I do that, God?”  Through our prayer, would you open our eyes and then allow us to walk in the way of your kingdom?  That doesn’t happen when we raise the white flag.  THAT happens when we are convinced that when we’re on our knees in prayer God gives us everything we need to walk in victory.  Friends, you have it!  Don’t let it sit on the sidelines.  And instead of making prayer our last resort, could we be the church that makes prayer its first priority?

Every Wednesday, we have a group that gathers here to pray at 6:30 pm — the Watchmen prayer team.  I’d invite you to join them. This Friday we’re going to have an opportunity to pray through Jesus’ time on the cross as we celebrate Good Friday.  Come and engage on a heart level.  Ask God to open your eyes to the battle that’s waging for your soul.  But more than that, more than corporate, may this be an individual movement of us seeking and hearing from the heart of the Father and then walking in the victory that He’s already purchased for us.  Let’s pray.

Take a deep breath before you go running out of here and whatever else the day holds for you.  God, in the quietness of this moment, would you stir in us the desire for more of these moments.  When we’re just quiet enough to hear you, attentive and engaged, believing that you speak.  Lord, would you remind us that there’s some battles that we’re fighting right now that we can’t conquer, we can’t win on our own, but that by your mercy and grace and your empowering and through prayer that you work and move….would you remind us of those?  For the people that are in this room right now, would you bring those to the forefront of their mind? Are there ways we’re walking in pride instead of prayer?  Lord, bring that up, stir that in us.  Father, there’s so many in this room, I’m convinced of it, there’s so many in this room who are losing the battle to things that you’ve already been victorious over.  I just pray over them right now.  In fact, if that’s you…..if you’re here today saying I’m just getting beaten down by temptation and I want God to move in my heart and my life, will you just slip up your hand right now?  I just want to pray over you.  {I see you. I see you.  All over.}  Father, for these people, I pray would you, as they seek you and as they pray, fill them with your Spirit that would allow them to walk in victory.  Teach them what that looks like, give them a taste of it today, I pray in Jesus’ name. Father, for all of us, we want to be people who live with eyes wide opened to the world that you’ve made in all of its beauty, in all of its pain, in all of its glory and in all of its need.  As we pray, would you open our eyes to the ways that you’re inviting us to live in your world?  For the glory of your name and for the joy of your people, we pray.  And all God’s people said…..Amen!

March 13th 2016

listen to last Sunday’s worship set.

Have you ever tried to think back and figure out what your earliest memory is?  Not one that you’ve seen in pictures or stories that you’ve heard, but genuinely the thing from your past that’s the very first thing that you can remember.  For me, I was five years old.  It was my birthday and I had been given a Big Wheel for my birthday.  Huge wheel in the front, two mini wheels on the back —- I was in love!  I begged my parents to let me take it on an inaugural spin around the block.  I was ready for my birthday party; I was dressed in a red-and-white shirt that had horizontal stripes on it.  I had red shorts on and on the left pocket was a little green alligator.  I begged my parents mercilessly; I now know where my seven-year-old gets it from.  They finally gave in.  I took my red and yellow Big Wheel on a spin around the block.  I went tearing out of the driveway, made a left hand turn, made another left hand turn, another left, another left and I was about to make my final left hand turn on the final stretch and I’m not exactly sure what happened.  Other than the little wheel on the back got caught in the groove that attached the curb to the sidewalk.   The next thing I knew, I was lying on my face, in the gutter, covered in mud.  I can remember getting back on my Big Wheel and making that final left hand turn and heading home.  I pulled up the driveway and put the Big Wheel off to the side and stood there, not exactly sure what was going to greet me when I knocked on the door.  It was the first time in my life that I can remember feeling shame.  It was the first time in my life I can remember failing.  The first time in my life where, regardless of anybody else’s standard for me, I didn’t live up to my standard for myself.  Can you remember the first time you felt that way?

Part of the struggle we have being human is that regardless of whose standard we compare ourselves to, even if it’s our own, we fall short of it.  I’m always amused and befuddled by people who assume that they’re going to heaven because they’re good people.  Maybe they’re way better than me, but I just know that even by my own standard—let’s take God out of the equation for a second—I fail to meet it time and time again, day after day after day.  There’s something on the very sort of DNA level of us as people, isn’t there, that we have this internal way of measuring and keeping track and remembering when we just don’t live up to our standards, don’t we?  The first thing I can remember from growing up is the Big Wheel.  Standing there in the front of my house, covered in mud, knowing that I’d failed.  We don’t have to look too far into the past to have our own list going.  Maybe it’s lies that we’ve told or….let’s just call them partial truths, right, because we’re Christians here.  Maybe it’s that we’ve cheated at times on things.  Or maybe it’s just these internal rhythms of our heart where we have evil thoughts or evil desires or we have things that go on inside of our minds and our hearts that we wish we could take back.  All of us know, in regards to this list, that it is impossible to hit rewind, isn’t it? Some people in the room wish they could.  Maybe there’s some things they did……(Ryan writes ‘adultery’ on the board)…..and their marriage……    There’s some places we’ve been and some things that we’ve done.

All of us have to deal with this list in some way, don’t we?  We have to.  It’s a human problem.  It’s not a Christian problem.  It’s a human problem.  How do we deal with not living up to the standards that even we set for ourselves.  How do we deal with the list?  We’ll try to ignore it and pretend that it’s not there.  We’re really good at this for a time.  But you and I have these moments where we lie in bed and right before we fall asleep we stare at the ceiling and aren’t there some nights where this list just comes up and pops up in your head. You can try to ignore it and ignore the things that you’ve done that you know don’t even live up to your standard, but we all know that ignoring it doesn’t work.  We try to rationalize it.  We can say listen, Big Wheel made that back right wheel a little bit too big.  It’s Big Wheel’s fault that I fell into the gutter and if Big Wheel had made that wheel the right size I never would have been in that predicament.  We can blame other people and find other things to blame people about and the list goes on and on and on of the ways it’s other peoples fault that we didn’t live up to the standard.  But we all know, in those quiet moments, that it’s not somebody else’s fault…it’s ours.  The other devastating thing that starts to happen is this list starts to haunt us.  This is the record that stands against us.  Some of us have so thought about this list and we’ve tried to ignore it and we’ve tried to blame other people and that hasn’t worked and we’ve just had to be stuck with the list.  The list is not just something that we’ve done, it’s something that we are.  We call that shame.  When we start to internalize the list and it just becomes part of the tape that plays in our mind, over and over, everyday.  I can’t believe you did that!  I can’t believe you made that decision.  I can’t believe you failed so bad, so terribly.  And all of us have this to some degree and to some level.  The other thing we try to do is…..this is my method….repair it. I’m going to try to make up for it, so I’m never going to do that again.  Have you ever had that conversation with yourself, right before you do it again?  I’m never going to do that again—-I’m not going to think that, I’m not going to say that, that is not who I am and you know how I’m going to prove it?   I’m going to prove it because from here on out I am not going to be that guy.  We all have a list, don’t we?  We all have different things on the list.  And sometimes the list is ours and we make it up and sometimes the list is given to us.  For those who follow Jesus, we’ve got a list of things that we’re not suppose to do and people we’re not suppose to be and it just seems like the harder I try not to live on the list the more I find myself writing more and more things down.

And so, when Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he doesn’t want to shrink back and away from the things that make us deeply human.  He doesn’t want us to pray about things that are just somewhere out there.  He wants us to pray for the things that actually really matter, the things that are very present in the world and in our world.  When he teaches his disciples to pray, he says after saying our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name—you’re completely holy and distant and other and yet you’re loving and present and here—that’s the tension of prayer.   Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven—-God, make your name great.  He then says God, there’s stuff that we need.  God, graciously give us everything that we need today to survive.  The very fundamental building blocks of human life.  Give us food.  Give us bread.  The next thing he does after the fundamental building blocks of physical life…he’s going to invite us to pray for the fundamental building blocks of our spiritual life.  Here’s what He says:  …and forgive us our debts  {The list.  The failings. The shortcomings.  The ‘we didn’t add and we didn’t make it even by our own standard.’  God, forgive us our debts.}  ….as we also have forgiven our debtors.    Right after asking for the fundamental building blocks of physical life, Jesus invites us to ask for the things that will allow us to restore our humanity.  That we would be forgiven.  That the debt would be wiped clean.  That the things that we are ashamed of would not translate into living lives of shame.  That’s what Jesus is inviting us to bring before the Father.  There’s a better way than just ignoring.  There’s a better way than rationalizing.  There’s a better way than trying to forget it ever happened or we ever made that decision.  And the better way….the way that takes the things that we’re ashamed of and does not allow them to turn into shame…..is by bringing them before our God, our Father in heaven, and saying, I have messed up big time.  Would you, in your grace, shower me with forgiveness?  Dale Bruener, the great commentator writes:  “Food is humanity’s priority need, but forgiveness is humanity’s profoundest need.”  So Jesus invites us to pray hey, talk to God about the list.  Talk to God about the records that stand against you and so, if we are going to be people in prayer who ask for forgiveness, we’re going to be people who need to unearth the things in our life that would potentially cause us to live in shame.  And we’re going to need to be people who bring those before the throne of God with confidence that He is a God who forgives and wipes the debt clean.

Matthew 18:21-35.  We’re going to camp there for a few moments today.  Jesus tells a story about this idea.  He tells a parable in order to illustrate just how significant this issue is.  And it’s a story you may have heard before, if you’ve been a part of church.  If you’ve heard this before and you go listen, Paulson, I know the punch line, I know where this is going….can I invite you to hold off for just a second, step back from it, try to wipe your memory clean from ever having heard this and let’s look at it with fresh eyes together today.  This is Matthew writing about the words of Jesus.  Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? {Translation by Peter–This is going to get crazy, God, if we do this over and over again.  Like we can’t be people who just whenever somebody wrongs us we forgive them.  There’s gotta be a limit.  Otherwise, we’re just going to get run over.  And for most rabbinic teachers of the day, they had a yoke, a teaching, that said you forgive somebody up to three times for something that they did wrong. And that was big.  Three different times for the same offense!!!!  Jesus says hmmm.}  As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.  {In order to illustrate that He tells a story.}  “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.  When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. {Everybody say wow!!  That’s a lot a money and we’ll talk about that in just a second.}  And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made.  So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’  And out of pity for him, the master of the servant released him and forgave him the debt.  But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’  So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’  He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.  When his servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place.  Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant!  I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.  And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’  And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt.  So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”   Wow!!

Five characters.  You have the king, who’s the ruler of land and personifies God in the parable.  You have the servant, who owes the king a ton of money.  You have the servant of the servant, who owes his servant some money.  You have people who are looking on, observing, and wondering how this is all going to play out.  Then you have jailers.  The parable starts with the king simply.  It says calling to account the money that’s owe him. So this king is a wise business person.  This king has a record.  He has an account.  He has a ledger.  He’s a good bookkeeper.  He knows who owes him and how much they owe him and he says it’s time to call to account and for people to pay up what they owe me.   This person, the servant, owes the king ten thousand talents. One talent would equal 15 years of wages.  Ten thousand talents equals 150,000 years of wages.  That’s a long time, is it not?  Let’s just assume that this servant is making minimum wage and let’s assume that’s $8.00 an hour, for round figures.  $8.00/hour for the next 150,000 years….here’s how much debt is on the books. $2,250,000,000! That’s a lot of money.  This is like Donald Trump-type of money here.  Here’s what the servant asks the king–have pity on me.  Literally, in the Greek, it’s be ‘big-hearted’ towards me.  Have patience.  Don’t call this all to account at one time.  Have patience, or be big-hearted, have pity…..which would mean be moved in the very bowels of your soul with compassion towards me.  That’s what he wants.  At the core of his asking is I just need more time.  It’s insanity, isn’t it?  I need more time.  I need 150,000 years, whereby I will work constantly and somehow acquire no debt that goes on top of that.  It’s a terrible ask, isn’t it?  It’s a crazy ask.  Because he could never work enough or earn enough or do enough and that’s the point of Jesus’ parable.  You can’t earn enough, you can’t do enough, you’re not going to find any sort of magic ball or any DeLorean to make time go backwards, I’m sorry, friends, but we are essentially stuck with the record that stands against us.  Most of us….what we ask God for….most of us ask God for a little bit more time.  If I could earn a little bit more, if I could do a little bit more, if I could be a little bit more than I’d be okay.  God says no, no, no, no, no, the king in this passage…..you look at this passage and what the king does is he does not acquiesce and say back to the servant, “That’s a great idea!  Wonderful thinking!  Let’s do that!  You work and I will sit here and I will keep track of how much you owe and how much you’ve earned and let’s do the bookkeeping thing…..forever.”  The king is so much better than that!  The king says okay, here’s the deal.  We’re not just eliminating the debt, we’re changing the system.  And the system is God is not in the bookkeeping business anymore.  That’s great news.  He’s not keeping track.

I’ll prove it to you.  Some theological undergirding.  Colossians 2:13-14.  Listen to the way the Apostle Paul writes this to the church of Colossae:  And you, who were dead {You had so much stacked up against you…there’s no way you were digging yourself out of any of these holes, individually or as a whole.  Not going to happen.} ….in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record {This word in the Greek, ‘canceling,’ literally means ‘to obliterate.’  Love that.  Because here’s what the cross does.  The $2.25 billion dollars you owe?  God doesn’t remember it anymore.  Those thoughts of your heart that are so evil and so decrepit and so messed up, the things that you’ve done, the ways that you’ve lived….he goes listen, listen, listen, by the cross—it’s not that I’m going to forget those, it’s that I’m going to just erase them.  I’m taking them down.  He’s cancelled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.  This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.  Friends, what the cross declares is that Jesus is no longer in the bookkeeping business.  If you go back through this parable and you look at the way that this book or the ledger or the record starts to show up, when the king forgives the record, the wrongs, the failures that the servant had against him, I think what the servant actually hears is I’m going to give you all the time you need.  But what actually happens is the king says it’s erased, it’s done for, I’m changing the entire system.  When the servant walks out of the king’s chambers, he’s still holding his ledger.  He’s still holding his book.  He still thinks there’s still a debt that he has to pay even though the king has clearly said this is forgiven, it’s over.  Did you know that the type of people who are able to offer this kind of forgiveness to others are ONLY people who have heard from the King of kings and the Lord of lords, I’m not in the bookkeeping business anymore.  I’m not in the business of keeping track of every little right and wrong.  I’m in the business of canceling the records that stood against you.  Until we know that we stand as forgiven, we will never stand in the gap as forgivers.  And until we know we are forgiven, we will run from the things that we’ve done that are wrong, we will try to justify our wrongs, we will internalize our wrongs and we will end up living lives that are not defined by God’s grace, but that are defined by our shame.  THIS, friends, is a HUGE deal!  Jesus wants to ask us this morning, are you still holding on to the records?  Are you still keeping track of the score?  We may say we’re not, just like they say they’re not when my son plays basketball and then I was asked to keep score.  I’m like whoa, I thought we weren’t keeping score here.  And they’re like oh no, we keep score, we just don’t tell anybody.  And I’m like oh, that’s like church!!  We keep track of the score, we just don’t tell anybody.  Hey, hey, hey, most of the time, we keep track of our score and how much wrong we’ve done, even more than we keep track of everybody else’s score, don’t we?  Oftentimes, the hardest person for us to forgive is the person that stares back at us in the mirror.

We wonder what we do with this shame.  Jesus has some hints for us in the Lord’s Prayer.  He says, first, before you ever try to be the type of person that forgives, you need to know that you stand forgiven.  Before he invites us to ask and to beckon help us to forgive those who have debts against us, he says listen, you need to know as a child of God that you stand before the throne of God pure, holy, spotless, blameless….the debt has been cancelled.  $2.25 billion dollars was in your account that you owed and the King of kings and the Lord of lords has said listen, I know you can’t pay it and I’m not waiting for you to pay it, that’s why I paid it on the cross with my own body and with my own blood.  And until you know you stand forgiven, you will never stand as a forgiver.  But when you do, when you know—-listen, I stand forgiven by the King of kings and the Lord of lords—the most natural thing then that starts to flow out of us is forgiveness.  If God is not holding the record above my head, then how can I hold it above anybody else’s.  John Chrysostom, the great early church father and prolific preacher, said: “To ask forgiveness from God is a great benefit, and then to deny the same to others is to mock God.”  {Would you look up at me for just a second?}  If I receive forgiveness from God, I forfeit the right to not offer it to my fellow human beings.   And there’s no footnote there, you guys.  That’s the hard part about this.  Unless they hurt you really deeply, unless they abuse you, unless they dehumanize you, unless whatever happens happens, right?  Because we all have those what-ifs, what-ifs.  There’s no footnote there.  If I receive forgiveness from God, I forfeit the right to not offer it to my fellow human being.  Jesus at the end of this says: And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you? When we realize that we are freely forgiven, we are freed to forgive.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t just have a record in my mind in what I’ve done, do I?  Because you don’t just have a record of what you’ve done and the wrongs that you’ve done.  Some of you might realize, I’ve got $2.25 billion on that, but you recognize, just like I do, that there’s people that have wronged you also.  In fact, in the story, it tells us that another servant owed this man one hundred denarii.  That’s a hundred days wages.  So using the same math that we used before, that would be a total of $4000.00.  Could he pay that back?  Probably, over time.  And the man refuses—-this is Jesus’ point, the climax of the story is this man forgiven of 10,000 talents is unwilling to forgive 100 denarii.  He goes if you don’t realize how much God has forgiven you, you’re going to end up in the same spot.  Either we hold on to the books or we release the records, but we can’t have it both ways.  The hard part about forgiveness is that I need to look in the mirror and see this number before I’m willing to offer anybody else forgiveness.  I have to look in the mirror with honesty before I look on anybody else with mercy.  The longer I ignore this and the longer I try to run away from it or justify it or rationalize it or hide it, the further I find myself from actually genuinely forgiving the people that have wronged me.

The second reason forgiveness is really, really difficult is because when I screw up, I want grace, but when somebody screws up towards me, I want judgement.  Who’s with me?  This is the confounding part of being human.  So much of the time we’re unwilling to offer what we long for in the deepest parts of our soul.  Jesus says I’m going to give you exactly what you want.  When you pray forgive me, he says I have, by my body and my blood, and now I’m releasing you to be forgivers.  Do you know the only thing that keeps us out of the kingdom of heaven?  The only thing that keeps this servant out of the presence of the king is his unwillingness to let go of the books.  He’s clinging to the books.  In the parable, you have this king who absorbs the wrong. You have the king who pays the debt, who says this one’s on me, it’s absolutely forever gone, I’m changing the system, I’m not playing the record collecting game anymore.  He looks at his servant and asks, will you do the same?  The only thing that will keep me out of the presence of God is refusing the grace of God.  The very thing that I need.  The very thing that defines who I am as a person.  The only thing that puts me in the jailer’s torment is an unwillingness to say I’m done with the bookkeeping business, the records are released, it’s done for, it’s gone.  Which is what forgiveness means.  It means ‘to send away.’  It means ‘to release.’  Jesus ends this parable with his statement: Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you? And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt.   Jesus goes if you want to play the record keeping game, I guess I’ll play it with you for all of eternity.  But if you want to release the records, forgiveness is freely offered.  It just requires that we would then, in turn, be audacious, ridiculous forgivers.  So the question I have for you, and for me, is are we still holding on to the books?  Listen, I had some faces in my mind as I planned this message.  I had some events in mind as I planned this message.  I just sense God saying, Paulson, are you going to preach this and hold on or are you going to preach it and release?  Immediately when you found out that we were talking about forgiveness, you had some people in your mind too, I’m guessing.  I’m guessing you had some events, maybe, that started to play back and you go listen, every time we talk about this THIS is the person on my mind and THIS is the event that happened and THIS is the abuse that I suffered and THIS is the wrong that was done to me.  God’s asking us today, collectively, will we be the type of people that recognize that the bookkeeping is over and will we release the wrongs that people have done to us, in the same way that our failures have been covered by his grace and our shame replaced by the name that He gives us.  Robert Capon, in his great book on the parables, says: “If we refuse to die—-and in particular, if we insist on binding other’s debts upon them in the name of our own right to life—-we will, by not letting grace have its way through us, cut ourselves off from ever knowing the joy of grace in us.”   What might it look like to become the type of people who receive forgiveness and then freely give it?  THIS. IS. THE. GOSPEL.  You stand freely forgiven and therefore, freed to forgive.  It’s the only thing that can actually motivate the human soul to say to the perpetrators of the deepest wrongs we’ve experienced, I forgive you.  I forgive you.

Here’s what I’ve run into as a pastor.  I’ve talked to a lot of people and they go well, I could never forgive this person and that person and when they start to describe forgiveness, I go well, that’s not forgiveness at all. What you want to do isn’t what you’re describing and what you’re talking about.  For the next seven minutes, I’d like to switch into ‘teacher mode’ and answer the question, What is forgiveness?  And what isn’t forgiveness?  My hope and prayer is that in defining this oh-so-important word, God might free us to live the kind of lives that He purchased for us on Calvary’s Hill.

Here’s what forgiveness is not—-I think it’s important that we define what forgiveness IS NOT before we jump in to what forgiveness is.  Forgiveness is NOT ignoring or overlooking the wrong.  Forgiveness is not saying, I see that but I’m going to choose to look the other way and pretend like it didn’t exist.  In fact, genuine forgiveness requires and demands just the opposite.  In his great book Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf, writes about this.  That “genuine forgiveness demands that we name the wrong that was done against us.  We cannot forgive if we are not first willing to condemn.”  In order to forgive, we must say THAT was wrong.  Otherwise, there’s nothing to forgive, is there?  We can play this nice game of platitudes and nice little sentiments and talk about forgiveness, but unless we’re willing to say that was wrong, we never have anything to forgive.  So forgiveness does not mean that we look the other way and it does not mean that we ignore the wrong that was done.

Second thing it doesn’t mean:  It does not mean that we forget the wrong.  I meet with so many people that say I could never forget what so-and-so did to me, so therefore, I can’t forgive.  The Enemy loves, loves, loves that you think that you have to forget in order to forgive.  Because you can choose to forgive and still remember what happened.  And you probably will.  But it does not mean….it’s a non sequitur to say well, I can’t forget, therefore, I can’t forgive.  Those two things never have to intersect.

So forgiveness does not mean overlooking the wrong or ignoring the wrong, it doesn’t mean forgetting the wrong.  It does not mean that there are no consequences left for whatever happened.  It does not mean that we eliminate the consequences.  You can forgive and still long for justice.  Those two things are in different categories.  The nation of Israel is forgiven by God for their lack of faith and willingness to follow Him into the Promise Land.  They’re forgiven by God (Numbers 14:20-23), but they still don’t get to enter the Promise Land. The consequences of their decisions remain.  And for people that have wronged you, or people that you have wronged, you may have to live with the consequences.  You probably will, but that does not mean that you are not, and cannot be, forgiven.

Finally, what forgiveness is not.  Forgiveness is NOT reconciliation with the wrongdoer.  When you forgive somebody, it does not mean you’re holding hands, singing “Kumbaya” around the fire.  It does not mean that. You may be forever, permanently estranged from whoever you need forgiveness from, and whoever you need to forgive.  Forgiveness takes one person—-YOU.  Forgiveness takes you.  Reconciliation takes two people—-you and whoever has wronged you.  In order for there to be reconciliation, somebody needs to look in the mirror and say, I was wrong, that one’s on me and I’m not going to make excuses and I’m not going to rationalize it and I’m not going to run from it and I’m not going to hide from it.  I’m going to look in the mirror and I’m going to own it—-that was on me and it demands repentance and a turning back and even then, it may take years and years and years and great boundaries in order to come to a place of reconciliation.  Please don’t come out of here saying well, Paulson says that in order to forgive we need to reconcile and then you call up somebody who’s been horribly abusive to you over the years and think you need to make amends with them.  You can make amends with them in your heart and not make that phone call.  Reconciliation does not equal forgiveness.

So we need to ask what DOES forgiveness mean?  Forgiveness means that we release people from the debt that they owe and we absorb the wrong.  In the story of this king, who pays the $2.25 billion debt that the servant owed the king?  Who pays it?  The king.  In the same story, who is intended to pay the $4000 debt that the one servant owed the other?  The servant.  And that’s what forgiveness is.  Forgiveness is saying I am not holding that over your head anymore.  Here’s the beautiful thing about that, guys…..let’s just play this through for a second.  The things that people have done, the wrongs that they’ve perpetrated against you……how could they pay you back for them anyway?   The things that people have said that are just seared in your brain?  They’re not finding a DeLorean any sooner than you are.  They can’t turn back time and go back and say listen, I’m not going to say that.  And you know and I know that saying sorry goes so far, but it doesn’t go far enough because they can’t take back the things that they’ve said.  So we’re hoping for something and longing for something that’s impossible.  Jesus wants to free the human soul.  Forgiveness releases people from the debt—they say, you don’t owe me that anymore.  I’m out of the bookkeeping business, praise the Lord, because I stink at math anyway.  You don’t owe me anymore than I owe God.

Secondly, forgiveness is a ceasing of the cycle of retributive violence and it’s an entrusting of justice to God. Miroslav Volf, in that same book, talks about the reality that in the Bosnian-Serbian genocide, the only way that anyone could offer true forgiveness is believing that God would make the world to rights.  That he would bring about justice.  That was the hope, that was the thing that people clung onto and allowed them to move forward.  “Forgiveness is a letting go of my right to hurt another person because they’ve hurt me,” writes Steven Tracy.  It’s what it is.  It’s I’m not playing the tape over in my mind of if I could talk to them again, here’s what I’d say.  And if I got to meet them wherever, here’s what I would say and here’s what I would do.  Forgiveness is saying God, you’re going to make this right in your time and your way.  Forgiveness is the penultimate expression of……I trust you and taking my hands off of it.  There’s an old Chinese proverb that says:  “Refusing to forgive is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.”

Forgiveness is refusing  to give the Devil a foothold in our life.  You know that the Enemy loves the fact that you replay in your mind what you would do if you had the chance to do it to that person…fill in the blank.  Loves it. Forgiveness is a fight for our joy, friends.  It’s a fight to say back to the Enemy, I know you want darkness to have a foothold in my life and by replaying these things and hoping that I can get revenge for them.  The gospel says back and the love of Jesus says back because I’m freely forgiven, I will freely forgive.   Enemy, you have no place in my heart and in my soul.  I am not carrying bitterness.  I’m not carrying the weight of that around my neck.  I’m not carrying anger anymore.  I AM forgiven, therefore, I will freely forgive.  It’s a fight for our own joy.  I’m not drinking the poison anymore.  Forgiveness fights to see the humanity, even in the people that have wronged us deeply.  I’m not going to dehumanize because I’ve been hurt, which is so much of our natural tendency.  I’m going to fight to see the image of God, even in the people that have wronged me deeply.  I’m not giving the Devil a foothold.  How about you?

Three secrets to forgiveness then I’m going to land the plane.  How do we offer forgiveness?  First, your greatest resource for forgiveness is the gospel.  Remember that you have been deeply forgiven.  Slate wiped clean. Records no longer being kept—completely released and sent away by the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And when I have trouble forgiving the other, I just need to remember for a moment—I am he.  And God has graciously and freely forgiven me.

Secondly, forgiveness is a choice before it’s a feeling.  I hope this brings some freedom for some people in this room today who are going I don’t feel like forgiving.  You may never feel like forgiving, but you have to decide are your feelings going to dictate your life or what you know to be true going to dictate your life.  You can forgive somebody before you feel like you want to forgive them.

Finally, forgiveness is not a one-time decision, it’s an active daily choice.  And if you’ve ever had somebody that’s wronged you deeply, you know this.  You know that you can choose to forgive them and genuinely mean it, then find yourself carrying the weight of the wrong in a day or a week or maybe five minutes later.  I’ve done that—five minutes later, I’m still carrying the weight of it.  What we need to remember is forgiveness is ACTIVE.  It’s saying whenever I find myself carrying the weight of the wrong, I’m going to shed it—-that’s not who I am anymore, I’m not in the record keeping business, I’ve released the records.  God has released the records against me and I’ve released them against anybody who’s wronged me, regardless of what the wrong is—-there’s no footnote.  {Look up at me for a second.}  I understand that it’s hard.  I understand that it feels like it’s wrong.  Like they should have to pay for what they did.  Here’s the thing—you can keep holding onto that and it will keep killing you and keep haunting you OR you can remember that Jesus is not in the record keeping business anymore and you don’t need to be either.  He will make it right.  Our job is to trust him and to live in the path that he’s purchased for us.

Would you close your eyes and let’s go to the Lord in prayer.  That’s a lot to take in.  So who popped into your mind, what situation, when you found out that this is what we were talking about today?  Maybe an ex-husband, ex-wife.  Maybe a person who abused you, wronged you.  Maybe somebody who you did that to.  I just want you to imagine, in your mind’s eye, Jesus with the books and all the things that you’ve ever done.  Maybe the shame that you carry, the guilt that you have, the regrets that if you could go back and take them back, you would. I just want you to imagine Him going to the cross carrying those things.  He’s canceled the debt.  He’s obliterated it by His cross, because of His love.  And He’s made a new way for you.  A new way for you to move forward and to live—without the bitterness, without the anger, without the shame, without the regret.  You see, the same thing that keeps us from saying “we forgive others” is the very thing that prevents us from hearing God’s forgiveness over our life.  You show me somebody who’s a forgiver and I will show you somebody who knows that they’ve been forgiven.  Jesus, today, we all have lists of some sort in our head and we just want to say that we are handing those over today, Lord.  We want to get out of the bookkeeping business.  The people that have wronged us—we want to make that daily choice to say, we forgive.  Whenever we find ourselves carrying the weight of it, we want to remember that you’ve already expunged it, that it is over, that it is done with.  We want to live in that type of freedom.  And Jesus, as we live in the freedom that you’ve so graciously offer to us, would you help us, in turn, be people who graciously offer the freedom of forgiveness to others.  Lord, help us live in your way—-with your heart, with your freedom.  So Father, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.

March 6th 2016

listen to last Sunday’s worship set.

If you’ve been with us over the past few weeks, you know we’ve been walking through a series on the Lord’s prayer.  If you’re new with us, welcome, we’re really glad you’re here.  We’re going to be diving into one of the stanzas in this prayer and trying to ask God God, what do you want us to hear from this portion of this model prayer that you gave your disciples to pray — a way for them to interact with you.

I grew up in a church that was sorta “high church.”  It was a Presbyterian church and the pastor wore a robe every Sunday when he preached.  I think it was because he didn’t want to think about what he wore under it.  Every time he prayed….he had this sorta booming voice….his name was Ben Patterson and every time he prayed, you just felt like the Shekinah glory of the Lord filled the room.  I can remember as a kid sitting there, going I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pray like that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to talk to God in a way that I really feel like he hears me, because I don’t know that many big words and I don’t know how to do that and I don’t know how to enter in…..   I can remember feeling almost a little discouraged by prayer as a young kid because I felt so distant from the way it was suppose to be done.

There’s a story of a young boy who was at a Lutheran church with his mom.   The pastor got up and prayed and said, “Father God, remind us that we are but dust.”  The kid pulled his mom’s coat and said, “Mom, what’s “butt dust?”   I think sometimes that’s the way prayer feels.  It feels a little bit like “what are we doing here?”  What are we doing when we interact with God?  What are we doing when we talk to God?  Does prayer really change things? God explicitly says I already know what you need before you ask for it, but ask for it anyway.  Does that confuse anybody other than me?  I know what you need, but come on and ask me and sometimes I’m going to give it to you and sometimes I’m not and I could all the time, but you’ve just gotta trust me in that one.  Does that confuse anyone except me?  This is part of the tension of prayer, isn’t it, and yet, we recognize that prayer is distinctly and deeply powerful, isn’t it?

There’s a story of a woman who grew up in Latvia under the communist regime.  This great scholar, Kenneth Bailey, went over and was doing some teaching in Latvia after communism fell.  There was this group of young people that this woman was a part of.  He went up to her and asked her how she became a follower of Jesus. “Was it someone in your family that was a follower of Christ?”  She said, “No, I never met another follower of Jesus.  Nobody in my family followed Christ.”  “Was it a church that remained open under the communist regime?  Underground churches?”  “No, I’d never heard of any church.”  “Was it a missionary that came?”   She said, “No missionary ever came.”  Bailey pressed her and said, “Well then, how in the world did you become a follower of Christ?”  She said, “When we would go to funerals, they would still allow us to say the Lord’s Prayer. As we recited the Lord’s Prayer, God stirred something so deeply in me and drew me to himself.  As we said this prayer, I needed to know THIS God.”  That’s part of the power of prayer, isn’t it?  It introduces us to the King of kings and the Lord of lords.

If you’ve been with us over the first few weeks, we have looked at the first few stanzas of the Lord’s prayer. We looked at the fact that the foundation of prayer is this “Abba approach” to God — that we view God as our Father in heaven.  We talked about wrestling with that because every single one of us had an imperfect dad. To view God as Father means that we need to go to the Scriptures to ask the Scriptures what do they say about God as our Father.  We did that.  We need to remember that God is distinctly other — THE other.  He is holy, beyond compare.  He stands alone.  This is a tension, isn’t it?  God as Father and loving and welcoming us home AND as distinct and standing alone.  Last week we said your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  That this part of the prayer (your kingdom come, your will be done) is a longing for God, not only to make his name great here, but to change the world to reflect more of the ethic of heaven.  We said we don’t just pray that and sit on our hands, but we pray that and we step in to be part of the answer to the prayer.  I got an email from my dad just last night.  My dad is an engineer and he’s currently on a mission’s trip in Honduras teaching in some of their universities and working with kids.  Just listen to this paragraph from the email:  “God is on the move around the globe, taking back ground from the Enemy little by little.  From dusty schools in Honduras to sweaty slums in India (where he was last summer), wherever his people are being faithful to follow him into uncomfortable places at inconvenient times where success is wholly dependent on God’s provision.  I’m convinced once again that if we aren’t seeing the movement of God in the worlds we live in then we just aren’t looking in the right places or putting ourselves in the right positions.”  Yes!  Thank you, dad. So, your kingdom come, God, your will be done and we play a part in that.

The next part of the prayer is going to be three petitions.  The first three were about God:  1) God, make your name holy, make your name great; 2) God, make your kingdom; and 3) God, make your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  The next three parts of the prayer are about us:  1) God, give us this day our daily bread; 2) God, forgive us; and 3) God, lead us.  Those are the next three petitions and that’s where we’re going.  Today, we’re going to look at this little phrase — give us this day our daily bread.   “Daily bread” is this Greek word, “epiousion.”  It was an unknown word in the time that it was written.  As we looked through ancient Greek literature to find out what exactly this word meant and to unpack the distinctness of this word, there was almost zero literature on what this word really meant.  We knew that it meant daily bread, but early followers of Jesus really took this to be ethereal, to make it very spiritual — give us the spiritual sustenance we need to survive.  In 1914, a scholar by the name of Adolf Deissmann unpacked and found this little shopping list.  On the shopping list was this word “epiousion,” daily bread.  They solved this centuries old puzzle about what this word really means.  It really means…..bread.  It means….daily bread.  It meant fresh bread.  It meant bread that was not baked yesterday.  This is not the marked down bread in the grocery store and, no offense to the food bank, it’s not food bank bread.  It’s daily bread.  It was bread that was baked TODAY for TODAY.  That’s what the word meant.  So Jesus invites us to pray for the stuff we need in order to survive.  Prayer is very real in that way.  He says come to me.  Pray for the stuff you need in order to survive.

There’s just one problem I have with this prayer.  I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve been praying and I’ve been praying it in the morning before my feet hit the ground, but there’s a massive problem I have with praying for my daily bread.  I have a refrigerator full of food!  My guess is you do too!  So how do I pray for my daily bread when I have two loaves of bread in my refrigerator??  How do we do that??  Is there any point to praying this?   Let’s just be honest for a second, there’s people all around the globe who have never uttered this prayer and yet have eaten every single day.  And there’s people all around the globe who are praying this….and starving.  We’ve just gotta be honest with that reality, don’t we?  How do we, as followers of Jesus, in all honesty and all sincerity, pray give us today our daily bread when we have full bellies and full refrigerators? Are we just playing some spiritual game here with God?  Are we just jumping through the hoops?  We know we should pray it so we do, even though I know exactly what I’m going to eat next week because my wife wrote it up on our little menu that we have hanging in our dining room.  So are we just playing games?  Are we just jumping through religious hoops?  Does it make any difference whether we pray this or not?  Because I pray before my meal, but I very rarely honestly pray for my meal; in the sense that if God doesn’t provide I don’t know how I’m going to eat.  Some of you have been in that position.  Some of you may be even are right now (we do have a food bank).  That’s why we have a food bank.  We want to meet practical needs in our community and in this body.  That’s a huge ministry and so important, but if we were honest with ourselves, very few times have we wondered where our next meal was going to come from or when it was going to come. The closest I’ve been is when I’ve gone on vacation with Kelly’s family…..because they just don’t eat!  We get in the car and drive…..and I’m like oh goodness, I’m going to starve in this car.  Our family’s philosophy on vacation was “we’re not doing anything so we should probably just eat.”  Her family’s philosophy is “we’re not doing anything so we don’t need to eat.”  I like my family’s philosophy better.  Every In-and-Out Burger we went to on our way to California we stopped at.  We just gotta pay homage.  We just gotta do our part.  That’s the closest I’ve been to wondering where my next meal was going to come from—-being on vacation with my wife’s family.

So what’s the point of prayer then?  If we already know, and if we don’t we have a credit card in our back pocket, where our next meal’s going to come from, what’s the point?  Here’s the point.  The reality is, friends, that prayer does transform the world we live in and, maybe even more importantly, it shapes the people we become.  In 2 Chronicles 7:14, a well-known verse, it says: …if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.   I’m going to transform them and I’m going to transform the world that they live in.  This all happens by prayer.  This all happens because we start to seek the face of God and we long to hear his voice.  Prayer transforms the pray-er and then releases them in power!

I want to give you three things that praying “give us this day our daily bread,” even with a full belly and filled refrigerator, actually does for us.  I want to answer that question “why pray this if we already know where our next meal and our next twelve meals are going to come from?”  Why do that?  Let’s look at this verse again. Here’s what Jesus asks us to pray or the model he gives us to pray:  Give us this day our daily bread.  Here’s what Jesus wants to do.  He wants to ground you and I in the glorious present, in the now.  In the here.  He wants to break us out of the fact that so many of us live in a tainted past or an anxiety-ridden future and he wants to plant our feet firmly in the now.  Through prayer, that’s one of the things that he does; he teaches us how to be present.   The emphasis, in this passage, is on right now, today, God, give us what we need!  Prayer is putting aside…when we go to God and ask him God, would you provide for my every need…prayer is putting aside the debris, it’s putting aside the anxiety.  Prayer is putting aside the worry and asking God–God, will you meet me in this space, right now, with everything that I need.  It’s boldly standing, in the moment, in awe of who God is and receiving all that God wants to deliver.  That’s what prayer is.  We don’t pray in the past.  We don’t pray in the future.  We simply pray right now.  That’s what Jesus is inviting us to.  It’s part of, and it leads us to, the reality that God loves relationship with us.  If we were to pray hey, God, would you give me ALL the needs for 2016?  And he were to say absolutely.  Done deal.  And he were to give them all to us right then….you know what we would do?  We’d be like hey, let’s talk again January 1, 2017, and if you could make the deposit again then we’d be good again.  But praying “give us this day our daily bread” keeps us connected to the vine.  In John 15:5, Jesus says this:  I am the vine; you are the branches.  Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.  So when we pray “give us our daily bread,” we’re connecting ourselves to God in the now, in the present, and saying God, I need to hear your voice.  God, I need to feel your touch.  God, I need to receive your provision.  Not tomorrow, but God, I need it right now.  Let’s be honest, friends, some of us are riding a spiritual wave that crested and broke years and years ago.  This epiousion, this daily bread, is that.  It’s bread for the moment.  It’s bread for today, so Jesus is saying you don’t need to live on stale bread.  Come to me in the present.  Come to me in the now.

I love the way the great preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, puts it: “The God who made heaven and earth, and orders the stars in their courses, likes to hear our lisping praises, likes to hear our petitions.”  Isn’t that great news?  Being grounded in the present naturally leads to enjoying His presence.  Because right now, in this moment, is the only time you can enjoy God’s presence.  When we’re tied up living in the past or when we’re anxiety-ridden living in the future failure that we anticipate coming, it’s impossible to enjoy God.  It’s only when we plant ourselves firmly in the now that we can enjoy the presence of our great God.  Jesus says pray give us this day our daily bread.  Here’s what we’d like to pray for—give us next year, give us whatever we need whenever we need it.  What he says is no, I want that connection, I want that every day.  I will give you enough provision for today and then let’s talk again tomorrow because I love to hear your voice and I want you to know Me and I want to be known by you.

So, does that mean that saving or planning is bad?  I’m sure somebody is thinking well, so should we not plan? Should we not have a full refrigerator?  Should we not have a retirement plan?  Should we just simply trust God in the every day and then make no provision for anything else?  That’s a great question, I’m glad you asked that. Dallas Willard actually answered that:   “Now, to make it clear about the teaching on prayer, it is quite alright to have things now that we intend to use tomorrow and to work or even pray in a sensible way for them.  What hinders or shuts down kingdom living is not the having of such provisions, but rather the trusting in them for future security.  {This is the key, guys.  Trusting in them for future security.}  We have no real security for the future in them, but only in the God who is present with us each day.”  That’s good!  It’s not what we have, it’s what we trust in.  It’s who we trust in that is the determining factor.

Here’s the way that Jesus goes on.  He says:  Give us this day our daily bread…  So I’ve been praying this and go Lord, you already gave it.  You already provided it.  I’ve got a full fridge and a filled belly……  I’m asking for something you’ve already given.  What I sense God saying was then praise me because I’ve already given it. Then honor me because I’ve already given it.  I’ve been good to you, I’m being good to you and now that you’re praying for it, you’re starting to realize I’ve already provided it.  Here’s one of the things that prayer does: 1) it creates a presence in the moment, but 2) it creates an awareness of the blessings that we already have.  When I pray for what I already have, I become aware of all that God has graciously given.  But if I don’t pray give us this day our daily bread, I might pray before my meal but I will never genuinely be in awe and grateful that God has provided it.  This type of prayer has led me to the realization that an abundance of products that we’re surrounded by erodes our awareness of God’s provision.  Let me say that again — the abundance of products that we’re surrounded by erodes our awareness of God’s provision.  Let me say it another way for you.  God’s consistency erodes my ability to see His goodness.  That’s true across the board.  Here’s how I know that:  Very few of you got up this morning and {breathing in}…..wow! I can’t believe I can still breathe.  This is a miracle! God, you have oxygen in the air!  You’re filling our lungs with breath.  You’re allowing my heart to keep beating! And all of these are gifts from God, but His consistency erodes my ability to see His goodness.  I woke up this morning…voice almost gone.   I’m like oh, Lord, come on!  But for the last 51 Sundays,  when my voice has been fine, I haven’t woken up and said, “Lord, thank you that my voice works today.”  Isn’t it strange how His consistent…like a river lapping over a rock….his goodness erodes our ability to see how absolutely amazing to us He’s being.  When was the last time you thanked God for some of the simple small things in life?  The breath in your lungs.  The sunrise coming up this morning….most likely the sun’s going to set over those beautiful mountains tonight.  When was the last time you just thanked Him?  When was the last time you opened your refrigerator and said man, Lord, I am blessed.  When was the last time you took a walk through your neighborhood and said hi to a few of your friends and thought Lord, thank you for fresh air.  Thank you for good friends.  Thank you for the blessing it is to be alive.  His goodness erodes our ability to see it.  His consistent goodness.

I just want to give you four things….I’m going to fly through these…..four things that when we become aware here’s what starts to happen in us.  An awareness prevents blessings from becoming burdens.  You go well, that doesn’t happen to me.  I think it does happen to you, let me give you an example of the way I’ve seen this in my own life.  I took my kids to the Children’s Museum in Littleton a few Fridays ago.  It was really muddy that day. My youngest son, Reid, is three and has a mind of his own now.  He was running all around.  He’d literally look for the mud and he’d just walk through it!  Clueless!  My daughter avoids it at all costs, but he is finding it at all costs.  We get back into the car and riding home and I feel these little feet kicking my seat!  I’m like God, help him!  I get out of the car and look at the back of my seat and it’s just covered in mud.  I’m like…..you kids!!!!! You’re so dirty!  (Ryan describes his frustration!)  I just sensed God saying, “Praise me for the mess!  Praise me for the mud!  Because the mud is tied to one of the biggest blessings I’ve ever given you.”  If you lose sight of the awareness, the blessing has a tendency to start to be a burden.

Here’s the second thing that happens.  If we are aware of what God’s given, it guards us against the comparison trap.  Of—-God, you’ve given me THIS, but you’ve given them THAT!  And come on, You’ve gotta give a little bit more.  And let’s just be honest a moment, Pinterest and Instagram are not helping us at all in this department. It’s so easy to compare to everybody else.  You see what somebody else makes for dinner and you’re like, “Sweet Lord!  How many hours did that take?”  Are they a real person?!  We start to diminish the blessings God’s given us because we look at some of the things we’ve…..but if we become aware of the fact God, there is a race that you have called ME to run.  Not anybody else but me and I want to run it in a way that honors and lifts high your name.  I think that’s a word for a lot of moms here.  As a mom, it’s so easy to compare yourself to what other people are doing and how other people are raising their kids.  It’s so easy to compare yourself and go man, if I could do a little bit better here or a little bit better there……I see so many moms walking around with so much guilt.  I just want to say take a step back.  Remind yourself of what God’s given you.  Become aware of the blessings in your life and then run the race that God’s called you to run.

So it keeps blessings from becoming burdens.  It guards against the comparison trap.  It stops complaining.  I love reading through the story of Israel in the desert and how after manna was falling for a time they started complaining to God.  Let’s just zoom back.  I get it!  Eating the exact same thing every single day, day after day……I like a little bit of differentiation, too.  If it were burritos falling from heaven I’d be like I’m all in!!  But manna, really.  It was everything they needed and nothing more.  That’s all it was.  They start complaining to God…..about a MIRACLE!  They’re in the desert.  Bread is falling from the sky every single morning.  They get up and go…..I’d really like some quail!  I’d like a little bit of meat.  One of my favorite passages in the whole Scriptures…..God’s like….you want meat??  I’ll give you meat!!  So many quail came that it said it was coming out of their nostrils!!  They’re like okay, fine, manna’s good!  We love manna!  Could we get some Nutella to put on it?!

I’m convicted about how many times I’ve complained about a miracle.  If we become aware—-and prayer’s one of the ways we do this—-and are reminded that God has already given us our daily bread, it prevents us from having blessings that become burdens, it prevents us from comparing ourselves to others, it prevents us from complaining about a miracle and it prevents us from becoming entitled.  To think that we deserve everything we get.   No, no, no, no, no, friends!  This is gift.  This is grace.  ALL of life is grace.  There’s not one little part of it that isn’t grace.  Here’s what happens.  When we become aware, the most natural thing that flows from that is…..God, you’re amazing!  God, I’m so thankful!  We started this by asking should we really pray this prayer if we have a full belly and a filled fridge.  Does that make any sense?  My argument is oh, absolutely!! Because it not only transforms the world you live in, but it transforms the people we become because it grounds us in the glorious present and it allows us to enjoy relationship with God.  Because it allows us to become aware of all the blessings that God has given us and to respond with gratitude.  You see, an awareness of God’s provision should always be an invitation to a life of gratitude.  Always. Always. Always.  If we lose sight of this ultimate reality that we are really dependent beings….because we start to go God, I’ve worked for that. I’ve done that.  Here’s what His response is: tell me more about that.  Tell me more about how you’ve worked for it, because I’d like to tell you about how I wired you and how I gave you the gifts that you have and how I gave you the mind that you have and how I gave you the body you have and how I gave you the air that’s in your lungs and how I wired you…….    Because EVERYTHING we have is a gift from God.  If we lose sight of that perspective, we lose sight of it all.

Finally—–Give US this day OUR daily bread.  I was astounded as I prayed back through this prayer over and over again that at every place there’s a pronoun it’s plural.  OUR father…..   Give US OUR daily bread…..   Forgive US OUR trespasses…….   Lead US not into temptation…..   Deliver US…..    I was convicted of how many prayers that I pray are “me” centered.  These prayers are plural.  Our God is a plural God and He invites us to pray plural prayers.  I can’t pray or model my prayer life after this prayer and pray only for me.  It breaks me outside of my egocentric bubble and springs me into the world that God has created, the people that God has created and the life that God has created me to live.  Give US this day OUR daily bread.  We talked last week about praying thy kingdom come and thy will be done and how it naturally launches us into being the solution to the prayer that we prayed.  The same is true when we pray give us OUR daily bread.    Here’s what it does.  It creates solidarity.  Not just an awareness of, but a connection to, people around the world that don’t have enough.  {Friends, look up at me for a second.}  We’ve got to find a solution to this problem.  There’s more than enough food in the world to feed everybody.  You know that, right?   We burn food.  So maybe somebody in this room is smart enough to be part of the solution to this problem.  But we can’t pray give US this day our daily bread with all sincerity, if we don’t care about the people in the US who don’t have enough.  God has to stir something in our heart, God has to stir something in our soul as we pray that.  One of the huge benefits of prayer in the way Jesus taught us to pray is that it ties us together with not only our needs individualistically, but the needs of the entire world and this is part of the community of faith that we are a part of.  What I’ve found is that it’s really difficult to judge somebody and pray for them.  You can try it and maybe you can find a way to do it.  I haven’t been able to.  I can’t find a way to judge somebody and pray for them.

Here’s what happens—-Solidarity with people in need creates a mission in my soul.  It stirs it up.  It sends me out.  It’s why so many of you are helping with Family Promise this coming week.  Because you’ve been praying……God’s put this on your heart and you’ve stepped into the mission.   It’s why some of you are praying about going to India or China this summer.  Because you’re praying and you’re going God, how do we become a part of the solution to the problem.  Give us this day our daily bread…..and there’s millions and millions and millions around the globe for whom that prayer is not being answered for them in the way it’s being answered for us.  It’s why so many of you, every single week, give so many hours to our food bank.  {Look up at me a second.}  You’re making a difference!  You’re making a huge difference in very real needs, but more than that, you’re making a difference in people and they’re meeting Jesus and the kingdom of God is expanding and pushing back the darkness.  Thank you!  But prayer is where that begins.  Prayer is where that’s birthed.  You show me somebody who prays give US today OUR daily bread and I will show you somebody who doesn’t just think about themselves, but who’s engaged with the needs of the people around them.

There’s this story about this monk who left his commune and went away to the mountains for a number of weeks to spend time seeking the Lord….by himself.  He came back after those few weeks and he stepped back into the commune with the other monks.  One of the monks said to him, “You don’t look any different.”  He looked back at him and said, “No, but you do!”  That’s the power of prayer.  It’s not so much that it changes us in a way that people can always see, but it changes the way that we see everybody else.  The type of prayers we pray determines the kind of people we become.  {Write that down.}  The type of prayers we pray determines the kind of people we become.

We all have very real needs.  Most of the time they’re not bread.  Full fridges and filled bellies.  But there are things that we genuinely do need and that’s what the crux of this phrase and this prayer is about.  Come to me with your needs.  Come to me with the things that are lacking and I want to fill you up is what God says.  One of the things you and I need I think Mother Teresa summarized really well.  Here’s what she said: “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved and uncared for.  We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair and hopelessness is love.  There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.  The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—-it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love as there is a hunger for God.”   Wow!!

Imagine if we started to become the type of people who genuinely prayed give us today our daily bread.  As we prayed it, we grounded ourselves in the glorious now—-the only time that we can have relationship with God. Right now.  And as we prayed it we became aware of all the ways in our life that God has already answered this prayer.  And it started to link our hearts with the people around us that don’t have enough and challenged us to be part of the solution.  What might this community of faith look like if we really started to do this?  What might God do with us if we started to say I’ve got more than enough and I’d love to meet that need for you. What would God do through a community of faith, like this church, if we started to embrace His heart for the people who don’t have enough and we started to assume that God wanted us to be the answer to the prayer. Here’s what would happen, friends, and I know this because it has already happened.  It would change the world!  It’s done it once.  The prayer I want to pray is God, will you, through us, do it again?!

For two millennium, followers of Jesus have been coming to this table.  They’ve been coming to this table to remind themselves that while we live by bread, we do not live by bread alone.  We’ve been coming to remind ourselves at this table, for over two thousand years, that the true bread, the true genuine bread that we really need, every single one of us, is Jesus himself.  In the book of John 6:35, he says I am the bread of life.  And if you eat of this bread, you will have eternal life.  He says I am the bread of life, so come and eat my flesh and drink my blood and if you don’t you have no part of me.  In doing so, what he was saying was you’ve got to take me in, you’ve got to allow me to become a part of you.  You can’t just associate with me. You’ve got to take me in in a way that transforms you at the very core of who you are.   And followers of Jesus, for two thousand years, have been coming to this table to remember that He is the genuine, true bread that our hearts long for and He is the giver of all that we need.  As you come this morning, come knowing that He longs and loves to hear your voice.  He loves to meet your needs.  Come present, now.  Come aware and as you come remember there’s followers of Jesus all around the globe this morning celebrating this table.  You’re part of that community of faith.  {Communion begins.}

 

“Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

(Matthew 6:9–13 ESV)

THE LORD’S PRAYER: Kingdom Invasion    Matthew 6:10

We’ve been in a series over the last few weeks, looking at this Lord’s Prayer.  When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, Jesus responded by giving them the Lord’s Prayer.  It’s not a prayer that we’re intended, necessarily, to say every week or every day, although there’s tradition throughout the history of the church that the church has.  In fact, early followers of Christ would say this prayer three times every single day.  But it’s more of a pattern that Jesus gives his disciples to follow, rather than a prayer to pray every day.  He says first and foremost that we should address God as “Father.”  That when we think about God, the first thought that should come to our mind is that he is the divine good father who chases us down and runs after us and welcomes us home.  We should also remember that God’s holy and that we should go to God, not only with an acknowledgement of his fatherhood, but an acknowledgement of his holiness.  If any of us were to see God face-to-face, not covered with the righteousness of Jesus, we would be consumed by his perfection.  The person of prayer is the person that holds these two things in tension: the fatherhood of God and the holiness of God.

Then Jesus changes gears a little bit.  He says then pray your kingdom come, God, and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  As I was thinking about this part of this epic prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, I was reminded of my son who just turned three.  Reid—-he is the happy-go-lucky kid.  He’s our youngest of three kids.  He just turned three last weekend, which means that he went to bed a sweet, little boy and he woke up possessed!!  Those of you that have kids know this drill and whoever coined the term “the terrible twos” obviously did not have a three-year-old yet, because there is an avalanche coming for them that they have no idea about. Reid went to bed a sweet two-year-old and woke up a possessed three-year-old, so this is what his week looked like.  He decided that he only wanted to eat granola bars.  He woke us up, by cover of darkness, 5 AM, right in our faces……you know that drill as a parent when you wake up and your kids are right there!!  Oohhh!!!  He’s like, “Want a bar, daddy.” “I’m going to need to go to a bar if you keep this up!!”  Then he transitions into….alright, I’m going to branch out into the yogurt category.  I will eat granola bars AND yogurt.  Demanded a yogurt.  He was graciously brought a yogurt, in a little tube, and he outright refused it!  Pushed it across the table.  I’m like so that’s how it’s gonna be.  I took that yogurt and {slurping sound} popped it right in there.  He started bawling!!!  I want the yogurt!!  I want the yogurt!!  Just a normal day in the sanctified Paulson household. Kelly, my wife, was eating a salad for lunch and he told her, “You can’t eat that!  That came from outside.  Those are leaves.  You shouldn’t eat leaves!”  She had her hair up yesterday.  He said, “Mommy, I don’t like your hair up.  You gotta put your hair down.”  He said, “Daddy, I want to snuggle with you in bed.” {This is all last week!}   I jump in bed with him and start snuggling with him and he goes, “Get out of here!”  “Gladly, my child.  God bless you.  Good luck.”  Here’s what he’s doing.  He’s attempting to build his kingdom.  He’s exerting his will.  He’s decided that he has an idea of how the world around him should function and should relate to him and by all means, we should be on our tippy toes waiting to accommodate his every whim and desire.  Here’s the thing.  If my son got everything he desired, the world would be a disaster.  And if you got everything you desired……the world would be a disaster.

From the get-go in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray.  And he teaches us to not only address God as Father and not only to remember God is holy, but immediately after that, before we ask Him for anything else, before we request that new car or that new house or that new whatever sparkly thing we need…….and we’ll get to some of that next week and the core desires of the human soul that we all have and we’re invited to pray about those things…….but before we ever pray about anything for us, we’re invited to surrender our desires. That’s the hard thing about prayer.  Prayer is encountering a God who is way bigger than us and surrendering our kingdom and saying, “God, my desire is not that you would build my kingdom and it’s not that you would do every single little thing that I ask you and it’s not that my life would go perfect according to my plan.”  But the second thing we’re invited to beckon, to ask, to petition God about in prayer is not for us, it’s for Him.  It’s for His kingdom.  Could we be honest for a moment and say that’s a really hard thing to pray, isn’t it?  Because we have to surrender our desires and our wants and our ideas of the way that we think the world should go and those are pretty ingrained in us.  Prayer, at its foundation, is acknowledging God as Father, remembering God as holy and then surrendering our desires and opening our hands to Him.  And saying God, what you want to have happen is what I want to have happen.  And sometimes we say that through gritted teeth, don’t we?  What I want to have happen, God, is ultimately what you want to have happen.

Jesus uses this term “kingdom.”  We ask God, would you allow your kingdom to come.  It’s a word that has a ton of misunderstanding that surrounds it.  A lot of us, when we think about the “kingdom of God,” think about a distant someday. We think about the day when God will come and set up His kingdom on earth.  It’s the same kingdom the Jewish people were thinking of and totally missed their Messiah.  We think of the kingdom that God will someday set up on earth.  He will.  Someday He will.  He IS coming back!   The Scriptures are unequivocally clear about this fact.  He is coming back.  BUT……the fact that God will come back and set up his kingdom in the distant future, does not negate the scriptural absolutism that God does reign right now!  We have this….the theologians would call it a “now, but not yet” reality of the kingdom.  It’s this God reigns right now, but just wait, someday He’s going to reign in a beautiful, masterful way.  So when Jesus steps onto the scene, He starts teaching.  I would invite you to read back through the gospel accounts and see if I’m not right when I say THE point of Jesus’ preaching and teaching in the New Testament is about the kingdom of God.  It’s about God’s reign in the here and the now.  He (Jesus) says:  From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, {This beautiful invitation.  Turn.  You can follow after Jesus.  Just chase after him.  Turn.}  …for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matt. 4:17)    It’s not a distant some day.  It’s TOday.

The kingdom of God could literally be defined as the effective rule and reign of Jesus.  Think of it like this:  the kingdom of God is the place and the space where what God wants to have happen HAPPENS.  It’s where God’s…..who God is and the plan that God has for the world starts to take root and it invades the kingdom of this earth and the empires of the earth.   When Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near,” he’s saying that the kingdom of God is enacting war on the kingdom of Darkness.  The kingdom comes in opposition to and alongside of the kingdoms of this world.  They both exist at the same time.  So that’s why you go well, Paulson, I’m not so sure that the kingdom of God is at hand, because I open my news app or open my newspaper and see what’s going on in the world and it just doesn’t look like Jesus reigns.  To that I say….you’re right!  But, there are places all around the globe where the kingdom….this is one of those places where the kingdom is breaking out.  And one does not negate the other.  It does not.  So the kingdom of God, right now, is alongside the empires of the earth and when we pray God, YOUR kingdom come and YOUR will be done, what we’re saying is God, push back the darkness with your marvelous light.  Extinguish oppression and abuse and hate with your goodness, your love and your mercy.  That’s what we’re praying.

When I was a college pastor, I took some of my students up to a leadership retreat.  We had the chance to go to this natural hot springs.  It was up in Mammoth, in California.  There was this river that was ice cold, mountain run-off, snow melt.  Bubbling up in this little sandbar, there was this scalding hot water coming from the center of the universe {or wherever it comes from}.  It was so hot that you could hardly put your hand on it.  You dive into the river and swim across as fast as you can because it’s freezing.  Then you get to the part of the river that feels like a hot tub!  It’s awesome!  Was the river cold or hot??  YES!  Yes, it was.  The hot water was right along side the cold water and it really depended on where you sat.

So when Jesus says the kingdom of God is here, it’s at hand, we look at the paper and go I don’t get it.  Jesus would say back to us, “Well, pray my kingdom come and my will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  There are places where this is breaking out!  In Ephesians 2:2, Paul writing to the church at Ephesus says that enemy, Satan, is the “prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.”  Earlier, in Ephesians 1:21, he said that Jesus is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.    We live in this tension, friends, of the “already, but not yet” nature of the kingdom.  The prince and power of the air and yet the victory of Jesus and the choice is ours.  What kingdom do we want to live in?  What kingdom do we want to carry?  What kingdom do we want to be a part of?  Dallas Willard, the great philosopher/pastor/theologian, says it like this:  “Persons other than God, such as you or I, are still allowed on earth to have a ‘say’ that is contrary to his will.  A kingdom of darkness is here, certainly, and the kingdoms of many individuals who are still ‘trying to run their own show.’ All of this God still permits.”  And I would add….for a time.

Jesus invites us to pray “your kingdom come, your WILL be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  So we’re people that long for the reign and the will of God to take root in our neighborhoods, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our marriages.  We’re people that pray God, have your way.  Which begs the question: are there places where God doesn’t have his way?  Are there places where God’s hands are tied?  Are there places where God wants to do something but just simply can’t?  If we pray, your kingdom come and your will be done, there must be places that God’s will is NOT being done.  Right?  That’s true.  You don’t have to look that far to recognize that earth does not look like, is not a mirror image of, the picture we have of heaven.  It’s not.  So the followup question would be: so, Paulson, you DON’T believe in the sovereignty of God then?   You’d have to ask that if we were sitting over a cup of coffee.  And I’d take a long drink of coffee and respond, “No! Absolutely, I do!!”  I do believe in the sovereignty of God, I just simply don’t define the sovereignty of God as determinism. Philosophical determinism would mean God simply just pulls the strings and you and I are all just marionettes and God’s pulling the strings and He’s sort of controlling the world in that way.  That’s not what I believe the Bible teaches as the sovereignty of God.  The sovereignty of God means that God can do whatever God wants to do whenever God wants to do it.  The tension we step into is….God, it seems like you don’t want to do it all that often.  It seems like, God, that you don’t want to step in.  Why is that, God, that you don’t step in more in these types of situations?  Are your hands tied?  Or are you frustrated?  The question we wrestle with is this: how does Jesus answer this prayer?  We affirm that God is sovereign and that all of history is going to culminate at a certain point.  The Bible tells that very, very clearly….that God is indeed sovereign and yet, as people, we have freedom and responsibility and his longing is that we follow Him.  So God, how do you answer the prayer “your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven?”  How does that prayer get answered?

Here’s how it gets answered in the Scriptures.  Flip over to Matthew 9:35.  Listen to the way that the gospel writer, Matthew, records this portion of the life of Christ.   And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming {or preaching} the gospel of the kingdom…    This was his message.  So he goes and preaches the gospel of the kingdom and he heals every disease and every affliction.  So Jesus steps in and goes I’m going to be the answer to that prayer.  I’m going to proclaim that the kingdom of God is here, it’s at hand, it’s now.  And I’m going to display that through signs and wonders where people are healed and where freedom and vitality and life are restored where it was simply dead or dying and desolate.  That’s part one of how Jesus answers that prayer.

There’s a second part, though, of how Jesus answers that prayer.  Matthew 10:5-8 says this: These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’   Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.    So the first part of Jesus’ answer to that prayer—God, allow your kingdom to come and allow your will to be done and we want the kingdom of God to invade the kingdom of darkness—-is to preach it and proclaim it and then go live it.  And then He sends His followers out to do the same.  Part one of the answer to the prayer is Him.  Part two to the answer to the prayer……is US.  It’s us saying, we have been rescued from the dominion of darkness and we have been placed into the kingdom of light, the kingdom of love and the kingdom of peace and shalom and healing and goodness and grace and mercy and we can’t just sit on that!!  We have got to be people who then carry the kingdom into the world.  Jesus envisions a community of people who don’t just pray that his kingdom would come, but who proclaim and live that it is NOW!!  I love the way the great, 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, puts it: “To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of this world.”  That’s awesome!!! Because we just don’t pray and passively sit back.  We pray and we anticipate and we step in.  It’s never passive, it’s always participatory.   As we pray God, your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven….we start to be challenged to be, not just pray-ers of the prayer, but part of the answer to that prayer.  As the disciples were when they went and preached and lived the kingdom.

Here’s what prayer does on a very foundational and fundamental level.  Prayer confronts our desire to want to escape and it challenges us to embrace Jesus’ appeal for us to invade.  When we pray your kingdom come and your will be done, we acknowledge God, you have a plan…but we also acknowledge God, we have a part.  We carry that kingdom.  When we live in the way of Jesus in our workplaces, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in the area that God’s called us to have influence….when we start to live in the way of Jesus, we carry the kingdom and his kingdom comes in conflict with the kingdom of darkness and hate and abuse and oppression and it combats with light and love and liberty and hope.  And you’re part of that!

But we only offer the things that we carry.  June 6, 1944.  The Allied troops stormed the shores of Normandy. You’ve read about this.  It’s called D-Day.  Over 150,000 Allied troops bravely and boldly got out of their ships, swam to shore and started to fight against an enemy.  An enemy who said life doesn’t matter.  An enemy who said if we have the power, we’re going to oppress rather than serve.  The Allied forces said enough is enough. They stormed the beaches of Normandy—150,000 men that day.  Nine thousand of them lost their life.  Here’s the deal, friends.  It would have been way easier to just stay in the boat.  It would have been so much easier to just try to escape rather than to invade.  Invasion is costly.  Invasion takes determination.  Invasion requires that we live differently with a different value, a different ethic and a different perspective, but in proximity with people who need this message.  Invasion is dangerous!  We would absolutely celebrate the people that got out of the boat, that stormed the shore with this message of freedom.  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said this at the time:  “The eyes of the world are upon you.  The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

Around that same time, there was a now-Christian author who writes about his experience about growing up in Nazi-Germany.  He was a part of the state-sanctioned church.  Their church butted right up against and was in back of the train tracks they used to transport prisoners to concentration camps.  Jewish people packed these train cars and as they were in worship services, they would hear the train cars go by and they would hear the whistle blow and they knew that the train was coming.  When the train came into the station, they would hear the screams of the people on this train.  And the church just lamented this reality, but felt like their hands were tied.  What they did was time the singing and the service to be at the same time that the train would come into town.  When they heard the screams of the people, they just sang louder.  It’s this tendency we all have to escape rather than to invade, to play it safe rather than to take ground, to protect ourselves rather than to be part of the solution.  I don’t know about you, but I think there’s areas in our lives and in our nation and in our environment right now where we’re just singing louder.  I want to appeal to you on behalf of the Scriptures, on behalf of God, to say that it cannot be!  We can’t go down like that!  The “prevent-defense” worked for the Broncos—they won the Super Bowl.  It will never work for the church!  It won’t!  You and I have everything we need to be the type of people that push back the darkness with the love of Jesus.  His spirit lives inside of you and there are pockets that you have access to where they need to know that there is hope and they need to know that there is healing and they need to know that there is forgiveness and YOU are God’s person to answer the prayer “thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  He’s going I’m giving you that message, church, carry it!  Live it!  Proclaim it!  Invite people into it with his power and for his glory.

I want to answer that question—what does it look like to be the type of people that really, truly invade rather than escape.  Here’s the first thing I want to point out:  Escapism looks for a path to leave; invasion looks for a way to love.  Let me just point out to you, Jesus, in this penultimate prayer where he teaches his disciples to pray, says your kingdom COME and your will be DONE.  He doesn’t say hey, take us away to your kingdom.  It’s not a prayer of escape.  It’s a prayer of invasion.  It’s not hey, Jesus, would you get us out of here; this is getting really tough.  It’s really hard.  We’re facing some serious persecution here.  His disciples were undoubtedly about to walk right into that.  The prayer is not “get us out of here;” the prayer is “allow us to be the type of people that bring what’s THERE down here.”  That’s the prayer.  For too long, the ultimate hope followers of Jesus have carried is an escape to a disembodied existence before God where we could get out of the place and He goes that’s not my plan.  My plan is I invade.  My plan is my kingdom takes hold and takes root on “earth as it is in heaven.”  So the Apostle Paul, in writing to the church in Philippi, says this: For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.  If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me.  Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.  {He’s saying I’d much rather die and be with Jesus, but He’s got me here!  And if he’s got me here then there’s a reason he’s got me here.}   I am hard pressed between the two.  My desire is to depart and be Christ, for that is far better.  But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. (Phil. 1:21-24)   So as much as what is in me wants to be there, I know that God has placed me here.  If He’s placed me here, I’m not going to look for a way to leave, I’m going to look for a path to love.  It’s so much easier to say I want to find a way out than I want to find a pathway to love.  Some of you are in marriages right now where you’re saying listen, it would be way easier to just leave.  Let me take a time out and say that there are some instances where you should.  But there’s also some instances where it’s just not meeting your needs and it’s not meeting your desires and the world doesn’t seem to be revolving around you in the way that you want it to and to you I say, please, take it before the Lord and ask Him if this is a time to leave or if this is a time to love. Because it’s way easier to just say I’m outta here than it is to say I’m going to look for a pathway to love.

I had a friend say to me the other day–if so-and-so gets elected, I’m out of here!!  I’m going to Canada!  I’m like dude, you need to do your research, because what you’re fearing is what’s already there!  I’m like come on!  I am sick of followers of Jesus who say if it doesn’t go my way, I’m outta here.  I want followers of Jesus who say we will be a beacon of light in the darkness and we will carry the hope of Christ to the places it is not and regardless of how bad it gets, we will not lose our voice and we will not lose our calling to be people of grace and truth and the mercy of Jesus in a world, hear me, friends, that desperately needs it!!  We cannot be people who value escape more than we value influence.  So, escapism says I’m going to value insulation.  Invasion, however, is built around influence.  Escapism says I’m going to insulate myself.  I’m going to build a bubble and live in a bubble.  I can control the bubble.  You need to ask me if you want to come into my bubble and if I don’t like you or don’t like what you’re going to say and I disagree with you, I will have my bubble and you’re not allowed to come into it.  Well, guess what happens when you live in your bubble?  You don’t get to interact with anybody outside of your bubble.  And if you don’t get to interact with anybody outside of your bubble, can you please tell me how you plan on being a light to a dark world?  So when Jesus says pray thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it requires, friends, that as the people of God who carry the kingdom of God with us that we are the type of people who say that as difficult as it is and as hard as it is we’re not going to value insulation more than we value influence.

Here’s the area that’s hardest for me.  It’s hardest for me when it comes to my kids.  Because I want to protect my kids.  I want to say hey, don’t climb that and don’t fall, although there’s some trees they should climb…..without a helmet.  There’s some trees they should climb and there’s some falls they should take and they’re going to be better for it in the end.  But as a parent, I find myself wrestling between protecting my kids and wanting to protect my kids and feeling a calling from God to protect my kids and preparing them.  Preparing them to be agents of change and to be agents of influence and to live a life of purpose in this world that they’re going to live in.  As parents, Kelly and I have come to the conclusion that we want to raise kids who are invaders not escapers.  So there’s some things that I’d love to protect them from, but I know it’s more important that they’re prepared so I’m going to let them go there and it might be a little bit sharp and it might be a little bit difficult, but I’m going to shepherd them through it and I’m going to love them through it and I’m going to point them through it because I want to raise invaders not escapers.  I want to raise a generation that storms the gates of hell and who invade the kingdom of darkness with the marvelous light of Jesus.  That’s what I want to do as a parent.  I feel like I’m in good company because that’s what Jesus was about. Here’s what Jesus says:  For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10)  That’s his mission. And every time I load my kid onto the bus in the morning, my prayer is Jesus, would you use him for your mission.  Would it be easier and safer to do something else?  Yep.  But I desperately want my kids to be part of the mission of God. William Temple put it like this: “The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.”  Who has God called you to influence?  Who are you praying for, “God, let your kingdom come and your will be done in {insert whoever, whatever} on earth as it is in heaven?”

First, we said that escapism looks for a path to leave; invasion looks for a way to love.  Escapism values insulation; invasion is built around influence.  Escapism operates in fear; invasion walks in faith. The invitation of “thy kingdom come and thy will be done” is saying back to the King of kings and the Lord of lords that we surrender it all.  We long for your kingdom and we long to be used as people who carry the goodness and mercy of Jesus into really, really dark places.  Did you know that you cannot pray this is fear has gripped your heart? You can’t pray this is fear has gripped your heart.  We were talking as a life group about this idea of God being holy and God being other and yet us not having a spirit of fear and timidity, but a spirit of adoption by where we can call our God “Father.”  One of the people in our group points out well, yeah but Jesus said:  And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.  Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matt. 10:28)  {Anyone got a tattoo of that one?!}  What’s Jesus saying?  Jesus is saying that we are going to be aware of how small we are.  You cannot run from that, you cannot hide from that and so we’re going to place our fear or reverence or awe in something and what we choose to “fear” or revere or worship will be the thing that defines our life, so Jesus tells us to fear the right thing, to live in reverence and awe of the right thing and it will, in turn, free you to walk in the way of God.  But for too long followers of Christ have feared the wrong thing.  We fear what people will think of us, what people will say about us, how we’ll be received and how we will be either celebrated or not celebrated and we’ve got to start fearing the right thing and revering the right thing, friends.  Because escapism operates in fear.  Invasion, storming the beach says we will not live in fear, we will live in faith.

Here’s why that’s so important.  Because some of the areas of darkness that God is going to call you to walk into will not lose their hold overnight.  It’s not going to be easy.  This last week, we celebrated “Slavery Awareness Day,” where we remembered 27 million slaves that are still in the world today.  Most of them in two industries—one of them is sex slavery, the other is child labor.  I can just tell you that if you’re a person that prays “thy kingdom come thy will be done” and THAT’S an area that’s placed on your heart, the kingdom of darkness is not going to let go of its hold easily.  It’s not.  And you can’t walk in with fear, you’ve got to walk in with faith.  If you’re the type of person that says listen, I’m going to invest in the homeless community around us and I’m going to serve with “Family Promise” or I’m going to serve in “Celebrate Recovery” to bring hope and to bring freedom to the many people that have hurts, habits and hang-ups in our neighborhood and in our church, that darkness is not going to let its hold go easily.  It’s not.  As followers of Christ, we have to be people who remember who we are and walk in faith rather than in fear.

Finally, escapism finds reasons to complain; invasion looks for ways to bring about change.  When I’m focused on the things I fear, I start to complain.  I’ve just noticed that in me.  When I’m focused on the things I fear, I start to complain, but when I’m focused on the God who says I’m bigger than your fears, I start to be a person that God uses to influence and bring about change in his beautiful world.  So here’s a few diagnostic questions for you.  1) Do you think about how bad the world is getting or how much potential there is with the gospel? Which occupies more of your thought base?  2) Do you focus more on what could go wrong or how God might move?  What occupies the space of your soul?  3) Are your thoughts more consumed with the people against you, or on the ONE who is for you?  Here’s what I’ve noticed.  It’s so easy for me to escape into places of fear and of wanting to leave and of wanting to control that I lose the mission of God that we get to carry the kingdom into really dark, really broken, really hurting places.  That is an absolute honor for us and we cannot shrink back at the darkness.  We must be people that carry the good news and the hope of Jesus into his broken, yet beautiful, world.  That’s our calling, friends, as followers of Christ.

I want to encourage you to be the type of person that invades rather than escapes and that we pray with conviction and then we act in confidence.  And it’s going to look different for every person around you.  Some of you it’s going to be praying for your neighborhood and then throwing a block party on Memorial Day to get to know your neighbors that you’ve lived next to for a decade and don’t know their names.  Or it’s going to be we’re going to invite some of our kids’ friends over for a barbecue.  Or I’m going to share my faith at my workplace.  Or I’m going to start having a time of prayer before work and I’m going to invite people to come with me.  Or I’m going to volunteer and serve at “Family Promise” or “Celebrate Recovery” or with the refugees that are coming to our area.  Some of you, it’s just going to be, listen, God, I want your kingdom to come and your will to be done so I’m going to turn off my phone when it’s time to be done with work and I’m going to be present with the people around me and I’m going to genuinely look for ways to serve them and love them.  It could look really different for every single person in here, but the principle is this:  we are called as followers of Christ to not just live in the kingdom, but to carry it.  Jesus preached the kingdom and lived the kingdom and he invites his followers, you and I, to be a part of his mission.  Friends, please, please, please….let’s not value escape more than invasion.  Let’s look for ways to love rather than leave.  Let’s look for ways to be an influence rather than insulate ourselves.  Let’s look for ways and encourage each other to walk in faith rather than in fear. And let’s look for ways to BE the change rather than being voices of complaining.  Let’s pray.

I just want to create some space for you to just sit for a moment.  Take a deep breath.  God, what are some areas that you would have us be light.  What are some of the beaches in our life that we need to just storm with your love and with your grace and with your mercy.  Father, in so many areas and spaces in our life it would be a lot easier to leave than to love.  So Lord, help us be people of invasion.  For the person in this room that’s thinking of giving up and leaving, would you give them the strong sense from your spirit today that they’re called to love.  For the person, Lord, who’s just living in fear….fear of what people will think about them, fear of their past catching up with them, fear of the future and anticipating what might go wrong, Lord, I pray that, by your Spirit, you would stir in them a refreshing of faith today.  Lord, for all of us, it’s easier to complain than to be part of the change, so give us eyes to see and ears to hear what places you’re calling us into that we might be beacons of light and beacons of hope, that we truly, genuinely would see your kingdom come and your will be done in the broken, beautiful places in our lives and on this earth as it is in heaven.  It’s in the name of Jesus we pray.  Amen.

Feb 21st 2016

listen to last Sunday’s worship set.

Feb 14th 2016

listen to last Sunday’s worship set.

As the eighth century B.C. was drawing to a close, the southern kingdom of Israel had King Hezekiah as its king. Unlike the northern kingdom, King Hezekiah had weathered the onslaught of the Assyrians.   The northern kingdom was taken away and into exile by the nation of Assyria, but Hezekiah was able to lead the southern kingdom in such a way that they turned their hearts back to God.  God moved on their behalf.  They weathered this Assyrian storm.  He was responsible for a lot of political and religious reforms in this community.  King Hezekiah was one of the very few really good leaders that the nation of Israel had during this season.  But he got sick.  One of the prophets of the time, Isaiah, came to him and said:  Thus says the Lord, “Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.”  {That’s quite the news to get, right?  Here’s what Hezekiah does. He takes a step back and he prays.  Now, those of you who are people of faith here this morning, who would say you’re a follower of Jesus, that’s probably the same thing you would do.  You’d pray.  Here’s what happened when Hezekiah prayed.  The Lord spoke (through Isaiah)….} ….”Turn back, and say to Hezekiah the leader of my people, Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you.  {So, here you have God in one verse saying, through the prophet, go tell Hezekiah he’s going to die.  Isaiah delivers his message, Hezekiah prays and God says never mind.  I will heal you.}  …On the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord, and I will add fifteen years to your life.  I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and I will defend this city for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake.” (2 Kings 20:1-6)