Building with Ambition

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning friends. Good morning. Good to see you today. My name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here at South. If you’re visiting we’d love to meet you afterwards. Grateful to have you here. Today. In a moment, I’m gonna read a passage of scripture, but first I’d like to touch on something. You’ve been here, sitting in this community.

Perhaps you came because it was Mother’s Day, perhaps a mother asked you to come because it was Mother’s Day, and yet what you’ve heard has been very little about Mother’s Day and there’s a couple of reasons for that. The first is this, we’re deeply aware that being a mother or not being a mother.

Can be a heart aching experience for so many people in the community. If you sit here and you’ve lost a mother this year. Then there’s an ache. If you sit here, longing to be a mother and aunt, there’s an ache. All sorts of scenarios that play out. So if you are here and you are a mother of kids and life is great, here’s what we trust.

Life will be great regardless of what we say here. You’ll go out and have lunch and you’ll feel celebrated and you deserve to be celebrating. Being a parent is a difficult thing, mother and father, and someone once said to me, if parenting is hard for you, it’s only hard for good parents, so congratulations, because if you’re a terrible parent, it’s really easy.

And so there’s all sorts of scenarios that we wanna, and sit in that space with you. The second is this, we’re a church that, that prides itself on being liturgical. What that means is that there’s a calendar that we follow, that we embrace that has different movements to it. You do not want me setting the church calendar for you.

I’m pretty upbeat. It’ll just be up and to the right all the time and that’s not what life looks like. There’ll be my own seasons to lend lament in the future as there have been in the past. But when I’m in the up and to the right mood, when everything’s great, that’s all you’d hear. And yet this church cycle brings us to all sorts of places of lament and sorrow, places of joy and happiness, places of fasting places of feasting.

And that is important and a gift, especially. When you need it but even when you don’t know that you need it. So we’re in this season right now called Easter Tide. Easter Tide is the six, seven weeks after Easter as we go through to the season of Pentecost, where we celebrate the gift of the spirit.

And what we see happen 2000 years ago during that season is we see Jesus dropping in with some of his followers, some of whom the crucifixion has left. In remarkably broken places. He steps in and speaks to Peter who’s embarrassed at his failure. He speaks to Thomas. In the midst of his doubting, he comes to all of them here in, in their uncertainties and their insecurities and their deeply painful emotions, and this guard of the resurrection steps into their world again and says, I’m here for you, even when it looks like this.

This is what we get to celebrate in this season. And if you are someone who’s on a journey with Jesus who you experienced or have experienced transformation, one of the things we’d love to invite you to is baptisms. So when we get to June 8th, we have Pentecost Sunday, we have gelato. You are allowed to cheer for gelato.

But you have, yeah, but you have to cheer louder for baptisms because those matter much, much more than gelato ever could. And so if you have a story and you would like to celebrate it here with baptisms with us, we would love to have that happen. You can just drop a quick message, go to south fellowship.org life, and we’ll connect you up with some pastoral counseling and move you through that process.

If you have a text in front of you, please open. To Philippians chapter two, verse three, and do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, rather, in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others in your relationship with one another.

Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God. Did not equality, consider equality with God, something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing. By taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself to become obedient to death, even death on a cross Jesus Today as we process what it is to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.

Speak to us, guide us, transform us. We realize that only transformed people can share the life of the gospel with the world around us, and we long to be those transformed people. Men, I wanna start today with a question a question that I find deeply frustrating at times and trying to be a good pastor, would like to share my deep frustrations with you.

It’s this question, what do you want? What do you want on the surface? What do you want is a simple question. When you’re in a restaurant, it’s simply a invitation to look at the menu and decide. That’s a fairly simple process unless you happen to be at the Cheesecake Factory which has a menu of every food created in the world, ever, and a deep suspicion that they can’t possibly be doing any of those things.

In a romantic relationship, perhaps it gets. More complicated. Any notebook fans out there? The moment where someone says to you, in the midst of a deep relationship, oh, what do you want here? Where is this going? Perhaps is the extension of that and more complicated. Again, when you get to a counselor’s office where a counselor sits with you and asks what are you really looking for in life?

What’s the hope? What’s the desire? Of your heart. What? What are you doing with this life that God has given you? The subject of desire or as it’s talked about in other places, perhaps ambition, perhaps goals perhaps dreams, all sorts of words. And we’ll get to a text that will unpack that in a minute, but it can be understood through that simple question.

What? What do you want? And yet as you start to uncover the workings of our human minds desire is not actually that simple. It’s fairly easy to ask a question like that in practice and to try and get an answer, but speak to any counselor and try to get to the depths of a human soul and what it’s longing for.

That, that is complex desire is a complex subject. Mick Jagger for all the last 60 years or however long he has been singing, has said, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need. But he doesn’t touch the depths of how hard it is just to know that this this is Slavo je, he’s a lacanian philosopher.

An atheist, a, a Marxist. Not Groucho Marx, Carl Marx. And he even, he says this being, being a confirmed materialist and someone who says it’s simply about possession in this life and what you can attain. He says this, the problem for us is not our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is we do not know what we desire.

There’s a richness to that desire runs. On different levels, making it hard to figure out on the surface the simply intrinsic desires. I want it because I want it. Most of you walked past the donuts and there were more today, and something inside you said, I want it. You just grabbed it. You took and life was better for just a moment.

And that’s fine. That’s your choice. But there’s other desires that lurk under the surface. There’s what’s called extrinsic desires. I want it because I want something else. Perhaps you go to work because you want the paycheck, you don’t love the job. In fact, maybe you des despise the job, but you want the paycheck.

Maybe you study for an exam, not because you love studying, because you want the grade that comes with it. There’s all sorts of ways that extrinsic desires work beneath the surface, and some of them are as obvious as the ones I’ve just pointed out. Some of them are far more complex. Now, if you would say maybe in this moment I’m actually just more simple than that.

I just know what I want and it’s really clear in my mind. Let me just show you some of the ways that it’s possible to play on how people appreciate certain things. This is a fish. How many of you would say you look at this and say, this is something that I want to go out on Mother’s Day and eat for lunch?

Probably none. And yet. This is routinely the most purchased fish in a restaurant. It’s a Chilean sea bass. It’s market name as it used to be called for most of history was Patagonian Tooth Fish. Which nobody would order ever. No one sits in a restaurant and says, I, I really want some patagonian tooth fish for lunch.

That’s what I want. And yet it’s available plentiful, and the worst chef in the world could not overcook this fish. It just has some qualities that if you are a marketer, you would say, we wanna be able to sell this fish. So take Patagonian two fish. And put it at the top of the menu next to filet mignon and all the other high priced dishes, and turn it into Chilean sea bass.

And suddenly you’ve worked wonders for the food industry. You never wanted this fish, but now something when you see high up on a menu starts to work in your status, wrestlings, and you’re like, okay maybe I’ll order this dish. We’re all susceptible to the work of marketers who manage to like undercut what we think are our desires and move us in particular directions.

And yet desires at times move us in negative directions. This is one John chapter two 16 in the message practically everything that goes on in the world, wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to imp appear important, has nothing to do with the Father James chapter one. Every each person is tempted when they’re dragged away by their own evil.

Desire and enticed. There’s ways that desires work in negative ways under the surface, leading us off into all sorts of places. And so as we mer work through Genesis. Dropping into places where we see humanity build something and see it often damaged by humanity’s own brokenness. We’re gonna move to Genesis chapter 11.

Let me catch you up if you are behind Genesis chapter one through three. We see God’s creation of Adam and Eve. We saw see the fall of our first human ancestors there. Broken us in chapter four. We see their children the fallout. There. Chapter five, we see some genealogy moving us further along in the story.

Chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight, chapter nine is this great flood story. Chapter 10. We have a table of nations as we start to see humanity expand, and in Genesis 11 we get here. I would say tariff, Babel. Some of you maybe would say Babel. It’s an accent thing. I’m not sure how to say certain words anymore, so I’m just gonna go with what seems natural.

Genesis 11, verse one to two. Another whole world had one language. And a common speech. As people moved Eastwood, they found a plane in Shinar and settled there. As life moves from this Eden story outwards. The move is Eastwood. Shinar is a place that comes up only a couple of times in scripture. It comes up in the book of Daniel.

It’s located here in the red kind of blurb where it says Babylonia, it’s a place. That Daniel is taken to in Daniel chapter one, verse one and two, we read this and he brought them to the land of Shar. So when you think Shar think Babylon, which has this kind of history or through the scriptures.

Verse three and four, they said to each other, come let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. This is a little pointer that the writer knows and understands how different regions build certain things. If he had said that they built with stone, the readers today would say we just don’t understand Babylon.

You don’t understand the cradle of civilization. This place. Out in the Middle East. And so it’s an important note to, to tell us that this writer is deeply aware of the history. And then they said, come and let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. So we mean make a name for ourselves.

This group, common humanity, one group begins to build upwards. There’s a few sort of guesses as to what this might look like. This is one of them, although that’s leaning a good bit. Maybe that’s post destruction, but it’s a tower in the sky. Others have said that it’s something like this more, more like a flat mountain top with huge staircases run up to it.

This is where it gets a little funky ’cause as you go through history, people have made guesses or estimates as to how tall this. This Babel Tower might be one person in antiquity about 1500 years ago. Said it was four times higher than what the Burge Khalifa would’ve been today. Maybe a little unbelievable, but lots of them put it in that region, two, 3000 feet up in the air.

It’s a tower that’s Desi designed as they say to reach the sky, to make a name for themselves. Otherwise, they say we will be scattered over the face of the whole Earth. This is their plan to build a tower, to make a name for themselves. Again, a complicated piece of language we’ll get to in a moment.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, the people were building. There’s this season where it seems God is interacting with humanity as a whole. As we push into chapter 12 then the interaction is with one person called Abraham and his particular family. But right now it’s this broader language.

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower of the people were building in it. And the Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Imagine what these people that just with bricks and mortar to created, if they created this huge ginormous tower, maybe they’ll create something terrible like the internet or nuclear bombs or something like that.

Humanity has this capacity for brokenness that, that we’ve caught early on. It seems that their creative genius quickly overtakes their moral capacity. Their ability to be good is vastly outrun by their ability to create just pure awfulness and think for a moment about some of the things. That we’ve created, even with this kind of pullback that we’ll see in a moment the still things that we have created that’s somewhat disastrous.

So this is God’s work. Come let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand one another. There’s this moment where everyone speaks a common language and the language there is particularly, it almost uses language twice. The suggestion is that they spoke the same words and they spoke with the same intent or heart.

They found it easy to connect. Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you’re both talking the same language but you would say, you just, you’re not getting me, you’re not making sense of what I’m saying and it seems in this history, they were really clear with each other and able to do incredible things because of it.

So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth and they stopped building the city. That is why it’s called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world, that the city is called Babel in scripture. The word Babel sounds like the word for confused in Hebrew. If you are translating it in a way that you could get that, I guess it’s a joke.

If you could get that, you would say, they called it confusing because there, they confused the language. Their God confused the language. Of the whole world, and from there, the Lord scattered them over the face of the earth. I would suggest this is what’s going on here. Babel is a story where humanity chases their intrinsic desires.

The desire is not necessarily just have a tower, they want a tower for a reason. A across that early ancient near East. History. There’s this idea that if you build a tower just by nature of their view of the world, which is that there’s heavens up here, and then there’s the middle part earth down here, and then maybe in later thought there’s something down below.

If you get higher, your conversations with God get better. So if we can build the highest tower, then by nature were. Closest to God. A lot of people, a lot of historians think that this Tower Babel was actually based on a tower, a Z rat in Babylon, which was called the door of heaven.

The idea was if you get high enough, then you’re actually interacting with God in a more particular way. But that doesn’t seem to be the viewpoint of scripture. This is what scripture seems to see, say, going on and watch this fascinating twist. Their desire is expressed in two ways, not to have a communication with God.

It seems like God says when you build these towers, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re not finding a better way to communicate with me. What you’re doing is you’re trying to be like me. It seems like a whole bunch of people in the ancient Near East thought that building a tar and better communication with God and it seems like in this passage, God starts to say, no, you are actually trying to become God.

This is becoming a conflict point in this language. Then they said, come let us build ourselves a tower. This is back to verse three and four, with a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. So we may make a name for ourselves, and that’s the point that a lot of commentators come, a lot of writers point to and say, this is what’s going on here.

Actually in Hebrew scriptures, no one gets a name like that. No one gets to make a name for all eternity unless God does it for them. Only God is forever. Only God outruns everything. You can’t make a name for yourself. He can give you a name as he does with some of broken humanity like Abraham who’s a nobody when God comes to him.

But you don’t get to build something and say, look at me. I’m gonna last forever. This is what a lot of commentators say is going on here in Genesis. Isaiah chapter two, verse 12 says, the Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty for all that is exalted, and they will all be humbled.

It seems when you played that game as kids like King of the Castle and nobody could last forever and here it seems like actually God says no. No one can be truly king of anything at all. Simply stewards. Josephus says that there’s a person behind this attempt, a person who tries to make himself guard.

There’s a character introduced in chapter 10. I’ll go back to the passage in a moment called Nimrod. Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man of great strength of hand. He persuaded them to ascribe it to God as if it were through his means that they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage.

Which procured them happiness. You see these old writers start to say, this is like humanity saying, we don’t need you anymore. We’ve got this covered. Look what we can do. Does that sound like a familiar story? Some of the ways we speak now says we don’t need God for anything. We’ve got artificial intelligence, we’ve got ways of prolonging life.

There’s a whole push to remove God from the center of anything. Nimrod is introduced the chapter four in the Table of Nations. This is what it says. Kush was the father of Nimrod who became a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the law. That is why it is said like Nimrod a mighty hunter.

Before the Lord. Apparently in this day and age, if you were great at hunting and shot like a great arrow or something, they would say, you’re like, Nimrod, a mighty hunter. So if you’re a hunter and nobody has ever said of you, you’re like, Nimrod a mighty hunter. You’re doing something wrong. You’re not good at hunting, but the suspicion with this language see there at the bottom, like Nira a mighty hunter before the Lord.

The language is vague. And so for some people it, it actually maybe should be translated a mighty hunter against the Lord, whether together or whether led by an individual. In Genesis 11, we see this rupture where humanity is no longer breaking God’s law, almost accidentally, or in individual cases, but cases, but as a one group of people is rising up and rebelling.

There’s a Genesis Midrash from the fifth century ad that says this, God has no right to choose the upper world for himself and to leave the lower world to us. Therefore, we will build a tower with an idol on the top holding a sword. So it may appear as if we attended intended to war with God. So this story, the reason it’s important, we’ll run all the way through scripture.

If you were here just before Easter, we talked about Babylon, same place. Babel becomes Babylon. And so this story that starts as early as Genesis 11 will run into Revelation chapter 19 or something like this, humanity opposed to God in a particular way, a humanity warring. Now here’s the good news to that.

Remember in that sermon, Juergen Mortman, great German theologian, the unassailable power of the forces of Viva will be, but sandcastles. And that leave no trace to their existence as the evening tide washes them away. In this moment where humanity wants to be God says no, that won’t last forever.

Second desire hidden under the surface to be permanent, which is a God-like. At attribute in Genesis nine, seven, God has said as for you, be fruitful and increase in number, multiply on the earth and increase upon it. So this is, they’re like, no, we’re gonna stay in the same place. We’re gonna be like, God forever here together, nothing will change.

Okay, all history, all background. This is what’s going on. Then the important question, what does it mean for us? We don’t build towers. We’re not noticeably, as far as I’m aware, pastorally in conversations trying to become God or fight against God. What does it mean for us? What does the Bible story mean for us in this present moment?

I suspect I. This story points to a certain way of following Jesus that actually becomes really common. It’s this way we follow Jesus, where we declare actually we can probably do most of the work, and actually what we bring is the significant factor. In the work of the good news, FIO Ky said this years ago, nothing offends a man of a day, and this was his day, but also true of a day and of our race more than to tell him he’s not original, that he’s weak willed, has no particular talents, and he’s a completely ordinary person.

We’ve actually all been brought up with this idea that we’re distinctly special. And in actual fact, the good news of what God does is this, is he picks up completely ordinary people perhaps with no gifting, perhaps not special, and he makes something out of them. If you come and sit and say, I actually don’t feel like I have anything to bring the old news of scripture would be good.

You’re actually in a brilliant place for God to begin to do something with you. But that is not the world that we live in. Our world that we live in actually looks something a little bit more like Babel. We’re actually taught early. Our job particularly is to climb. Does this idea behind this, I would suggest it looks like this.

Many of our extrinsic desire, remember those are the ones that are behind the scenes. The ones that you don’t know that you have are rooted in envy. So we have to make a trajectory upwards because everybody else is going upwards. If you’ve ever been to a reunion for school people and felt, oh man, I just don’t feel like I’m as successful as I wanted to be when I met these people.

Again, if you start to wonder if your life matters enough, all of that is that root of oh, am I enough? Am I okay? Ecclesiastes chapter four says this and I saw the all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless. A chasing after the wind. Envy has us climbing stairs on towers we don’t actually want to be on.

So a whole bunch of smart people, not particularly Christian, but people who notice what goes on in the world, said this a while ago, life teaches you this. I’m told early on, what do you want to do? What do you want to be? What do you want? And you start guessing at different career tracks. And so you feel early on there’s this pressure to make a decision, and then it tells you you’ve gone to elementary school and now that’s a good thing because now you can go.

To middle school and now you’ve been to middle school and that’s a good thing because now you can go to high school and then you move through all of these different movements and it tells you, that’s good. ’cause now you can go to college. And then it says that’s good. Now you’ve been to college.

’cause now you can go and get a graduate degree. And that’s good because now you can go and you can get a job, and then you go and get a job and they say now you need to do this, and then you can get the next quarter. So what life teaches you. Some smart people have said is this is the first thing to do is get on a step and then you you get the first thing

and you open it ’cause you’re really excited. There’s nothing in it, but that’s okay because the thing comes. At the next step. So you gotta get up a step and the thing’s coming, so don’t worry, you’re gonna be fine. You get to the next thing. And if this is all your life is based on, there’s nothing in it, and then you gotta get up another step.

And so you keep going and keep working your way up and you get your quota or you get your targets or hit your sales and then. There’s nothing in it. And you go, and soon you start to find yourself like out of presence and out of gifts. My, my beautiful wife wrapped these this morning before she opened a Mother’s Day presence.

So gratitude. And so you gotta keep going. And actually now you get to this point where the people around you are maybe more concerned for your safety than you are because you gotta. You gotta get to the top of the thing. And then the danger is you get to the last step

where maybe the theory that is don’t do it. And actually the theory is it’s empty there too. Now. Now that might sound like an overreaction. But this story emerges all over history. Arthur Brooks the sociologist says this in the intro to his book, from Strength to Strength, he tells how he was sat on a plane and this one conversation gave him the impetus to write all of his work.

He was sat on the plane and the guy behind him had whined the entire flight to his wife about how broken his life is. How nobody would remember him, how unimportant he was and he may as well be dead. And Arthur Brooks says that I sat there thinking about how glad I was, that I wasn’t this guy, that at least I’d done something with my life.

At least it mattered. And then he got up to walk off the plane and he said, this guy is one of the 10 most famous men in America. He has achieved more. With his life than I could achieve if I work 80 hours a week for the next 40 years. He said, you know who this person is? He’s changed your life. He’s made such a difference, and now he’s 80 and he feels like this.

He’s got to the top of the step and the box was empty. It’s just something that happens over and over again. We’re given this sense of this is when life will feel like life like it’s supposed to be. When I get this house, when I get this kind of salary, when I get this thing. Now I’m not saying success is universally bad.

I’m certainly not saying it’s universally good, but if it’s the only thing we have to clutch to, then it’s the Babel story all over again. It’s us saying, we’ll make a name for ourselves and then when we do, life will be good satisfaction. Arthur Brooks says, comes not from chasing bigger and better things, but paying attention to smaller.

And smaller things. We’re told to base a lot of our time building what are called in some people’s language, resume virtues. They look good on paper and they can be ridiculous things. They can be things like, oh, look at me. I have lots of frequent flyer miles, but they’re not eulogy things. No, no one will ever say that about your life when you die.

This guy, he had status with Delta. It was a big deal. We all know that eulogy virtues are more important than resume ones, but our culture in our educational system spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate the sort of inner light.

Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than how to build inner character. The problem with that story is there’s always a better view from the floor above you. Just get up another step and everything will look great. Count to the Babel story is a story that emerges in Genesis chapter 29.

I’m gonna read it really quick. Jacob. The character introduced here, left be Sheba and sent out for set out for heroin. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the son had set taking one of the stones there. He put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a sir stairway resting.

On the earth with its top reaching to the heavens and the angels of God were descending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above and around him and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father, the God of a Isaac. I will give to you and to your descendants. The land on which you’re lying.

Your descendants shall be as of the dust of the earth and you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, and the north and the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed through you and your descendants. Behold, I am with you. And we’ll keep you wherever you may go, and I will bring you back to this land for I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.

And Jacob awoke from sleep and said, without any doubt, the Lord is in this place. And I did not realize it. So he was afraid and said, how fearful and awesome is this place? There is none other than the house of God, the gateway of heaven. Richard Baughman says this, what he had discovered is not so much that God is in that particular place as much as that God is where Jacob is.

God is with Jacob and will be with him wherever he goes from now on Every place where Jacob sleeps will be Babel because God will be present with Jacob, wherever, everywhere, and all. The time when we think about this story, we see two types of Christianity. One that’s a Christianity of glory that says, I have to get up there and make something, and another, that’s a Christianity of the cross that says, God comes down to us, that he is the one that makes a difference.

In Philippians chapter two, verse six, we read those, these words in your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus. Who being very nature guard did not consider equality with God, something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing. By taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

It’s the verses before this that often get forgotten. That fascinate me quite a lot. I do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain concede rather, in humility, value others above yourselves. Not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others. I know a lot about me, even though I don’t know all of my extrinsic desires, I know a lot about what I want.

I spend a lot of my life thinking about it. The surprising call of Jesus is the way of the cross. That says, anyone who wants to follow me must pick up their cross and die. That kind of Christianity isn’t necessarily popular, but it is the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus and the one we’re invited to when desiring and chasing success.

And again, not success is universally bad, but it’s not universally good. Keep asking yourself that question. Is this about my name or is this about his name? Because ultimately his name is the only one that will stand the way of Jesus is in choosing humility and nothing else. Glad you to just stand with me for a moment and we’re gonna practice something together in recognition of the fact that the joyful message of Christianity is this, that you own nothing.

That you can keep nothing, that you’re simply a steward and all you have belongs to him. We get to hold a loose grasp on everything that we have. So I’m just gonna invite you for a moment to imagine everything that you’ve been given and hold it in your hands. Just feel your palms. Upwards. Just contemplate it, feel it, recognize its transience.

Recognize that the God of the universe has given you it to steward.

And then knowing that when you are ready, just turn your palms over and imagine letting go. The beautiful message of Jesus is this the man who has Jesus and everything else has no more than the one who has Jesus and nothing else.

Jesus, thank you for your teaching. Thank you for calling us to the way of the cross. Thank you that we don’t have to go up to find you, but you came down. Thank you for the transformation that’s at work in everybody’s life in this room. Amen.