Good morning, friends. Happy New Year to you all. It’s so good to be with you in 2025. I Got to take a little break over the last few days. So this is the first time I’ve got to be with you since Christmas Eve, and I just wanted to just say just a big thank you to all the staff, the volunteers that made that happen.

That 65 voice choir on Christmas Eve. It was just wonderful to hear that hallelujah chorus to remember that Jesus is both baby born on that day and yet also King above all kings what was just beautiful and then last week We had the joy of hearing Nathan preach to us and it was so great to hear him talk about The Detroit Lions among other things We were sat in Detroit while we were listening to that and as he was talking we were like wait That’s not normal.

Why is he doing that? That’s the wrong place for that. And yet, it all made just beautiful sense. As we begin a new series today, I’m going to invite you to open the scriptures to Matthew chapter 11 to verse Where should we start? 25. Verse 25. Just take a moment to do what Teresa invited you to do.

Just pause to maybe reflect on some of the way that the day has gone so far. Maybe you come in heavy hearted at the start of the year. Maybe you come in light and breezy, hoping for new things. Maybe you come in weighed down by the journey with Jesus. However you come, at the end of this service, we’re going to come to this table that invites us wherever we are.

Some call it Eucharist, the Mass, Lord’s Table. Communion is a place where we encounter the God of the universe in new ways. Verse 25, at that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father. Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to little children.

Yes, father, for this is what you were pleased to do. All things have been committed to me by my father. No one knows the son except the father. No one knows the father except the son and those to whom the son chooses to reveal him. Come to me or you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle, and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. These are the words of Jesus for you today. Whoever you are, he stands inviting, welcoming you to him. Amen.

So my name is Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. If you’re visiting, it’s really great to have you with us at the start of this year as we begin a new series. I’d like to start with just a short story. It’s about walking. I love to walk. My family will tell you I love to walk. A walk that is short is a walk that, to me, is just deeply frustrating.

I love the fact that I get to just get out into the beauty of creation. One of my favorite things about owning a dog is simply that she gets me out walking. And I want to think back to my times of walking. The first memory I have is walking with my dad. My dad is prodigious. walker.

He’s six foot four, has these huge long legs, and so every step he takes is just the most feet ever that you could imagine. He just charges along. If you’ve walked anywhere with Aaron Bjorklund, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the same experience. He’s my dad’s walking group. Call him the machine because he has this incredibly long stride pattern and seemingly endless energy.

He can just go and go. And so I remember walking with him as a kid, just trotting alongside, desperately trying to keep up. And he would keep saying to me, Come on, keep going. He would push me and push me until eventually when I got to that point where I was just like, Dad, I’m just done.

I can’t go any further. With these incredibly strong arms, he would just whip me up onto his back and then just continue to walk as though I weighed nothing at all. It was just this beautiful experience of growing up where I feel like his love of walking was not taught to me, but I caught it.

from him. There was something about the way he entered into it that I love to enter into it, too. If you will watch, to watch us walk now, you might well say we walk in the same way. I’ve picked up his habits, just his mannerisms. I get more like him, I feel as I get older. There’s something about that magic that I’m now trying to pass to my kids, although I feel like, so far, I’ve been far less successful than he was, because they seem to mostly resent every walk that we go on, at least after about a quarter.

of a mile. Walking side by side, it seems to be this beautiful thing where you’re moving slow enough with someone that you can enter into conversation. You can journey with someone and learn so much about them. So it’s probably no surprise that when we look at Jesus pattern of discipleship, it’s primarily spent around walking.

Jesus spent years of his life walking through the Judean countryside, the Middle East countryside, with a bunch of his followers, doing discipleship. The passage that we just read is followed by this passage right here. At about that time, Jesus was walking through some grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, so they began breaking off some heads of grain and eating them.

But some Pharisees saw them do it and protested. Look, your disciples are breaking the law by harvesting grain on the Sabbath. Jesus, as a rabbi, is traveling around the local area, and unusually, perhaps, for many rabbis of his time, is taking the Sabbath to walk. to journey with his disciples. These 12 men had this incredible privilege of watching Jesus over these three years, seeing the things that he did, not necessarily seeing him sneak off early in the morning to pray.

They may have been sleeping, but certainly seeing him come back from having spent the night. time with his father. They got to see where he put his feet. They got to see how he practiced Sabbath, how to him it wasn’t a religious thing, but it was a life giving thing that enabled him to pour into the lives of others.

They got to see how he lived day to day. There’s no surprise that, to paraphrase Kosuke Kiyama, the Japanese theologian, the name Jesus of Nazareth, God walked. Three miles an hour. That’s how discipleship seemed to take place for Jesus, a journey with a whole bunch of guys teaching them his ways. When we think about the series that we’re going to walk through together for the next few weeks, some of it was birthed out of us studying Jesus teaching.

In the Sermon of the Mount last year. In Matthew 5 through 7, Jesus teaches in some of the most profound ways. His depth of ethic is incredible. It still shapes the world that we live in today. But if that was to be all that you had, about Jesus, you may well be left with some questions. The ethical teaching is incredible.

It’s essentially Jesus commentary on the old Testament. Lord, just imagine for a moment, even if you wouldn’t describe yourself as a reader, imagine you were wandering through a library, looking at different books and you happen to see a book, a commentary on the book, maybe Exodus or Leviticus and under author, you were to see Jesus of Nazareth.

Even if you’re not a reader, you may well pull that book off the shelf, just curious as to what this incredible teacher had to say. That is what the Sermon on the Mount is. It’s Jesus commentary on the Old Testament law, but it is ethical teaching. Even when Jesus talks about practices like prayer, when he talks about things like generosity, when he talks about things like fasting, he pushes towards the ethics of it.

And if all you did Was read the Sermon on the Mount and then tried to follow Jesus. You might be left with some questions. Maybe some of these Okay, so what do I do now? Yes, obey what he said, sure but what do I do what disciplines, spiritual disciplines do I do? Like, how do I live day to day life?

You might ask, how do I put this into practice? What tools will help me live this really high standard of ethics? How do I order my life? Or maybe, does Jesus care about the whole of my life? Or just the spiritual part, the most western question ever, when most of the world doesn’t really think in terms of spiritual verses, non spiritual, but something we are quite often likely to find ourselves saying.

We’re left with this quandary that this series is designed to begin to address it. It might be phrased or summed up. Those questions might be summed up in this question. What does my journey look like? On the piece of paper that you have, I lost my copy somewhere. Steve has one right here.

Thank you. You will see for your enjoyment an outline. As a confession, this is not something that I usually do. It’s not something that I can promise that I’ll always do, but it is there right now for you to enjoy. Someone grabbed me before and said how are you going to like meander and go constantly off the point if you have an outline?

And I said, I’m sure it will happen naturally. We’ll meander a fair bit, I’m sure. A spiritual life, often, in all sorts of streams, is described using the metaphor of a journey. You are going somewhere. This is particularly true of the Christian faith, long before Christianity. Long before the Christian faith was called Christianity, long before following Jesus was called Christianity, it was simply known as the Way.

Now, there’s all sorts of ideas behind that phrase, the Way, because Jesus provides a way to God. That’s a huge part of the Christian story. His death and resurrection makes that avenue possible. So the Way, on one hand, can mean a way to God. But it also means seems to encompass a particular way of living a journey day by day with the God of the universe.

Now before we go any further with that metaphor, it maybe creates a problem. Because journey to some of us will mean very different things than it might mean to others of us. How many, with a show of hands, how many of you undertook a journey over the Christmas season? Just throw a hand up in the air. How many of you undertook a journey with small children over the Christmas season?

Okay, so your quality of journey, just based on that, was wildly different compared to other people. In the room, as we walked through the airport on the way home, I just noticed some people who seemed to be doing a journey like it was a vacation. They were just wandering through airports. They were grabbing coffee.

They were sat in lounges. They just seemed to be living a higher quality of life than we were living, navigating that journey. Perhaps when you think of a journey, you think about something like that. You seem, you think about wrestling children into a car, perhaps others of you think about journeys in terms of something like this, a beautiful Winnebago, a campsite, a river, mountains, all of those wonderful, different things.

When we think about a journey as a metaphor, some of us will instantly think about something difficult. Some of us might think of something easy and life giving, and the interesting fact is that the Jesus journey encompasses both of those things. If your idea of journeying with Jesus is only easy, you’re missing something.

If your idea of journeying with Jesus is only difficult, then you too are missing something. Janet Hagberg and Robert Goulais, who wrote the book The Critical Journey, said this, The spiritual journey is deceptively simple. Entering into life with Jesus begins just with a moment and ask a prayer and yet at the same time It’s deep and it’s complex and it’s rich and you can journey in this way for the whole of your life and still Be learning something.

The longer They go on to say the journey continues. You might say the more nuances it takes up. The journey with Jesus at times can feel hard because it’s challenging to live like Jesus. And yet, as we’ll see as we look back at the passage I read at the beginning, there should also be this refreshing and ease to it.

Here’s my hope for us as a community in 2025. You as individuals in 2025, my hope It is that the journey with Jesus is hard because we try to do difficult things together. We try to impact the world around us. We try to love our neighbors well. We try to live out the ethics of Jesus. I pray it’s not hard because of our lack of self worth, because of our deep or a low valuation of ourselves, a constant self doubt.

And I pray it’s not hard because we make it hard. I pray that each of us has the courage to enter into what Jesus offers here. So let’s read that passage back again, this time in the messenger. I’m going to go slow because I hope that it just sinks in what Jesus has for you, especially if you’re someone like me who deeply and often needs to hear the kind words of Jesus as he invites me into this gentle life with him.

Because I am someone who regularly feels disappointed with the way that I live the life of Jesus. And has somewhere this deep suspicion that if I’m disappointed with how I do it, then the God of the universe must be infinitely more disappointed with how I do it. Feel these words. Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion?

I love that the first thing he points out is that actually it may be religious life and religious people that have become exhausting to you. No surprise that such a huge section of the population now describe themselves as spiritual, not religious. Come to me. It’s a beautiful invite in the Writer Andrew Murray says that the life with Jesus begins with those words, come to me, but must also include the words, abide with me.

Come to me, but stay. Don’t leave. Stay with me. Continue to journey with me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Have you felt perhaps how some things in life purport or claim to be rest and actually ultimately are not really restful at all? You can sit and watch hours and hours of Netflix or whatever and actually come out of it feeling more exhausted.

You can sit around technology for hours and feel tired afterwards, even though you’ve not done anything physical, and yet Jesus is offering, he says, something that he calls real rest. Something more than that. Walk with me. Again, that journey metaphor, that movement together, and work with me. Watch how I do life.

Not just hear the teachings of Jesus, not hear how he thinks about morals, But live life at a pace that Jesus lives life. A challenge, perhaps, when you’re surrounded by the swirl of life, we’ll get to that in a moment. If that’s your frustration there, hold on to it, because I get it. I feel it.

Learn, I love this phrase in the message, just compelling, learn the unforced rhythms of grace. If you felt that feeling at times that religious practices, doing anything spiritual can feel like it’s forced work, perhaps pick up a copy of the scriptures, you’re like, I will read this section, I will get through it.

Make it through Leviticus this time. Sit down to prayer perhaps, and you feel like, just that my focus, it’s all over the place. Feel the unforced rhythms of grace. Does that feel like something that we talk about often enough in church? Catch this last one. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you.

Keep company with me. And you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. Imagine what it must have been like to hear the God of the universe, the three mile an hour God, walk with you and say those kind of things. We’ve heard before the example of the yoke. The yoke is a picture of two oxen walking together and an oak would go over the shoulders of both and the older oxen would take charge and would lead and the other one would learn to follow in its footsteps, but that metaphor feels like work.

It feels forced and everything Jesus is saying is the opposite. a forced. It’s an invite into a journey with him, a walk with him that is supposed to be beautiful and compelling. Jesus invites us to the unforced rhythms. of grace. So what do we do to get life to feel like that? Knowing that we felt the weight of Jesus ethical teaching and said how do I do that?

And that we felt just the busyness of life in general. And so part of what we’ll do during this process is over these weeks, we’ll talk about different spiritual disciplines, different practices that you might like to try, might like to enter into that are refreshing or perhaps new. Some of them you may say, I’ve been doing that for years.

Brilliant. God may speak to you in new ways and invite you into something that’s slightly new for you, a different way of practicing it. But at the end of it, what we’re going to invite you to do is consider not New Year’s resolutions, which when they’re broken, feel worthless. Like they never even happened, but something called a rule of life, a way of living that’s particular to you.

Now this term of rule of life is an old term, it comes from the monastic movement, so if that’s like where your mind goes, maybe there’s some things to jump at you and say I have no capacity to live the life of a monk. They do something I could never do. And sure, living as a monk has some challenges.

This is the, hold on, let’s get to that in a second. The rule of Benedict is 73 chapters long. It describes the life of a monk in detail and ends with this phrase, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. It encompasses every moment of life. Eight times of prayer a day. Everything accounted for.

Work in the community, work in the monastery. It is this hard way of living. And yet a monk doesn’t have some of the challenges that perhaps we would have in this community. A monk has all its clothing taken care of. A monk has a place to live, guaranteed, doesn’t need to pay for a house. Yes, the life is hard and different.

But their life looks good. Completely different to your life or my life the life of a monk is challenging, but again, it’s Different perhaps we might say this that when we see the word rule of life Don’t automatically think that this means that you’re incorporating something super hard into your life as some people feel called to do and perhaps That is something that you feel This is something that’s going around at the moment online.

I don’t know if any of you have caught hold of it. It’s called Hard 75. It’s this way of living for 75 days that’s supposed to transform your life. Two 45 minute workouts a day, one of which has to be outdoors. I didn’t know you could work out twice a day. I didn’t realize that was actually allowed. You have to follow some diet, any diet, but there can be no cheating on it, no alcohol whatsoever, drink one gallon of water a day, read ten pages of instructive literature a day, and every day take a progress picture to show how far you’ve come.

Again, something difficult and exhausting, but not necessarily a helpful picture when we talk about a rule. It’s not the images I want you to grab at all. The word rule of life comes from the word regular, which simply means, in our language, regular, sure, which used to actually be an antonym for secular, which we don’t have time to get into, but quite literally, it means trellis.

It means the thing that you see before you hear, and not the thing before you hear. This is life. unmanaged, growing beyond its capacity. It sits under the weight of its own growth. And slowly a plant like that dies. It has no capacity to live anymore. Eventually it will kill itself with its own. Wait, this is a picture of life well managed.

A life that has the strength to grow but not the strength to hold its own weight up and has a continuing support system that allows it to continue to flourish. When these people that wrote about rule of life created this idea, this thing here in front of you is what they were talking about. How do you manage?

A life that needs to be managed. You might say this, that a rule of life is a support system. It enables you to steward, to care for the life that God has given you to live with all of those particular challenges that you might have. The challenges that might include. Kids might include a difficult career might include lots of travel might include Helping care for grandkids might include retirement all of those different things that might be encompassed It’s the system that says this is how we hold this life up now sure Relationship with God is a huge part of that but interestingly not the Only part of that.

There’s a line in the outline that says something like this like a trellis supports plant life. A rule of life supports, and I wanted to say spiritual life, but again, if you, if your western mindset has spiritual life moved to a tiny little corner by itself, you’ll miss the largeness of this.

A rule of life is beyond just that spiritual part, it’s supports.

You might say that creating something like this helps support the life that you happen to live. Your rule of life depends on the life that needs ruling. Which will be different for you than it is for me. When I was living in New York, I used to work out more than I do now. And I was part of a CrossFit gym for a while.

And so one day we went into the gym and they gave us what’s called the workout of the day. And they simply said to us this, today’s workout is simple. Just hang from a bar for seven minutes. It’s way harder than it sounds. If you think that sounds pretty easy it’s so difficult. And so they said what you do is this, you break it down to the amount of time that you can handle and then every time you fall off the bar or drop off the bar, you have to do ten push ups.

And then you have the privilege of getting back onto the bar and continuing the workout. And then when you drop again, another ten push ups, and then you climb up. As I looked at this workout and knew some of how hard it was to just hang from a bar, I decided okay, I’ll do two minutes. And then I’ll drop and I’ll do my push ups, and then I’ll do two more minutes, and then I’ll drop and I’ll do my push ups, and then I’ll do a minute and a half, and more push ups, and a minute and a half, I’ll be done.

And then when I started, I realized I couldn’t do two minutes. So I had to change my whole plan all over again. That was my system for getting through what I needed to get through. One of the other guys that worked out he just hung there for six minutes and then for the last minute, he dropped.

One arm off the bar. And held on with one arm. And then for the last minute he kicked his toes to the bar repeatedly over and over again until he was done. I worked here. This was my little office space that I had created for me in New York, while he worked here. And needs and experiences of life were very different.

What for me was growth and challenge and difficult for him was simply a small workout before he went to work at Cirque du Soleil. A whole life. Your life looks different from the person who sits next to you. And the trellis that’s required to help support that life is different than that life of the person next to you.

My life in some seasons has been busy, in some seasons it’s been hard. For you right now, a rule of discipline might include taking a nap on every day that has a Y in it. Which is all of them. Laughter. Laughter. It might include things like prayer at a specific time. It might include specific readings of scripture, which we’ll get to in just a moment.

But somewhere what we feel is this, that in amongst all of these different disciplines and all the different habits of life, there is something that God has for you to put together in order to, for you to steward and care for this life that God has given you. If you have small children, a rule for you might be you need 20 minutes by yourself at some point during the day.

If you spend a lot of time working indoors, your rule might include getting outside into nature at some point during the week. It could encompass all sorts of things, but it enables you to say that my life will not crush itself. That I can pursue life with God in a way that is meaningful and rich. What?

Trellis? Do you need for your life right now? Where has life become insufferable and difficult and how might the unforced rhythms of grace that Jesus offers enable you to live a life in a particular way? And so for just a few moments, I want to offer you one thing that I think is for everyone, perhaps not daily, but certainly regularly.

It’s one that I think is probably something that a lot of you do, but something I’d love to reiterate. And it’s simply this, the gentle, not hurried, not rushed reading of the scriptures. The scriptures that we’ve been given that we read from today, they speak to us in multiple ways. You might, it might say scriptures function.

In a variety of ways, some of which are really apparent to us, and some of which, if we over focus on, can start to feel rather forced and ungracious. But others, if we can capture hold of them, increasingly become more and more life giving. To begin with, sure, the scriptures are, as we often think of them, they are for instruction, probably the most common way that we read them.

Eugene Peterson says this of reading the scriptures, Obedience is the thing living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not what does it mean, but what can I obey? A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.

Definitely the scriptures has rules for living. It has guidelines of God’s ideal way of being human in the world. But if that’s all you get out of it, I would suggest you might be missing something that they have to offer for you. For the first followers of Jesus, when they first started to gather these ancient writings as they were shaped over the first 350 years of the church life, the scriptures became seen as an encounter with God.

There was a God breathedness to them that made them different from every other writing that they encountered. As they opened them, they believed that the Spirit spoke to them as individual followers and brought that kind of transformation that somewhere the Jesus who was visible to twelve guys as they walked around that Galilean countryside was no longer visible, but visible through the Spirit who lived now within these first followers and through these ancient recordings that enabled people to hear from God in a particular way.

Surprisingly, not as individuals, at least all the time, but in a community like this one. As you think about the rule of life, think about how you engage with these writings that we’ve been given from past generations. The modern statistics say something like this. The average follower of Jesus to take the average followers of Jesus in this century, read the scriptures About 30 percent of people in a church read the scriptures at all at any point.

It’s something that’s potentially passing out of this generation that I’d love us as we build rules of life to see revived in this community. Gordon Fee says this about the idea that scriptures bring this sense of this encounter with God. I begin with a singular and passionate conviction. That the proper aim of all true theology is doxology, is that thing that we just sang.

Theology that does not begin and end in worship is not biblical at all, but is rather the product of Western philosophy. As you pick up these ancient writings, the goal is not just that you learn something, but somewhere you say something like this. Met with God as I read what I read. That’s the heartbeat of these things.

That’s not forced. That’s not ungracious. That’s not just building more rules to try and incorporate in your life. Somewhere. It’s opening a heart to encounter with the God of the universe. But a final one to consider as you read in a beautiful way and an undervalued way, the scriptures are a faithful witness to what has happened before to the stories over ages.

to the grand story of God across history. Think about Romans chapter 15 for a moment. We’ll just read it as we begin to come to communion. For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the scriptures and the encouragement they provide, We might have hope.

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind towards each other that Jesus, Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice, you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we open these texts that God has given us, we’re reminded that we might feel at times like our life is unique and yet it rarely is.

You are unique. God made you in a particular way with all the sort of quirks that you have and yet your life is not unique. People have been through what you’re going through now and these scriptures as we open them as part of a rule that we of life, become a faithful witness to us. Of all the different ways scripture helps us, one of the most forgotten is its faithful witness to what has been and what will be in the future.

As you journey, your scriptures become a companion on the journey. They speak to you of the things that God has done before, that he’ll do in the future. They speak to you of his purpose for this world and for you. as an individual living in it. They remind you that you’re loved, that God welcomes you into not forced rhythms, but unforced rhythms of grace.

He loved you to the point of death. They remind you that for 2, 000 years, followers of Jesus have gathered around the table in front of us and done what Jesus asked us to do, which was simply to remember him. to remember what he did, to remember the life that he lived, the way he taught, but yes, the practical footsteps that he left on this world at three miles an hour.

To remember his death for us, his startling and surprising resurrection, and the new story he created in his church. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus gathered with his earliest followers.

And breaking bread, he handed it to each of them, said, this is my body broken for you. And same way he took the cup and handing it to each of them, he said, this is my blood shed for the sins of the world. As long as you gather together, do this in remembrance of me. This table is open to all, but to those who have chosen the Jesus way, that can be you today if it’s never been you before, whatever your past, whatever your story, whatever your life looks like right now.

The invitation is to come to Jesus, to journey with him, to walk with him, to learn from him, to practice the unforced rhythms of grace.

Jesus, thank you for this table. Thank you that you left us more than ethics. You left us a practical way of living in the world around us. For those of us that came in heavy laden, thank you that we’ve heard those beautiful words. Come to me. Walk with me. Learn from me. Practice the unforced rhythms of grace.

I don’t come to lay anything heavy upon you.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for this table. Thank you for your body broken for us, your blood shed for us as we come and take this bread and take this cup. Reinvigorate us to live in the Jesus way. Encourage us to step out of this room into a world that needs people that live like Jesus. Amen. As Aaron sings over us, whenever you’re ready, come take the bread, take the cup.

Take the bread whenever you’re ready, personally. We’ll come back together and take the cup as a community. Let’s stand.