And we are in, of course, 1 Peter. Like I've been telling you over
the last few weeks, we're not going to rush through the concepts. There are several things that
I've just sort of been realizing that we do just generally as
a culture, and one of those is that we often forget what we're
trying to accomplish when we read, study, and hear
scripture. And that is sometimes we get
so inundated with the verse-by-verse aspect of exposition that we
forget that it's all part of a complete context. And there is nothing worse than
identifying an application out of a verse that you have not
put in the context of all the other verses in the entire letter,
and then also the entire scripture. It's a very, I'll just say, dangerous
practice. It is where we see many interpretations. This interpretation, well, that's
your interpretation. Well, that's my interpretation. Well, that's
their interpretation. But when really the letter says
what it says and that's the end of it. And if we read it in its
whole and we read every part of it as part of the whole, we
don't mess up. And so this morning, I want to,
before I continue to get into verse nine of chapter two, I
want to go back in to this idea. I mean, look at verse nine of
chapter two real quick, but you are a chosen race. a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies
of him who called you out of darkness into marvelous light.
Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once
you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the
passions of your flesh, which has very little to do with little
particular sinful things that we like to participate in and
more to do with the mindset of who we are and what we're supposed
to be doing in the world. And to abstain from the path
of which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among
the Gentiles honorable. So when they speak against you
as evildoers, they'll see your good deeds and glorify God on
the day of visitation. And the reason I want to pause here is
because it reminded me, verse 9 reminded me of just how easy
it is to get into the single verse fallacy of expanding one little
sentence. Because Peter is writing to Jewish
Christians who have forsaken Judaism. And understand, he reminds
them that they were not a people. Jews descended from numerous
groups of people who were called out by God to become a people
nomadically, Abram. They were not an ethnicity. They
were not a nation. There is no bloodline in that
context. But that's where they had come. And some people will take this
and say, OK, see that Israel. Israel is not in question here,
it's not even in view here, you see. We need to understand this. We know Old Testament theology
accurately by apostolic authority. No matter who you are, what scholar
you are, how many PhDs you have in antiquities and Old Testament
understanding or archaeology or history, Your assertions are
absolutely 1,000,000% incorrect when the New Testament apostles
say differently. The Sanhedrin were wrong. The
Pharisees were wrong. The priests were wrong. Their
practices were wrong. They misunderstood the point
of the Passover. They misunderstood the point of the Exodus. They
misunderstood the point of the feast. They misunderstood the
point of Messiah. They were wrong about 100 percent
of all of it every single time for thousands of years. And that
is the point. Right. Even when God says this
is what I'm doing and we go, OK, and we walk against it. Because it is about him who is
faithful, not us. And so the picture of taking
a man, a Chaldean out of Ur, worshiping the moon and making
him the father of righteousness is the greatest irony that's
ever stood foot on dirt. Because it shows that God, just
like He said, let there be light, and there was light, and He said
the light was good. He said, you go, and Abraham went, and
God said it was good. And Abraham was faithless, and
he lied, and he deceived, and he nearly cost him his family.
It was crazy. And I can say all that because
I have the whole of the New Testament. Now, the only debate against
that is to say these things, the apostles were pigs, they
weren't divinely inspired. And if you say that, fine, you
have no hope in Christ Jesus. People say that, they have no
hope in Christ Jesus. It's okay to say, let's look.
But if God hasn't granted you the faith and the word, Through
fallible men, through fallible women, through fallible children,
through cats that might meow, through Balaam's ass. Whatever means to which God speaks,
Balaam's donkey, that always gets everybody's attention. Then you're not going to believe
it anyway. And I think this is one of the
reasons why we're not able to really embrace certain things. And when Peter says to these
beloved people, long, long for pure spiritual milk, like
an infant. That's verse two of chapter two,
that by it you may grow up into salvation if indeed you have
tasted that the Lord is good. There's always the question in
a lot of people's minds, mine included, what about when I don't
long for that? I asked a question three weeks
ago, how many of you have just been so overcome by the scripture
at certain times in your life where that's all you wanted to
do, you wanted to read it, you wanted to get up and read it,
you wanted to get up and hear it, you wanted to sit around and do it, you
just want to long for it. And I've been there many times. Sometimes
I'm there, sometimes I'm not. But yet we long for everything,
other things, right? We long for productivity, we long for
entertainment. We long for intimacy. We long
for fun. We long for money. We long for
stuff and ideas and feelings and emotions and experiences
and closeness. We long to undo that which was
done. We long to fix the problems of the world. We long for all
sorts of things. And yet, at the end of the day,
All that stuff gets in the way of us longing for the Lord Jesus.
And then we recognize that because we go to church and we hear preachers
say, hey, you better long for the Bible. And so we pretend or we posture
or we lie to ourselves like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got to do that.
And then the world of Christendom says, oh, you're probably not
born of the Spirit. A lie, that's the enemy. It's
the enemy. It's a lie. We have to grow up into salvation.
We have to grow up knowing that the greatest part of success
is standing on top of the failures that brought us there. A couple of us brothers were able
to meet yesterday morning for, I don't know, I guess three hours.
We stayed a little longer. Is it noon yet? It was 1.30. I had the thought in our conversation,
which was extremely edifying, that the world looked at the
death of Jesus as the ultimate failure, but in reality, it was
the actual pinnacle of creation. It was the greatest success. So in all that he experienced
as a person, everything that he could have been, He was not. Jesus never reached his potential
in the world. He never exercised his greatest
gifts to humanity as a person. I want you to think about this
for a second. In the way we view success, Jesus
just died as a martyr. It's sad. He could have been
so much. Imagine an unbeliever without understanding the reason
he came was to die. You could easily say, man, if
Jesus could just have lived to be 100, the changes He could
have made in the world. But yet dying at age 33 and being
raised from the dead, He did change the world. He saved it for Himself. And if you are counted in that
number, God has granted you faith. Think about that. And it's absurd. I mean, what leadership school
could you go to that tells you, you know, let people run you
over, let people blame you and accuse you. Don't worry about
not having a, just don't worry about having a family. Don't
worry about having a place to live. Don't worry about being
bankrupt. It's part of your amazing success. I don't think they'd fill stadiums
with that. I don't think they'd sell tickets.
I think you'd have to pay people to come to it just so they'd
get the money. It's the only reason they'd show up. And if
you didn't pay them until after, they wouldn't even stay. But yet that is the heart of
Christ. And I think we've mistaken this
idea that we are to be something that the scripture
doesn't show us that Christ was. And I stand here today and say,
and this is a conversation that sort of came out of our talk
yesterday, that we've been a church that's hurt people. I've said these things before,
but not directly in that context. I've been a pastor. I've been
a husband. I've been a father that's hurt
people. No matter my intention, it wasn't like, you know what,
I want to hurt these people. And living up to my potential,
living up to our potential, hurts people. Because that's the point. We take our eyes off of longing
for pure spiritual milk. We take our eyes off the vision
of Christ. We take our eyes off the gospel. We've done that. But every person, even the ones
who are hurt by each other, every person is responsible for how
they respond, how they react and how they behave in the context
of that. We've been a church. I've been
a pastor that didn't love like I was supposed to love, but yet
in all of it thought I was loving the way I was supposed to love
by telling people what they needed to do rather than listening. Even if it was good. How do we
know these things? How do we grow? We go through
them. If anyone ever is expecting anyone
ever to be absolutely right in anything all the time, don't
even go break your mirrors because you won't even find it at home. Yet Jesus Christ was never wrong. Even in His feelings, His desires,
His prayers, His thoughts, His concerns, His burdens. Yet my burdens often reflect
on me and how I feel about them. And I know a lot of people who
are always thinking of others, yet they don't even see that
their thinking of others is fueled by their thinking about how they
think about others, which is their identity. And they can't escape it. It's
really fun to laugh at myself now when I find that stuff. I'll
feel it and I go, whoa! And I just laugh sometimes. Even
Robin. What are you laughing at? Me. If I'm journaling in the bed
for some reason, if I wake up in the middle of the night and
then I'm laughing at myself. This is so funny that we are
so right and we are so on the straight path and we so know
what we know that we know that we know and we know nothing. And some of us feel like we can't
go on in the faith because we don't hunger the way we're supposed
to hunger, because we've been doing it the right way for so
long that led us to nowhere. And now we're here. And so we
just give up. That's why I read out of Proverbs
this morning, there's a way that seems right to man, but in the
end it is death. Ultimately, we need to seek the
wisdom that is from God, not the wisdom that is from this
world, not the wisdom that comes from James or you. But the wisdom that comes from
literally reading the letters of God to us as he communicates
to us. And I could stand here and I
could give a long hour list of every problem that I have identified
in my life and in your lives. and in the life of ministry at
large and the life of this church. And I can strategically organize
it in such a way to show all the damage of everything that's
ever happened in the world. And in doing so, I would feel
a little smug, a little proud, just a little bit humble. And look what I've identified.
But what does it do to identify anything? How about we just become
something new? If you read what I write and
you listen to the nonsense that I post, you'll know that I've
been talking about this for about 12 days. Being successful in life as a
Christian is not about mastering anything, but it's about discovering
everything. You will never master anything. There are some masterful skills,
but there's always somebody better. And there's going to come a day
when these hands won't work, when this voice won't work, when
these eyes, it's my fourth set of glasses in six weeks. Long
story. And then what about master? See, it's common to encounter
seasons where we do not hunger. And our drive for the Lord diminished
and then we fall into despair and then we erase that and push
it away and try to just not look at it. We try to not focus on
things that have caused us pain. But beloved, as believers, it's
the pain that God uses to grow us stronger. How do we lose it? How did I
lose my passion? You might ask. How can I be like
a newborn baby longing for pure spiritual milk? Well, first, I think it's important
for me to share what the scripture teaches about how we lose it.
We first have taken our focus off of the Lord. In Hebrews chapter 12, it exhorts
us, therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,
let us also lay aside every weight and any sin which clings so closely
to us, that keeps us from running, so that we may run with endurance
to race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder
and perfecter of our faith, who, Jesus, for the joy that was set
before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame and is now
seated at the right hand of God and the throne of God. So by
fixing our eyes on Jesus, we regain our focus. We regain our
strength. We regain the ability to step
back into the race, even if we're limping the rest of the way or
being dragged by someone else or carried. Something really went walking
with my eyes. My right eye got a little weaker.
My left eye got a little stronger. And then we changed this. We
changed it. I've got four prescriptions up here, four different ones.
And actually, a little bit of a medium. There might be 5 and
3 quarter prescriptions in here. But I get the new glasses. This
is great. A week later, I can't see, like an explosion in the
lab. It's awful. Migraines go back. Oh, yeah, we need to tweak this.
Two hours. Went back. Need to tweak this.
Another three or four days. Need to tweak this. And finally,
we got all the glasses I had in the house and all the prescriptions
that I'd had over the last seven years. And I know my poor doctor's probably
lost his rear end on that visit. But he fixed it. He finally figured
out what I needed to see. And these are great. I mean,
I can read. My eyes aren't jumping. I don't have the little googly
eye over here on the left anymore. We take our eyes and we lose
our focus. It's not that we forget about Christ. It's not that we
forsake the faith. But some of us fall into that
category because we just get so bombarded with the guilt and
the shame. We just go to heck with it. I
can't do it anymore. I just can't do it anymore. So we quit. We
just stop looking. So we lose our drive because
we know that that drive leads us to pain. Isn't that true for
anything sometimes? But beloved, without the pain,
you're never going to love. You're never going to have joy. You're
never going to have freedom. If you think it's freedom to
avoid suffering, you are in a prison right now and you can't even
see it. Ask me how I know. I lived there my whole life. Until two years ago. And when we do that, several
things happen. We lose our satisfaction in life. We lose our identity. We lose
our hope. We lose our assurance. We fall
into despair, ultimately ending up in the very pain that we're
trying to avoid. And we live with a complete blurred
vision of life with no focus, no direction, no purpose, no
drive, no ambition, nothing. We give up. And then we cope
We cope with those things either by trying to find a spiritual
drug. If I can just listen to this kind of music, if I can
just find this kind of career, if I can just get in this kind of
relationship, I can just get out of this situation. Or if I can just
do this, eat this, taste this, experience this. We all do it,
maladaptive coping mechanisms, but we do it psychologically,
we do it emotionally, we do it cognitively, we do it physically.
We do it with every aspect of our lives. We find ourselves
running to those little things and we do it subconsciously.
If we were aware, we'd stop. We don't even know that it's
happening. Little triggers in our brains, little stories going
off, little newsreels. I use a metaphor for myself,
it's like little newsreels, little flashes of film. And it writes
and I just don't even pay attention to it, it just comes into my
mind and it's like reality. And it's not reality, it's a
lie. The reality is Christ. So losing satisfaction in 1 Peter
2, 9, it reminds us you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood. This
is not talking about just these Israelites. This is talking about
you, beloved. And the reason I believe we lose
our satisfaction in life, spiritually speaking, is because we lose
our identity in life. You know, until December of 2022,
I'd never even answered the question, who is James? And when it was asked of me,
I lost my mind. I lost it. And then for three and a half
months, I sought to find it. I sought to find it. And everywhere
I dug and every hole I got in, I buried myself deeper into an
identity that wasn't me. And many of you are there now.
And some of you are at the precipice of that hole. And some of you
may not see it for 30 years. And our satisfaction as believers
in our identity is either anchored in Christ or it isn't. But because
it is according to the promises of God, when we lose sight of
that, we have nothing to hope for but despair. Disaster. When we lose sight of Him, we
find empty pursuits, like I talked about. And then we have an identity
crisis. But we're a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession. Paul tells it to the Ephesians.
He tells it to the Colossians. He said, you've been snatched
out by force by the power of Christ from the darkness into
the light of His Son. You are in the kingdom. And in John's revelation, we
see that it is uncountable, the number of people from every nation,
from every tongue, from every tribe, not just the 12. In all
the nations, counted in the number of the assembly of the Lord Jesus
Christ, for when the world is made new and we stand together,
we will know who we are and we will know that we need nothing,
for the Lord is our shepherd, we need nothing. We lose our hope and our assurance
when we lose our identity. Life just seems overwhelming.
But Peter encourages us in chapter one, verse three, blessed be
the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his
great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So we now
have an inheritance that is imperishable, unfading, undefiled, and kept
in heaven for you who by God are being guarded for a day of
revelation. When you will see who you really
are face to face forever and it never changed. That's an assurance. Our hope and our assurance are
secured in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus reached everything
he came to do. He accomplished everything he
came for. He came into the world and died
and rose again because it's the reason he created the world to
begin with. That's it. And all this other
stuff, listen to me, everything, even important things and vital
things and essential things and good and righteous and godly
things are secondary to that. Because of who we are, we do
not shift. We do not have to find our purpose
in saving people's lives. We can save people's lives because
of who we are. We can invest in the community
around us because of whose we are. Our purpose and our identity
is found in whose we are, not what we do. Our assurance and our hope is
found in what Christ has done and that we are in him, not in
what we do with what Christ has given us. Those things, there's
not one person, there's not one man or woman in this entire scripture
that has ever lived to their fullest purpose. Because every
time they did good things, they eventually were arrested, were
seized, were halted, or were killed. They were stopped. Paul himself never went to Spain.
Paul himself never, ever accomplished any of the goals he set forth
except that he rejoiced in his suffering and that when he was
bound, the Word of God was free and he was content. How did he
find contentment? Because he labored in anguish
toward that contentment. How did he find freedom? He labored
in bondage to see the freedom in Christ. How did he find hope? He sat in despair wondering if
his life meant anything and what he had wasted for 30 plus years
as a Pharisee now to see that it was all for nothing but everything
was gained because of Christ. This wrecks intellectual minds. And it wrecks non-intellectual
minds. Because it takes away the power.
to define our purpose. 1 Peter 4, if you go to chapter
4, verse 12 and 13, it says, Beloved, do not be surprised
at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you. See how
I preach ahead of where I'm at? As though something strange was
happening to you, but rejoice insofar as you share Christ's
suffering, that you may also rejoice and be glad when His
glory is revealed. See, our suffering is not without
purpose. There are opportunities to share
in the sufferings of Christ and to anticipate the revelation
of His glory. And when we're given into despair,
we live in a blurred place. We live with blurred vision. Proverbs 3, y'all know the text.
Verses 5 and 6. Lean not on your own understanding. But in all your ways, acknowledge
Him and He will make your paths straight. Because when things
are blurry, what we're looking for is clarity. What we're looking
for is vision. What we're looking for is answer. And only the Word of God can
give us clarity, vision and answer. And here's the thing, church,
no matter what we're going through right now, the longer we wait,
the longer we wait to face it. But we're going to face it. It's like canceling that dental
work. I just can't do that this weekend. And three weeks later,
man, I should have done it three weeks ago. You've got to have that surgery.
You've got to write that check to the tax guy. Just do it. We cannot see. Spiritual. Blurry, that's spiritual
blindness. Keeps us from seeing and understanding
and being thankful for the bigger picture of God's purpose in our
lives. And I don't know about you. But
when I'm in the thick of it, I don't want to hear what I just
said. And let me let me confess some
things to you about yesterday. I was exhausted. And when I got home yesterday
afternoon and I tried to do some things that needed to be done,
I was so tired I sat down and I said this word out loud. I
said, I just want to be in a bad mood for a minute. And so I removed myself from
my family because I didn't want to be in a bad mood around them.
And I went and found some people to be in a bad mood with, and
I found them. I found them. They were complaining
about everything, fussing. I'm not talking about you brothers.
This was after our meeting. And then I realized, you know
why I'm in a bad mood? Because I chose to be. It was a great morning, great
opportunity for meditation, prayer, reading of scripture, then a
great fellowship with good brothers around Christ and around life,
and a wonderful, beautiful day that was on fire. It was extremely
hot. And there was no reason for me
to want to pout, except that I felt it for just a moment,
and I decided that I wanted to do it. But here's the cool thing.
I had the choice. And it was my fault, and nobody
else's. And then when I got around people,
I told them, hey, Tiffins, what you up to today? I said, I'm
in a bad mood. I don't want to talk. I just want to be here. Just let me be here. OK. And then they walked on eggshells
for 45 minutes. Didn't say a word. Don't bother
him. He's in a bad mood. I'm like,
this is not how it works, guys. I'm being honest. And it just
sort of struck me. How many times in life did I
do that not knowing I did it? And then not intentionally protect
those people around me, but just went out into my world and then
rubbed all that dirt all over everybody else. How about 25
years of marriage? 28 years of marriage. How about as a son? As a dad? And we don't know what we don't
know, but when we know, whoa, we better not stay there. Your mind is mostly your choice. You might say, well, I just can't
help what Pop's saying. You're right. But you can think about what
you're going to do with it. You can be aware this is a thought
or a feeling that I have. Now some of you, if you're depressed,
you can't do that. When you're in clinical depression,
I don't care what you say. You can't talk yourself out of
that. You gotta get help. You gotta get professional help.
You can't work yourself out of psychological conditions and
you certainly, you certainly cannot cope with maladaptive
tendencies and control of a personality disorder. You can't. But even then, it's
not an excuse as a Christian. It might be the reason, but it's
not an excuse. Beloved, I know standing here
before you today that I'm probably one of the nicest people that
ever walked the planet in my own eyes. Because every day I thought,
I got to do this for somebody and I want to help people and
I want to do. But I never really understood that everything that
I knew about helping people was really fueled by a fear of not
helping them correctly. So I controlled them through
my intensity and persuasiveness. Not for my own gain, for their
own good, according to my own standards that I myself could
not keep. But I didn't know about it. And
God helped me and those people around me. I'm not responsible
for your feelings, but I am responsible for my actions. Don't forget that, beloved. And
during that time, we're blurred spiritually. I don't care how
focused, how theologically precise. I think you said this yesterday
that, you know, in times of our life, we're really theologically
precise. And somebody said to you, brother, you're more theological
than biblical. Ha, I wrote that down. Y'all
gonna see a lot of that this week. We create from conversation. We live and create intimacy through
conversation. God has created intimacy through
conversation. Even a bush on fire spoke. We can't live life together if
we're not talking about life together. The good, bad, the
ugly and the indifferent. Here's the reality that we have
to learn. Like newborn infants long for
pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow into salvation
if indeed you've tasted and see that the Lord is good. It's OK.
Remember what Trey said in March? Fifth, 2023. It is OK to not
be OK. It is OK to not hunger for the
Lord. It's OK to not hunger for the
Lord. It is okay to be in a season of pure unbelief, a season of
pure frustration, because you can't change the seasons. But God has changed the circumstances
by changing the mind to look at them through the right lens.
His sovereignty, His power. Oh, beloved. Me and some friends
of mine, we've just decided in the last few months that, and
of course we all steal this from each other, but how's your day
going? It's the best day of my life.
I say that. Because it's the only day of
my life, I've said this already, the Lord has made it and it is
good and if I don't see that, that's my problem. So I choose
to see it that way. Thirdly, it is also the only
day of my life because right now, this very moment, what I
am doing, though there is a lot of stuff on my shoulders, these
things don't matter right now. They'll be there when I get to
them. The worst thing I could ever
do for you, beloved, is to serve you with the burden of tomorrow
on my shoulders because I will preach it straight out of my
mouth. I won't even know it. I think you said this, Tom. Sometimes
you can hear what preachers are doing in their lives just by
their teaching. He basically said, I can tell when a preacher's
about to leave. I mean, that's it. We've got to be present. We've got to be here. It's OK
not to hunger, but this is the best day of our lives because
it is the only gift we have right now. The question is, what are
we doing with it to build intimacy with those around us? And what
are we doing with it for the glory of God? If we're not building
intimacy, We are waiting on something. We are escaping something. And
it's okay. Because we've got to go through
what? We've got to go through this pocket to get to where I am today.
If you'd have told me after that brief depression that I had in
2007 and 2008, after a terrible situation with the loss of a
loved one, and a very difficult ministry experience, I mean,
in a lot of different ways, It caused a lot of the problems
that exacerbated a lot of the issues that I dealt with. But
I thought I'd conquered them. And then new issues come. Well,
I'll never be there again, says your famous last words. Yes, you will. But you've got
to go into these seasons when you find yourself here knowing
that it's okay and that God will not forsake you. God will not forsake you. When
our spiritual appetite wanes, it's essential for us to remember
that it's part of the journey. It's OK to not feel the hunger
for the Lord. It's OK to not want to hear the
scripture. It's OK. It's real. People don't like
to hear me say it's OK. But if God is sovereign, it's
OK. It may not be good. It may not
be profitable. It may not be what it is not
what his best Promises are being fulfilled in our lives, but it's
through these things that the promises are made real. Where
do we get off of thinking that we're outside the will of God
as believers? You're not. Nothing we experience is outside
the will of God. We have to remember that he's
with us, Christ is with us every day. Paul talks about that, he
says in Philippians 4. Not that I'm speaking to being
in need, but he was in need. But he says, I'm not speaking
about being in need. He wasn't humble bragging. He literally in his
mind thought, I don't, I don't really have a need right now.
I've learned that because I've learned that in whatever situation
I find myself in, I'm to be content and I know how to be brought
low and I know how to abound. I know to have a lot and in every
circumstance I've learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger.
abundance and need that I can do everything and endure everything
in Christ who gives me strength. See, our faith is secure in His
presence. And unbelief cannot destroy us because He remains
faithful even when our feelings and our faith falter. 1 Peter 5, 7. See why we got to
read this in its context? See why I tell you to read the
whole letter every week? 1 Peter 5, 7 says, cast all your anxieties
on Him because He cares for you. So there's some lessons I've
learned through all this. Of asking the questions, according
to this letter, what does it mean to hunger? How do I hunger?
How do I thirst for righteousness? How do I long like a baby for
pure spiritual milk? Is it devotion and discipline?
Those things are a part of the formula of how it works out in
the Lord, but we can't muster this stuff. I mean, we can rise
up and do the work. We can obligate ourselves to
it, but it's never joyful. It's always what? Work. And John says it this way in
his first letter. The law of God is not a burden. The law of what law? The law
of love. It's not a burden. Because God has put the burden
on Christ. He loves us through Christ and he cares for us. So it's not a burden. Why? Because
we are framed in such a way that we are called the righteousness
of God. We are called the children of God. We are called these things.
And it's not just a mind trick that God has done. John says,
because we are. We are called these things because
we are these things. So I've got, how many lessons
did I write out? Eleven, but I'm only gonna deal
with seven. You'll quit. A thought in the scripture. How do I hunger? What does it
mean to hunger? Lesson one. Remember the Lord. Remember the Lord. Remember the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remember Christ. Remember
His mercy. Remember what He's done to cause
us to be born again. Remember the hope that we have. Remember
the promises of this imperishable inheritance. Remember the promise
of eternal life. Remember the restoration of everything
that we've ever lost tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold.
Remember the absolute joy. Remember the answer to every
why. will be found. Remember how I preached that
in the first part, the first few weeks? We stand face to face
with Jesus. All these things that I write
down in the proverbial notebook of my soul that I want to ask
will be answered in that moment. I won't even have to hear a response. I will see Him face to face and
it will make sense to me. So I can remember the Lord now.
We can remember the Lord when we renew our minds. Beloved,
we've got to do that. Our focus must go back to the
cornerstone. Our focus must stay there in
line. When we find ourselves stepping
off the wall, off the trajectory, and it's not about what we're
supposed to be doing and not be doing in this world, get off
of that. That is so infantile. That's
just infantile. We're way beyond that as human
beings in the faith, as beloved. We're way beyond trying to figure
out, does this make God mad? Does this not make God mad? Is
this what we're supposed to be doing? This is not what we're supposed
to be doing. Focus on Christ and watch the wall. Watch the
line. Watch the cornerstone. Watch
the founder of our faith. Watch the perfecter of our faith.
Look. I've got a Belgian Shepherd at
home that's two years old and that dog, when I let her out
of the crate, she looks at me and she watches my face 100%
of the time. She never takes her eyes off my eyes. It's unnerving
if you didn't know her. That's what she was trained to
do. She will not turn her head from my gaze. If I move, she
walks in heel and she looks up at me, not where she's going,
up at me. So that when I turn, she walks with me. If I back
up, she backs up with me. And the only time she leaves
is when I tell her from my face to her face to go somewhere,
to climb somewhere, to go to spot, or to touch. And that's
the only time she'll ever leave, or if you throw food or a ball
and you give her permission to go after it. And then immediately,
she turns back her gaze and runs back to me. So if a dog can do
it, the simplest of metaphors, We have to keep our focus on
the Lord. But not with that intensity.
Not with, oh, what do I need to do, Lord? What do I need to
just, I see you, Lord. I'm resting in you, Lord. We remember his mercy. We remember
his hope. We remember him as our anchor.
That's what it means to put our eyes back on him. And then in
doing so, we renew our mind and our focus. If we want to see
clearly, we have to think clearly because we are what we think
about. We are. We are the product of where our
mind rests. There's no way around that. Therefore, preparing your mind
for action, verse 13 of chapter one, preparing your mind for
actions and being sober minded, set your hope fully on the grace
that will be brought to you at the revelation of Christ. We
have to put our thoughts and our focus in line with God's
grace and truth. And this renewal, this mindset,
this meditation, this mindfulness, this embodiment What does it
do? It combats the distractions and
the blurry distortions of life. It enables us to live sober minded
with purpose. Lesson three, eat the word of
God, even when it's tasteless. It works. And there are little
seasons in my life where I really engage in my family and I send
them scripture and I do this and I do that. And then they
sort of like scatter like flies, you know, in my mind. They don't
want me to do this. I'm overwhelming them. You know the answer to that?
If that's who I really am, be overwhelmed. I mean, there are times even
now as as focused as I am on living authentically that people
don't even talk about it. A severe tragedy was told to
me last night. Among some peers, some colleagues. And I just froze. I did not want
to be a counselor. So I sat there. 20 minutes. And I thought, but I
can be a mouth. Here's this, here's that, here's
what the Lord of the Word says. If you want to talk about those
things, I'm all ears. Go see a therapist. Get some help. Tragedy. Serious tragedy. We feast on the word of God.
It's essential when we can offer it to others. It's not our problem
if they don't want to eat it. Beloved, don't you ever not tell
me to be in the word of God. It is the single thing that set
me upright and kept me walking. When it feels routine, when it
feels tasteless, We eat it anyway. Our spiritual nourishment and
growth depend on a constant intake of scripture. And this fosters
a deep understanding, a connection to God's promises and His love
and forgiveness. Lesson number four, be honest.
Be real. Be brutally honest with yourself.
So put away all deceit, malice, hypocrisy, envy and slander.
Put it away. Unclothed. Take it off. Do not
be deceitful to yourself. Do not put on the Christian ruse.
Do not act in a manner according to what you think you should
be. Be who you are. And if we can't
accept it, then we need to grow up. If we get triggered by something,
authentically with people who love us, whom we should love,
then we have work to do. And guess what, beloved? We all
have work to do and we all need to grow up into him who is Christ
into the head. We know that we're an infant
when we think that we're not having to or have no area to
grow in, even in the areas that we have mastered. Especially
those areas. We need to be honest. We need
to be honest in our dealings with ourselves, with our Lord,
with each other. It is crucial. If we are not
open about how we feel, then how are we ever going to learn
how to receive other people's feelings? And you know what's going to
happen when we start acting like that? We're going to be hurt. We're going to be
triggered. We're going to take it personal.
We're not going to be able to listen. We're going to put it
about us. Somebody says, hey, this is what I've been thinking.
If it's even an issue of ideology or difference of opinion or difference
of theology, we've got to be able to be honest about it. And we've got to be humble and
broken. Lesson five. 1 Peter 5, 6 and
7. Humble yourselves, therefore,
under the mighty hand of God, so at the proper time He may
exalt you I've already said this part, casting all your anxieties,
worries, fears on Him because He cares for you. See, if we're
not broken, we don't need anything. If we're not broken, we don't
need God. Jesus said to Himself with the
Pharisees and the religious leaders, OK, since you say you can see,
then your guilt remains. I didn't come here for well people. I came here to heal the sick. We need to embrace our brokenness. We need to embrace and humbly lower ourselves and
be honest about our need for the Lord and our need for the
Lord's people. It's actually only in our weakness
and only in our brokenness that he will even work. I want you to hear that again.
It's only in our brokenness and in our weakness that he will
work. Therefore, Paul says, I will
boast all the more boldly about my weaknesses, for in my weakness
he is strong. Lesson six, have conversations. I've said it at every point.
and have conversations. Why? To know each other. To seek
understanding. But not to change one another. A lot of folks like to talk so
that they can get their point across so that other people can
be changed. That's the wrong motive. Because
that means that I'm not broken, I'm not humble, and that I'm
the master of what I know. Even though I know what I know,
and I'm pretty sure I'm right, It's not my place to make you
believe it. And when I'm humble and I understand
who I am before the Lord and that there is no one else that's
like Him, but that everybody else in the world, even the ones
that I despise, are just like me, that allows my conversations
to come from a place of curiosity and interest, rather than control,
unbeknowingly. Lecturing is not communicating. and certainly in a conversation.
1 Peter 3, verse 15, but in your
hearts, honor Christ as the Lord and the Lord is holy, always
being prepared to make a defense or to give an answer, to give
the reason to anyone who asks you for why today is the best
day of your life. That's my paraphrase. a reason for the hope that is
in you. But no matter what you do and every reason that you
do, you do it with gentleness, you do it with respect, you can
speak as a matter of fact, not as a matter of control, conviction. Engaging in conversations with
a genuine desire to understand rather than to persuade fosters
respect and deepens intimate relationships. It reflects the
love of Christ and it opens the doors for authentic sharing of
our faith. And I have changed my mind on
this to such a degree that I'm probably going to sound a little
over the edge. To the point that I don't think
there's ever a time that a human being should ever walk up and
just generally pop in a conversation about Jesus. Because I don't
see it. I don't even admire it anymore,
it's a little off-putting. Because usually when people do
it to me and I say, well, tell me about Jesus. Then they tell me
what I must do to live. Not interested. I'm not interested. I will not live that way. Because
the Bible doesn't tell me that that is life. Life is found in
Christ. He will guide my path. So what
do we do with all this? But beloved, I started out, and I'll end in the same way.
1 Peter 4 says, above all, keep loving one another earnestly,
since love covers a multitude of sins. Lesson seven, seek love. You've heard theological arguments,
and if you haven't, okay, thank you for not being tainted by
this, but you've probably heard theological arguments about what
is the rule of life for the believer. Is it the law? Is it the Decalogue?
Is it the Bible? Is it this? Is it that? No, it's
love. The rule of life for the believer
is love. Love is the guiding principle.
Love is the renewal of our mind. Love is the foundation on which
we stand. If we're standing on the bedrock
of Jesus Christ, we're standing on the bedrock of love from God
Almighty, and there is no escape. So that we can have conversations,
we can be broken, we can be honest. We can do all these things. without
ever fearing that we'd be rejected by one another because Christ
did not reject us, so that we can have the freedom and the
safety of knowing that we'll be protected and provided for
by each other as the body of Christ, no matter where we are
in life, no matter what's happening. This is something that we don't
know as a church yet. Remember, we're not lost. We've
just lost focus. So I'm parsing some core values
as a congregation. That we will value truth. That
we will value intimacy. That we will value openness.
We will value compassion, proper use of Scripture. We will value freedom and autonomy, among some other things. Thirteen years ago, a little
more than that now, I wrote these words down thinking I had come
up with them, and then a thousand other churches have the same
idea. But we want to be a people for his glory, by the power of
his grace. Now I want to expand what that
really looks like by saying that we are going to be a people who
are dedicated to being a beacon, a light. And I want us to be
a light for the unchurched, for the broken Christian, for our
community where truth and intimacy, openness, compassion, the proper
use of scripture and freedom thrive. And as we live out these
core values, beloved, it's gonna reflect the heart of God in everything
we do. It's gonna create a safe and
transformative space for us to gather together with anybody. You might say, well, what about
these watchdogs or these devils or these decompossessed people? All jokes aside, it doesn't matter.
We have boundaries in place and openness to hear what they have
to say. And then we just set the record straight and then
they'll go, oh, thanks. I'll find another people to hang
out with. Together, I believe that we can
be a community, a family that embodies the grace and truth
of Jesus Christ. And quite honestly, I think that
everything we've gone through has prepared us for that. And
we're going to go through more things individually. Thus, we will be going through
them collectively. Because we rejoice with those who rejoice,
we weep with those who weep. And beloved, at every single
second of our lives as believers, we're going to be weeping and
rejoicing, even when the rejoicing is inexpressible because the
weeping is too hard. So in that, let us remember the
Lord and meditate on him that we may know and taste that he
is good. Because when we taste it, We
will go back for more over and over again. Let's pray. We thank you, Father, for the
love you've given us. For the hope we have. Thank you, Father, for your forgiveness
and mercy. And not only has Christ taken
everything we've ever done wrong, but you are still patient. To prove yourself. To prove us
justified. Even when we continually add
to that list. Well, the world in which we live
is not the same as it was just four years ago. And that's always going to be
the case. Tomorrow, the world is not going to be the same as
it is today. So let us be ever mindful and ever growing and
ever restful, knowing that you have it all in your hand. Father,
help us to become a beacon, a light, a city on a hill that cannot
be shaken as we rest fully in Christ Jesus. In whose name we
pray, amen.