Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] I have been going to church since I was a baby. And now before you start thinking he was probably a pretty holy baby, then my parents took me. It wasn't my fault.
[00:00:17] I didn't earn it. I just showed up. You know that some people say we were there every time the doors were unlocked.
[00:00:25] Well, my family unlocked the doors.
[00:00:28] We showed up early, we got the doors unlocked, my mom cleaned the church. I mean we were, that was our second place. We knew, as every good youth minister's kid knows where the wheelchairs were.
[00:00:44] And that was what we played with when no one was around.
[00:00:49] I loved being at church, my friends were at church, we had, we went on trips together. It was just, it was a great time. And sometimes the, the an interesting thing happened, sometimes an interesting event like we, where you're watching and you're not supposed to laugh at church. That's a rule.
[00:01:16] Shut it down.
[00:01:18] No matter like what happens, you have to just like it's very serious church, like what we do here, what we believe, what we are is very serious. And it's more serious for us because we're not like those people who don't take it all that seriously. And churches in our hometown fought not face to face, but we side eyed each other as if like to say you're not a real thing.
[00:01:47] And it was small enough where we liked those people, but you know, they just weren't quite us.
[00:01:55] And not quite us pretty quickly became equated to not like Jesus where people would come. Yes, you come to Jesus to find all of your hope, but before the only way to God is through Jesus, but the only way to Jesus is through me.
[00:02:17] Now maybe you're still there, but I've come to find that that sort of attitude is destructive.
[00:02:29] It tears you down, it tears your community down. It is not helpful to think like, oh well, I've got it all together. If people could just listen to me, if they could just talk, you know, talk the way I talk, say things the way I say things, believe things the way I believe them, then all of a sudden they'll be right too, just like I'm right.
[00:02:53] I've been right for a few, a few minutes now since the last time I was corrected.
[00:03:00] And hopefully this, this one will stick.
[00:03:03] But I'm guessing, and you probably know this quite well, that I'm wrong about something.
[00:03:09] And so the, the excitement or like the, the, the arrogance I have and the excitement about my correctness is wasted really. It's a worthless feeling. Quit feeling that way.
[00:03:25] I've got the Bible Right. Okay.
[00:03:29] You realize the Bible, the Bible is an ancient document from three different languages that's been translated for us into English, gathered by archaeologists, packed into our binding. When people talk their Bible, you're just, yes, it is beautiful and deep and God is revealed in Jesus through the Bible.
[00:04:01] But I guarantee you that you that, that I do not have a handle on the whole thing and praise God for that, that every time I open my Bible, I am not reading some pamphlet that I wrote, but I'm diving into a deeper perception of the world through Jesus. I'm diving into something beautiful and inspired. And inspired by the Holy Spirit, I am diving. I am reading the very words of God.
[00:04:44] And so I must come to that with humility. I must come to the word of God with an openness to being wrong, to being changed, to having to repent.
[00:04:56] And when sometimes we treat church like the place where the people who are right gather.
[00:05:06] It's a mistake.
[00:05:10] It is, dare I say, sinful.
[00:05:16] That's how humanity misses the mark oftentimes is we don't see our own brokenness and we see other people's so, well, Jesus, when talking to the religious and listen, I love again, I love church.
[00:05:38] But sometimes we, the religious need to sit down and hear a woe or two just to straighten our spines, ready us for the world to know what we who grew up in church, some of us grew up in church.
[00:05:59] We can be tempted by.
[00:06:04] And man, Jesus says the first one he gives is this like, woe to you, you Pharisees, you hypocrites.
[00:06:15] And then the second one comes in just the same way. But man, it packs a punch. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
[00:06:24] You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make that new convert twice the son of Hell as yourselves, right?
[00:06:45] That might be one of the harshest sentences in all of scripture that you guys are doing work to make converts. You're converting people, you're doing work to make converts, and you're making them like you, those poor things.
[00:07:14] So cross land and hell. Here is when they use the word gehenna, which is was, was a well known place. So it's a word that's translated hell.
[00:07:31] When they use the word gehenna, it's a, it's like a dump outside the city that burns pretty much constantly, burning their trash. So he's saying, you know, you turn them into twice the trash, boy. Like it's there it is, it is a phrase of like, this is the broken all the brokenness of society burns like that. But he's saying you make them worse and you make them worse in the ways your wor, you're bad.
[00:08:07] It's like when we go into all the world and preach the gospel of Jesus in khaki pants. You remember that practice first you gotta dress like us, gotta go to church in the right outfit.
[00:08:27] The gospel, when preached, oftentimes produces people who aren't like me because Jesus isn't like me.
[00:08:40] Jesus is not the son of Benjamin.
[00:08:46] Jesus is not the product of my life, I am the product of his.
[00:08:53] And so when he gets onto us religious folks and said, be careful that you aren't converting them to you.
[00:09:03] Be careful that you're not trying to make them into something that just looks like a version of you, have you ever heard somebody say, well, if I was in their shoes, I'd do this, this and that.
[00:09:19] What's so insulting to the people who are struggling with that particular problem? Those shoes you're hoping to fill because you're assuming that you've had all the same lived experiences. You've had the same parents, the same friends at school, the same siblings, you've had the same grandparents, you had the same brokenness in college, you had the same struggles in marriage, you had the same everything and you somehow came out on top and you would know how to do things.
[00:09:45] When we are influenced by the lives we lead, we are influences, influenced by the difficulties throughout our life. And everybody is influenced in different ways. And so the shoes that you're wearing are typically built by the people you've interacted with.
[00:10:06] The life experience, the actions you're taking are oftentimes built by the people you've lived with. And that's. Your story's not complete. But to think that if you could just somehow get and make, take their, their shoes and live that life and fix their problems is arrogance. What you're saying is, my goodness, they need the Savior, me hear how we speak about that.
[00:10:39] If they could just do what I do, if I could just make their decisions for them.
[00:10:47] We reduce Christianity down to just, do you make the right decision or not? And sometimes I just make the right decisions and other people don't.
[00:10:56] But life is complicated and nuanced and difficult. People have lived lives and terrors that you can't even imagine.
[00:11:08] You don't just jump in and say, guys, be like me.
[00:11:15] The best a Christian can offer is guys, I'll walk with you, fellow brother, sister, I'll walk with you.
[00:11:29] The best we can hope for is in the name of Jesus being with people, you go over. Let's put that scripture back up there one more time, Aaron. If you go over land, you will go over sea and land.
[00:11:44] You pretenders. Remember, hypocrite is just an actor wearing a mask.
[00:11:50] You cross sea and land to make a single convert and you make them twice of what you are.
[00:12:00] You make them a worse version of themselves because I'm trying to get them to be in the shape of me and all of my frailty and all of my brokenness. That's not helping them.
[00:12:18] And that passage that Spencer read, Jesus tells them that not everyone who says lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.
[00:12:30] Let's cry out, but only the one who does the will of the Father in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?
[00:12:43] Did we not cast out demons in your name?
[00:12:47] We did many deeds of power in your name. We did great things. And then I will declare to you, depart from me. I never knew you.
[00:13:03] The life of the Christian starts with a relationship with Jesus, the resurrected king, the crucified Lord, the one who will return.
[00:13:21] A relationship with Jesus. The Christian life starts with being in relationship, knowing Jesus.
[00:13:31] We can do all the performative things, get the converts and prophesy in power, do great deeds. We can do all the performative things, but the performance is. Isn't a relationship.
[00:13:44] We can show up to church and we can offer our praise and we can shine up our shoes and there still be blood on our hands.
[00:13:57] We can hurt people with our words, with our actions.
[00:14:04] My goodness, you can scathe people with your posts, like this world we live in, this social media world, you can be meaner than you've ever wanted to be.
[00:14:25] When I was growing up and my goodness, I'm at that age where I was, where I'm talking about when I was growing up, back in my day, when I was growing up, if you wanted to say something crazy in public, you either had to buy a bullhorn, print a pamphlet or something, or have the presence of mind to take a sharpie into a bathroom stall.
[00:14:52] When I was a kid like you, that's all. If you wanted to be mean just anonymously in public, that's how you did it.
[00:15:02] And now everybody's writing everything. Listen, listen to me. Next time you get on Facebook and I want you to read all of the awful things that are going on and go, this bathroom stall has been vandalized.
[00:15:17] That's all it is.
[00:15:22] I want you to see it like that because it's just this anonymous, just brokenness that's going before us and we're biting in and we're swallowing it hook, line and sinker and letting it make us angry, letting us make us afraid, making us worry about what isn't and keeping us from focusing on what is. And what is, is. The kingdom has been. The throne has been occupied. The kingdom is ruling.
[00:15:51] What is, is the resurrection is real. The tomb is empty. What actually is, isn't my big powerful proclamations. It's not the great acts of the deeds of power I'm doing. It's not all the good work and the good prayers I put together.
[00:16:07] What actually is, is Jesus, the savior of the heavens and earth, the God, the God who created heavens and earth, the Spirit who dwells within us and gives us power. That God wants me and just me.
[00:16:29] He wants to know me.
[00:16:32] He wants you to know him.
[00:16:37] Depart from me. I never knew you.
[00:16:41] What good does it do you? All of the big acts of praise and power, all the great deeds that you've performed in front of men. Jesus says, what good does it do you if you never knew me?
[00:16:58] We spent the past two weeks with kids at camp talking about Genesis.
[00:17:05] And one of the most interesting parts of Genesis to me is in the garden.
[00:17:15] Eve happens past the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which I don't know if you remember, they're not supposed to eat of it.
[00:17:27] It's a persimmon.
[00:17:32] They're not supposed to eat of that.
[00:17:35] And the snake is craftier than all the other animals in the garden. So a snake comes up and says, says, did God really say.
[00:17:45] Now, up until this point in Genesis 2 and in Genesis 3, it's. It refers to God as the Lord God, or in Hebrew, Yahweh, Elohim. It's two word title of God, name of God.
[00:18:03] And then the serpent comes up and says, did Elohim really say.
[00:18:10] And then Eve follows suit. Eve says, well, Elohim didn't really say that, but he did say this.
[00:18:21] And she misquotes him too. She actually makes him more restrictive. She says, you shouldn't touch it or you'll die. Which that's not what God said.
[00:18:31] So he says, you have to.
[00:18:35] She says, we're not supposed to eat of it or. And we're not going to touch it or we'll surely die. And the serpent says, oh, Elohim didn't say that. He didn't. That's not the reason.
[00:18:48] And they eat of the tree. Sorry, Spoiler. If those of you haven't read it. They do eat of the tree, and then they hide shame.
[00:19:01] In their shame, they hide.
[00:19:05] And then God shows up and it says, and Yahweh Elohim was walking in the garden.
[00:19:15] There was this dehumanizing. Not dehumanizing, but like this, this. This was the first time in all of scripture, and it's early on, so it's not that impressive, but the first time in scripture where they're talking about God instead of to Him.
[00:19:33] And we need to be careful as the religious that our doctrines and our theologies and our ethical theories don't come too detached from the God who knows us and loves us, that we don't talk about God more than we talk to God.
[00:19:57] That our theology doesn't hurt our relationship or at least doesn't get in the way of it.
[00:20:06] Yahweh Elohim is in the garden looking for a conversation with us, looking to be with us in the cool of the day.
[00:20:15] And sometimes out of our shame and our fear, we hide.
[00:20:21] But the same God who wants relationship then, wants relationship now.
[00:20:28] The same God that was looking for Adam and Eve is looking for you.
[00:20:33] And it's not because you're great and God needs more people like you.
[00:20:38] It's because God loves you, wants to know you, wants you to know God.
[00:20:47] And once you know God, you'll want others to know God.
[00:20:53] One of the best ways to point to evangelize the world is to point to Jesus and get out of the way.
[00:21:05] Invite him to the table and then get out of the way.
[00:21:11] You don't have to manage their next few steps.
[00:21:15] We believe in the Spirit. We believe in the power of the resurrection. We believe in King Jesus. We believe in the God who created the heavens and the earth.
[00:21:25] Trust them with your brothers and sisters.
[00:21:31] Don't make them sons of you, but show them that they are loved and honored.
[00:21:38] Sons of God. Daughters of God. Children of God.
[00:21:44] We want to bring people to Jesus. We want to bring people to the table. If you haven't invited somebody to church recently, do it. I feel like we can worship together. Enjoy here. We worship together in a way that's joyful here. I love it.
[00:22:03] I love this church.
[00:22:05] I think people should come to this church.
[00:22:07] I don't think they should quit their church and come to this church.
[00:22:10] But I think people who don't have a home, who don't have a place to sit at a table and be with other followers of Jesus, this is a great place for them. Invite your friends, but we invite them. Not so that they'll be like us, but so that they'll be loved like us.
[00:22:31] So that they'll be known like we are known.
[00:22:35] So that they'll be.
[00:22:36] They'll have hope like we have hope.
[00:22:40] This grace that we find in God, it's humbling.
