Your Future Self Will Thank You

Hey Orchard Hill, welcome to our virtual weekend.

It's great to be together in your homes, on your computers, on screens, wherever it is that you're taking this in.

Hey, before we jump into the teaching today, I just want to say thank you to all of you for the way that you've stayed engaged this year.

This year has been a ride for everybody, and so many of you have been stayed engaged in the church, many through coming to the outdoor services in the summer, coming back in person, coming online.

Some of you haven't been back at all, but you've been engaged online, you've been in Zoom groups.

Now I just want to say thank you, and I want to say thank you as well for just your continued financial partnership in this year.

Your giving has allowed the church just to continue on track throughout most of this year.

And I do want to remind you if you haven't participated in year-end giving, that every year about 20-25% of our revenue comes from year-end giving.

And so any uh gift that you can make or pledge into next year that would be tied to year-end giving would uh really help the church to plan and approach next year and do ministry, hopefully in a way that can continue just to impact our community and beyond.

So appreciate that and appreciate you being a part of that.

Let's pray together.

Father, thank you for the chance to gather today.

I pray that you would speak to each of us.

Lord, I pray that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So let me uh just uh start by saying that there's something very typical that happens this time of year.

And that is as we approach the end of the year, it's very typical for many of us to take stock of the last year and then to make some decisions, maybe some changes for the coming year.

We don't always call them resolves, but what we do is we look at ourselves and say, maybe next year I'd like this to be true.

I'd like to spend more time with my family, or less time with my family.

I'd like to get in better shape, or I don't care about getting in shape, or I'd like to be more spiritually focused than I was this last year.

Whatever it is, we tend to do that at this time of year.

But let me ask you a question.

Did you make any decisions five or ten years ago that you look back on today and you say, that was such a good decision?

That changed the trajectory of my life.

Maybe it wasn't just a decision, but it was a pattern of decisions or choices that you made that had a positive impact.

But I would guess that I could also ask the question when you look back five, ten years, did you make any decisions or patterns of decisions that you look back on now and you say, I am filled with regret because of that.

I wish I had done it differently.

I saw a book uh not long ago.

It was called Your Future Self Will Thank You.

And it was written by a man named Drew Dick.

I didn't actually read the book, I just saw the title and I thought that is a great title.

And the book basically takes several areas of life and says, here is what you need to do in this area of your life so that when you look back in five to ten years, you'll be thankful.

You won't regret the decisions that you make.

Another author, Sean Covey, wrote this.

He said, Our habits will make or break us.

And what he was was referring to when he said, our habits will make or break us, is that ultimately the choices we make, the small choices we make along the way impact the way that our lives live.

James Clear wrote this in his book, Atomic Habits.

He said, Goals don't determine success.

And then he said this the cost of our good habits are in the present, and the cost of your bad habits are in the future.

In other words, when you and I make choices today, the choices we make that are good, we actually reap the benefit in the future, even though the cost is in the present, and then the reverse is true with our bad habits.

We get the benefit of the bad habit today, but we pay the cost in the future.

Here's another thing that James Clear said.

He said, as a general rule, the more immediate the pleasure you get from an action, the more you should question if it aligns with your long-term goals.

In other words, when you uh make a choice and something feels really good in the moment, you at least need to ask the question: is this part of my long-term goal or the way that I want to live life?

You see, there's uh some things that we do occasionally, but it's the things that we do habitually that make the biggest difference.

Now, sometimes when it comes to faith, what happens is we take all of this good self-help thinking, and there's a lot of good thinking in the self-help movement, and we put a verse on it or an idea on it or change our list a little, and then what we do is we say, now, if you want to really have a great walk with Jesus, if you want your future spiritual self to thank you, here are all the things that you need to do or address or become.

And we merely kind of make a new list that's a little more spiritual in orientation.

And that's not a bad thing.

There's some benefit to that.

But what I'd like to do today is I'd like to look with you at a passage at the end of 1 Thessalonians chapter 5.

1 Thessalonians 5 · chapter mention

You heard it read.

And this is one of those passages where it speaks the words that the apostle Paul was writing to the Thessalonians, kind of as he was saying, here is something that I want you to consider.

And often when we're at the end of something, when we're leaving or coming back, is when we'll say something that's really important.

In other words, if you have young kids and they were about to go off to school for the first time, this is back when kids went physically to school, what what you would do is you would say, okay, I really want to tell you these things.

Or if your kids left for college this last year or a few years ago, it's like, here's one thing that I really want to impress on you.

And in a way, this is what Paul is doing here, and so I'd like to suggest today that from this passage that we see four things that your future self will thank you for if you welcome these things into your life.

Four things that if you say, I will embrace these things, your future self will be glad you did.

And here's the first one, and that is your future self will thank you if you embrace or welcome all of life as it comes.

And here's where we see this: these little pithy verses.

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

And what you have here is just the simple statement that says, Rejoice, be glad, and pray all the time.

And that may seem like it's just spiritual pie in the sky, but the reason I say this is welcoming all of life as it comes is because it starts with rejoice, and then it says pray always, and then it says, be thankful in everything, not for everything, but in everything.

And what this is is pointing to is that you're welcoming life as it comes, rejoicing in everything, being thankful in everything is a way in which you ultimately express your confidence in God rather than in your circumstances.

Paul David Tripp wrote about this, not directly, but in one of his books, he says this a life of quiet or not so quiet complaint hammers away at our confidence in the wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness of God.

In other words, every time that we complain and we say, This isn't how it should be.

I don't like this.

I I this needs to be different.

What we're doing is we're grumbling, we're complaining.

And by not being thankful, what we're doing is we're basically saying, This isn't how it should be.

Now, certainly if you read through the Old Testament in the Psalms, there were places where the psalmist said, This isn't how it should be.

Although usually those were injustice issues, not inconvenient issues for them.

And to say pray without ceasing is like saying, remember that you're not alone.

And so we have the opportunity in life to say, I'm going to welcome every situation that comes.

And sometimes the gifts that God gives us are really things that at first we don't see as a gift.

It's something that comes into our lives and it's disguised, but we'll miss that gift if we have a predetermined idea of what the outcome has to be.

If we say, the only outcome here that's acceptable is this outcome.

But sometimes the greatest gifts that you and I will ever get is when we say, God, I'm going to rejoice in everything.

I'm going to be thankful in everything.

I'm going to pray without ceasing, whatever's coming, because sometimes God is at work behind the scenes orchestrating things that you and I wouldn't orchestrate to bring about ends that we can't bring about on our own, that may be way better than something else that you or I would come to think.

And so one of the habits that you and I can build into our lives and need to, frankly, right now, is this idea of saying, I'm going to welcome all of life as it comes, without grumbling, without complaining, but being thankful so that I can say, I know that God is at work in this in some way.

Here's a second thing that your future self will thank you for welcoming into your life, and that is for welcoming the spirit's fire.

And I say that because verses 19 through 24 say essentially as much.

It says, Do not quench the spirit, do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test them all.

Hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

Now, the spirit here is a reference to the Holy Spirit.

And when I say do not quench the Spirit's fire or welcome the Spirit's fire, what I'm referring to is this idea that the Holy Spirit works in our lives to bring about some ideas of conviction into our lives.

Now, it says, do not despise prophecies.

And I just want to address this for a moment.

There are those who will hear this and say, well, do not uh despise prophecies is really uh an indication that this is how God works.

But there's two basic ways that people over time have understood prophecy.

And I'm talking about in our time.

Now, there's another way that I think is unbiblical.

So two basic ways that have been accepted within the broader church.

One is to say that prophecies refers to something that's revealed now.

And these people would say there's a difference between Old Testament prophets and New Testament prophets.

In other words, Old Testament prophets received a direct word from God that was authoritative.

New Testament prophets received promptings from God that may or may not be authoritative.

That's why it's important to test everything.

This is why 1 Corinthians says that when you speak a prophecy, people should weigh them to see whether or not they're true.

And what this view does is it basically says God can impress on you something that may or may not be right, but it's still a prophetic thing from God, a word from God that you can get.

Now, the reason that I say there's there's another view that I'm not giving credence to is there are people who say that you can be a prophet in the same sense as the Old Testament.

In other words, you can speak authoritatively for God.

And I say that that's been generally rejected by mainstream Christianity.

There are those who some people might consider mainstream who hold that view.

But as soon as somebody says that they speak with the authority of God, walk away, run away.

That person, those people do not understand the scripture, and they do not speak for God.

When somebody holds the view of prophecy, what they do is they say, I think that God may be saying this.

And then what you're to do is to test it, to look at it.

So that's the revealed now approach.

The other approach is what I am going to say, revealed before.

And this is the view that says a prophecy is when somebody speaks something from the scriptures that's already been revealed, and what they're doing is they're applying it or expounding it, and they're basically saying, I'm taking something that has already been revealed and I'm speaking it.

And so some people would see this even as being teaching or preaching in a public setting.

Now, in a way, it doesn't matter which of those views that you take to heart, because the tie here with prophecy, to do not quench the spirit and abstain from what is evil, is really saying, in essence, that these things are the prompting or the work of the Holy Spirit, and our job is not to quench it.

In other words, whenever we hear something that we say, that sounds like God, or God is convicting me to do something or change something or think differently about something, that anytime I resist it, I'm quenching the Holy Spirit.

So, for example, you're listening to a message and something all of a sudden impresses on you, an application of the Word of God.

If you don't act on it, you're quenching the Holy Spirit.

And so the idea here is to say, as you as you welcome the Spirit's fire, you will grow in conviction, and by growing in conviction, you'll grow in godliness, and the results in your life will be better than if you simply resist them.

Now, I tend to take the revealed before view, not the revealed now view if you're wondering.

And this is one of the things that you hear me often when I start to teach.

In content and in tone and in emphasis.

And those words are tested.

That's the job of our elders, our servant leaders, our board here, where they will look at the content of the teaching, not just mine, but the teaching that happens here, and say, Does this reflect the word of God in content and in tone and in emphasis?

And that's part of being in a church community because what happens when the spirit's fire is convicting and leading us somewhere is we are drawn to say, This is that this is true, this is right as a community.

And by the way, one of the first roles, the first convicting, the first uh ways that you can quench the spirit is to simply say, I don't need Jesus at all.

In John 16, we're told that the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict the world of sin.

In other words, one of the very first ways that you quench the Holy Spirit or you don't welcome the Holy Spirit's fire is by saying, I don't need Jesus, I don't have a sin issue, I don't have any reason to need to believe in and trust Jesus Christ as my Savior.

And as a result, what happens is you quench the Holy Spirit and you never enter into spiritual life at all.

But even once you've entered into spiritual life, every time that you resist the prompting, the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, you're quenching the Spirit's fire.

And so when Paul here is talking to the Thessalonians at the end of this letter, he's saying, Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to welcome life as it comes.

I want you to welcome the Holy Spirit's fire.

And here's what I know just from years and years of being a Christian now and a pastor, and that is every time that I resist any conviction that it ends up dying just a little bit.

But every time I lean into conviction and I follow it, that comes from the Holy Spirit and is confirmed in the Word of God, then what happens is God opens up more and more insight.

And that's part of why it's so important to welcome the Spirit's fire.

So we want to welcome life as it comes, welcome the Spirit's fire, and our future self will thank us if we also welcome, and I'm going to say the sanctifying work of God.

Now, if you uh attended last weekend in person or online, you heard me talk about sanctification last week as well.

So two straight weeks, sanctification.

But the word is used right here in the text.

Verse 23, may God Himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.

May your whole spirit, soul, body, uh, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who calls you as faithful, and he will do it.

Now, sanctification means to be set apart, it means to be made distinct.

In other words, God is at work sanctifying, calling us to something different.

And this really goes hand in hand with the idea of conviction, because sometimes what happens is when we have some work that God's doing in our lives is we don't want to welcome it.

Just imagine, this is a hypothetical.

But imagine with me that there's a high school age young woman who is part of a church somewhere, and she's in a small group, and she's professed faith in Jesus Christ.

And as she is living her life, some of the friends in our small group start to say, Some of the choices you're making right now aren't matching up with a Christ follower.

And you're you're making some choices that could lead you down a bad path.

And she resists it.

And then a few weeks later, she does some things that come out to some of her friends, and her friends bring it to their small group leaders and say, Help us know how to talk to our friend.

And her friend's like, Leave me alone.

I don't want to go there.

And then something bigger happens.

And it's known, not just to the leader there, but to others, and they come to her and bring it to her parents ultimately.

And here's what resisting the sanctifying work of God looks like it looks like saying, You're wrong, and I want no part of you telling me anything.

And so, what we do then, what people do often is they say, now I'm just gonna go somewhere else to church because I don't want you meddling in my life like this.

The the welcoming the sanctifying work of God is saying, even when it's uncomfortable, I am willing to receive that correction.

I'm willing to receive the prompting from other people in my life as well that God might be using to get through to me.

You know, if you think about it this way, if you go to somebody to be a coach for you, maybe an athletic coach, a music coach, and then when they give you instruction, you're like, no, no, no, I I don't want that.

What happens is you miss the benefit of that person being your coach.

My wife and I sometimes will watch the TV show This Is Us Together.

And there was an episode, I think it was this fall, where um one of the actors, his name's Kevin, on the show, plays a man who's an actor.

And there was a juxtaposition of him in a tryout where the director was riding him fairly hard.

And then to his childhood, when there was his mom and his dad, and his dad kept saying to his mom, listen, you have to let him experience basically the consequences of his own choices.

You're too easy on him.

And she wanted to go and rescue him and save him.

And what it did is it juxtaposed the two and showed how not being corrected well as a child led to him not being able to take the instruction or coaching or rebuke of his director in his present-day life.

And it was, if that's what they were going for, maybe that's up for interpretation, but it was really well done because you saw it and you said, oh, how easy it is to try to save somebody when they're young and it lives with them forever.

And there's a little bit of that that happens when we, in essence, say, I don't need the sanctifying work of God, I don't need the work of community, I don't want anyone to speak into my life, I want to do what I want to do and leave me alone because what we're doing in that moment is we're saying, I'm an independent contractor doing my own thing.

And what we'll end up doing is missing God's gentle, corrective hand that will bring about the right changes in us to make us the people that He called us to be.

I mean, think about it this way.

If you think back about 15 years to who you were, what you were like.

You know, if you're 35, think about what you were like at 20.

If you're 30, think about what you were like at 15.

If you're 60, think of what you were like at 45.

Most of us would say, my 15-year-ago self is not somebody I'm super proud of.

Some of the things I thought, some of the things I said, some of the ways I interacted, most of us would say, I've really grown.

But here's what that means: it means our future self, 15 years in the future, will only be able to say, I have changed even more, become a better version of myself if we're responsive to God's sanctifying work in our lives right now.

Now let me just just press this even a little further.

In Hebrews chapter 10, there's a verse that says this.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

This is verse 24, 25 of Hebrews 10.

It says this and let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.

In other words, how can we together?

Become who God made us to be.

How can we embrace God's sanctifying work?

And then it says, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day approaching.

Now let me just talk for a moment about virtual church.

Virtual church is a good thing.

It's a good option, especially if it keeps you connected to the church family while traveling or not able to attend.

It's a good thing in the midst of a global pandemic.

And there are many of us who, for good reason, are saying, right now is not the time to be in a public gathering.

And I want you to know we support that and support that decision, and that's part of why we've worked hard to create online opportunities.

But let me also just say to you that virtual church can become an easy substitute for in-person church, where we start to say, I kind of like this, but you're gonna miss something about what the experience is intended to do and some of God's sanctifying work in your life if you say, my main experience with church from now on will be through a screen.

And here's why I say that.

There are at least four limiters to virtual church.

One is community.

Now I realize some of you will say, you know what?

I have community with who I want to have community with.

I'm in a group with the people I want to be in a group with, and I don't see a lot of other people anyway, so what difference does it make?

But that's part of the problem.

Community is designed not just to be the people that we self-select, but sometimes to be with people who don't see everything the way we see everything, who don't like everything that we like, who don't address everything the way we would address it, because that rounds us into the people we need to be.

And so one of the benefits of gathering in person that you can't get from doing it online is the broader community and the and the narrower slice of community.

I think there's also a limit in terms of public affirmation.

You see, one of the things that happens when you attend in-person services, when you walk into a room where there's public worship of God, public declaration of God's word, is you are in essence saying, I'm affirming something with this.

And if you sing the words, you're affirming it when you sit under the teaching and without the ability to fast-forward it or say, you know what, I'm gonna get up and do something else for a little bit.

What you're doing is you're saying, I'm sitting under the authority and I'm part of the community that affirms this.

And in doing that, there's something spiritual that happens because it allows God's sanctifying work to do something in you that I don't think can happen in the same way on a screen.

And I believe that there's a limiting factor in uh kind of our whole online church experience because, in a sense, it makes us consumers and critics in a different way than when we're in person.

Because it's a lot easier, just like we do with everything else through a screen, to say, I that was a little off, I didn't like this.

And when there's not the relational dimension and the affirmation dimension, then what happens is is we start to say, Do I like this?

Do I not like it?

Is there something more interesting somewhere else?

And and I'm critical and I'm a consumer rather than a participant.

And then I would say there's just a chance, greater chance of distraction in virtual church.

Now, my point again isn't to rail on virtual church, but it's to say, sometime in 2021, I believe that when you believe it's safe, it's important for you not just to simply say, I prefer this mode of church, but I actually want to be a part of the gathering of people where I can encounter and welcome God's sanctifying work into my life.

It is multifaceted, it's more than just watching the music and hearing the teaching, it has several aspects that are important to how our spiritual life unfolds.

So, our future selves will thank us if we welcome life as it comes, if we welcome the Spirit's fire, if we welcome God's sanctifying work.

And then I would say our future self will thank us if we welcome other people into our lives.

Here's where we see this.

Verse 25, 26.

Brothers and sisters, pray for us.

Greet all God's people with a holy kiss.

Now, now, some people have have read this and they're like, holy kiss, that's cool, and want to physically give kiss.

That's not obviously what this is about.

Holy kiss was a way of welcoming people and saying, we're connected.

And so when we talk about a holy kiss, what we're talking about is this idea of saying, I'm open to people in my life.

And here's what's happened, I believe, in this last year.

For most of us, our circles have gotten smaller.

Oh, we've kept friendships and circles together.

But even some of our good friendships have become less frequent for a good reason.

And many of us haven't taken on any new relationships because of just the year we've been in.

But that's not the way that human beings thrive.

We thrive in relationships.

And all of these transitions and issues throughout the last year, um, where maybe some people have moved on or things have happened.

What we want to do is say, I'm going to continue to welcome people into my life.

Maybe older friends, maybe newer friends, but there's a richness and a breadth to my life when I welcome people into my life.

I heard a quote uh some time ago, I think, I'm not even sure the source, but it said, if you end up having significant resources or enough, commit to building bigger tables, not taller fences.

And I love that image.

Because the image is saying, when you have time and resource, have a bigger table, invite more people into your life rather than build fences to keep them out.

And that's at the very heart of Christian thinking and the Christian gospel to say, I will welcome people into my life as God has welcomed me, I will welcome people.

And it enriches not just them, but you.

And I know that you've experienced that at times in your life, and that this last year has, for many of us, caused us to limit our circles.

But maybe this next year is a time to say, I'm gonna welcome people into my life.

And I don't believe that you'll have anything in the future but your future self thanking you for the people that you'll welcome into your life, even people that are just there for a season.

Because every time that we have people in our lives, what happens is they bring something to us, and we bring something to them.

So when you look back five, 10, 15 years, what are some of the things that you say, I'm glad I did that, or I wish I had done that?

Well, here Paul, I believe, gives us four things that if we welcome into our lives, our future self will thank you.

And so I hope that this next year for all of us will be a time where we'll say, I'm gonna welcome life as it comes.

I'm going to welcome the Spirit's fire, I'm gonna welcome God's sanctifying work, and I'm going to welcome others into my life.

Thanks for making today part of your weekend.

Let me pray, and then I'm going to encourage you to be part of a campus next weekend, either virtually or in person, as we kick off the new year.

Father, thank you for this chance to gather virtually.

Thank you for the way you worked at Orchard Hill throughout the Christmas Eve season.

Father, we pray for those who are struggling right now with health concerns, financial concerns, issues that maybe are unrelated to even this whole year that we've been through.

But God, I ask today that you would help us all as we move into the new year to establish spiritual patterns that our future self will thank you for.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.