You Are Always Becoming // Formed Pt. 1 // Luke Humbrecht

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast.

The Church of the Lookout is an old of Colorado, and our vision is Jesus, abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love.

Visit us online at thelookout.ch so good to see you guys.

I'm gonna invite Anastasia to come on up to the stage.

Everybody, welcome, Anastasia.

Come on.

There we go.

That's how we like to do it.

Here, let's come to the front so everybody can see you.

So Anastasia is one of our awesome kiddos, part of Lookout Kids, the Shield family.

Um she asked me during worship if she could share a testimony with you all.

Would you guys like to hear a testimony from Anastasia?

Awesome.

What would you like to share?

So I was tubing on a river and there's like a mini waterfall.

I was on the smallest tube, but um then I flipped over forward.

I flipped in the water, and the two was on top of me, but I couldn't get it off of me because it was like a magnet through the water.

Um and brother, he yaded out of his tube to try to get me, and but I was too wiggly, and mom was like so scared, like crashing out scared.

Crashing out scared, yeah.

Um and so there was uh mom and her daughter, and she was a life god, and she pulled me up on her too.

So yeah.

Um your life was saved.

You didn't go under you didn't drown underwater.

No, I I felt like I was like about to drown.

I was like couldn't touch the water, and mom thought that um mom thought that um he was like he forgot it was like not deep that I could reach the whole way.

Um yeah.

Do you think do you think Jesus was with you?

Yeah, he was like he knew he wanted me to like share the rest of my story.

So he gave me that that go to lift me up too.

And he I know he lifted me up because he wanted me to share the heart, share my heart with the whole world and make it better.

That's so awesome.

Is there anything else you want us to know, Anastasia?

No.

No, okay, that's so good.

Thank you so much for sharing your testimony.

You know what?

God has an awesome plan for your life, and that's why he pulled you up out of the water because he loves you and he made you for a special purpose to tell the whole world of his love.

You know that?

That's awesome.

Everybody give it up for Anastasia.

Thank you.

You can take a seat, okay?

Awesome.

Come on.

So good.

Good morning, everybody.

Good to see you this morning.

Uh, if you have your Bibles, we open up to Romans chapter 12.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

That's where we're gonna start today.

Romans chapter 12.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

If you don't have a Bible and you would like one, you will see some blue Bibles potentially on these back tables, but certainly out in the lobby, you'll see blue Bibles.

If you need a Bible, you can uh take one.

It's our gift to you.

And uh yeah.

Um and so this morning we, like Jesse said, we're just we're gonna start a new body of teaching for the next several weeks, and and I think it'll be great foundation laying for us.

And so um I'm gonna read, uh we'll start in Romans chapter 12 and we'll build from there.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

Sound good?

All right.

This is Paul writing to the church in Rome.

And here's what he says He says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Let's pray together.

Jesus, we thank you.

We thank you for your mercy.

I thank you for Anastasia's story of mercy.

I thank you that you find us wherever we are in your mercy and you pull us from one thing into another.

You never leave us as we are.

God, I thank you that as we open your scriptures today, would you get our attention, would you call us into your thoughts, into your life?

And uh and today, Jesus, help us to order our lives around your love.

We welcome your Holy Spirit to speak to us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So uh as you know, life in Christ is a life of ongoing transformation.

And we love stories of transformation.

We love before and after stories, do we not?

Um, have you ever witnessed somebody that went through a complete transformation in maybe a certain area of life?

Um could be that student, that scrawny high school student that signed up for the army, right?

And they leave, and you're like, there's no way you're gonna make it.

And then they leave, and like a summer later, two years later, they come back and they're ripped, right?

They're just jacked, and they look at you in the eye, and they're paying attention, they're asking good questions, and they're making their bed, right?

I mean, it's an it's incredible, like a transformation, just very quickly, like that.

It's like they were one thing, then all of a sudden they're a different thing.

Something happened over that period of time.

And maybe uh maybe for some people that's like a health journey.

And some of you have been on a health journey, uh, which may or may not involve weight loss, but some people people start health regimens that involve uh involve a dramatic change in diet, lifestyle, behavior.

They caught a vision for a new kind of life.

They were surrounded by people around them to help them get them the tools and the plan to get there.

They hit the gym, they started doing burpees, and voila, right?

They just it's something happened that was dramatic.

Now they're walking with confidence, they're at home in their own body.

We've seen that happen.

Maybe you've been through that journey, maybe you've seen other people uh been through a journey like that, like a health journey.

And around this room, there's no doubt, if we went, if I handed that microphone, which we're not gonna do, but if I handed that microphone around this room, if you were to talk about your own stories of transformation, I know around this room there's stories of what your life was like before meeting Jesus and what your life was like after meeting Jesus.

Who has a story?

Has God made a change in anybody's life here this morning?

Come on.

Jesus does not leave us, he meets us where we are, but he never leaves us as we are.

There's something about his very presence that gets to us.

Why?

Because there's something about when we come to Christ, we are transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of marvelous light.

Somebody say amen.

Come on.

And this is what we get to celebrate.

Now, I have been through a huge uh journey as well.

Even just look at my time here at the church.

Here's a photo from about, I don't know, 25 years ago, 20 years ago.

This is me.

Um I I tend I show a lot of old school photos of me here just because I want you just to know, I just want nobody to forget I had hair at one point in time, okay?

And I I'm not trying to live in the glory days, all right.

I'm in my glory days, but I just sometimes I wish, right?

Sometimes I wish.

So, you know, so that was me, and then you know, transformation 20 years later, here would be a photo of me.

Look at this guy.

Come on.

Pastoral, look how pastoral he is.

Got glasses, he's sharp.

Look at that, leaning over like I got something to say.

But you know what?

Transformation never quite stops.

Here's my vision for transformation this next year.

I want to see what you guys think of this, all right?

All right, I don't have to stay the same.

I'm becoming a new person, all right?

So you guys can tell me later if you think that's a good one.

But um, you know, so we go through stories of transformation.

Transformation follows all of us.

Some of us know positive transformation, but maybe you've experienced a negative transformation.

Or maybe a better word for that would be deformation.

Maybe not transformation, but deformation.

And it could happen in a lot of different ways.

Someone who suffers a traumatic loss or a grief, and slowly over time they start to give themselves to coping mechanisms.

Maybe that's gambling, maybe that's substance abuse of some kind.

We've seen it.

Maybe you've experienced that yourself.

And if that's your your story, you know, you're not the only one, right?

Or it could be somebody who's gained the whole world.

Everything has seemed to go right for them.

Their career just continues to, you know, to yield, just to be fruitful.

Um, but they lose focus in that, and it's not enough.

And so they lose their soul.

It's like we were singing, um, take the world but give me Jesus.

And even Jesus said something about that, that whoever, you know, uh is it a good thing if you gain the world but lose your very soul, right?

And so some people can get lost in a life and be deformed even through accumulation.

Success can deform you as well.

Do you understand that?

So, greed, maybe lavish spending, maybe the lack of compassion, right?

Um, maybe you know a high school graduate, again, who was once on fire for Jesus.

They were the ones at every youth camp at the front, they were worshiping with their hands up and the whole thing, but they went off to college and something happened at college, and maybe it was the intensity of that environment, new ideas, the people they were with, and somehow it accumulates into what we could call a crisis of faith.

And, you know, to be fair, not every crisis of faith is a bad thing.

Oftentimes God brings us through a season where things have to be disillusioned so we can refind them again.

So even if you're disillusioned, you're not at the end of your story.

I just want to leave that there.

If that's a story that you're in.

But we've seen that.

And high schoolers, you know, you know, junior high high school, listen to me.

You can come back from camp, you can do all the things, but there are forces in this world that can affect the seeds that God has planted in you.

And we have to be aware of that.

We have to be the aware of that in our marriages.

I talk to couples sometimes who, after 10 years of marriage, they'll come back to me.

They said, I don't know what happened.

Uh, I'm disappointed.

My spouse, can you believe this?

My spouse has changed as a person.

And I always look at them like they're looking for me for answers.

It's like, well, what did you think they're what did you think was gonna happen?

Like, well, I thought they were gonna be, you know, I married that person, they're gonna be the same person.

They're not the same person they used to be.

I always ask them, like, what do you what did you expect?

Did you expect they would always be the same?

Because the truth is, it's not.

You're not the same person as you were when you got married, you're not the same person 10, 20 years.

You're becoming a different kind of person.

Here's the question: What kind of person are you becoming?

It's not if, but what, right?

Here's another way to say it.

You are always being formed by something.

The question is not if, but by what and into whom.

Okay?

And I want you to remember that because this is going to be a through line for the next several weeks.

Here's what I want you to know: transformation is not a one and done event.

It is a lifetime of becoming.

It's a lifetime of becoming.

This is important for us to know, including us as Christians, because I don't believe, especially in this time and era, that we take seriously enough the forces at work to form us into the patterns and the schemes of this world.

We don't take that uh seriously enough.

It is true that when we come into the Christ, you're not the same person you used to be.

When you confess the name of Jesus and you surrender your life to him, there is something supernatural, miraculous, instantaneous about a transfer of kingdom that you come from.

That is very true about you.

You're transferred in identity, you are you are made clean, you're made right, you are your sins are atoned for.

I mean, there's you you come into supernaturally something that happens in a single moment.

You come into the kingdom of God.

Praise God.

He lets us in before making us earn it.

Amen.

He doesn't say transform first and then you're in.

He didn't say that.

He said, You are my beloved.

If you receive that, there is something new about you.

And guess what?

Now you get to spend the rest of your life growing into that person that I always knew that you you could be.

This is what God does with us.

He says, Come on and take your first steps towards me.

But how many of you know that salvation, when you take your first steps towards Jesus, how beautiful it is to take your first steps towards Jesus.

But they still are your first two steps.

And then the good news is you get to spend the rest of your life being loved by God, learning about Him, becoming free, becoming whole, becoming healed.

This is what Paul is saying in this passage.

He says, Listen, you have an invitation to re-take the rest of your life now and reorient your whole life around Christ and His kingdom.

We're invited to be disciples, your better apprentices, right?

We're learning a new way.

We're practicing a new way to be with Jesus, become like him, and do what he did.

And this was so core for Paul that even before he wrote his letters to the Romans, he had already written several letters.

One of them was to the Galatians.

In Galatians chapter 4, 19, he says this he says, My little children, for whom I am again in anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.

Galatians 4 · chapter mention

So I just feel the words of Paul as he's spending time with these churches.

Like, listen, I am like a mother in angle, like in childbirth.

There's something so stirring in me.

There's something, there's there's something at work in me, and I am what I'm after, and this is Paul.

He says, Listen, I am everything I am at about, is for the image of Christ, for Christ himself to be born in you and formed in you.

Because Christianity, as you guys know, is not just believing about Jesus, it's over time becoming like him, beholding him, and being transformed into his image and likeness.

Amen?

Alright, you guys with me?

So this idea of being formed, the theological classical term is this word sanctification.

It's a lifelong work of agreeing with God about reality and about ourselves.

Because nobody's quite arrived yet.

Anybody arrived in the room?

Yeah?

Anybody?

No?

Not a single hand.

I mean, I'm I've arrived, but I'm hoping that over the series you guys will arrive.

I'm hope, I'm pleading with you to arrive to where I'm at.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

We are on this journey.

Nobody is an expert in this room.

We're all learners at different phases of a journey.

And so we're being formed.

And so here's a few questions we're going to be asking.

Number one, how do we transform?

Specifically into the image of Christ and the love of God.

Number two, what are the forces that are forming us without us even knowing?

What are the forces that we're not even conscious of?

It's the water we're swimming in.

Three, how can we actively participate?

This is important.

How can we actively participate with God's work in our lives so that every part of our lives, not just the church-going ones, but every part of our lives is actually being transformed around the love of God.

Do you guys know that?

Sometimes we have the sacred secular divide, we have our spiritual parts of our life, and then we have every other part of our life.

That's not like that's not the lens that we're called to in Christ.

Every part of your life that matters, every part of your life is sacred.

And it is possible to organize every single part of your life around the love of God.

Come on.

So if you're a guest here today, if you're just dropping in, you're like, okay, what are we talking about today?

You might not even know if you buy into all of this yet.

Maybe you believe in fate, just everything just kind of works out.

And I'm in control of who I become, and that's it.

Okay.

So you can walk out the door today and never come back, but I'm just telling you, this still applies to you.

Because listen to me, through the stories you believe, the habits that you give yourself to, and the community or lack thereof that's around you, you are becoming a certain kind of person in this world.

And my question to you is is that the person that you want to be?

And are you becoming the kind of person that embodies the love of God for the sake of the world?

So back to Romans 12 where we started.

In view of God's mercy, it says, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.

And so Paul is he's drawing us back into this, it all starts with the work of God.

There's something merciful God has done.

And because of our view of Him, he's saying, Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to offer your bodies as a sacrifice.

You're not sacrificing animals anymore.

We're not killing things as an act of worship for God.

Now you are alive.

Now offer your body and your whole way of life now as a sacrifice to God.

And this is what he said.

He said, This is your worship.

So just to be clear, our our songs are awesome when we sing.

Sometimes we've heard a worship as the singing part of our service.

We love that because it's prayers put to music and it excavates our hearts to the language of what we want to speak to God.

But he's saying, listen, your whole life is an offering to God.

And so he says this in view of God's mercy, offering your bodies.

Here's what he says: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

There's a couple key words here.

Conform to this word schema.

Do not be conformed, do not be pressed into a pattern, a schematic.

That this world has a schematic.

And it's uh this this this verb tense is a uh is is one that it's it's present imperative.

And so uh I was told earlier this week what that means is that it's something being done to us, but we're also kind of participating in.

So it's something that's happening to us, the schema of this world.

He said, instead of that, be transformed, metamorpho, by the renewal of your mind.

So metamorpho like metamorphosis, be transformed.

Again, this present imperative word, which means that you're not the one that's doing the transforming.

Transformation is happening to you and it's ongoing, it's continual, but you are participating in it.

God is the one doing the transforming, but you're participating in his transforming work.

So it's not a one-time thing, it's a process of keeping ourselves availed to the work of God in our lives.

Do you know that even as a Christian, at some point we can cut ourselves off from availing ourselves to the love of God and the transformational work in our life?

We actually can do that.

Just because you've made two steps towards Christ doesn't mean that at some point you can't be lured into another way or another direction.

And so Paul's saying, listen, do everything you can to submit to the ongoing work of God.

So, in other words, you do the you do the presenting, God does the transforming.

All right?

You do the presenting, present yourselves.

You do that.

That's your part, and God does the transforming.

Now, the way that we think that transformation works, especially in our culture, is information.

Right?

We think transformation comes from information.

I'm just gonna learn more and consume content.

But I think we've seen, and you probably would agree, that doesn't quite work for real transformation.

The scripture says, do not conform.

Listen to this, or else you will be deformed.

But it's not enough to be informed, you must be counterformed so that we can be transformed.

Do you not conform or else you'll be deformed?

But it's not enough to be informed.

We must be counterformed, formed in a different direction so that we can be transformed.

There's a lot of ways to talk about transformation.

And the writers of the New Testament, they were they were very certain of this that there are other things at work in our lives.

Um John in 1 John chapter 2, here's how he put it, starting in verse 15.

1 John 2 · chapter mention

He says, Do not love the world or the things in this world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Okay?

For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

And the world is passing away along with its desires.

But whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Do not love the things of this world.

Really?

Broncos?

Food?

Movies?

All of it?

I can't love anything?

Is that what he's saying?

He's not saying don't enjoy life.

He's not enjoy the life that God's given us.

He's saying, listen, there are things at work, and when we fall in love to our attachments of the way that the world works, it's going to have an effect on you.

It's going to affect the quality of love that we live in, we live from and we live towards.

And he really sums it up: the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life.

And again, I'm not going to have you raise your hand, but have you ever succumbed to the desires of the flesh and the eyes and the pride of life?

There are seductions all around us.

There are temptations that face us on every side.

But he says, listen, all of that at some point is passing away.

But the one who does the will of God, who presents themselves before God, is submitted to the ways of God.

There is an abiding life that's available that can never be taken from you.

You know, eternal life doesn't wait till you die.

You can start eternal life now by entering into the life of Jesus.

Eternal life is a quality of life, it's a quality of living in a love that can never be taken from you.

And it can actually form you from the inside out in every particular way.

John Mark Comer says it like this there are no accidental saints.

There are no accidental saints, meaning you don't become a man or woman of God by going with the flow.

Every man or every saint in history, anybody would consider a saint, they took seriously the work of keeping themselves, organizing their life around the love of God and the transformational work.

Because if we're not intentionally formed by Jesus, we will be unintentionally formed by the world.

Now, how does how how might this look?

Some of you, you maybe have felt these things.

I'll just name a few practical things, and you felt this in your life.

You didn't choose any of these things, but I'm sure you felt the effects of this because it's the air that we're breathing.

Um, how many of you guys have ever felt hurried?

Just just hurried, okay?

You're lying if you're not raising your hand, all right?

So in our culture, we've so normalized hurry, we call it productivity, so we feel better about ourselves.

Hurry isn't a scheduling problem, it's a condition that makes love impossible because love takes time.

Love is mostly inefficient.

You cannot be a person of love while always being on the go.

Okay?

Because love lingers.

Love is long suffering.

And time is the one thing that hurry refuses to give.

So what happens when all of us are some are are living our days hurried and we don't even know why?

We have no idea why.

What happens is it makes us incapable of being present to God and present to the people around us.

You didn't choose that.

It chose you.

Okay?

What about this?

What about hostility?

This belief that somebody is out to get you.

And this political environment in our nation right now, this is an environment that has contributed to it.

Um and and there's a lot of things around this.

Uh, you can control people if you can get them to be against each other.

This has everything to do with what happened in Rwanda and the genocide there.

There's a lot more there.

And so, what but what happens is when we when there's a generally an operating system of againstness, then the only response is to live our life guarded, cautious, always relating to people with a 10-foot pole.

We never quite know who they are or what their intentions are, so I'm gonna keep you at a distance.

We're being taught to keep people away, which again is antithetical to love.

You can't live in a culture of hostility and still cultivate a culture of hospitality.

It's not the same operating system.

So, but but you're being we're being formed into hostility.

Here's how you ought to think about the people around, right?

We're less trusting than ever.

People don't even trust pastors anymore.

And I understand why I think on some level there's been so many stories of abuse and so many stories of lost trust, okay?

But we don't trust people that should be trusted.

Where everybody is, we're just this kind of in like just a suspicion that permeates everything.

Hostility, right?

Anybody felt that?

Okay, here's a third one.

Hyper-individualism.

This is a really interesting one in our culture.

Individualism in itself is not bad.

God loves you as an individual.

Hyper-individualism is something that we organize our entire lives around our own preferences, but we just call it freedom and independence.

Um, really, it's about self-interest over the self of others.

I'm just mostly concerned with my past, my path, my growth, my calling, over and above, giving ourselves to a collective, either a society or even a body like a church.

We don't even think about what's good for the church.

We think about what's good for me.

And we've been formed to prefer individual interests over communal interests.

Every kind of community, not even to the church, any kind of community is feeling this in the modern age.

We leave churches based on preferences and opinions.

But how many of you know God saves not only persons, but he's shaping for himself a people?

So when God looks down here, he's looking at us as a people.

The larger list, we could just keep going and going and going and going.

There's a larger list: greed, distraction, compromise, and more.

These are formational elements.

Nobody chose them.

But here's the good news.

That was a lot of bad news, but here's the good news.

God has different plans for us.

Isaiah 64 8 says this But now, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, and you are our potter, and we are the we are the work of your hand.

Listen, guys, that's incredibly good news.

We are on a wheel, so to speak, and if we stay on the wheel, with his loving hands shaping us and molding us, he will transform us patiently and over time to learn his ways, to become like him, and to, as a people, as a community, live as a prophetic sign and wonder of a new coming age of the kingdom of God.

That is the role of the church.

Now, all that said, we're not the only ones to live in a uh in a time period that faces unique pressures and formational things that form us from the inside out.

There's been several other periods of history.

One of my favorites, and we haven't talked about it a whole lot here, but one of my favorites globally happened in the third and fourth century is a time period marked by what we've come to know is desert fathers and mothers.

Has anybody ever heard that term before?

Desert fathers and mothers.

It's a beautiful time in history.

They didn't think so at the time, because what happened was this is when Christianity, 300 years in, was becoming successful.

This is when it was actually, it wasn't persecution, it was actually all working.

And it went from illegal to advantageous because Constantine legalizes it in 313, and he just says, All right, everybody's a Christian now.

Get with the program, all right?

So that created a lot of new dynamics, both in the church and in the world.

And uh within a lifetime, it became the religion of the empire.

And so what happened was being a Christian stopped costing anything, didn't cost anything anymore.

And so that has consequences too.

When your faith no longer costs you anything, that has consequences, and and that's when for them the trouble started.

It wasn't persecution, it was success.

The church became respectable, and so then the idolatry of the cities and of the nation started to move from the outside of the walls into the inside.

And this is where one of the desert fathers, later known as Antony, he went to the desert.

It was a little actually before Constantine, 270 through 271, and he's like, I gotta get, we gotta get out of the city.

There's too much idolatry.

And so men and women and uh they walk out to the deserts of Egypt and Syria and eventually Palestine, not to escape difficulty.

It wasn't to escape difficulty, listen.

It was to be cleansed of the idols of culture and the idols in the church and the idols of their own hearts.

They were fleeing the world to save the world.

They believed that the only way to be of any use to the world was to stop being formed by it first.

And at first they went out alone.

They were monks living in the desert, these solitary caves all across Egypt.

It doesn't sound very appealing, if you ask me.

Um, there's different kinds of wildernesses that might you know rank to the top of my list, but we're talking about, you know, they walked maybe um 40 to 60 miles outside of Alexandria.

And they started living into this new way of life.

At first it was solitary, um, they weren't just monks living in caves.

But then people started leaving the city to come find them in the desert to both receive wisdom and to be called into repentance.

And then over decades, what happened is those solitary figures started organizing into communities.

It's like, all right, we need to pull together out in the desert to preserve a way of life in community.

So they started to name the shape of this way of life, and they started creating this kind of documenting a way of life of like, hey, this is how we're going to pray together, and when to eat, and when to work, and when to be silent, and and how we interact with our community.

And they started kind of uh uh yeah, somebody wrote it down at one point.

Two centuries later, somebody named Benedict ended up simplifying it into four ordinary categories of life called prayer and rest and relationships and work, and they just kind of decided, hey, listen, if we're gonna preserve ourselves for God, um, we need to give ourselves to a way of life that is different than the way of life back in the city.

And it was a way of kind of naming every part of their life, not just the spiritual ones, and it was a structure that later became known as what they would call the rule of life.

And and what happened was as they were living into this together, there was, they were marked by holiness and purity and power.

And people would come out and say, You're you're living into something that's different than what's in the church, that's different than what's in the city.

And it became a remarkable period of church history by all measures.

It could be considered one of the greatest, to use our words, revivals or spiritual renewals in church history, because there was a purity that was happening, that was actually a witness to the world again.

And and people would leave the city.

And so we have to find something, we have to find who is living into a life set apart for God again.

And so officials and bishops and merchants, ordinary people, made the trip out of the city into these deserts just to be with these desert fathers and mothers.

And then in these monastic communities that were that were forming, um, all of these things started to take shape.

Hospitals and books and farming communities, they redistributed food to the poor, they even slaves were being freed in this context.

And so it was their courage, listen, it was their courage and resolve that brought back a potency to the church in a culture that was deforming in the way that they were doing things.

They said, we need to live into a different kind of way that were preserved for the purposes of God again.

So, you know, as I share that story, you might have a couple different thoughts.

Maybe you're like, oh man, I want that.

I want to move to the desert.

Get me out.

I mean, every every like probably once a week I hear somebody saying, I'm out, I'm out of Colorado, I'm I'm moving to Kansas, right?

I'm moving to Montana.

So, but most of us are not, right?

Nobody here is moving to the deserts of Egypt, all right.

Um, I live in Kenosha Farms, all right?

This is not Egypt.

This is not third and fourth century.

I live in a suburb of Boulder, a suburb of Erie.

The point here is not that we're fleeing all this persecution, all these things, and so we got to form these monastic communities and let's scrap it all.

Let's get a that's not what we're talking about.

This is our life, and we have the context of life that we're actually living living in.

But the wisdom that we can learn from ancient Christians, particularly the desert fathers and mothers, is how might we, in the context of our life, index our lives and our habits and the way of life and the culture that we're that we're building around the love of God.

So his love stays the very center of the shape and the pattern and the texture of our lives.

And so what they called it was a rule of life, which is kind of a weird term.

It doesn't mean rules of life, it just means we're gonna organize ourselves to be uh uh to make sure that we're centered on what God says is important and not assume that we don't have things that are shaping us from the outside.

So this rule of light, this with this word rule actually means trellis.

It comes from a word regular, which is where we get the word trellis.

And you know, a tr a trellis, as you guys know, is a structure that's built so that vines can grow.

Um if a vine starts growing and it remains on the ground, there's a lot that's gonna happen to it.

It will not be exposed to the elements it needs, it will not be uh fruitful.

And so a trellis, really, the purpose of a trellis is designed to keep the life of the vine exposed to the sun and keep it growing somewhere.

The point is not the trellis, the point is the vine.

The point is the life that is that is growing.

But a trellis serves to make sure that the life is structured in a way that keeps it available to the right things.

And so, in the same way, in order to be formed, and listen to this, in order to be formed into the image of Christ and not be deformed by the world, we must give ourselves to a shape and pattern of life with practices and convictions and a community that helps us stay exposed to the white hot love of God.

I'm gonna say that again.

In order to be formed into the image of Christ and not deformed by the world, especially in this age that we live in, we must give ourselves to a shape and pattern of life, both with practices, convictions, and a community that keep us exposed to the white, hot love of God.

Imagine building a way of life where every part of your life is organized around giving and receiving the love of God, being present with God, being present with others, patient, purposeful, attentive, generous, hospitable, self-giving, bold in faith.

Just imagine if the love of God was the central organizing figure of our very lives.

And in our language here, we use like we use words like the presence of God and the family of God and the mission of God, but it's just another way of just a catch-all of ways, saying, here's our life with God, our life with others, our life and the work He's given us to do.

And what if as a community we took seriously counterformational habits and convictions that we lived into together and we called ourselves up into, not because they're the point, not because we're into religious duty all of a sudden and we're back into law, but because we are so serious about the moment that we're living in and the stakes in which we're living that we're willing to do anything to keep the love of God at the center of every single part of our life.

Not just our church life, our hobbies, our health and our fitness, our finances, not just your nuclear family, but your church family, your communal family, that everything we do we're filtering through.

How can we give ourselves to God thoroughly in every part of our life?

What if we became a community of fidelity to God's word in a culture of compromise?

Through taking seriously immersion in the scriptures as a way of life?

What if we became a community of rest and delight in a culture of hurry and exhaustion?

Through the practices of not only prayer that keeps us communing with God, but through Sabbath keeping and ways of interrupting our life to call our attention back to God?

What if we became a community of covenant love in this culture of hyper-individualism through just not considering community optional, but we actually consider it formational, that this is part of us living into becoming a people of God together.

It actually reflects his glory on this earth.

What if we became a community of welcome in a culture of hostility where it's just normal for us to open up our tables and our doors and our homes and our hearts because that's what Jesus did and that's how he expects us to live?

Is anybody awake?

I could keep going.

But there are things that deform us and there's things that can reform us.

What about what if we became a community of purposeful stewardship where your work and your vocation and your giftings were stewarded with purpose in a time where so many will tell you that it's all meaningless, that it's all we're all just atoms floating through the air.

It's not true.

You have been designed by God, you have been, you are a unique workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.

And this is what we get to do, but it means that we have to pay attention to how we organize our lives and what we give ourselves to.

This is what we're gonna be talking about for the next several weeks around the lookout.

How are we being purposeful about the love of God being at the center of everything that we do and how we organize as a community?

Does that sound fair?

It's a way of life that happens not just about what happens in church on Sunday, it's the day-to-day ordinary life with God.

We're breaking down sacred secular divide.

It's we're recognizing that the Spirit of God is not just in church.

The Spirit of God has been given to us to empower your Monday through your Saturday.

There is no moment that is insignificant to God because He desires we live in His fullness all the time.

And the reason this matters is because at the lookout, we're not here to play church.

And if you want to play church, if you came because you're looking for a good church, um, you know, just for a Sunday morning experience, we're gonna be very disappointed very quickly.

Um, because I have no desire to inspire you unless that inspiration leads you to reorganize your life around the love of God.

That's the only thing that has the potential to change you.

My words cannot change you.

But when we give ourselves to God, living on his mission, we can actually become a people who have tasted and actually extended the awe-inspiring love of God.

Okay.

I could keep going, guys.

This is exciting to me.

I believe we're called to be a transformational community, not just to encounter God ourselves, but to extend it powerfully in the way that we live our lives.

I believe this matters now more than ever.

And again, there's there's all kinds of places in church history.

This is one last thing, and then we're gonna wrap it up for this morning, okay?

But the the reason this matters, there's there's another point in history that uh a beautiful example of this playing out in Charles Marsh's biography, Strange Glory, a life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Some of you have heard of this man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived in the early 20th century.

Um, and and he was living at a time um during Nazi Germany.

They were being a church in Germany trying to figure out how do we be a faithful witness of God and the life of the kingdom while there is an uprising of a whole other way of life.

Can you imagine this for a second?

So B G Dietrich Bonhoeffer is this young Pastor, and he's just trying to figure this out.

He's like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible.

This is like, what are we going to do?

And so he and others formed a church that had a discipleship school.

And at one point, somebody came to visit, a young historian came to visit this discipleship school, and they were kind of cautious because they're like, Man, this seems a little over the top.

This is too much spiritualism.

You guys are just kind of into your, you know, over you're over-spiritualizing everything.

So he came to check in on the school and just wondering, is this even effective?

And so he came and he had his questions.

So the first thing that happened was Bonhoeff reportedly took him on a rowing trip across the Oder Sound, a body of water right next to their school, and got out of the rowboat and led them up onto a hill with a clearing where they could see down on this military airfield, fighter planes taking off and soldiers drilling.

The Third Reich was organizing and they were marching all around them.

And the records show that Bonhoeffer was speaking of this new generation of Germans whose disciplines were being formed, quote, for a kingdom of hardness and cruelty.

And he said that a superior discipline of life among Christians would be necessary.

Here's what he said you have to be stronger than these tormentors to find that find everywhere today.

You have to be stronger than these tormentors that you find everywhere today.

In other words, Bonhoeffer goes up on this hill.

He said, Listen, our only chance is if this is stronger than that.

This must become stronger than that.

And he was pointing down, he's like, we don't stand a chance if we don't have something that we're living into that has the potency and the power to be stronger than the formation that's happening all around us in very effective ways.

That might sound super dramatic for a Sunday like this, but I'm telling you, in the core of my being, I just believe that we're in a moment that's going to separate the church that shines in glory from the church that gets obscured in ambiguity.

And it's a people that are willing to give themselves wholeheartedly to the love of God, willing to ask ourselves, what must we do to be formed into the image of God so that the world, not just for us, but so that the world can see that He is good.

Bill Johnson said it like this we owe the world an encounter with God.

This starts with our very lives.

So here's what I want to do this morning.

Just take a moment here today.

And just join me.

Just close your eyes across the room.

But I just want you to reflect on your own life.

What has been most forming you in this season?

If somebody saw your calendar or your checkbook or your life, what would they say your life is organized around?

Now I understand that's not totally a fair question because we have very important things that take up a lot of time in our calendar in our checkbook.

But what I'm saying is, if you did an audit and you said, what kind of person am I becoming?

Am I just going with the flow?

Or do I see transformation into the image of likeness of God?

Maybe you feel deformed.

And you just know there's parts of your life that are just not helping with that.

Listen, if that's if that's you, it's okay.

Like you can submit to the potter.

He is our potter, we are the clay.

You just form that into a prayer.

Say, God, I there's parts of my life I'm feeling like off the rails.

I'm feeling like I don't know if I'm looking more like you.

I just encourage you today just to bring that back to the Father and say, God, what do you have to say to me?

How do you want to shape me and mold me?

It's individual for us, but but collectively.

I think there's an opportunity for us as well to just say, hey, Jesus, as a people, we want to look more like you.

And God, would you get our attention if there's any ways we have been conformed into the pattern of this world?

I just ask that you would get our attention and draw us back to repentance even.

So that we can be renewed in our minds that lead to our habits and our language and our behaviors and our community.

I just encourage you to hold that prayer before the Lord as we sing.

Here's what I want to do.

I want to invite some of our ministry team.

If you're in a prayer team, I want you to maybe just come to the sides of the room.

And I do want to give a chance.

Maybe you're here today, and you just know in your heart, like I I need to I need to present myself before God in a fresh way.

And it feels like a turning of a season.

And you felt pulled on every side, but this is a chance for you to pray with somebody, say, I just want to bring myself back to God and say, God, I want to dedicate this season to you to be shaped and molded exactly like you want me to be.

And if that's you today, maybe it's the first time ever.

Actually, like praying with somebody, we invite you to do that.

Maybe it's the thousandth time, but you're just like, this is a moment in life.

I just, I want to respond.

There's nothing that is more important than to be responsive to what God is stirring in your heart.

Nothing more important.

So if that's you, do not walk out that door.

Do not just run out that door.

Pay attention to the work of God in your life.

I don't want to give you a moment.

If that's you, you can just even make your way over to anybody on the side of the room who's willing to pray with you.

And listen, in this season, as we as we continue this series, we're gonna unpack this more to cooperate the transformational work in our life, and it's gonna be super exciting.

There's so many cool things coming up over the next several weeks.

And so we want to invite you to come back and be a part of this.

But this is part of what it means to live in the white hot love of God.

Amen.

So as we end here today, I'm gonna pray a blessing over us as we go because we're going in the love of the Father.

We're going with all the beautiful gifts of heaven and the riches in his hands that he sends with us.

So may the Lord bless you and keep you.

May he make his face shine upon you.

May He be gracious to you and lift up His countenance upon you and give you rest and give you rest.

And with that said, I bless you to go in the peace and the strength of the kingdom of God.

Love you guys.