Greater Than | Part Three | Pastor David Kalamen

Thank you for listening to the Kelowna Christian Center Podcast.

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Well, it's good to see everyone here this morning.

We know we have a lot of our church family that are on school break and gone away for a few weeks of uh of recreation, rebuilding.

We're very grateful for the opportunity during the year.

I just want to share my gratitude for your prayers while I was away.

I feel a little nervous this morning.

It's been six months since I've really been in the pulpit preaching.

Welcome back, fellow.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

You know, some of you are aware that for two years uh we've had smoke and fire in the Okanagan, and some of you again were aware of the uh surgery that happened on my lungs to found out that my lungs had been scarred, um and it was interfering and compromising uh my health.

And along with that, there was a cough, and some of you witnessed that.

And then one night in uh in early October, uh coming back, uh just uh just enjoying the day, went to bed and start having some severe shakes and and a fever that went to almost 104, and I was rushed to the hospital that night, and uh that was the first of facing three consecutive bouts of pneumonia.

So one uh they say um dealing with one at my age, at my old uh ripe uh seasoned age, uh is enough to take some people out, and I'm very grateful that I survived that.

But then to be hit again after the second bout that was became much more serious, and our family doctor came in to visit me one night, and uh I was unresponsive.

And as a result of that, there was a decision to uh take me down to the trauma ward and restart my heart.

Uh they said that I had lost all of my physiological reserves to fight, and uh I understand that that's exactly what was happening.

My blood pressure, my my pulse, my breathing had become very erratic, and uh my wife and sister came down and then they did the procedure, which I'm grateful worked.

Praise the Lord.

I'm still back on this side of terra firma.

Um, but but while waiting for that procedure, I wanted to talk to you about two things, uh, two thoughts that just overwhelmed my thinking.

The first thought was this that it was well with my soul.

I don't know how much you uh know that about your own soul until it's tested in the fire of potential not you're not waking up again.

Uh but I knew in my heart everything was okay with my soul.

And uh that I had no regrets.

I didn't have to uh call somebody up immediately and ask forgiveness because my, you know, there was an offense or an issue between us.

I actually was at peace uh whether I stayed, whether I lived or died, I was at I was at peace.

And that's a that's a powerful experience to have, uh to be at peace in those kinds of times.

Excuse me.

The second thing that I feel felt inside was there was no fear of dying.

No fear of dying.

I know who I belong to, that I don't belong to anyone but Jesus.

And I know where I'm going, and I was at peace with not only my my fellow brothers and sisters and the world around me, but I was at peace with God.

And uh I want to tell you, I'm I'm grateful for that experience, just for that fact that I am able to stand here before you today and know that God, you know, delivered me.

I know it was his will that I be here, but also it was the prayers of God's people that kept me here.

And I know that God's purpose and intention for my life is not yet complete.

Uh when it is, I'll be happy to go home.

Right?

But we got things to do, and so I'm I'm committing myself to serving the Lord.

In the midst of that, sharing some of that with uh Pastor Brody, he said, Dad, when we're going through 1 John, it would be great for you to talk about life and death.

This paradox, this tension that uh happens to function all the way through the book of 1 John, portions of scripture that we already read uh this morning.

And when John introduced Jesus in his gospel, because there's the Gospel of John, and then 1 John, 2nd, 3rd are the epistles of the Old Testament or letters that he wrote to the church, in the Gospel that Jesus uh that Paul wrote, I mean John wrote, he wrote this.

He said, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

That sounds very, very complicated, but let me explain to you what he was trying to do, because as we attempt to be very relevant to our culture with the gospel, with the good news of Christianity, of what Jesus did at the cross and in the resurrection.

Um John was trying and attempting to do the same thing in his own culture.

And when he used this word, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, he was using a word that the Greeks understood in almost every other religion that was in the Mediterranean understood, and that was this uh this word Logos.

The word translated in the Greek was Logos.

He describes Jesus as the Logos.

Now that doesn't mean a lot to us in our culture today, but let me uh help you understand what what uh the culture, when they heard Jesus referred to as the Logos, how it would have affected them.

The Logos in that culture simply was the primary thought or the rationale behind the entire universe.

In other words, if we were looking at a novel, we would say it's the storyline.

If we were to look at a play, we would say it's the meta-narrative or the theme or the plot of the play.

But in philosophy and religion, and in the day in which John was living, he used this word very creatively and said, Jesus is the word.

And the word was with God, and the word is God.

This Logos, as he writes in the epistles, came, the one who created everything, came and presenced himself on earth.

And John said, We woke up every morning and gave this Logos a hug.

Can you imagine waking up every morning and giving God a hug?

The one who created it all, the one who gave rationale behind all of life that you're experiencing right now, the God who created the primary principle or reasoning for the existence of life, whether it be human life or universal life, that Logos manifested himself in physical flesh.

And John said, we woke up in the morning and gave him a hug.

That's my way of saying it.

That's how close God came to his creation.

And so when John introduces Jesus as the Logos, he said he's the creative intelligence behind all of life.

And if you want to understand life, if you want to understand your life, you're gonna have to get to know the Logos.

You're gonna have to get to know the rationale behind why life was created.

In this epistle or letter to the churches, John gives a new title to Jesus, and he says, He's the word of life, meaning he's not only the rationale behind it, but he's the one that is the source of the life behind what he created.

So if you want to know how to live and to live out life abundantly, you're going to have to welcome into your life not only the thinking and the rationale and the philosophy of Christ, but you're going to have to welcome Christ who is the very source of life.

Christianity is not a philosophy, it's not a religious experience from a perspective of taking on a rationale and thinking like a Christian, therefore you are one.

Christianity is deeper than that.

It requires not only a mindset, which we would call the logos, or understanding the philosophy behind life, but it's also understanding the very person who created it all for you.

Getting into his head and his thinking into your head is going to maximize your life.

So the juxtaposition to John's outline of Christ being the word of life, if you accept him, you'll know life and you'll be able to see life through his genius, through his eyes, and live life on his terms.

The juxtaposition to that is if you reject Christ, you're rejecting the source and the rationale behind why God created you.

And then living your life is going to be locked out in terms of knowing the purpose and the intention that God has you here for.

When John says that if you are born of God, the seed of eternal life, the principles of life, will be planted into you, into who you are, and you will love those who love God.

You'll be known as to be a Christian because of your love for your brothers and sisters, and you'll want to follow his word, which is the Logos.

You're going to say, I want to get to know as much about how God thinks about life as I possibly can, because the more I get to know about how He created it and why He created it the way He did, the more liberated and free and life-giving I'm going to experience in my life.

So this is what he's saying.

He's saying if you dismiss the wisdom of the Logos, if you dismiss a relationship to him who is the Logos, it is a choice to die.

It's a choice to die.

You are making a choice to die and not to live if you reject Jesus, the person, the Logos, and His thinking about how you should live.

Every time you reject Him, you die a little bit more.

Every time you reject His word about how you should live life and are disobedient to it, what we call sin, missing the mark of honoring the Lord, you're going to die a little bit every day.

So there's a choice.

And that choice is whether you want to know life and live it fully and abundantly, or whether you want to experience death and just die a little bit every day.

And so we have we have in our culture, and oftentimes culture reflects the the genre of what we're encounter, what we're experiencing.

You know, we had that we had that uh series called Survivor, and and much of this generation understands survival.

The survival of the fittest, the idea of hanging on there and being the last man standing, and what you have to do to actually be that person.

But you know, I saw a series and I absolutely hate the look of it called The Walking Dead.

Come on, anybody?

And The Walking Dead is again a representation of people who are alive but actually dead.

And this is what John is talking about.

He's saying, you can be alive but dead.

Walking around with death at work inside of you rather than life at work inside of you.

So let's talk about this because how it starts is through what we would talk about as the born-again.

The Apostle John uses the phrase in 1 John 3 9 that we read, describing a spiritual transition that's got to occur between who you were and what you could be if we are willing to move from death to life.

He describes it as being born of God.

And he says, Everyone who is born of God passes out of death and into life.

Now, this is not talking about something that will happen after you die.

This is not talking about life that you're going to experience after you die.

This is talking about something that will happen in the immediacy of now, when you surrender your life to God, and you're born of God, you will pass from death into life.

You will pass from knowing how to die daily to knowing how to live more abundantly every day of your life.

That's a good message.

The primary evidence of passing from death to life and being born again is that you're going to love those who love God.

And you're going to love his word.

He who has the Son, by accepting him as Lord and Savior, has the life, has that eternal life inside of him.

That eternal life is the Zoe life.

It means the life that God would live.

God wants you to live on the same level of life that He Himself is living.

Now that's when we talked about peace today.

He doesn't want you to search out for peace.

He wants you to experience His peace in the midst of your circumstances and allow that peace to rule in your life.

That's the eternal life.

That's the eternal life that has to do with the peace of God being welcomed into your life in such a way that it forever changes you.

This born of God idea is critical to our understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

And unfortunately, there are many churches that don't ever give a person an opportunity to become a Christian and experience being passed from death to life.

They talk about Christianity as a philosophy that you mentally affirm and agree to, but don't never experience the change and the shift.

I remember one of the churches in the city here asked me to come and minister.

My wife Carlene attended with me.

And this was the church that, you know, didn't have an awful lot of opportunity to talk about becoming a Christian.

And that the church was full that day, probably three, four hundred people.

And at the end of it, I shared a message, and then I said, listen, if you if you want this new heart, if you want this shift to take place in your life, take the hand of the person beside you and squeeze it.

Just let them know.

At the end of the service, I asked those of you who squeeze the hands, would you just raise your hand and tell me if you did that?

There were over 150 people that gave their life to Christ in Kelowna in one church.

People coming to the door as they were going out, crying and weeping because they experienced a shift in their life from death to life.

They knew that they were going to live.

What John talks about being born of God, the prophets talked about as having a new heart.

That he was going to give you a new heart and put a new spirit inside of you.

In essence, God was going to do a nature shift inside of you.

And what you were led to be and do before was going to change in a moment of time by a nature shift.

Jesus talked about it as you've got to be born again.

Nicodemus said, What do I have to do?

Do I have to go back into my mother's womb and come out?

He said, No, that's a natural process.

What I'm talking about is a spiritual process.

You're born into this world, but you've got to go back into the womb of God and be born of God.

Paul referred to it as the new creation.

He said, Everyone that accepts Christ is going to become a new creation.

And the old things of life are going to pass away, and new is going to come on the horizon.

What was will be gone.

What is will be changed.

What is possible will start to enter into your life.

Let me unfold that to you just a little bit because this good news story is important for our understanding.

In Genesis 1, Adam and Eve's creation was blessed.

And they were given the life of God.

They were created in the image of God.

The Bible says God breathed his life into them.

In Genesis 3, I'm going to do this quickly, but it's important to get this wrapped into our heart.

In Genesis 3, they disobeyed God's word, the Logos.

And death entered into their lives.

Not just spiritual death, meaning a separation from God, but physical death began to happen.

And we see evidence that their psychology and emotions and choices were affected when they started to feel things like shame that they'd never felt before.

And they began to run from God rather than to God.

And they began to blame everybody around them for their life rather than accepting responsibility.

We know that there was psychological, emotional, volitional shifts that began to take place, but also physically they began to die.

When a person sins, it actually adds to the spirit of death.

You die a little bit every time you sin.

The wages of sin is.

Come on.

The wages of sin is death.

You do it, and the wage you'll receive is a little bit more death.

And you can be the walking dead.

You can be walking in this life, and everybody may think that everything's going cool, but you're dying a little bit every day and every moment that you do things that are a departure from and a dismissal of who God says He is and how life should be.

So they did that.

And they separated it in Genesis chapter 5, verse 2, it says, After the fall, man created after his own image.

Genesis 5:2

That image had been marred and messed up with sin.

And by the chapter 6, when you read it, it says the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination or intent of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually.

That's how quickly things began to devolve.

Morally devolve.

Spiritually devolve.

How many of you know a little bit of sin goes a long way?

It's like a leaven.

The Bible says it leavens the whole.

When you hide a little bit, when you just commit a little bit of disobedience, a little bit of rebellion, a little bit of dishonor, it sows a seed that grows up into a large tree.

And how many of you know it's easy to rip out that little root when it's a when it's just a little weed, but when it's a tree, it's hard to bring it down.

And it can monopolize and take over your entire life.

So man has been looking for a cure to this fatal condition from that moment to this moment.

And there's all kinds of religions out there, but let me tell you about Christianity.

From the very right from the beginning, God begins to prepare humanity for a savior.

And he says, I'm sending one, I've got a solution.

And the prophets started talking about it that God's God is going to do an operation on us.

He's going to give us a new heart.

I didn't get a new heart that day in the hospital, but I got a the heart that I had was restarted, and I feel like it's a new life.

We see the promise, the prophets promising a new heart.

Heart referring to the core of your being, from which all of the issues of life proceed from.

This is why Solomon and Prophet.

Proverbs 423 said, Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows all of the issues of life.

So if all of the issues of life, how you look at life, how you face life, how you work through all the details of life, flow from the state of your heart, if the state of your heart is wrong and dysfunctional and diseased, if the heart is the problem, it's got to be changed.

Or else we look like Paul referred to the Pharisees and the religious leaders of his day as whitewashed uh, you know, tombstones in the cemetery, looking all nice and white on the outside, but dead bones on the inside.

You you can you can cover up with religion a lot of who you are, but unless the change happens from the inside out and there's a heart shift, then there's not going to be any change, and you're not going to know life.

You'll be a survivor.

You will not you will tolerate life, you will get by, but you will not know abundance in terms of what Jesus was talking about.

And David understood this paradigm and this conflict because he grew up knowing a little bit about the law of God, the logos, but he wound up doing some terrible things, committing adultery and actually murdering a friend.

And in Psalm 51, he cries out to God and he says, I was brought forth in a state of sin.

In sin my mother conceived me, and from the beginning I was sinful, but you want truth in the innermost being and in the hidden part of my heart.

You will make me to know wisdom.

That's the Logos.

You purify me and I'll be clean.

Wash me and I'll be whiter than snow.

Hide your face from my sins and blot out all of my iniquities and create in me a clean heart, O God.

And renew a right spirit in me.

So his cry was, I get it.

I'm dysfunctional.

I know what's right to do, but I'm not doing it.

And when I don't do it, I know it's wrong, but I can't seem to change it.

You've got to create something in me, something that was not there before.

And the word create in the Hebrew is ex nahilo.

It means to bring something into existence that never was.

Out of nothing, God creates a new nature, plants, puts it inside of you.

You wake up from the surgery of making a prayer to God and accepting Jesus as your Savior and Lord.

And it's a moment of surgery, divine surgery that happens as God responds to your faith and a new nature is placed inside of you.

You say, Wow, that sounds way too easy.

It's just give me something to do and ten things to tick off, and but it's not by works.

You're not saved by works, you're saved by faith through the grace of God.

So David says there's something wrong inside of me, and I know it.

I need to have a new heart.

Paul wrote about that human condition in Romans 7.

He said, I do not understand my own actions, I'm baffled and bewildered by them.

I do not practice what I want to do, but I'm doing the very thing I hate, and I'm yielding to my human nature and my worldliness and my sinful capacity.

Ever felt like that?

Well, when you give your life to Jesus, Paul is not referring to that as the state of the Christian.

He's referring to it as the state of a religious person who has adopted a religious set of rules, knows what's right, but somehow doesn't have the power on the inside to be able to do what he knows is right.

I remember I may have shared, I've shared this from this platform over some years ago when Dr.

Stephen Markward and I sat on a plane from Calgary to Cologne, and he was helicopter skiing in the in Banff.

And I looked over and I saw him on his way to California.

He was a cosmetic surgeon, did it for all of Hollywood.

And he was sitting there reading the book, The Road Less Traveled.

And we began to talk about it because I understood and knew the book.

And I asked him a question at the end of it.

I said, you know, Dr.

Marquart, have you ever done something that you knew was wrong, but you went ahead and did it anyway, even though you knew it would hurt you.

Have you ever done something like that?

He said, Yeah.

He says, I'm struggling with that in my own nature.

I know what's right, and I just don't seem to have the power to do it.

His family was in a wreck, his marriage was uh going downhill very quickly.

And I got off the plane in Kelowna in a snowstorm.

I was going to be picked up that night.

I was waiting for my ride, and in from the plane came Dr.

Stephen Morcourt, dressed in his jeans and a t-shirt, in the middle of a snowstorm, blizzard, and said, I need to give my life to Jesus.

I led him to Jesus in the Kelowna airport when he says, I just want that removed.

And my wife and I had a chance to visit with him down in California right after that meeting.

Make sure he was going to church.

Paul in Romans 7 was describing a tension between religious belief and a heart shift, a nature change.

He goes on to compare the state that he found himself in as a religious person who was trained by Pharisees and trained in the law of God as a person that was connected to this body of death.

And that is the picture term that I need to just take a couple minutes with you about this morning and say the picture term, the body of death, was a direct allusion to when criminals in the Mediterranean in that ancient world were found guilty of murder.

One of the acts of consequence or the penalties of it was that their body, living body, was attached to the dead corpse of those they murdered and bound hand to hand, foot to foot, and they died the death of the decomposition of that person's body.

It's a terrible, terrible view.

But Paul makes a statement, he said, I'm connected to this body of death.

I've done things that are wrong, and I know they're wrong, and now I'm suffering the consequences of it, and death is entering into my system.

And then he asks this question at the end of Romans chapter 7.

Romans 7 · chapter mention

He says, Who's going to deliver me from this body of death?

And he rises up and he says, But thanks be to God, Jesus will.

Hello?

Thanks be to God, Jesus will.

And that picture you have that he's presenting there in his heart is that Jesus comes and takes the ties off between the hands and the feet and replaces himself or you with himself.

And he dies in your place for your sins, and you go free.

That's what salvation is.

That's why we sing, What a beautiful Savior.

Anybody here of anyone of right mind would sit back and say, I have this is my destiny, my life is going to be destroyed slowly as death integrates itself into my system and I die the death of death.

Or someone replaces me.

And my life is given back to me again.

And do I have do I have reason to say I am entitled to this life?

No, because in my heart I know that I sinned.

That I'm guilty and I should be paying the punishment for my sins and my crimes.

But this is the grace of God.

The grace of God comes and he replaces you with himself, himself with you, and he enters into your life and bears your punishment, which is what we call the cross.

He goes to the cross, takes your sin upon himself, takes your regret upon himself, takes your shame upon himself, dies in your place, and you walk away knowing that someone loved you enough to die for you.

And there's no greater love that can any man could have for another man than to die in their place.

That's what it means to be a Christian.

Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And the story of salvation begins at that point.

So whether you call it like the prophets did, this transition from death to life, whether you call it getting a new heart, putting a new spirit in you, or whether it was like David when he said, Create in me a clean heart, because there's something wrong on the inside.

I need you to go on the inside and work this change from the inside out.

Because I can't change myself.

Can a leopard change its spots?

I can't change myself with my own power.

So God, I need you to come on the inside and change it.

And only at that point do I pass from death, walking dead, to the walking alive.

All of a sudden there's a shift that takes place, and you say, Well, I don't feel anything.

I I accepted Jesus, but I didn't feel a thing.

Well, it's not only accepting a personal relationship to Logos, the very meaning of life, the one who is the source of life, it's also walking in his word, the Logos.

Because everything he's put down for us will bring life.

Those commandments are not commandments that rain on your parade and make your life sad.

Those commandments are meant to be a blessing to you and to keep promoting life inside of you.

Amen.

So we need to get our life back.

John in his epistle, he says, What the prophet said, a new heart, and what David saw as a creation of a new heart, what Jesus spoke about as being born again, and now what John talks about in 1 John is you've been studying that through the scriptures as being born of God.

This was the doorway that every person must define if they want to walk through it.

We stand at a doorway, we stand at a threshold, and we go, do we want to be born again?

And I I keep on reminding myself of a message I spoke years ago on The Matrix.

How many of you remember The Matrix?

The movie The Matrix.

There was a guy in the movie called Neil, which means new, a programmer who began to realize that the world he was living in was programmed and set up by someone else, and he was living a fantasy and under the deception of that of that source of the world.

And he asks this question, he says, There's got to be something more than this.

And he's introduced to one who knows the way through the matrix to move from where he was to where he could be.

The matrix is simply the birth canal.

That's what the matrix is.

It's the moving of a child from the womb into the world, another world.

How many of you know that that's what happens when you give your life to Jesus?

You move from your world that you're presently living in into his world.

A brand new world.

And you pass from death to life.

How many of you know if you stay there, you'll die?

You've got to make a move, you've got to be willing to cross over the threshold from where you are to where God wants you to be.

I'm here today to say to you that there is more to life than what you're experiencing.

John speaks about accepting Jesus as the Logos, as your Lord and Savior, the one who died for your sins.

The Logos is not only a person who, when you welcome him into your life, becomes your life, but he's also a way of thinking, a rationale about how to live life and how to live it responsibly and fully.

And so when David wrote in Psalm 33, he said, Oh Lord, you have brought my life back from the pit.

You brought my life back from hell, from the netherworld, the place of the dead, and now I'm alive.

Now I'm alive.

Salvation means crossing over, letting God do some surgery on your heart.

And Jesus said, the thief comes only to kill, to steal, and to destroy.

But I have come that you might enjoy life and have it to the abundance, to the full, until it overflows, right?

And the picture that he gives there is a wave that hits the beaches or hits a rock and just not only covers the rock but splashes in all directions.

That's the kind of life that God wants to give us.

Man?

So John was pretty excited when he wrote this epistle to the churches.

He was really excited about it.

I'm telling you, he said, if you're born of God, you're going to cross the threshold and leave death behind and move into life.

And he writes in the Gospel of John, he said, if this life is in you, you will never die.

That's why Paul writes, Death, where's your sting?

Because death as an enemy has been defeated, and we transition from this life into the next life.

That's the hope of a Christian.

I don't fear death now.

The spirit of the fear of death is gone, and life has taken over.

My death sentence has been commuted for eternity.

Amen.

This is what it means to be a Christian.

So if you would bow your heads with me this morning, as I just look out over this audience, I just want to give you an opportunity, as Pastor Brody and the team have been doing.

If you don't know Jesus, you haven't had this nature change, you haven't had a shift from the inside out, and you've been working hard to change your life, but it hasn't been working.

I want to tell you that there's a way for you to pass from where you are to where you should be, where God will come in and give you strength and ability to become all that he wants you to be.

And then he'll teach you about how to live this abundant life.

If you don't know Jesus this morning that way, you've never been born again, you want to know Jesus, you want to give your life to him and accept him as Lord and Savior.

Then I'd just like you to just raise your hand where you are in the congregation this morning.

If you would do that, please.

Anyone here?

Well, okay.

Then I assume that all of you given your life to Christ and that this change is occurring in your life.

So, Father, we want to tell you this morning as believers, we want to say, Jesus, thank you.

Thank you for paying the price so that we could pass over from death to life.

Thank you for not only the source of life, Christ, coming into my life, but also for your thinking coming into my thoughts, so that I could not only know what is life, but actually do it, and have a logical and rational defense for my faith.

Thank you, Father.

We just want to say we love you this morning, and we love those who love you, and we love your word because your word brings life.

And everyone said, Amen.

God bless you.