What deserves the center of your life? /// The Way: Part 1

Welcome to the Plum Creek Church Podcast.

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Now, before we get into the message, we want to remind you of one thing.

We really believe that if Jesus is right about God, about life, about the soul, then it only makes sense to rearrange our lives around what he says is true.

Because when you choose to follow Jesus like that, it really does change everything, including the lives around you.

Okay.

Let's posture our hearts for what God has in store, this message.

What's up, Plum Creek?

How are you?

Me too.

I'm so excited about this series because we are about to dive in to the single most brilliant person who has ever walked the face of the planet.

Jesus.

And so over the next few weeks, oh, it's gonna be so good, but I want to rewind a little bit.

Um some of you maybe remember about a year ago, uh, we as a church went on a journey into this, the follow guide.

And a bunch of you got it.

You wrote in the uh margins, you put it on your coffee table.

We as a church, there were 1,700 of us that went through this together just in an effort to understand what does it mean to follow this man named Jesus?

But you may not know this.

Um, 10,000 other people have also gone through this guide trying to understand what does it mean to follow Jesus?

And so look, if you're brand new and you're like, man, I just started coming here.

Um the cool thing is is you can grab one in the atrium and and you and you can start your journey today.

But um I want to start this series, uh, honestly, where you rarely do start at the very end.

Um I'm gonna flip to the very end of the guide and I want to read to you uh a sentence, a phrase.

It says it's the very last page of the follow guide.

It says, if Jesus is right about God, about life, about the soul, then it only makes sense to rearrange your life around what he says is true.

So have you answered that question?

I mean, honestly, have you sat and answered this question?

Because there are easier questions to answer, like, um, do you like Jesus, right?

Or do I believe in God generally?

And sometimes we answer other questions that are easier to answer, like, well, do I want to have teach my kid good values here at a church?

Or do I like the music?

Or do I sometimes like that preacher, right?

Um, but this sentence, it isn't asking any of that, is it?

It's actually asking something that matters more than anything else.

It's asking whether Jesus was right.

And then underneath that, it asks another question.

Have you arranged your life around it?

I was thinking about this in this series, and uh this week, this last week, has been one of those weeks where I began to understand that I am getting old, right?

No matter what it looks like by the by the shoes that I wear, I am getting to uh old.

And I know that because a couple things start happening when you get old.

First, you start to say all the same things that your parents used to say, right?

You just do.

But but the other thing that made me understand I'm getting old is that my grandbaby started kindergarten.

My grandbaby, this little redheaded little thing went off to kindergarten.

And I I had a moment, and I don't know if you've had these moments where uh you're taken back in time, where in a moment I saw these all these pictures of my little grandbaby going to school, and I went back in time, not just to when my little baby, that little girl's mom, went to school, but all the way back to the beginning.

And I was 23, Chrissy was 22 when we got married.

And we had only been married about seven months when I got the phone call, when she called me and said, Um, I'm pregnant.

I was like, How'd that happen?

Right.

I didn't, I didn't have it, I was broke as a joke.

I'm like, how are we gonna have a baby?

And so we we ended up, you know, uh we go through the process and we lived in this tiny little apartment, and it had two rooms.

Had one room for me and Chrissy, and then um I had my room, right?

Now listen, this is a precursor to a man cave because I was so broke I didn't have anything to put in that cave, right?

It was like some blankets and a few things from college and a piece of furniture that nobody else wanted, but that was my room, right?

This was my room, and so when Chrissy came home and started to ask questions, it's like, you know, we're having a baby.

Um, where's that baby gonna sleep, Eric?

I'm like, I have no idea, but not in my room.

That's my stuff in there.

Well, as we got closer to daily arriving, we went and did what you do as new parents.

You go and buy a crib.

So we got a crib and I had to put that thing together.

And I still remember this day when I set that crib for the very first time up in my room.

Because it was in that moment that it all got real, right?

All of a sudden, it like dawned on me.

I'm like, oh, we're gonna have a baby in this room.

Like, this is the room that my little girl is gonna grow up in, and it is so interesting how quickly I began to rearrange that whole, my whole room, around that one crib.

And you know, I think about it in our lives, and here's the truth about every single one of you.

Every single one of you walk in here today with a life that is arranged around something.

Like it's arranged around something.

It might be your career, it might be your kids and their 17 schedules, it might be around comfort or being liked, it might be something deep that you've never shared with anyone else, a fear so that makes you so scared.

Your whole life is arranged around it.

But you need to hear me say, as your pastor, nobody in this room has an unarranged life.

In fact, being unarranged is somewhat of an arrangement, isn't it?

See, every single one of us have arranged our life around something.

And Dallas Willard, who spent his whole life thinking more carefully about Jesus and his way than really, I think, anyone in the last hundred years, he says it this way He says, everybody gets a spiritual formation.

It's just like education.

Everybody gets one.

The only question is, which one do you get?

Look, nobody opts out of being formed.

You're being shaped all the time, you're being formed all the time by what you give your attention to, by what you're afraid of, by what you reach for first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

When we say spiritual formation, this is not a program or a class at a church.

Formation is already happening to you, and that's what I mean by nobody in this room has an unarranged life.

You don't choose whether your life has a center.

What you choose is what is that center, which means the most important question that any of us can answer is not whether your life will be arranged, it will be.

The question is what deserves the center of your life, and it is really that sentiment behind this phrase that I started with.

And if you notice, we didn't start with the word arrange.

We actually start the phrase with two letters, a different word.

If the whole thing, this whole thing sort of hangs on this one word.

Because at the center of this word really asked the question: do you actually believe that this man from Nazareth named Jesus is the single most brilliant person who has ever walked the planet?

Does he know more about life than anybody else?

Is he an expert?

Because truthfully, I think most of us live around expert advice.

Well, I kind of hope you do.

Like when you take investment advice, I hope that you know you're going to somebody who you believe is right about money.

And when you take medical advice, I hope you're going to somebody who you believe is right about the human body.

And I will tell you, I will drive across town because somebody told me there is a guy that is right about barbecue.

Isn't this how we all live?

Expert advice.

People who are right.

But but here's what I've come to believe to be true about what's really going on.

Look, I really have done this for a little bit.

Be a pastor.

And I say this with all the pastoral love in the world, but I have come to believe that there are too many of us who do not actually know what Jesus said about life.

That we think we do.

Like we know, like, well, I don't know, he was born in a manger and he died on a cross, and he said something about Samaritans and the prodigal son.

We know of our rabbi.

But I think far too few of us actually know what our rabbis say.

And so it's really hard to know if our rabbi is right.

See, you can't rearrange your life around words you've never heard.

Nobody can.

So maybe the question, not just around today, but the next season all through this fall, isn't, you know, why don't I take Jesus more seriously?

I wonder if the question is different.

What did he actually say?

What did he say?

You know, I've come, I've spent a lot of time in this book.

And I'll tell you, the more time I spend with Jesus, the more I start to find out, man, this dude was right about a lot of stuff.

Like, for instance, listen, Jesus 2,000 years ago, he goes and he stands in this hillside and he's talking to a bunch of people, and he says this phrase.

He says, Can any of you by worry worrying add a single hour to your life?

Now you have to understand who was sitting on this hillside.

Now, these were not people who had savings accounts and had pantries.

These were subsistent farmers and day laborers, people who literally were living one bad harvest away from hunger or one Roman tax collector away from ruin.

So for them, worry was not like a mental health issue.

This was a means by which they survived.

It was a strategy.

So you gotta understand, like when Jesus stands up on that hill and tells these people not to worry about food, that would sound something like telling a drowning man not to think about water.

Right?

People would have been like, this is absurd.

This is maybe borderline irresponsible.

What is this man talking about?

And yet, Jesus wasn't just offering a sentiment in this moment.

Do you know Jesus was in this moment making a claim about how human beings actually work?

Now, fast forward, 2,000 years later.

You know, we have entire fields of research on chronic anxiety, on what sustained worry does to your body, to your heart, to the immune system, to your brain.

And the findings at the bottom of all of it is exactly what Jesus said on that hillside.

That worry doesn't add, it subtracts.

The strategy everyone assumed was keeping them alive was actually quietly killing them.

And so, come to find out, this carpenter was right.

Then he goes on, he says another kind of what seemed like a bizarre thing.

He said, It is more blessed to give than receive.

Now, understand, this is a world of scarcity where giving was transactional.

So the wealthy would give, but they would give so that they could be seen, or they would give to collect honor.

Sometimes they would give to put someone in their debt.

And everybody knew where blessing sat.

They knew.

Blessing sat with the man with the full storehouse.

Blessing was a family with an inheritance.

And then this rabbi comes along and he says, you know, the flow of blessing runs the other direction.

This would sound to some people like what you say to poor people to keep them content, right?

And then a bunch of centuries later, a bunch of people start doing some research.

They start putting people in brain scanners and watching what happens when they give something away.

And when you know it, the Braven Reward Center lights up like a Christmas tree.

And these days, this day and age, study after study finds that people who give their money and their time and their attention report deeper and more durable happiness than people who spend the same resources on themselves.

That blessing really does sit on the giving end.

So come to find out.

This carpenter was right again.

And then, and then Jesus says this thing about forgiveness, and it would have been offensive to people.

He says that the quantities that we should forgive is 70 times seven.

Now you have to understand, like when Jesus says this, he's not even giving a number, he's actually saying you should just forgive infinitely.

You just always forgive.

And this would have sounded to people sort of absolutely insane.

Because when someone wronged you, retaliation wasn't a character flaw.

This was justice.

It was how you kept your name, protected your family.

In some ways, it was survival.

And the rabbis in Jesus' day trying to be generous, some would say, Well, you could forgive someone three times.

Okay?

So that's why when Jesus and Peter are talking, uh, Peter says, seven.

Peter's trying to be uber generous.

He's going, Well, I heard a rabbi say three, so I'll say seven.

And Jesus goes, No, no, no, no, not seven.

Always.

And in that world, this was not mercy.

This would have been seen as weakness.

It would have actually been seen as an open invitation to be wronged.

Really forever.

But now, you know, there are cardiologists and immunologists who study forgiveness.

And do you, it turns out that unforgiveness behaves in the body like a low-grade poison.

Did you know that?

Blood pressure, sleep deprivation, even cardiac health, resentment that we carry to like protect ourselves from the hurt is the very thing that is wearing us down.

The people who learn to release it, this is what the studies say.

They don't just feel better spiritually, they are measurably healthier.

The thing that looked like weakness wasn't at all weakness.

And as it turned out, this carpenter was right.

Now, I want you to hear me carefully as your pastor.

Because I am not saying that we believe Jesus because some journals and some journalists finally agree with him.

Okay?

That's not what I'm saying.

He doesn't need their endorsement.

But what I am saying, something that might be even a bit more unsettling.

That if given honest tools and enough time, and we go looking into the deep structure of what makes our human life work, we keep finding this rabbi's fingerprints all over them.

In other words, he wasn't guessing about us.

He wasn't guessing about how life worked.

He was describing us, sort of in a way that, you know, this is like an old-fashioned watch, you know, it has gears in it.

He's describing us in our life, the way that an old-fashioned watchmaker would describe the way that the gears work inside this watch.

This is what he's doing.

So when this series asks, was Jesus right about God?

Was he right about life, about the soul?

Understand this.

This isn't a religious question that we're asking from inside some sort of metaphorical stained glass bubble, right?

This is the most practical question you can ask in your life.

Was he right?

Because if he was right about worry and about generosity and about forgiveness, the things that we can right now measure, then odds are really, really good, that he's right about the things that you can't.

You know, like what we are and what you're worth, and what happens to you when you die, about the things that belong in the center of your life.

Look, if Jesus was right, in rearranging your your life, it isn't religious, it's it's just math, it's just math.

And the truth is, this isn't a new idea, rearrangement.

Actually, it's the oldest idea in our faith in so many ways.

Because this is what the word disciple would have always meant.

I mean, if you go back to the first century, when a rabbi would look you in the eyes and say, Why don't you come follow me?

Everybody knew what that rabbi was asking, right?

A disciple did not add a rabbi to his other otherwise full schedule.

That isn't how it worked.

He didn't take a class with him or agree with him from sort of a respectable distance.

No, no, no.

When a disciple took on with a rabbi, he walked where the rabbi walked.

He ate what the rabbi ate.

He slept where that rabbi slept.

He watched how that rabbi handled money and enemies entire days, and he reshaped his priorities, his thoughts, even his desires around that one life.

And I believe it is meant to be the same today.

The discipleship for us is the ongoing journey of rearranging our lives around this truth of Jesus.

And look, don't just take it from me.

Jesus says so much in Matthew chapter 8.

Matthew 8 · chapter mention

The two people who want to follow him, in verse 19, look what it says.

It says, Then a teacher of the law came to him, this is Jesus, and said, Teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go.

And then Jesus replied, Look, you can almost hear him say, Really, you want to follow me?

Foxes have dens, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

You want, you want to do this, you'll have to rearrange your life.

And then the Bible tells us that another one said to him, Lord, well, then first let me go and bury my father.

But Jesus tells him, Follow me and let the dead bury the dead.

And I know on the surface, we're like, gosh, it's so harsh.

But Jesus was getting at something around discipleship.

That to follow me is rearrangement.

It's almost as if Jesus is saying, He would rather have no disciples than the one who will not rearrange his life around Jesus' words.

And so Plum Creek, I tell you.

That a Jesus who neatly fits into your existing arrangement is not the real Jesus.

Right?

The real one requires us to rearrange our lives around him.

So when you open the gospels and you begin to read those red letters, which those are Jesus' words, he is speaking.

And remember what you're actually doing.

Your Rabbi, he is speaking to you.

And disciples have only ever had one response to Jesus' word, and it is rearrangement.

And rearrangement is not addition, it is not performance, it is not willpower, which is why when we began to wrestle through years ago, like how do we put a definition to what it means to follow Jesus?

We came up with this phrase.

That it is the ongoing rearrangement of our life around the things that Jesus said was true.

That rearranging our lives around Jesus isn't just some modern metaphor, it is the original meaning of disciple.

And so that brings me right back to the problem that I named earlier, which is you cannot rearrange your life around words you have never heard.

You just can't.

And a disciple cannot follow a rabbi, he cannot hear.

So the honest question sitting in this room today is not, do I know all that Jesus said yet?

It's more, are you willing to learn?

Because that's the invitation.

In fact, it's a very specific invitation.

I could not be more excited about what is about to happen this fall.

Because we're gonna do something that I, as a pastor, have wanted to do for years.

We are gonna sit down as a church and we're gonna look at everything that Jesus said from the book of Matthew, starting there.

Now, this all came because a few years ago, um, honestly, as your pastor, I began to ask myself the same questions.

Like, I'm like, do I actually know what Jesus said?

Like, for real.

I mean, I talk about it all the time.

I stand up here every week and I preach about Jesus.

Do I actually know the things he said?

And so um, I was inspired by someone else who was doing something similar.

I started writing down the things that Jesus said.

I would read them one a morning and I just write down thoughts.

Let the Spirit guide me.

What is Jesus trying to say?

But something funny started happening.

I started seeing stuff that Jesus was saying, and I would say to Pastor Doug, I'm like, uh-oh, I'm gonna have to do something with that one, right?

You read something like, uh-oh, Jesus just said something that confronts a lot of stuff that um I believe to be true about me, my life, this situation, and I'm gonna have to do something about this.

And then Pastor Doug had this idea about halfway through the journey.

He's like, what if what if we just all did this as a community?

What if we took all the things that Jesus said in Matthew and we started to wrestle through it as a community, and so that's what we're gonna do this fall.

In fact, in three weeks, there's gonna be a guide that you can grab.

And this guide takes 93 things that Jesus said, and on one side of the page, it's his words and a little thought, and on the other side of the page, it has a bunch of lines for you to write.

What is it that Jesus is saying to me?

What is he asking me to do?

And I'm absolutely convinced that something absolutely grand is about to happen.

And why do I think that?

Because that's what happens when we rearrange our lives around Jesus.

He messes up all kinds of stuff.

All the stuff that we thought was important in these rooms start to look like trash.

Because now there's something else centered in it, and we're like, whoa, whoa, this?

That's awesome.

And this is what we're gonna do together.

We're gonna wrestle through this as part of a series on the words of Jesus, where we look at what did he say about God, what did he say about life, what did he say about the soul, these same three claims in our sentence.

And I'm gonna ask every single one of you to grow on this journey together.

That as a faith community, we just explore what did Jesus say?

What did he say?

I still remember.

Um, I still remember when I was all done setting up that crib for the very first time.

I still remember what it looks like.

Um someone said to me, I told I said at a at a service last night that I got it at Crate and Barrel, and they're like, There's no way you got that at Crate and Barrel.

You were broke, right?

I probably didn't get it at Crate and Barrel, but I know this, I know exactly what that crib looks like still.

I know the color of the wood, I know exactly the size of the slats.

I remember staring at that crib.

I remember the bumper that was inside.

It was pink and white checkered.

I remember everything about that crib.

Because it was like the moment I set that up, it's like everything changed.

Everything changed.

And all the stuff that I thought was so important, these this glassware and this silly blow-up Jayhawk, I still have that somewhere in the basement.

Um, they weren't important anymore.

I I literally didn't care.

All this stuff that I had centered, this whole room around, all of a sudden, it just all seemed like a bunch of stuff.

Because what mattered was what was about to happen in that crib, and it was as natural as anything, it was so natural.

Like once I saw it, it changed everything in Plum Creek.

This is our invitation.

Like together.

This is the entire series.

And and look not asking you to earn anything or prove anything to God, to me, to the person next to you.

This is just a journey to say, What have I arranged my life around?

And what does Jesus say about life?

And what would it look like to rearrange my life around what he said?

And to see what happens, to practice rearrangement every day, week in and week out, around the most brilliant person who has ever walked the planet.

That seems like a good idea.

So, this is my one invitation as we begin this journey together.

My invitation is this not to do a bunch, you don't have to do a ton.

I'm not asking you to take a full inventory of everything, but I am asking you to be thoughtful this week on one single thing, one single thing as we start this journey together.

And this, this.

What have you rearranged?

What have you arranged your life around?

No, you you don't have to share it with anyone.

Maybe you write it in the margins of your Bible, maybe you put it in your journal, maybe you store it in your brain.

But it's really important as you start this journey to recognize what you have arranged your life around.

To spend some time over this next week and ask the Holy Spirit to maybe help you see what you've arranged your life around.

And then we'll walk on this journey together.

Of utter rearrangement.

And I promise you there will be days that it will be challenging.

There will be days when Jesus' words will wrap you like a blanket, there will be days when Jesus' words will offend you, there will be days when Jesus' words will challenge you.

But I also promise you this if you want to journey back to the person that Jesus thought of when he thought you up, this is the path.

And we will go together.

Will you stand with me?

I say this on behalf of me, and I think I can say it on behalf of Pastor Doug.

I have a lot of opinions about how people should live their lives, but what I can promise you is that the only opinion that really matters is the one that's in this book.

It's it.

And the older I get, the more I realize I don't know very much.

But man, this book says it all.

And so I hope you'll go on this journey with us.

I'm gonna pray for us.

I want you to join us before we worship God.

Will you give us the courage to step into, to step into rearrangement?

Will you help us journey toward what you have in store for us, each and every one of us, individually and as a community?

Will you give us courage to confront what has been at the center of our lives?

Will your Holy Spirit give us grace to move and rearrange our lives around what actually is true?

May this be so for all my friends in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks again for listening.

Our prayer is that this message encouraged and challenged you in your journey to follow Jesus.

If you'd like to learn more about our church, please check us out online at plumcreek.church or if you find yourself within driving distance of Castle Rock, Colorado, we would be honored to see you in person on a weekend.

So until next time, grace and peace in the name of Jesus.