What About the Future?

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We exist to awaken this generation to new life in Christ.

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It is so wonderful to be with our awakening family, and thank you to Pastor Ryan and the whole team for making us feel at home.

Those of you who may be newer to Awakening, this is our hometown.

We grew up in Silicon Valley, but we've been living in the Rockies for the last three years.

But every time we return, we feel so much the presence of the Lord, the welcome of this wonderful church family.

And so if you're newer, I just urge you, let this be a place of solace, encouragement, instruction, and wisdom for you.

We're glad to be with you.

If you have a Bible, turn to James chapter 4, verse 13, and we'll come to that text in just a moment.

James 4:13

As we continue this amazing series, Now What?

Now, right now we're hearing words like unprecedented in the midst of this pandemic and some of the protests around us.

And certainly for all of us, it is unprecedented, but it's not unprecedented for the people of God.

It's not unprecedented for our Lord, who has already walked through all of this and is helping us be faithful as we walk through these circumstances.

But we'd also be deceiving ourselves not to be aware of some of the real stressors that we're under right now.

And I'd like to just encourage you that this is a time to rejoice in the Lord, but it's also a time, as we heard it a little bit earlier, it's okay to lament.

It's okay to feel the weight of what we're going through.

In fact, all of us are feeling about three layers of stress right now.

First of all, just the stress of the circumstances themselves, just the desire to break out of the restrictions and experience more of life.

And then we have the second layer of stress, which is will I have work?

What's going to be changing in my world of work, in the economy, in our society?

And then underneath it is all kinds of things that we kind of battle quietly seem to come to the surface in these moments.

And so today, as we again talk about now what, in light of this moment and look at the scriptures, God wants to reach into our hearts and help heal and deliver and really help us deal with all these levels of stress in order that we might bring Him glory and we might bring good to those around us and ourselves feel more whole than ever before.

It's an interesting thing, but faith and uncertainty are actually partners of grace.

You know, our security doesn't come from the immediate circumstances, but it comes from our eternal hope and the presence of the Holy Spirit giving us little foretastes of the kingdom.

Every time we feel God's forgiveness, every time we reach out to others and express our mutual respect and love and joy, we're getting a little taste of that future kingdom that's coming.

Every time God answers a prayer and every time we persevere through challenges, the Holy Spirit is with us, giving us those down payments of a future where one day there won't be any more tears or pain or uncertainty.

The other thing on a very practical note is that our future is built on God's design.

My friend Anthony Liebenberg said that God has a designer life for every believer.

And in Ephesians 2.10, Paul says that God has good works that we're to walk in.

So God's design matters, but our discipline matters as well.

In order to step into that beautiful blueprint, we have some steps to take, and James is going to help us with that.

And the other thing I want to make us alert to, in addition to the stresses, is that this moment calls upon us to be alert, to realize the spiritual battle that we're in.

You see, every trying circumstance is an opportunity for the Lord to refine our character, to grow our community.

But our enemy, our adversary, wants to disintegrate our lives, wants to depress us and to discourage us.

It's also a time for wisdom in the work that we do, to really listen to God, listen to his word, listen to his spirit, listen to how he speaks through one another, and really walk in wisdom.

But it's also a great opportunity, and I was sharing this with Pastor Ryan and other leaders across the country.

What a great moment for recalibrating how we understand God's work when we can't do all the normal activities.

So this is a great moment that we're in, but we want to acknowledge that it's a challenging one as well.

By the way, James is going to talk about people making decisions, kind of without regard to God.

And I just thought it'd be kind of fun to look at all the predictions human beings have made that just show our own pride and presumption and sometimes just silliness.

In the 1950s, they predicted we'd have nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners by now.

In the 1960s, people said no one's ever going to buy a car from Japan.

I've looked in the parking lot at Delmar High School where the cars come from, folks.

In the 1970s, in the late 70s, and I worked at this company, a leading CEO said nobody's ever going to have a computer in their house.

What a waste of time to invest in that.

Since the 1960s, even as close as Stanford, there have been all kinds of apocalyptic predictions that world population would grow and that we'd all perish by the year 2000.

Well, we have lots of needs around the world, and we want to be concerned with our environment and our economy and justice, but you know what?

We're still here, and in fact, we have a 20, 25% food surplus in the world.

You see, God has a plan, and he's allowing us to partner with him, and all the human predictions are not going to thwart that plan as we partner with him for good in the world.

One other thing I find interesting, and I just I so love the worship team here and so love the different styles that you bring.

But in the 1990s, they said, it's the end of vinyl.

Nobody's ever gonna listen to records again.

And here we are, people are buying vinyl and buying record players.

BC, James's hearers, and we as hearers of God's word face some of the same circumstances.

They were persecuted and scattered.

They were marginalized, they were minimalized, and in some cases overtly persecuted.

Now we don't face that kind of overt persecution in the United States, although millions of our sisters and brothers do around the world, but we do feel the marginalization, we do feel on the outside at times.

The community that James is speaking to, or I should say the communities as they gathered, they faced issues of pride and prejudice.

And I'm not just referring to a great Jane Austen novel or movie there, but they had internal challenges.

By the way, the minute you get two or three people gathering, you have both the presence of God in great joy and purpose, and you have the potential for conflict, don't we?

Now, at least, of course, not in awakening, everything's perfect here, but I've just heard rumors that there's a potential for pride and prejudice to sneak into our hearts and into our conversations.

And then James's friends had to learn the integration of their belief system with their real behavior every day, learning about faith and work.

And so as we come to our passage, the context of this whole letter becomes important.

And Pastor Ryan's been preaching on this, and you've been reading in James, the great contrast between God's wisdom and our pride.

And by the way, we are made in God's image, and there's much for us to take joy in that God's given us gifts, but he wants us to bring everything in reference to him and not ourselves.

We have problems in James and in our own day of rich and poor learning to serve each other.

You know, around the world, class, gender, race, ethnicity, these are conflicts until the Holy Spirit comes.

And around the table of the Lord, we find a unity that only God can create.

Christ died for it, and we're called by the power of the Spirit to help maintain it.

And then James had to deal with the fact that we can look in the mirror and walk away and forget what we've seen.

We can have a great moment in church and then on Monday wonder what we just heard sometimes.

And he wants us to integrate our lives.

So let's look at the text that we get to look at today, and let's allow the Holy Spirit to take God's word and change our hearts and minds together.

James chapter 4, verse 13 to 17.

James 4:13–17

Now listen, you who say, Today or tomorrow we'll go into this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.

Why?

You do not even know what will happen tomorrow.

What is your life?

You're a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Instead, you ought to say, If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes.

All such boasting is evil.

If anyone then knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them.

Wow, what amazing poetry here.

As James unveils the condition of our heart.

By the way, don't take this paragraph as the sum total of everything God says about you as a believer in Christ.

James is not trying in this moment to build us up psychologically or heal childhood needs.

He's trying to remind us that in the midst of God's work in us, he also wants to bring humility.

You notice verse 13, he talks about human planning and presumption.

We're going to go into this city.

We're going to make this plan, we're going to do this.

You're sitting around your, of course, we can't sit around our cubicles anymore or conference tables, but you're on your Zoom call and you're making all kinds of plans.

And James says, What's the attitude behind that?

Why are you making those plans?

And there's verses 14 and 15.

James uses a lot of Old Testament references here as he talks about this mist, this temporality, this briefness of our human life.

And he's calling for humility and submission to God.

And then in verse 16, he says, Watch out for your arrogance, watch out for your pride.

And then in verse 17, just when we think there's just almost no hope, he says, By the way, there's something we can do.

There's things God's told us to do that we can be about today, even when we're not certain of tomorrow.

I want to say that again.

There are things God's word tells us to do and things the Holy Spirit's put on our hearts, both as an awakening family and as individuals, that we can be about doing even while we wrestle with uncertainty about tomorrow.

Now, real quick here, before we jump into what we can be about, a couple things James is not saying.

James is not saying it's wrong to plan or to prosper.

He's not saying it's wrong to put a business plan together or wrong to make plans.

In fact, in Luke chapter 14, Jesus tells us if you're going to build a tower, you sit down and you calculate all the costs and details in building that tower.

Luke 14 · chapter mention

If you're in a military campaign, you're not just going out there with your troops, you're thinking about it, you're counting the cost before you do something.

One day we were doing some strategic planning in an organization I was part of, and there's always this tension.

And I'm sure you've experienced it in your life and your work and family and maybe even in some areas of church conversation.

But this tension between strategic planning and master planning that goes beyond just the immediate week or two or ten, and this sense of wanting to walk by faith, being open to the Spirit of God.

So we had a real venerable leader, an older leader standing up talking about strategic planning, and all of a sudden a missionary stood up and said, What about faith?

We got God called Abraham to go out in faith.

You know, you're supposed to just trust God as you go.

And this wise old leader said, You know what?

Absolutely.

There are times that God calls us just to trust him and go out and know he's going to provide.

And then he said, This that was has changed my life.

He said, We can also hear from God in our planning.

And whether it's our financial planning, whether it's personal planning, whether it's business or work or ministry, the Holy Spirit can help us plan well and plan from right motives.

And that was life-changing because, on one hand, there are moments when he tells us, hey, let's take a step and go.

And then there are moments when we need to wait and get the details in order.

Which leads me to say this we have to learn to live with a little bit of complexity, with knowing that things are going to change.

Our stability is our identity in Christ and our sense of calling, not the current circumstances or even the job title we have, which by the way could change tomorrow.

We have to live with a little bit of complexity.

We have to live with some nuance sometimes.

We have to live with the fact, and I'm not talking about moral absolutes or theological truth, but live with the fact that things aren't always clear or the answers aren't always immediately evident.

We have to press into God and listen humbly to one another.

And sometimes we have to live with paradox.

What I love about this passage is one minute I feel like almost slammed by James.

I mean, come on, you've told me my life is just a mist.

That's not, I thought I was important.

And the the paradox is this we're so important that Jesus died for us.

And by the way, if you're a a seeker, maybe you've been hanging out for a while here at Awakening, maybe you've been on the edges of full commitment to Jesus Christ.

I want you to know that he loved you so much he went to the cross, loved you so much that he bore every bit of your sin and your suffering, every bit of your sorrow and unanswered questions.

That we serve a Lord and Savior who's forever one of us, who died for our sins, and on the third day he rose again, telling us that we have a future beyond this moment.

And if that's a Lord worth following, I want to urge you today to make a decision to begin to step in to a life of faith.

It's going to include some complexity, it's going to include some paradox, it's not going to include having all the answers to every detail at every moment, but it's going to include a deep assurance that God is with you and loves you.

Encourage you to step into that.

In Romans, in Romans chapter 14 and 15, in Acts, in the book of Acts, Paul made plans.

Romans 14 · chapter mention

And God honored those plans as Paul went out to the people who'd never heard the gospel before.

And yet Paul's plans were altered at times.

One time, as Luke tells us, the Holy Spirit told us, no, you don't go there, you go somewhere else.

Another time they had spiritual warfare and they confronted some real adversarial powers and they had to pivot and make other decisions.

So we're allowed to plan.

But what God's concerned about is that we plan with humility and with understanding of his grace.

So now what?

How do we take this passage?

And I just want to give some practical advice that comes right out of this text.

It just sort of leaps out and helps us live in light of the uncertainty that we find ourselves in.

First of all, today's listening is tomorrow's lifeline.

Today's listening is tomorrow's lifeline.

If we want to be walking in a sense of assurance and peace, if we want to be resilient and ready for what's ahead, let's press in and listen.

By the way, that listening includes listening to the Lord in prayer, listening to one another and praying for each other, listening to God's word, both directly as we read it, and then through Pastor Ryan and the team and others bringing it to us in different forms.

But it means also listening to the world around us and hearing the heart cries and the hopes of others.

Because as we listen, a picture emerges of our place in God's plan, and we can be a person of resource and encouragement and not be a victim of the circumstance.

The other thing is that today's discipline is tomorrow's destiny.

When we have a sense of what God's called us to, and let me make this really practical.

But you know what?

I can have those outlined and I can have great intentions and dreams, but if I don't sit down and write something almost every day, those books just sort of sit there as an idea.

I have great goals for my physical well-being.

Now, I know I looked really cool and buffed right now, but the fact of the matter is it takes daily discipline just to keep ourselves reasonably healthy.

And but I can have all these great goals, but if I don't exercise discipline, so God will give us the goals.

God will tell us what our destiny is, but he wants us to exercise discipline.

And then I love this at the end of the passage when James says, hey, if you know what to do and you're not doing it, hey, you're kind of in trouble here.

That's what we call the sins of omission.

You really need to be about what you know.

And one of my Scottish mentors said, Today's obedience is tomorrow's guidance.

I don't know tomorrow's circumstances.

I have some plans.

I'm looking forward to the appointments that Kathy and I have made to see some people here, but I don't know what tomorrow may bring.

But if today I'm doing all that I know to do, you say, Well, I don't know what to do today.

I mean, where do I start?

Well, you begin in the simplest way possible by submitting your day to the Lord and saying, Lord, I offer you my plans today.

And if those include all the business that James mentions, that's great.

Offer them to Him.

You begin by kind of getting rid of the attitudes toward people and some of the thinking patterns that get in the way of really hearing the Holy Spirit speak.

And by the way, this is daily discipline.

We all do it every day.

But you can begin.

You can begin by submitting your day, kind of shedding the old clothing, Paul calls it, of some of those attitudes.

And then by allowing God's word to be in you as you go about your day.

Now, you may not be a mem a person who memorizes a lot of things.

You may not feel like you're a great scholar.

Don't worry.

God can give you a verse or two that become a lifeline for today.

And so I encourage you as you're in God's word, even if you don't have a lot of time, I know there's a lot of you that are moms raising little kids.

By the way, dads are raising them too, but moms bear a special burden.

You're a new mom and sleep deprivation is normal.

You're a new dad and you're learning all of this.

Hey, take those five-minute moments, get some of God's word in you, and you'll be amazed at the clarity of your mind and heart as you face new circumstances.

You know, we can't alter the circumstances around us, but we can change our responses.

We can allow God to work in our character, develop our gifts.

Let me go a step further with James's text here by way of application and just kind of get a wonderful view of how he's encouraging us.

First of all, we need God's perspective.

In the providence of God, we are made for this moment.

And that's not just a cliche.

Um can I just I want to be really honest with you?

A few weeks ago, I was going through a tussle with some people in leadership, and for a little while I felt like a fossil.

I felt like, man, are my best days over?

Um, I don't want to make these changes they want me to make.

And then I had to laugh a little bit as the Lord worked in my heart that I'd been praying for some of these changes for years, and now I was the one that had to change more than the people I was praying for.

We need perspective.

We're made for this moment.

And I and God has begun begun to show me that the last 40 plus years of serving Him are being refined into something that can be a gift for others, even if it's just a word of encouragement, even if it's just coming alongside someone in private and being able to help them take a next step.

Suddenly you realize we have the great texts like the book of Esther.

You're called into the kingdom for this moment.

We we have to be honest, we don't always feel that way.

But we are indeed called to God's kingdom for this moment.

We're not accidents.

He loves us, he's gifted us, he's refining our character, he's placed us in certain positions and places.

We're made for this moment.

We also have to continue.

You notice you've heard me say four or five times now that we want to listen to his voice.

So not only do we need perspective, but we need our perceptions refined.

We need to be able to hear his voice in all the ways he's speaking.

God speaks to us directly by the Holy Spirit in confirmation of his scriptures.

God speaks to us through the spoken word that our pastors bring.

God speaks to us through the prayers and wisdom of others.

God speaks to us through circumstances.

By the way, it's always good to listen to God's whispers before the megaphone of difficulty.

Comes along.

He speaks to us in all different ways.

And we want to just refine our hearing.

And by the way, if you wonder, you know, am I hearing from God or am I just kind of mixing it up with the pizza I ate last night?

You know, am I hearing from God, or is it just my desires?

Talk to a brother or sister within the church community that you trust.

Talk to somebody and pray with them.

And often God will give confirming and affirming words or maybe adjusting words to help that get refined.

A few years ago, I would, we had to make a decision, and it was a challenging one.

And so we uh, and Kathy and I usually find ourselves in agreement, I won't say easily all the time, but pretty pretty quickly.

And this decision was a tougher one.

So we found a friend we trusted to help us walk through that decision and reframe it.

By the way, it still wasn't easy, and but we were able to make a wise decision that has since opened a lot of doors.

And by the way, that wise decision also opened a lot of challenges.

So no decision is without consequence.

But that our friend helped us frame it so that we could have a unity and make a decision, so our perceptions can grow.

And then I would say today that our personal and professional relationships are more important than ever.

Folks, we're in isolation.

We're feeling the pain of this moment.

But what a great moment, what a great moment to be in better touch with people.

We've met more of our neighbors than we in the last four months than we've met in the previous three years where we're living in the Denver area.

We have exchanged more phone calls, more texts, more emails of a personal nature, not just the spam that it feels like we're assaulted with.

What a great moment.

What a great moment to increase our personal relationships.

You know, one of the things we're discovering in the church is that activity may not be progress and proximity and meetings may not be relationships.

We have a chance to recalibrate and to really deepen both our personal and professional relationships in this moment.

What's James helping us to do in this now what moment?

He's helping us realize that we can be obedient to what we know to do.

And in that obedience, guidance will begin to open to us.

James help is helping us be humble.

We make our plans, but we make them in conjunction with the Lord.

And he's helping us realize that humility will lead to wisdom.

You know, I love earlier in James, he says, God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.

I don't know about you, I want to be on the side of grace.

And as we humble ourselves, we can discover that.

James is a little bit direct, a little bit hard with us when it talks about our life being amiss.

But remember, that's just one text of an entire body of scripture that tells us our life is of eternal value, but some of the things we focus on are very temporary.

One day there's going to be no more sorrow and pain.

One day after our Lord returns, all of our work and our play, all of our rest and our relationships will be pure and perfect.

And until that day, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can watch God perfect, refine, and help us bring foretastes of his future into everything that we do today.

What a great answer to the question of now what?

What does James say?

Hey, humble yourself, be obedient to what you know is true, deepen your relationships, and you will find in that moment everything that you need for life, for godliness, and to bring pleasure to God and the world around you.

Praise his holy name.

He is so good.

Would you join with me?

And I want to just pray in a couple of points with you as we allow God's word to take hold in our hearts.

Gracious and loving Father, we thank you that you are the Almighty and you're also Abba.

But we humble ourselves, Lord, under your mighty hand and say, please, Lord, here are our plans.

Refine them, change them, bless them.

We humble ourselves under your hand, and we thank you, Abba, that you embrace us with your intimacy and your love.

Jesus, you're the King of kings and the Lord of Lords.

We were the joy set before you as you went to the cross and rose again.

We also thank you that you're the good shepherd and we can hear your voice.

And sovereign Spirit of God, whose breath animates the stars, whose breath raised Jesus from the dead, you live in us these jars of clay.

And we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would give us ever greater sensitivity to your voice and ever greater understanding of how you are at work as we go about our day.

We give you praise for this now and thank you for the power of your word in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for letting me be part of the family with you.

I hope you're encouraged today.

And I want you to know that Kathy and I pray for you with great joy, and we can't wait to be together with you in person.

Thanks so much.