Nobody Argues Their Way Into a New Life | Unforced (Week 1) | Chad Belew

But first, I need to tell you

that this last month has been incredible for me,

not just because I didn't have to do anything, because I did.

It's like I didn't do anything.

But for the last four Sundays,

I get to either sit on the bench and watch,

or even in my car,

I was just driving and listening,

and I got to listen to four people from our community,

but not just listen to them preach,

but to tell their story.

For me, it's one of my favorite things.

I've always loved being able to sit on the front row and

just listen and watch someone who has been part of this community,

get to share their faith journey,

their love for God,

the way that they feel loved by God.

It's absolutely one of my favorite things.

We have more people that signed up for the series stories,

and so instead of just letting it go on for months and months,

we decided to pull back and we're going to sprinkle them in.

So every month or so,

we'll have someone come up and tell their story and

do what we did through the Arsenal stories.

I feel like people liked it,

we got some good feedback from it,

so I want to keep doing that.

But as I listened to those messages and to the stories,

one of the things that I heard four different people,

four very different lives,

very different journeys, very different directions.

There was one word that kept showing up in their talks,

that kept showing up in this room week after week,

and it wasn't a churchy word,

which I was pretty proud of,

but it was the word safe.

Alexis actually titled her whole talk,

"You're safe enough to stop hiding."

Mark told us he used to show up here late,

still does, but I'm just kidding.

I'm kidding. He's early. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

He used to show up here late and leave early.

When he first started coming,

we had pews here, he would show up late,

leave early for months because he couldn't sing the songs yet.

He couldn't stand up and mean

the words that he's been asked to sing and nobody made him.

Nobody chased him down a clipboard.

He got to not be okay in the room at his own pace.

He told us that when he went looking for a therapist,

he wasn't trying to date the therapist.

Although he described a therapist,

you'd think you would want to date,

but he specifically asked for one that was not Christian.

Sit with how honest that is for a minute,

standing on a stage in a church,

talking about going to a therapist and being able to say,

"I asked for one that wasn't a Christian."

I think he had to know that the room was safe

before he was able to speak that truth.

Then Taryn stood up here last Sunday and said,

"I'm done worrying about whether she's performing her faith correctly."

She's okay being where she's at and she feels safe to not only be there,

but to be able to say that.

So four people, four completely different roads,

and that thing that I haven't been able to stop thinking about

is the thing that this whole series comes out of.

See, I did it. Not one of them got to where they are in their faith journey

by either winning an argument or someone winning an argument with them.

Nobody stood up here and said,

"And then someone finally explained the doctrine properly to me."

My body relaxed. It's not what happened.

What happened in every single story was time and safety

and small things done over and over in a room where nobody was king's score.

Four people, four different stories, and an argument didn't win them over.

I'm going to go back to something that Taryn said.

She was describing the faith that she grew up with.

If you missed it, all the talks are on YouTube and on the podcast,

and we're all caught up. I'm super stoked about that.

I finally figured out how to get Claude to just edit everything.

I was like, "Just please fix these."

But she was describing the faith that she grew up in,

and she didn't describe it with doctrine.

She described it with a T-shirt.

She said it was like I was wearing a T-shirt with an itchy tag.

This ill-fitting faith was always there,

just scratching at the back of my mind,

reminding me that I wasn't enough.

Ill-fitting, hold on to that for a second.

Because a few minutes later in the same talk,

she said I started to find a version of faith that actually fit,

that made sense to me.

Here's what I need you to know.

Taryn had no idea what I was planning to preach this morning.

I really didn't know until probably this morning.

I hadn't told anybody.

One week before we opened this text,

she stood up here and she named the disease using

the exact word that Eugene Peterson uses for the cure.

I'm going to show you Matthew 11.

Jesus is talking.

I love how Peterson translates this in the message.

It says this, "Are you tired,

worn out, burned out on religion?

Come to me, get away with me and you'll recover your life.

I'll show you how to take a real rest.

Walk with me and work with me.

Watch how I do it.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.

Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and light.

I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you."

Is what scripture says as Jesus is talking.

There's three things in this short little passage.

I want to look at them real quick.

One, it says, "Are you burned out on religion?"

I think Peterson put that phrase there on purpose

because Jesus wasn't recruiting people who never tried.

He's talking to the people who tried hard,

who did everything they were told,

and they got tired doing it,

which I think is a lot of us in this room.

Then two, it talks about the yoke.

Underneath this passage in maybe the translation that you read,

it probably says, "My yoke is easy."

The word there is zugos.

In the Greek, it's what a yoke is not.

A yoke is not a weight.

A yoke adds nothing to the load that you're carrying.

It's actually fitted equipment.

It is something that redistributes

a load that the animal is already trying to pull.

It helps to make it less stressful on the body.

There's a backpack that I was going to bring this morning, I forgot.

But I have this backpack.

It's by a brand called Kriga, and I love it.

I've had it for almost 15 years.

Then when we had our motorcycle shop,

I brought the brand in because I just loved how Kriga made their stuff.

But the idea behind this backpack was,

it's a backpack made for people that are riding motorcycles.

One of the reasons is it puts some pressure on your lower back,

and then when you strap it on and you click the buttons together and you tighten it up,

it pulls against your chest.

What the idea is, is that it pulls against your chest and your lower back,

in order to pull the weight off of your shoulders,

so that you don't get tired while you're riding.

It's a way to redistribute the weight onto parts of your body that can hold it,

so you don't get tired.

This is what a yoke is.

It is redistributing that weight, so you don't get tired,

so you can just continue without heaviness.

This Greek word, zugos, it's a yoke,

fitted equipment that redistributes that load.

The only question there about the yoke is whether it fits right or not.

Is it properly fitted for you?

Then the third thing in this passage that we'll get into in a little bit is,

the word that's translated to easy.

The word that's underneath that in the Greek is kristos.

Not kristos, kristos.

It carries the sense of kind, well-made, serviceable.

It's a well-made thing,

but also it's well-fitting,

and also that word became used to describe people of mild,

benevolent character, moral goodness.

It became this word to describe people that were just kind people.

So what Jesus is actually offering in this passage,

what he's talking about, is not just a lighter life.

Read again, he says, "Walk with me, work with me."

So there's still a load, there's still some work happening.

There's still a life to pull, but he's offering one that fits.

Not easier, just a better fitting life.

Now, in this series, I'm going to get into like practices, spiritual practices.

And before we go into this, before we take another step in it,

I want to name something because I can already feel it when I say the word in the room.

The second I say the word practice, some practice, we're talking, sorry.

Don't shake your head like that, that's, come on.

Hey, Ted Lasso's back, season four.

Yeah, anyway.

When I say the word practice, some of you hear assignment,

like this heavy work.

Some of you've been, you've probably braced for it all year.

If you're new here for five months, I've been standing up here saying,

God isn't keeping score.

And part of you has been waiting for like the other shoe to drop.

Like waiting for the catch.

Here it comes, right?

Like week one, Chad's got a list.

So let me like just say as clear as I know how, like, I'm going to make you an offer.

If anything, in these next eight weeks, sounds like a new way to fail, come tell me.

And I mean it, like, I mean like come tell me, don't, that's not just like a pastor being like,

oh, call me out, like find me.

I make gold coffee every morning, right?

Every morning.

Especially this week because the kids start back to school.

So I'll be there because I got to get up early.

Send me a text, interrupt me at HE.

I prefer you not interrupt me while I'm talking up here, but we can discuss.

If one week of this lands on you like it's a scoreboard, like you're having to do something

in order to prove something, I want you to know to come tell me because then I've built

that thing wrong.

I've said it wrong because I think there's a difference.

And honestly, it's this whole series, the idea behind it.

I'm not asking you for performance because performance ask, am I enough yet?

Have I done enough?

Have I got there yet?

Well, I'm asked, practice ask, am I remembering who I am?

Like thinking about if you were an athlete or a musician, practice was where you kind

of went through the different parts of what you're supposed to do in a way that it becomes

muscle memory so that you know what you're doing, so you know who you are and what you're

supposed to do, what the goal is here, how you're operating, who you are.

So this could be like same actions sometimes, may look identical from the outside, but it's

got a completely different engine that's driving it.

And you're going to find out which engine is running the moment that you fail.

Like you skip a performance or you lose, you do something wrong, you lose standing, right?

I'm no longer as good of a Christian as I was, right?

Like, oh, did you read your Bible every day this week?

I can ask you, you do.

If you mess up, if you miss it, you slide down the scoreboard a little bit.

You skip a practice, you just skip to practice, right?

Nothing happened to your standing because that was never anything that you were trying

to produce anyway.

So this whole thing, this isn't me being nice.

It's not me being like, hey, call me out, but really, I'm not going to take it well.

Like tell me, Robert will tell me.

You guys can tell me.

Right?

He'll tell me.

Chad, you missed that one.

But I want that.

That's the whole point of this place is like, come tell me.

And this isn't just me, this is Paul too.

There is a moment where Paul is praying for the church in Ephesus and you've heard this

verse.

I say it all the time.

It's one of my favorites.

Listen to what he asked for.

He says, and I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together

with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and how high and deep is the

love of Christ.

And the beautiful part about this passage and obviously we read it in English and so

we get the translation, but the words rooted and established here in the Greek, I'm not

going to pronounce them.

We'll put them up there.

Those are the words.

They go.

Here's Omenio.

Oh, I think I nailed it.

Both of those words in the Greek are perfect passive participles, which I know we're not

back in school yet, which is next week, but for grammar nerds, that is already done and

it's been done to you.

Already rooted, already grounded.

And somebody else poured that foundation and put you there.

So Paul's not praying that they would get rooted.

Read it.

He's praying that they would have the strength to grasp what is already true of them.

And this is what practice is for.

It's the entire job description.

Nate said it in one sentence in his message a couple weeks ago, pointing at his head and

then his chest.

He said, I believed it up here, but it took a lot longer for me to believe it here.

And the distance between those two points, that's the distance that practice crosses.

A practice doesn't build the foundation, it reminds you you're standing on one, that

you are rooted in one.

And for me, when we started thinking about this in the Christian faith, if you want to

be honest about it, and this is the questions that would get me in trouble, there's a question

underneath, I think even this one, like, okay.

So practice is reminding me that I'm standing on solid ground, that I'm rooted, that I'm

grounded.

But the question is like, why bother?

Why bother crossing the distance?

What's the point?

Because the faith that most of us were handed had an answer and the answer was you're in

a waiting room.

Say the prayer, get your ticket punched to heaven, wait to die, and then go somewhere

else.

Like when we die, you get to go somewhere.

And everything in between the 60, 70 years, 80, whatever years it might be in between

the saying of the prayer and the getting to die and go to heaven is a holding pattern.

Behave, make sure you do everything right, hold on to that ticket, kill time, basically,

try not to lose your ticket.

That's what I was taught.

And if that's the deal, then practices really are just something to do in the waiting room.

They're like the old magazine on the table, right?

That nobody reads anymore because we all have cell phones.

But the old tradition before we got this kind of Europeanized, evangelical, Christian, Protestant

faith that was handed to us to make us work really hard in order to control us.

Before all that, the older tradition, they never believed this idea that, hey, we're

just waiting till we die.

And I mean like much, much older, like Athanasius, who I've brought this book, I've talked about

this book before, Athanasius is a fourth-century theologian, he wrote this book on the incarnation

that is incredible.

In fact, this little green one has C.S. Lewis did the foreword and it's probably just as

the book, it's incredible.

But Athanasius, in this little book, put a sentence that messes every modern reader up.

Athanasius says, "He was made man that we might be made God."

Now, think about this kind of in the same breath that Athanasius did.

Every church father who ever said this sentence also said it and they said the limit to it.

"He became man so we might become God is by grace, not by nature, is by adoption, not

by essence, it was participation, not promotion."

We do not become God, we become like Christ, actually increasingly now, right, in our lives.

The Eastern church had a word for this, they called it theosis.

Theosis is the lifelong project of becoming like Christ, by grace and adoption, participation,

it's not the reward at the end of the Christian life, this is the Christian life, theosis,

the life of becoming like Christ.

It's not a prize at the end, at the finish line, it is the project, it is the life, it

is right now.

The finish line version is this like modern shrinkage of what Christian life should be.

Another fourth century theologian, a desert monk, Evagrius, Evagrius said it maybe even

more bluntly, his line was "The kingdom of heaven is apothea of the soul, together with

true knowledge of beings."

And I know you read apothea and you think, wait, apathy, that's what that means.

It means a settled soul.

The kingdom of heaven is not a location, it's a state of a person and it's available now.

Again, this is not where we go somewhere, it is now.

Origen, second, third century, and I'm paraphrasing here, whoever prays your kingdom come is praying

for the kingdom to rise and bear fruit and to be perfected inside them.

This isn't just some idea that like, hey, I need the kingdom to come down from heaven.

Christian would say, no, no, the kingdom is within you.

So when you pray the kingdom come, I am praying for it to rise and to bear fruit and be perfected

through my life, just like the life of Christ.

And this isn't just the ancient like second, third, fourth century guys, Gustavo Gutierrez,

who is an incredible theologian.

If you haven't read Gustavo, you need to read Gustavo Gutierrez.

He's the father of liberation theology.

He's like 20th century, about as far from like the desert cave of these early church

theologians as you can be as a theologian.

He defined theology itself as critical reflection on practice.

Practice is the first act of theology.

Understanding is the second.

The desert monks, the liberation theologians, 17 centuries apart, they landed on the same

sentence.

You don't think your way into a life, you practice your way into one and then you understand

it.

And I'll tell you where that road goes and then I'll leave it alone.

When you start knowing who you are, you start seeing who other people are and what the systems

around them are doing to them.

It opens your eyes.

That's what liberation theologians would say is like, when you begin to understand who

you are and you begin to see people who they are and then you begin to see the systems

that are harming and breaking people, you can't just sit back and wait till you die

and hope that the kingdom comes.

You have to, you get into practice, you begin to fight because love asks us sometimes to

fight for those that are hurting.

And when we begin to understand that Christian life is not a waiting room, that practice

isn't just killing time, that practice is how you live the life, the actual life that

you've been called to, then it's not a test any further or any more.

And it's, Jesus said this, there's a moment in Mark, religious experts, the Pharisees,

they catch Jesus disciples.

They're breaking the Sabbath, right?

I think in this story, actually, Jesus and his disciples, if I remember right, they're

like walking through a field of grain and they like grab some grain and eat it because

they were hungry, but they were picking grain and that was work on the Sabbath.

And so the Pharisees were like, hey, just saw you guys picking grain on the Sabbath.

We're not supposed to work on the Sabbath.

How are you going to let, you know, you're supposed to be a leader.

And Jesus says an incredible statement to them.

He says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

The practice was made for the human, not the human for the practice.

There's a shift there.

Sabbath isn't a test that God set to see if you pass it.

It's a gift, not ill-fitted, but fitted to how you were actually built, like the yoke.

Because to Sabbath, to rest, if you step out of the idea of like practice in a performance

religious standpoint and you look at Sabbath to take rest, from a purely scientific standpoint,

it's good for you.

It actually like helps your mind and your body and it puts you back together so that

you can operate at your top level.

So Jesus is saying, hey, the whole point of Sabbath was so that they would rest to be

at their best version, not to prove anything to God.

We turn it into these rules that we must follow, but that's not healthy.

That's not actually healing the body and the mind.

Jesus says the whole point of this was for the human.

It's for them to be better equipped to go love.

And I'll tell you this from a scientific standpoint, there's three pieces of evidence to this and

you can ask people that are much smarter than me on the psychological side of this.

Nate spoke up here.

I think Allison just said something about it.

Talk to Dr. Allison.

Positive affirmations backfire.

The mirror thing.

I'm a lovable person.

Look at yourself in the mirror, repeat it until you believe it.

There's actually a study out of Waterloo, Wood and colleagues 2009 found that for people

with low self-esteem, repeating I am a lovable person made them feel worse.

Worse mood, less interested in doing anything pleasant afterward.

The words bounced off and confirmed how far they were from actually being that.

And the condition that actually helped those same people was the one that let them admit

the statement wasn't fully true.

Now again, asked Dr. Allison, this is a small study.

It was like 68 people don't write a theology on it.

Hold it as suggested, like not settled yet.

There's a lot of studies on it.

Watch the shape of it.

Forcing the words made it worse.

Permission to tell the truth is what made it better.

Now flip that self-affirmation, which sounds identical but it's a different thing and this

one works.

There's been decades of studies on this.

Steel in the 80s, a major review by Cohen and Sherman in 2014.

Look at what it actually is.

Not telling you you're great.

You write about a value you already hold.

Something you already love.

And people become less defensive, more open, more able to change.

So you're not manufacturing a self, you're remembering one.

Here's what I know about me and I'm going to write that down.

You're remembering something about you.

You're not trying to convince yourself that you're something you're not.

This one, which admittedly I'm terrible at, sleep.

There's a huge review published last year, 154 experiments, more than 5,000 people found

that what sleep loss reliably strips out of a person isn't happiness.

It's the capacity to be moved.

A tired person isn't in more pain.

They're less able to be delighted.

Rest doesn't earn you anything.

It restores the equipment of the word that we've been talking about for a year of awe.

This idea, rest restores the equipment that awe runs on.

So you can see things and be delighted.

And because you know I can't help myself, the counter evidence, this is from the stage

for free.

The largest study anyone has done on clergy actually keeping Sabbath, 1,300 pastors, found

no health effect at all once you account for social support.

Gratitude journaling, the darling of the internet, right, barely beats doing any other halfway

decent thing with your evening.

So note the data on this.

It's not necessarily like a slam dunk.

It tells you that this study proves this practice will change your life is selling you a scoreboard

and they have a lab coat on it just to try and...

The honest read of all of this is that the practice that helps is the one that lets you

to the truth.

So why is this series called Unforced?

Out of that whole passage, learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

The word that I chose is unforced.

Unforced is a rhythm word.

A rhythm is this picture I know of how grace actually gets a person.

Like, say with me, because a beat catches you before you decide anything.

Right?

Like, think about music.

There's a study, 2009, researchers played drum patterns for newborns.

Two days old.

And when the patterns set up an expectation, boom, boom, boom.

And then the downbeat went missing.

The brand new brains, these little newborn two-day-old babies, they registered surprise.

And the beat -- there was a pattern, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Something in that newborn's brain said, wait, something's missing.

I was already on the beat.

The idea is you don't learn to be caught by a rhythm to arrive already caught.

One baby is here and already knows, like, music does something, right?

It goes further right now, sitting perfectly still, hands in your laps.

If music with a good beat came on, your motor cortex, the movement part of your brain would

already be active before you tap anything, before you catch that beat.

Your body starts participating without even asking your permission.

And the researchers who study groove, the quality that makes music feel good, they keep

finding the same funny thing.

The music people as most enjoyable is the music they rate as the least effortful.

It's the ease of the music that's the pleasure.

That's the cresstos.

That's the well-fitting thing.

It's a good thing.

It's the same finding, just a different lab.

One more in my favorite, a brain imaging study of people listening to music gives them chills,

found that at the very peak of the musical pleasure, the amygdala goes quiet.

You've heard me talk about the amygdala before.

At the peak of the beauty of the music, the threat system in the brain stands down.

And you guys have heard this before.

There's a version of "Switchfoot Song Meant to Live" by my favorite artist, John Billy,

and J.D.'s laughing because he probably knew that I was about to talk about this song.

In this, the voice, the strings, it was recorded at Abbey Road.

Billy has said publicly that this song "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot is one of the reasons

that he got into music.

And it's one of those songs that I cannot listen to it as background music.

I try.

I love it.

You know, when your Spotify playlist end of year comes out or your Apple, whatever, whatever

Android to listen to it on, my top artist, my top song for like the last three years

has been this song by John Billy.

Because I just, I love it.

Hits me every single time.

And I never once decided that like this is the song that's going to get me.

It just does.

Maddy likes to say when she hears music that like, that she just, that she loves that like,

it makes her ears happy.

And I can look at her and I know when that's happening.

I'm like, oh, and my favorite is when John Billy in music does it because I'm like, oh,

she likes my music too.

Not mine, you know me.

This is the whole series.

It's what we're after, not eight weeks of trying harder, but eight weeks of getting back

into rhythm with something that was already playing.

You don't decide to feel a beat.

It gets you first and then you just catch the rhythm.

And the secret part about all of this is you're already practicing.

Everybody is you reach for your phone before your feet hit the floor in the morning.

That's a practice.

You rehearse the argument in the shower that you're about to have later, but that's a practice.

Getting your failures at two in the morning to yourself.

That's a practice and you've gotten really good at it.

The question this series keeps asking us is not, will you start practicing?

The question is what are you practicing and did you pick it?

So the assignment, one thing before next Sunday, I'm going to give you some homework.

Pick one practice.

And I want it to be the smallest possible version of anything that you can think of.

Not this impressive version.

The version so small you'd be embarrassed to post about it.

Like you don't have to tell Instagram you did it.

Like attention, 10 minutes outside without your phone.

Just once this week.

Rest, take two hours, put it somewhere in the week on purpose and don't try to earn

that back afterwards.

Like just two hours of rest.

Or like a table, a connection, text one person this week that you don't typically text.

And before you try to inflate it, the smallness of the thing is the point.

The smallness of this is the theology.

Like if you can't fail it, it can't become a scoreboard.

That's not like some concession.

That's the design of this whole thing.

Because here's where we started this morning.

Four people stood up here this summer and nobody argued their way into a new life.

They practiced their way there.

Small things over and over.

In a room where it was finally safe to stop hiding.

You're already rooted.

You're already grounded.

Somebody else has already done the work there for you.

The creator created you for this.

So we're going to spend the next eight weeks remembering that.

It's what our whole final statement of every week that I say rides on.

You were made to do this.

You were made to be a conduit and a representation of the love of God.

Made to practice love.

You were designed for it.

That rhythm is already in you.

You just have to catch it.

It's artisanal.

Go do that.

Catch that rhythm and go love well because it's who you're made to be.

We'll see you next week.

Love you guys.