Everyday Mission: Uncaged Gospel

Hey, buddy. So glad to have you guys here. I was on vacation all week,

so this is a lot for me right now.

It's good. I'm happy to be back. I'm happy to be hanging out with you guys this

morning and having Father's Day.

What we've been doing the last couple weeks is making our way through this series,

and we're calling it Everyday Mission.

We're just thinking about what does it involve for us as normal people,

You know, not to become people who we aren't, but as the people that we are,

how does it look like for us to partner with God in his mission to reach the

world and to share the gospel and to invite people to faith?

And yeah, we've just been thinking

about that. And we're kind of thinking about it's not just a do this.

It's not just an instructional kind of series. We're thinking about kind of

what's behind a missional mentality. What are the attitudes or ways of thinking,

things that we need to understand in order to become the sorts of people who are missional?

Because again, I don't think it's just that we need to learn a bunch of methods or techniques.

I think we just need to change the way that we think about how we are in the world.

And last week, I shared with you a little bit kind of about my own story,

which I don't like to do very often, but we talked a little bit about my own story. Okay.

And some things that God taught me about living on mission. And as I kind of

explained then, I learned some of this stuff or grew into some of this stuff

in sort of a weird, sort of an unexpected way, not the normal way.

And for me, it took me kind of leaving the country in order to see the reality

of what I was facing and how really I was really incapable of living my life for Jesus.

You know, after college, I just didn't understand. I didn't know.

I thought about this question of how do I live a missional life?

How do I share the gospel? How do I live a life that honors the Lord as just

like a normal person? I just couldn't figure it out.

And I'm probably just, I'm just pretty dense, I think is probably the issue,

but I didn't know how to live my life for Jesus.

And I couldn't just get over the fact of how difficult it was to try to live

on mission when I was immersed in a culture that was really shaping me,

informing me, and I was caught up in it, you know?

And so what I did is I moved abroad for a little bit.

And in that time away, kind of away from my own culture, the Lord was able to

kind of show me some things.

And we talked a little bit about that last week, but, you know,

I want to just keep talking about that a little bit more this week.

And honestly, like I'm not, I think a lot of people, if you've spent some time

in like a cross-cultural experience, you sort of learn a lot about the culture that you come from.

Ironically, the culture that you've left, that you grew up in,

you learn by leaving that culture, how that culture has shaped you.

And of course, I'm not the first person to experience that. I bet some of you have.

And many, many Christians have experienced that too. Many other Christians have written about this.

One of my favorite theologians, and I talk about him every now and then,

is a guy named Leslie Newbigin.

He's Leslie, but he's a guy. He's British, so that explains it.

A guy a guy named Leslie Newbigin. And Newbigin left his homeland of England in the 1930s.

And he went to South India, and he served as a missionary in South India for over 40 years.

And then at the end of those 40 years in India, he returned to England,

and that was around the mid-1970s.

And as I'm sure you can imagine, leaving England in the 30s,

coming back in the 70s, he found his country very much changed over that course of time.

There was a lot of things that it happened. The Second World War happened.

There was a radical shift in culture, you know, hippie culture,

and then just like all the ensuing stuff.

There was a wave of secularism that had come all over into Europe and into the Western world.

And what he noticed is that the church in England was caught pretty flat-footed

in the midst of this, and they were feeling quite defeated and discouraged about

the gospel and what prospects the gospel would have,

what prospects they had as a church to spread the gospel in this kind of culture.

And Newbigin then spent the next 20 years of his life writing and lecturing

and encouraging the church in England on how it could reach the Western world

and how it could understand and diagnose what had happened over that period of time.

And he argued that what was needed is for the church to have a missionary encounter

with Western culture in the same way that he as a missionary went into,

you know, South Indian culture and acted as a missionary.

He said the church in its day, in its culture, in what historically has been

a Christian culture, needs to actually have a missionary encounter once again with Western culture,

because he argued that Western culture had already been so thoroughly shaped

by the gospel, but that it had grown really accustomed and unbothered by the

gospel because of its familiarity with it.

He often wondered something like this.

He says, he wondered, have we gotten into a situation where the biblical message

has been so thoroughly adapted to fit into to our modern Western culture that

we're unable to hear the radical challenge,

the call for radical conversion, which it presents to our culture.

See, what Newbigin realized is that for the church to have a genuine missionary

encounter with Western culture,

we need to account for the fact that the Western worldview has managed to domesticate

the gospel and the message of scripture and to to understand it in such a way

to put it in kind of a place within the culture that it posed no threat.

And it should have posed a threat. It should have posed a threat, a good kind of threat.

Let me kind of illustrate it this way. Let's think about what it was like for

the Apostle Paul to set out into the Roman world and to begin to preach the

gospel of Jesus Christ in Roman culture.

We kind of know, because we've gone through the book of Acts recently,

or just to catch you up if you're not familiar with it, Paul went out into the

Roman world, and the Roman culture had so many gods.

They worshipped all the gods. They loved the idea of worshipping gods. Gods did not scare Rome.

They were good with the idea of God because they knew how to manage gods.

They had a way in their culture to handle and domesticate their gods.

They were very powerful, but they knew how to keep them in their little boxes in Rome.

But when Paul went out of his way to make clear is that Christ was not like

the Roman gods, that Jesus Christ and the the gospel of Jesus Christ would not

fit into the little box of Roman religion.

To follow Jesus was not like worshiping any of those gods.

And in Acts 17, we hear like a quick sermon that Paul gives in the city of Athens,

you know, in the midst of the religious hotbed of Roman culture.

And what he does is, I'm just going to read you what he says to them, okay?

Let's just pay attention. attention to the ways in which he is not letting the

gospel fit inside the box.

His intention in preaching is so that it would not sit and be domesticated into

this little square of religious belief.

So he says this, Paul stood in the middle of the Aeropagus, this is kind of

this place where they would gather and teach and share ideas,

and said, people of Athens, I see that you're extremely religious in every respect.

For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship,

I even found an altar on which was inscribed to an unknown God.

Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you,

the God who made the world and everything in it, he is Lord of heaven and earth.

He does not live in shrines made by hands, neither is he served by human hands,

as though he needed anything, since he himself gives everyone life and breath and all things.

From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth,

and has determined and appointed their times and their boundaries of where they would live.

And he did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out

and find him, though he's not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets

have said, for we are also his offspring.

Since then, we are God's offspring. We shouldn't think that the divine nature

is like gold or silver or stone, an image fashioned by human art and imagination.

Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people

everywhere to repent because he has set a day when he's going to judge the world

in righteousness by the man that he has appointed.

And he has provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.

And when they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule

him and others said, we'd like to hear from you again about this.

And so Paul goes around into the Roman world and he's proclaiming the gospel

that Jesus' death and resurrection proves the power of God and proves that God

is trying to reconcile with the world.

But he is careful to make it clear that this Jesus and his gospel is not like

other news about other gods.

It's not just another option amongst the religious ideologies of the day. He isn't interested.

Paul is not interested in Jesus just being a part of the Roman pantheon.

He's trying to make it clear that Jesus is not going to settle for that kind of a relationship.

He's not going to fit into the box of Roman religion. And in fact,

faith in Christ was a threat to the whole Roman worldview, to the whole system

of life, to the values and beliefs of that culture.

Not in a domineering kind of way, but in a way that just simply says,

we know you think that these things have power. We know you think that these things are important.

But the gospel reveals that those things are not ultimate. They're not powerful.

They're not of ultimate importance.

And what Paul preached is a radical conversion, right?

The invitation, the explanation of the facts of who God is and what he's like,

and the fact that he does not sit well with the Roman pantheon.

His explanation in his call was to repent.

He says, stop buying into this domesticated version of God.

Stop thinking that God is just like wanting something from you.

Stop being in that kind of relationship with God, And instead understand that

the one who you really long for, the one that all people are trying to connect

with, like the holy that we all are longing for,

like it is in the person of Jesus Christ and that person is going to judge all things.

He's going to be the true standard by which the whole world is going to be judged.

What Paul preached, this God that Paul preached, it was a definite threat to the Roman way of life.

And bringing it back to Newbigin, Newbigin's point, his critique of the church

in the 1970s and in the modern world is that modern Western culture has arranged

itself in such a way that the gospel,

this crazy news that Paul preached, that Jesus Christ has come into the world

to to reveal the character of God and to invite people into a restored relationship

and to invite people into forgiveness of sin and into life everlasting,

that gospel which he preached.

Is the same as it was then, and it will not sit nicely in Western culture in

the same way it did not sit nicely in Roman culture.

Because the problem is, what Newbigin noticed, and I think many of us have experienced this.

We could say, if we reflect on it, that in our culture, it's totally possible

to talk about the gospel, to believe the gospel, to call yourself a Christian,

to believe that you're a Christian, but to do so in such a way that it has no

real power to disrupt your life.

It does not, to believe in such a way where it doesn't become the motive or

the guiding way that's going to transform your choices, right?

So many of us get into this thing, and I do too, by the way,

this is not a you problem, this is a me problem, this is an us problem.

We let the culture kind of put the gospel into a little box.

We can come to believe in Jesus in the same way that the Romans believed in all their gods.

They did some things for these gods. They burned some incense.

They offered some sacrifices. And they thought that would get these gods off their back.

And we do the same thing with God, even confessing Jesus Christ is Lord.

It's easy to start to believe that all God wants from you is just kind of an

agreement agreement, where we give him what he wants, and he'll give us what we want.

So we say, well, I'll just live a moral enough kind of life.

And I'll define that by doing certain things, not cheating on my spouse,

not cheating on my taxes, not swearing too much, not drinking too much.

And we think, if I do those things, then God will be happy, and I'll be a Christian, and that's great.

We go to church. We think, oh, well, that's what God wants me to do. So I'll go go to church.

And then, you know, the other 168, 67, is that right? I don't, I can't remember.

I think 167, the other 167 hours of my week, I won't think about God that much,

but I went to church. So he's going to be happy.

I will have offered him something. I will have given him some of my time or,

and maybe, maybe he just, we just think, well, God just wants some of my money.

He wants me to give some of my money to, to, to a good cause.

And so I'll take, you know, I'll take three, five, 10% of my money and I'll give it away.

And then I'll be a generous person and I'll feel good about myself and God will

just let me go about my life.

But how does that stand up to Paul's message that he tells the Romans about?

This is what he tells the Romans in order to kind of just burst their little

bubble about the way that they've worshiped. And I think it should burst ours too.

He says this to the Romans, well, to the Athenians.

It says, God who made the world and everything in it, he's the Lord of heaven

and earth, and he doesn't live in shrines made by hands, neither is he served

by human hands as though he needed anything.

Thing, since he himself gives everyone life and breath and all things.

See, the Romans had domesticated their religious life.

They just made kind of an agreement with the gods that if they did certain things

for them, they wouldn't be mad at them anymore.

And so often we kind of treat God in that same way.

We think, oh, God just, I guess, wants me to go to church.

He just wants me to be sort of a moral person. He wants me to live a certain kind of life.

And so I'm going to do that and then I'll get off my back and then I can go

about the things that I'm really interested in in my life.

And we can think about, and I think actually so much in our culture,

affirms the idea that that is believing the gospel because we have these beliefs

about Jesus and God and who he is.

But it ends up just leading, I would say, to a kind of a powerless sort of a life.

You've probably heard the famous quote by C.H. Spurgeon, a preacher from back in the day.

He says, the gospel is like a caged lion.

It doesn't need to be defended. It just needs to be let out of its cage.

Here's the thing. So many of us believe a gospel that's in a cage because we've

just made it about just doing this one or two or three things to be good enough to get God off my back,

that he needs something from me, and so I'm going to give it to him,

and that'll be the end of things, and we'll all be content,

and we can all go about our business.

But the gospel needs to be let out of its cage, and when we let the gospel out

of its cage, it actually becomes this crazy thing, which does not sit squarely

and at peace with just my normal American life.

Not that the American way of life is particularly bad. All cultures have sin in them.

But when we understand who God is and what he's like, in fact,

he doesn't need anything from you, but he's actually just revealing who he is.

He's letting you know that he loves you and he cares for you.

And he invites you into something so crazy and beautiful.

It's going to wake us up. It's going to wake us up to a radical vision of what

it could be like to live life as a normal human being who gets to know who God is.

When we start to understand the gospel in that way, it's like letting the lion

out of its cage. Things are going to be broken.

Things are going to get a little wild. That's what Spurgeon is getting at.

If we proclaim and believe and understand the gospel for what it is,

then it takes on a new kind of life and a new kind of power.

And what it does for us is it demands a radical response.

That's why Paul's call was to repent, to have this change of mind.

We've taken repentance in Western culture over the last hundred years,

and we've made it to be about stopping to do bad things.

That's not what it originally meant when that word was used in the Greek.

It's the word metanoia. It means to have a new mind.

It's to understand some truth that is revealed, to understand what it means

that Jesus Christ has come and died on a cross and that God is everything who he said it says it is.

And if we repent, then we'll understand those things and the result will be,

yes, a transformed moral life, but it's not about that only.

It's about coming to see that the world is not what we thought it was and that

God is doing something in our midst.

And so that is going to demand a radical response.

But so often we believe leave a gospel that is caged.

So here's what I'm trying to get at. The gospel, if we understand it for what it is,

is a foundational statement about reality and what the world is about and who

we are in relation to God and what is ultimate.

It is not, as we, I think, have sort of made it, just like an option that might

make your life a little bit better, that might make you a little happier,

that might bring you a little peace.

And it can do all those things, right? But it's not a private belief that's

just there to make you feel more content.

The gospel, when we come to believe it, it's so much more than that.

It becomes just a foundational, orienting, primary sort of way of looking at the world.

It's not about a way of managing God or getting him off your back.

It's a new way of looking at your whole life. And it's a good news.

The gospel is good news about what Jesus has done and how that matters for all

of history and for all people and for you and me in particular.

But it's interesting, as we kind of look at the way even Paul presented the

gospel there in Athens, and as we kind of reflect on what the gospel means,

the gospel is not a set of rules.

It's not an even agreement between you and God.

If you believe this certain kind of way, then the results will be this kind

of life, and you won't have to go to hell. You'll go to heaven,

and it's going to be great.

The gospel is actually laid out not by a set of rules, not by kind of a contract,

but by just the telling of a story, because that's what Paul does there.

He tells a story, and then he says, and now you need to respond to the story.

But it's not just a story that's made up. It's a true story.

What Paul does is he makes clear that something has happened in the world,

that God is at work in the world.

And as we tell that story, we explain what God is doing in the world.

We're talking about what the gospel is. We're presenting reality as it is from God's perspective.

That's how Paul presents the gospel in Athens.

He orients the Athenians and

he calls them to faith with a narrative that explains what God is up to.

It explains why the world is the way it is and what we can do about it,

what we should do about it.

Because the gospel is a narrative. Every time in the Bible, the New Testament

characters talk about the gospel, they're telling a story.

Story they're telling about some facts of things that

happened related to jesus and saying these

things happened and because they happened it means

something it and it demands a response from us from us and so let's let's think

about that story for a second because again if you're going to be people one

who are believing this yourselves and also who are capable to explain this to

other people then you then you need to know the story of the gospel okay and

i mean it's just a really broad outlines.

You kind of know it. I bet you're familiar with this story. I have a little

slide to get us right into it.

It begins with what has happened, right?

And in the biblical narrative, the first thing on the first page of the Bible

is that God created the world, right? He created people.

He created the world. He created everything we see. And we kind of see it summed

up at the end of Genesis 1.

Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible.

God creates everything, and this is what it says, "...and it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed.".

We have to ask the question as people, where did we come from?

Where did things come from? And the Bible has an answer.

The Bible's answer is that God made everything, and he made it good.

God created us, he created the world, and he created it well.

He created it to function in its proper order.

He created it to be a place where we could interact with God.

And that's what happens in that Genesis 1 narrative is that God and man are

in relationship. It's a good relationship.

There is trust, there's faith, there's connection, there's partnership here

in the Garden of Eden in this original created order.

God created the world good. That is the answer to where the world came from that the Bible gives.

But something obviously, I mean, if anyone has has been alive for a year or

two, we know that the world seems to not be that way.

And so the question is, why is the world, if God created the world good,

if God created us for relationship, why is it that we experience the world in all of its brokenness?

And the Bible has an explanation for that. It's part of the backstory.

The things are broken by sin. We see early on in the book of Genesis.

You know, God created things, and then within a short period of time,

sin came into the world. And we know the story.

Eve saw a fruit forbidden to eat.

The serpent came in, deceived her. She took the fruit. She ate it. She gave it to Adam.

He ate it. They both were in rebellion against God's commandments.

They had broken the trust. They had broken the obedience and the relationship

between God and man and the consequences of that sin, that disobedience,

that rebellion is that the world that God had created originally good,

it became broken.

We were created for relationship. Sin gets in the way of that relationship.

We were created for trust, for dependence.

Sin gets in the way of all that. And so now we live in a world where things

were created well, but sin has caused the world to be broken.

And the consequence of that we read about in Genesis 3, 23, the Lord sent him,

Adam and Eve, away from the garden.

And so now we experience a world that's broken, right?

We believe, man, God has created us for more. He's created us for relationship.

He's created us for peace. But we experience the consequences of sin on a daily basis.

We live in a world that's broken by sin. That's kind of the backstory.

And Israel, you know, God's people in the Old Testament, they had this,

all this stuff revealed to them.

And they were called to be people who were talking about God and God's story

amongst the whole world.

And they were also given another little piece of the story.

They were, they knew where the world came from. They knew what happened to make

the world a less than perfect place.

But they also had heard from God and the prophets were speaking to Israel and

telling them that something else was coming.

They were people who were taught by God to anticipate restoration.

They were anticipating restoration. And we see this in the Old Testament.

We also see it in the New Testament.

I mean, the book of Revelation, I think, paints the clearest picture in Scripture

of what the world, the end of the world, the direction that the world is heading in.

And this is from the very end of the book of Revelation. It is a beautiful image

of what this restored world looks like, because that's where the world is going.

It's going towards restoration.

And it says this, there'll be no longer, there no longer be any curse.

The curse of sin will be broken. The throne of God and of the lamb will be in

the city and his servants will worship him and they will see his face.

That relationship is restored and his name will be on their foreheads and night will be no more.

People will not need light of a lamp or the light of the sun because.

We have, like any story, a beginning and an end. The beginning is God created things well.

And then some development of the narrative is that the world became broken because of sin.

And we know where the story is ending. It's this restoration.

And we are living here in the middle.

Israel knew this, and they lived in hope for God's restoration.

The ancient prophets understood,

there were going to be some historical events. I have another slide for that, right?

There's historical events that lead into each of these different eras, right?

From creation to fall, there's this event of sin. There's Adam and Eve's temptation.

It leads to brokenness in the world. And they anticipated another event that

would take them from fall to redemption.

And it was going to be a king who was going to come, a Messiah who was going

to come, who was going to lead them to this new place.

It's the basic outline of the biblical worldview.

But what we see is that when Jesus came to earth and he started to go around

preaching and talking about his gospel, he made an alteration to this plan.

He surprised everybody by doing something. thing.

He is the Messiah, he says, who's come to bring redemption, right?

The one who's going to come and lead the whole world into this place of restoration.

But he's had this preliminary event, this unexpected event in order to bring us to that point.

And what Jesus does is he comes, God in the flesh, he lives a perfect life.

He teaches people all about who God is. And he says, I'm going to come and I'm

going to establish a kingdom.

And he does that by dying on a cross to take away sin and then being resurrected from the world.

And what Jesus makes clear throughout his ministry is that his death and resurrection

open up a way into the kingdom.

Kingdom, but it's a surprising kind of pathway, right?

Because what Israel was anticipating is this Messiah was going to come and it

was just going to be, everything was totally different.

Immediately, there'd be a king on the throne and the world would be set right.

And we'd have this restoration of relationship.

And what Jesus does is he comes and he says, I'm going to make it so that this

kingdom could come but it's going to come in the midst of a still broken world.

Right? Israel was thinking, we're going to be done with the old,

out with the old, in with the new, done with this old way of brokenness,

straight into this way of restoration.

And what Jesus says is, yes, there will be a time when I will come and I will

rule and I will be the Messiah that you've anticipated.

But right now, between the cross and the kingdom, there's going to be this This

time, and we are living in the middle of it, it's a time that calls for faith.

It's a time that calls for hope.

This is the time that we live in.

And it so matters for us to understand that we live in a time where,

through the cross, Jesus has pulled the future into the present.

This future anticipated time where everything was going to be set right,

and there's going to be no tears, and there's going to be no curse.

Jesus has pulled that into this present world so that we could understand and

live into a relationship with him.

But I'll just, and this is my whole point this morning, it's going to require

for us like a radical transformation, a radical conversion, conversion and it comes by faith.

It comes by faith. I mean, the crazy message of scripture is this,

is that there's a story of things that have happened.

Jesus has come into the world. He has paid the price for sin and we make something

of what he's done by responding in faith and living in faith,

living into the story and finding ourselves into this in-between place of where

we're still living in a broken world, but God's kingdom is coming among us and he's at work among us.

And we step into this by faith.

Leslie Newbigin says this about our call, our call both collectively as a church,

but as Christians individually, he says, if the gospel is true,

that is, if it's true that Jesus Christ has died for sin, invited us into a new kind of life,

invited us into forgiveness and invited us to experience the future restoration

of all things right now, it says, if that's true, then its light will make more

sense to the world than the limited insights of the cultural community.

The mission of the church is to embody the gospel in such a way as to offer

an alternative way of understanding and living in the world.

So we want to be missional people. If we want to be living on everyday mission,

then we do that, I think, most clearly and most articulately as we live,

as we know where we We are in this story and we live into and embody the reality

of what we confess to be true.

But that is so hard, you know, because it's so easy for us to believe that we

live kind of in these prior times.

It's so easy for us to feel like a victim in the midst of a broken world,

to feel powerless, to feel like all of our faith is just about just coping with

the little that we And just getting by,

living kind of this like starvation mentality,

this kind of faithless, doubting, discouraged kind of life.

But what we are invited into is a new way of living, a way of living that comes

and understands the times that we find ourselves in and understand that right

now we live in this overlapping time where, yes,

we are experiencing a broken world.

And yet also we are drawing on the power and the love of Jesus Christ,

of God himself, come into the world and we are being made new.

James 1, 18 through 21 says this, He says, by his own choice,

he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

My dear brothers and sisters, understand this. Everyone should be quick to listen,

slow to speak, slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God's righteousness.

Therefore, ridding yourselves of all moral fruit and the evil that is so prevalent.

Look at what we have is we have a story that we're living in.

And what we start to understand is that if we locate ourselves in this story,

then our life can suddenly take on a new purpose.

What the Athenians had difficulty with and what our culture has difficulty with

is that it's hard to make sense of the world.

And so we tell ourselves stories and we create value systems and we pursue certain

ideas and we think that those things will be, will scratch the itch and the

desire that we have for a meaningful and purposeful life.

But what we're told is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is gonna give us all

the purpose that we need.

Our call is to live as people who understand where we live.

We are called to live as people of faith, people who are living still in a broken,

sinful world and yet anticipating what God has done and he is doing.

And we do that by faith. And faith is, I think, like James says here,

it's just simply receiving the implanted word.

We just believe it. when we say, because what God says is that in this moment

in time, the future has come into the present.

And yet we live as if we still have so many needs and so many wants.

And it's like, yeah, the fact of the matter is, and you've probably heard pastors

talk about this, is that one thing about this dynamic is that there's a lot

of already, that is, there's a lot lot of the things that are coming in the

future, and yet there's still some not yet.

We experience this life in this age, even as Christians, even as people of faith,

there's a lot of already, and yet there's still a lot of not yet.

But what we're called to do is to anticipate and hope in the already and to

ground our feet and to live as if what God says is true and what he's going to do is true.

We're called to live in this story and to receive the implanted word.

Worship team's going to come up here a second. Oh, that went shorter than I

expected. victim. Just never know.

And here's what I want us to do. Because again, like I could just tell you,

and that means just do this and do this and do this and do this.

Sometimes I think I'm a bad pastor because I don't tell you what to do enough.

So sorry. Sorry, I'm not able to do that.

But that's the thing about scripture.

Like if we want to just turn it into a bunch of rules, then that's just a way

of domesticating the gospel.

That's a way of us getting power over it so that we can know that we're okay.

But that is not the kind of power we're invited into.

What we're invited to do is to receive the word that can save us.

To simply say, wow, I understand what history is about.

And history is about the God who created all things coming into the world,

restoring all things and doing that now in this moment in time and letting my

life be about embodying what he has invited me into.

And so I can't reduce that to a list of three or five or 10 or 300 things for you to do.

I can actually just invite you into that tension between the cross and the crown

of what it means to walk by faith.

And I'm telling you, that might just sound like scary or awful,

but everything that is good that can come from the Christian life happens in that space.

Everything that's good and awesome and great and full of promise in the Christian life,

this whole new life that we have living by truth, it comes in that space and

living into it, receiving that word and acting as if it really were true that

the world is not separate anymore,

that I'm not separated by sin, that I am not away from God anymore,

but actually I'm stepping into to this new kind of life at the cross because of what Jesus has done.

And to simply humble myself and to receive that word, that changes everything.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to take some time to worship.

We're going to do that together.

And then we're just going to pray together because in the end,

it's something that is between you and God.

You have to ask yourself, how do you embody your faith?

And I'm not going to answer that for you.

James says, quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger. Human anger does

not accomplish God's righteousness.

Rid yourself of moral filth and the evil that's so prevalent.

And I could show you passage after passage of scripture that is instruction

that says, in light of what Jesus has done, in light of what is true now,

the fact that you live in this kind of overlapping period that's anticipating

the restoration of all things, how ought you to live?

What should you do with that? But here's the great news.

Jesus already died. He already forgave you your sin.

And he's created this place where we can live in faith and it's all gift because

he's already done the work.

You're not earning your way in by living in faith.

You're not earning your way in by embodying the gospel. You're trusting what Jesus has already done.

And then you are just invited to this world of experimentation, Experimentation.

Experimentation to see how much already is there in my life.

How much can I anticipate the wiping away every tear, like the healing of all

wounds, the ending of all curses, like the joy that's promised at the end.

How much can I live into that now?

And that is the fun of faith. Faith can be fun.

Living in this time and in this period can be fun.

It's exciting. And if we would simply open up the door to the ways that we've

kind of domesticated the gospel and just let our minds go wild and let the Holy

Spirit lead us into this place of finding out how much already there is here,

even in the midst of some not yet, we would find our faith suddenly exciting.

And you would wake up every morning asking yourself the question,

Lord, what can I do today with you?

What would it look like for me to step into faith and to live into this story

and to find myself in the midst of this moment?

That will become a time where your faith will not just be like something that's

like a privately held belief.

It will become, at that point, it'll become something that guides your life story.

So let's take a moment, let's worship, let's seek the Lord.

Let's pray together, okay? We're going to ask the Lord to speak to us even as we gather, Lord.

So Lord, we know you've given us your Holy Spirit, like you promised that in

Romans 8. That's the first fruits, part of this first fruits,

Lord. We are the first fruits. We have life in you.

We have peace in you. We have joy in you by knowing what you've done.

Lord, we step into this reality, anticipating what's gonna come,

like the full restorations of all things, Lord.

And so, Lord, we ask you, Lord, even as we're just people, we know we're sinful,

Lord, but we know you've forgiven the price for our sin.

Lord, we know you've put your Holy Spirit within us. If we've trusted in you,

if we've repented of the old and we've stepped into the new.

And so, Lord, we ask you, Holy Spirit, even now, would you come?

Lord, would you instruct us, God?

Would you show us what it's like for us to be normal people,

living out the gospel, living in the times in which we find ourselves to be, Lord?

So you say you'll convict of sin, righteousness, judgment.

Holy Spirit, you will do all those things. And so we ask, we invite you,

Lord. We're listening to you now as we worship.

Lord, would you speak to us? Would you lead us? Would you give us clarity and

would you teach us to walk into our faith? All right, so let's worship together.