Made To...Walk It & Talk It with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medichurch podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medichurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

We are in our seventh and final week of our Made To series, where we've been looking at the seven values that have formed and guided this movement, trying to help us prioritize the original intention that Jesus had for this movement.

These are the values that mold us into the leaders that Jesus needs to impact our world around us.

And you guys got to hear from one of those leaders who's having a big impact here at MetaCurch last Sunday.

Can you guys help me thank Tony Albano for bringing just an incredible word?

It's not his first time preaching, it is his first time jumping right into the middle of a series and carrying that so well.

Today we are at our last value.

It is the simplest value to understand conceptually, and probably the most difficult value to actually apply into your life.

And it's the one value that all of the other ones hang on.

We're gonna spend some time in Matthew chapter 22 today, and this is a section in Scripture where we could do another seven-week series.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

And that's what I like to do.

I like to dive really deep.

I'm kind of a theology nerd in that way.

Today we're going to keep it simple.

What we're really paying attention to is Jesus and his reaction when people were trying to trap him.

In Matthew 22, it says, Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to trap Jesus by what he said.

And so they sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians.

Teacher, they said, We know that you are truthful and teach truthfully the way of God.

You don't care what anyone thinks or show partiality.

Tell us then what you think.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Now, perceiving their malicious intent, Jesus said, Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?

Show me the coin used for the tax.

And they brought him a denarius.

Whose image and inscription is this?

Jesus asked them.

Caesar's, they said.

Then he said to them, Give then to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.

And when they heard this, they were amazed.

And so they left him and they went away.

So far in this series, we have seen that we were made to move together.

We were made to live with the end in mind, to love unconditionally, to give sacrificially.

We were made to walk by faith, and we were made to team up.

And today, we're closing out with a value that goes right to the heart of all of those.

Whether or not we are gonna be just another church that's like a religious exercise where you check a box and you stay up in the area of theory and conjecture and you talk about the lofty things of spirituality, or whether we are going to be the powerful, impactful movement that God actually created us to be today.

We were gonna see that we were made to walk it and to talk it.

We were made to walk it and to talk it.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you and we're here seeking you.

Um, we're here because at some level, even those of us who are foreign to the idea of faith, those who are still on the fence, those who are even skeptics, we know somewhere at the deepest core of who we are, that we were meant to live for more than the status quo, that we were created with a purpose.

We're seeking a life of meaning.

Holy Spirit, we believe you're here, you're ready to meet with us.

I pray that we would be open to whatever you have for us today.

We love you, we pray these things in Jesus' name.

If you're ready to walk it and talk it, say amen.

Amen.

Jesus was on earth for a very specific purpose.

He had left heaven, right?

Which is like perfect.

There's no pain, there's no jealousy, there's no unmet needs.

He left all of that, took off his radiance and glory, and came down here to our earth.

And we just saw that while he was teaching, you know, these different groups of religious leaders, there's actually three different groups that try to trap him by the end of our time today.

Uh, they come up and they all have their different tact.

And what they want is for him to lose credibility with people, to lower his status.

Jesus was starting a revolution.

I mean, people were following him by the thousands, and the main people getting left behind were the religious leaders, the spiritual elite of the society.

Jesus was speaking out very directly against their unwritten rules and how they had prioritized their own traditions and their own power over the original intention for God's movement.

They just wanted to talk about their faith.

They just wanted to theorize.

Jesus came and was actually walking his faith out every second of every day.

Now you'll notice in the text that we read today and the verses we've already read, they don't directly attack Jesus.

That's coming later in Matthew's gospel where they get the big mob and actually arrest him and figure out.

At this point, they haven't figured that out.

They're not going to directly try to defeat him.

At this point, all they're wanting to do is distract him.

And so they think of all these neat little riddles and traps and word games to approach him with.

They know they can't defeat him, at least not yet.

They just want to distract him.

And here's why I think it's important for us to understand the strategy that these enemies were using against Jesus.

It's important for us to understand their strategy because I believe that when people really begin moving, that was week one, we were made to move together.

When you actually start living with the end in mind and realize that eternity is very close and it lasts forever and ever, when you actually start loving unconditionally and giving generously and teaming up, getting in Christian community, when you start really pursuing your purpose and making an impact on the world around you, when God's people start moving, Satan's greatest weapon is a distraction.

And a lot of times I think that Jesus' followers think that Satan's only agenda is to defeat us.

Like if he can just absolutely wreck our lives, then he will have won.

And I disagree.

I think that Satan is way more likely to distract you than to try and defeat you.

Satan doesn't need you to lead your kids into all of the nuances of witchcraft and Satan's powers.

All he needs is for you to be distracted enough, keep them in enough sports leagues where you never see them, keep yourself at work enough where they never see you, keep yourself invested in enough hobbies, keep your face in your phone enough where your kids are never active in the body of Christ and never see a spiritual example in your life.

Satan doesn't need for you to be the world's biggest hard drug dealer.

He doesn't need you to be the next El Chapo.

He just needs you, with all the pain inside of you, to try to pacify it by swiping credit cards or scrolling through pornography or being hooked into the social media matrix.

He just needs you distracted.

I believe that Satan's ultimate goal for a marriage is actually not divorce.

Satan would rather you be in a distracted marriage where you don't invest in each other, where you're strangers in your own home and can't stand each other, but are still married than divorced, where you might actually seek after God.

We're so quick to blame Satan for things.

And the reason distraction is such an insidious tool of the enemies of God is because when we feel defeated, when we finally lose the job, we'll blame that on Satan.

Now you haven't been on time for your job in six months, but it's Satan's fall, right?

We'll blame Satan.

When the diagnosis comes, when the divorce papers are delivered, I mean that's when Christians finally open their Bible app.

That's when we'll we lose the job, that's when we'll finally pray.

It's in the defeats that often we finally actually turn and look to God.

You know, one of the things we say here a lot because Metachurch is a place for all people, you can belong here even if you don't believe what we believe.

We are gonna be honest with you, though, and you know, I'm just like a guy with a microphone doing my best to read scripture and then preach it to you.

You don't have to believe any of this, and you can keep living your life apart from Jesus, but you've got to remember that I said this part, because without Jesus, the bottom is gonna fall out again and again and again and again because you're putting your hopes in the things of this world that cannot support the weight of your hope.

You're trying to make yourself your own God, you're trying to make your spouse your own God, you're trying to make your work your own God, and it cannot hold the weight of your hope or your future.

And when the bottom falls out enough times, you'll end up at what we call rock bottom.

And we blame rock bottom on Satan a lot, but I think rock bottom is a much more useful tool in the hands of Jesus than it ever is for Satan, because Jesus doesn't mind meeting you all the way at rock bottom.

You get all the way to the bottom, all you've got to do is look up, sideways, down, or behind you.

Jesus will be there waiting for you in the defeats.

I mean, atheists, they get an emergency and they will look up to God.

It's the distracted believer that Satan is most content with.

It's the distracted believer who is the most impotent and useless for the kingdom of God.

Satan doesn't always go for the kill shot.

That might open your eyes to where hope actually comes from.

You need to remember this.

Satan does not have to defeat the church.

He just has to distract.

I think Satan likes our religious freedoms.

Freedom of association, freedom of religion.

Where we can take it for granted.

I mean, if we ever really came under persecution as the church, historical precedent would say that's when Christians would actually start taking their faith seriously.

Satan is not coming against your rights.

He likes your rights, they make you comfortable.

And when you're comfortable, you're easily distracted.

Some people, not y'all, some people won't like this sermon.

Because I'm not like diving into every nuance of the text, I'm not exegeting it, I'm I'm we're not even gonna read all the verses.

It's simpler than that today.

I just want you to see what Jesus did with distraction.

In verse 15, the Pharisees went and they plotted how to trap him, Jesus, by what he said.

And so they sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians.

I love this.

Teacher, they said, We know that you are truthful and you teach truthfully the way of God, and you don't care what anyone thinks, or you don't ever show you.

You're so wonderful, Jesus.

I've heard you literally walk on water.

You're just the best, you know.

You know when your kids come and they lead with like three compliments and you're like, what's happening right now?

You know?

Man, dad, you're looking really fit today.

Oh, Sunday sermon was so good.

I'm like, what do you want?

You know?

What is this shakedown that's happening?

They're like buttering him up, you know.

Oh, Jesus, you're just the best, man.

Everybody's talking about you.

I mean, all my friends, you're you're in all their Instagram stories, man.

You're just, I'm telling you, you're the best.

So then tell us.

We were just wondering, I mean, should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?

And here's why it's a trap, you gotta understand a little bit of historical context.

Rome is the dominant empire, and of course, Caesar is the head of Rome.

And Rome had come in and taken Israel captive.

Jesus was a Jewish man in a Jewish context, and Caesar was their captor.

And so it's a very loaded question because if he says, no, do not pay your taxes, now he's an enemy of Rome.

Well, that works really well for the religious leaders.

They want him dead anyway, and as soon as you're an enemy of Rome, the countdown has begun, they'll kill you.

And if he says yes, of course you should pay your taxes, well, now he's a puppet of Rome.

And everyone feels like he's turned his back on his people.

You know, when we think about Jesus, I think we don't often have a high definition version of who he is.

Uh, some people only like the angry Jesus.

Maybe you grew up in that church.

They like the times when he's flipping over tables and like talking about drowning, you know, people who mess with kids and stuff.

Like that's a they like angry Jesus, and that's kind of their like like L C D version of him.

And some of us only like loving Jesus, you know, as if he had no standards and didn't care how you lived at all.

We know Jesus was the most loving, the most powerful, the most wise.

We can forget he was also the most intelligent person who ever walked the earth.

The smartest individual who has ever or will ever be on planet earth.

This first trap is theological.

It's a distraction.

We live in the age of political distraction.

I mean, every time you venture onto social media, uh, people are just chumming the waters with political distraction.

Just people whose full-time job is just to have arguments with people that go nowhere and change nobody's mind, and they want you to bite so badly.

And he could have.

Jesus could have done a 10-week seminar on how to delineate your purpose inside of your nation, your purpose with God, your purpose under your governmental structure, and how to address all of those things perfectly, and it would have been perfect.

I mean, it would have been the greatest seminar anyone ever put on on that topic in the world, ever.

But that's not why Jesus came to earth.

It's a distraction.

I wonder how often you take the bait.

I wonder how often you're willing to step out of your actual God-given role to be the hands and feet of Jesus and step into the distraction of political discourse that's going nowhere.

There's few things in today's world that bring out actual hatred for other people, like politics does.

I mean, I see it online all of the time.

You guys forget you friended me on Facebook four years ago, okay?

Like people who I know love Jesus, I know they're trying to follow him.

They love Jesus, and they are online damning their political opponents to hell every day.

It's a distraction.

Jesus settles it with one sentence.

He doesn't take the bait, it doesn't work.

And so another group comes.

That was that was the Pharisees, those are the elite of the elite religiously.

They didn't show up, they just sent their lackeys, the disciples, and kind of this little group, the peons.

They sent them, they don't want to get their hands dirty.

And so another group comes, they're called the Sadducees.

This is another religious group.

It says in 23, that same day, some Sadducees, and here's their mark, here's what they're known for, who say there is no resurrection.

They came up and questioned Jesus.

And really, what they want to know is, Jesus, do you believe there's a resurrection?

That's all they want to know, but they can't ask it simply.

They're trying to trap him, they're trying to distract him.

So you can read about it.

They put together a whole convoluted hypothetical scenario about a woman and all these brothers, and all the brothers keep dying, and she keeps having to marry all the different brothers because of the custom at the time.

And then they say, so, you know, at the resurrection, the one they don't believe in, who's she gonna be married to if she ended up having five or six husbands while she was on earth?

It's just a trap.

It's just a distraction.

And once again, with just the incisive intelligence of Jesus, he sidesteps the distraction.

Not because he couldn't spend four hours answering, not because he couldn't involve himself, not because he couldn't get into the debate.

It's because Jesus had marching orders.

He was on earth for higher purposes.

He didn't have time to take the bait.

He didn't have time for the distraction.

We had a political distraction and then a theological distraction.

And then the Pharisees, who didn't care to show up the first time, they regrouped, they showed up themselves, and now they're gonna get them.

This is the trap of all traps.

Now they're gonna go theoretical.

They picked the smartest guy in their group and they asked Jesus a theoretical question.

Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?

We've got a political trap, a theological trap, and now we have a theoretical trap.

Which command in the law is the greatest?

Now, in the Jewish world, there are 613 of these laws.

They comprise every part of life.

And here's what the religious leaders were in the habit of doing.

They would spend day after day, all day long, in the temples or in the synagogues.

These are the sacred places of worship, or they sat above the rest of society, they held all the power and all of the influence, and they would lounge around and they would have these obscure theoretical conversations about these 613 rules, laws, and regulations.

And they would put them into different categories, and then they would argue which of the 613, which one belonged in which category, and then they would rank order them, you know, like trying to predict which ones are most important to God.

You know, like when you're getting ready for the NBA draft, and you try to just rank order what order everyone's gonna go in, and it doesn't really matter because the Spurs have the first pick, so we're gonna get the first one anyway.

That's kind of besides the point, but these theoretical conversations that they would have, and and look, our value today is that we were made to walk it and to talk it.

I'm not saying we quit talking.

Scripture has something to say about every aspect of your life.

Scripture informs how we should view the most pressing political questions of our day.

And sometimes even our Sunday services are the times to see what God has to say about how we're viewing the world and how we're navigating life and how we're behaving so that we can get clear so that we can get rid of distractions.

But when religious leaders are content to just sit and theorize, this right here, trying to make a list, priority of 613 rules, this is the kind of crap that religious leaders do when they forget that there is a world outside the walls of their little sanctuary of people who are dying without hope, who are living without peace, who have no sense of meaning in their life and need somebody to quit talking about it and start actually walking out into the real world and sharing our faith.

Satan doesn't have to defeat the movement of Jesus, he just has to distract him.

And we are the most distracted generation ever.

Facebook put out a new app threads that came out on Thursday.

It's just Twitter.

It's the seventh version of Twitter that's come out in the last year.

And so you have to check on your friends on Instagram, and you have to check on your family and Snapchat, and you I guess you have to check on your grandparents in Facebook.

That's role, folks, now, right?

Facebook.

And then you gotta check on politics in Twitter, you know?

We're so distracted.

I mean, if you're in a waiting room and you sit down and you don't get your name called in 17 seconds, you pull your phone out.

Y'all are gonna be in a waiting room and you're gonna count to 17 and be like, man, Clayton knows some stuff.

Because your phone's gonna be in your hand.

We start our kids off, you may not know this, but on an iPhone, you can turn a smartphone into a dumb phone.

You can take everything off of it with parental controls.

And so when they get it, they can call and text us and they have a calculator, and that's it.

That's all they have.

And you know what's wild is I've I've watched, you know, both of our boys, when they got their first phone, I've watched them sit.

And if there isn't something to do in about 17 seconds, they don't even like math.

They just get the calculator out, you know?

It's just a distraction.

And for a lot of Christians and a lot of churches, Satan doesn't even need them to get addicted to porn.

Doesn't need them spending every free minute on social media.

Doesn't need them obsessed with their bank accounts.

For a lot of Christians in a lot of churches, the distraction of choice is the actual religious practices of church itself.

Thinking that just attending and being in the church building every day of the week, people who know the Bible backwards and forwards but never actually step outside of their normal routine in their Christian circles to be the movement of Jesus to the world around them.

Yes.

Satan can even use good things, can even use things that are meant for God to be the distractions that keep you from your destiny as a part of the movement of Jesus.

You know what Jesus told the religious leaders one time?

He said, You search the scriptures because you think in them is eternal life.

And yet, eternal life was standing in front of them in the person of Jesus.

We walk it and we talk it.

This wasn't the only time Jesus would be confronted like this, and things have not changed.

We are more connected, we are more online, and we are more distracted than ever.

And it's no coincidence that in a world where Christians, followers of Jesus, are more distracted than ever, Christians, followers of Jesus, are less effective than ever.

We're not defeated.

We have everything we need.

You are not defeated.

You have everything you need.

And maybe it doesn't feel like it.

You haven't been a Christian all that long.

You don't know all the Bible verses, you don't know most of the songs we sing, you still have a lot of questions.

You, if you're a believer in Jesus, have the Spirit of God inside of you, you have a testimony, you have a story of what God's done in your life, you have everything you need, but distraction will keep you from experiencing the fullness of life that God created you for.

Here was the last distraction.

What is the greatest of all the commandments?

There's 613 of them, and anyone that Jesus chose, singling it out, would be controversial.

Any behavior he highlighted would seem to devalue all the other behaviors.

Any truth that he put emphasis on would give people reason to argue.

Jesus, what is the greatest of all the commands?

In verse 37, Jesus said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all of your mind.

Love God with every freaking thing you have.

Love God to the ultimate possible ability that you can muster today, and then love God even more tomorrow.

This is the greatest and the most important command.

Then he says, and the second is like it.

There's a few things odd about that.

They had asked for a singular, one greatest command.

And Jesus is gonna give them two.

Not only that, but he says the second is like it.

It's a little lost in our English, but in the Greek that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in, it's very clear that this is language of equality.

The second is equal to it.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

That's a wild statement.

They were trying to trap Jesus, trying to get something juicy and controversial.

They could have never imagined that he was gonna say something this wild.

In Jewish thought, your love for God was not in another ballpark, not in another continent, it was in another universe from the priority of your love for just mere people.

And Jesus makes it equal.

In fact, he finishes by saying all the law and all the prophets depend on these two commands, loving God and loving people.

The law and the prophets, those are the Jewish scriptures.

He's saying every inspired word of the text that guides our life, all of it hangs on loving God and loving people.

This is how we move together.

This is how we keep eternity in view, how we love unconditionally, how we give generously.

This is how we team up with our love for God and our love for others.

And Jesus introduces a new equation of what it means to actually walk out your faith and demonstrate your love for God.

I want you to do this with me.

Point up.

You have a vertical responsibility.

This is your love for God.

You love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all of your mind, every capacity that you have, you love God.

And most of us are okay with this.

Man, we sing songs to God, we read his book, we give our money to him, we love God.

He says, Yeah.

And the second one is equal.

You love the people in front of you.

There is a vertical aspect, and there is a horizontal aspect.

And there's more.

Because the rest of the Christian scriptures explain in detail how this vertical and horizontal love actually demonstrates itself.

And here's what scripture teaches us: that the way you show your love for God, it isn't actually by your heartfelt singing and your generous giving to the offering and memorizing all the scriptures.

The way you actually demonstrate your love for God is by loving the people in front of you.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

And in another one of the gospels, someone spoke up and said, Well, who's my neighbor?

Jesus told a story, and the point of the story is your neighbor isn't the person who lives next to you, your neighbor isn't the person who's in your family, your neighbor isn't the person who votes like you, your neighbor isn't the person in your church, your neighbor is your worst enemy on their worst day.

You love God by loving others unconditionally.

I had a unique experience because I'm a step parent.

Now, that's a legal designation.

Those are my kids, I'll fight you, okay?

But I am a step parent.

All that to say, it just means I had to date a woman with kids.

It's a little different.

A lot of step parents in the room, and if you're not, you can probably imagine.

And imagine if I had spoken my love for Katie every day.

The most eloquent words possible.

In fact, some of you know this, I'm a musician.

I even wrote her songs, you know.

They weren't good songs, but they meant a lot.

I'm from the heart, boy, you know?

They were cheesy as all get out, but I meant those suckers, right?

I sang her songs.

She knew.

I mean, a month in, she could have been like, I need your money, like all of it.

And I would have just sold my car.

I mean, it was love, love, you know.

Imagine I give her all my time, all my attention.

I'm early to every day.

I give her all my money, I sing her songs, I tell her every day, over and over, how much I love her.

And I neglect and abuse her kids while we're dating.

Well, I could tell you what would happen, um, but I'd have to censor it for the stage, you know.

Um, and I'd be like, but babe, I love you.

And any parent worth their salt would say, if you love me, you'd love my kids.

And I think a lot of Christianity today looks like expressing our love in the most verbose intellectual tones that we can, singing our songs to him, filling his ears with our worship out, just how much we love, giving our money to him, giving sacrificially, man, giving an amount of offering that your friends think you've lost your entire mind, showing up 52 weeks in a row, never missing Sunday.

Look how much I love you.

And God's like, if you love me, you would love my children.

We have a vertical responsibility to love God with all of our heart and all of our soul, all our mind and all of our strength.

And we demonstrate our love for Him, not by our acts of piety and religion.

We demonstrate our love for God by how we love the people in front of us.

And a lot of what is keeping us from loving the people in front of us, while sometimes it is hate and sometimes it is difference, most of it is distraction.

We are too distracted to stay on mission.

Every little political bait that gets thrown out, we take and we run with it.

Hours of our day, our anxiety is high, we're pissed off the rest of the day, we don't treat our spouses well, we're mad at our kids, and it's all because we are living and dying based on the hope of the religion of politics.

We are so busy thinking through the religious implication of things that we don't actually walk out the faith that we have.

We're so busy theorizing about life, we are so distracted that we become ineffective.

And we can understand all the other six values in theory.

You were made to move together with Jesus Christ Himself to write the pages of history.

You were made to live with the reality of eternity on the horizon.

You were made to love because of how much Jesus loved you.

You were made to take your time, energy, attention, and resources and give them away, invest them in this world around you.

You were made to team up with people who see you and value you, who will love you and encourage you.

You can understand all of it in theory, but if it's just talk, it's useless.

Here I think is a good prescription for the modern church: less talking.

Not no talking, less talking, more walking.

One of the worst things that we can do as believers is stand on our pulpits and preach about grace and preach about love and preach about forgiveness and then never walk it out in our real lives.

We're not just seen as ineffective, we're seen as hypocrites.

In James chapter one, it says, but be doers of the word and not hearers only.

You can't just understand it in theory.

You can't just come and listen and talk about it.

It says if you do that, you're deceiving not the world, you're deceiving yourself.

When we think we've done something because we got in a building on a Sunday and talked about it, we're deceiving ourselves.

We think we've done something for Jesus when in reality we've made no impact.

Be doers of the word, walk it out.

God created you on purpose.

It is by no accident that you're on planet Earth, and God created you with purpose.

You were made to impact, to impact your family, your marriage, your community.

We were made to impact our city together as the movement of Jesus, and maybe even beyond our city.

The simplest solution is to love God and to demonstrate that love by loving whoever is in front of us.

To be this movement, this all-powerful, impactful, highest mission, ambassadors of God on the earth, we have to push past distraction.

Distraction is killing us.

It's sabotaging our significance and it's crippling the movement.

Today, group after group, trying to distract Jesus.

I have to be honest with myself when I approach these texts.

If I'm Jesus, the literal smartest man on earth, all the power of heaven inside of me, by the time that second group got there, I'm dropping one ball of fire.

Like that was me, guys.

That was me.

I'm just letting y'all know what I got.

He didn't take the bait.

The reason I wanted us to see how Jesus handles distraction is because this is what happens when you realize the magnitude of your mission.

This is what distractions look like to you when you understand the plight of a world that's living without the hope of Jesus.

This is how small the distractions become when you actually start walking out your love for God by showing your love for others.

And so we're gonna end in a very practical way.

We all have distractions, many, many distractions that plague our life.

And for some, the distractions that have a grip on your life are not unique at all.

It's the things that all of us are wrestling with, and for some of your distractions are very unique to you.

But those distractions are getting in the way of living out how you were made to live.

On your way in, you got uh a simple handout.

On the front side, we just wanted you to have all seven of these values.

Make it easy to remember.

If you have a physical Bible, you can stick it in there, you can put it on a mirror, you can put it in your car.

But on the back, there is a self-assessment.

This is homework.

I don't normally hand out homework, but this is homework for you.

It lists all seven of these values and asks you to assess how you are doing with them.

And here's why this is valuable.

On the values that you're struggling with, behind that struggle is a distraction.

This is a way of beginning to pinpoint what is keeping you from the life that God has given you to live.

There's something I believe deeply, you cannot manage what you do not measure.

And we're not just talking about managing your bank account or managing your job at work.

We're talking about managing your mission.

Being the movement of Jesus and living your life for God.

Right where you're at, if you bow your head and close your eyes, I want to give you just a moment, a distraction-free moment, something that is precious in our busy lives.

I want to give you an opportunity to just get really honest in assessing the distractions that have a grip on your life.

The distractions that have a grip on your time.

What is keeping you from going all in on the promptings and purposes that God has placed on your life?

What is keeping you from moving, from walking out your faith?

What distractions are not allowing you to love the people around you how you know you should?

What distractions are taking up so much of your financial energy you're not able to invest in even yourself, much less invest in the things of God.

What are the distractions keeping you out?

Of teaming up, of beginning to put yourself in proximity to other believers, people who are like-minded, who could be there to love one another and encourage one another and carry one another's burdens.

What distractions are keeping you from walking out of your faith?

Let me pray for you, Jesus.

We live in a world of distraction.

And yet we also believe wholeheartedly that you've given us an incredible destiny.

You've placed a purpose inside of us.

I believe the antidote to distraction is action.

That we would get active, that we would begin to see every situation, every relationship as a divine appointment, an arena for us to live out our purpose.

We thank you, Jesus, for allowing us to be a part of what you're doing on the earth.

And I ask that we would not allow distraction to waste our time.

We love you and we pray these things in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.