Made To...Live With The End In Mind with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medicurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medicurch.

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.

Man, there are so many incredible stories just like Ephrains that come out of here all the time.

One of the things we're wanting to do in this series is just get a bunch of these stories in front of you to keep you encouraged and to see that this really is happening.

Like we learned last week.

We are a movement that is meeting together, but we are also moving together and making a difference in our world.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And we're gonna jump straight into our key text today.

It was written by the Apostle Paul, very interesting guy.

If you read his story in the book of Acts, he was the number one enemy of the church when it very first started.

His like full-time job was rounding up Christians, persecuting them, throwing them in jail, doing everything in his power to stop the movement of Jesus.

And then Jesus got a hold of him in this incredible moment, and he becomes one of the most powerful influences spreading the gospel of Jesus around the world.

This is what he wrote to a church he started in Corinth.

He says, From now on, then, we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective.

Even if we have known Christ from a worldly perspective, yet now we no longer know him in this way.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away, and see, the new has come.

Everything is from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he's committed the message of reconciliation to us, to the church.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.

We plead on Christ's behalf.

Be reconciled to God.

We're gonna take some time and break down those few verses today.

In this series, the Made to series, we're looking at seven values that we've had at Metachurch from actually before day one of Metachurch.

We call them our how we live values, and they guide us.

They also act as guardrails, keeping us focused on being the most effective part of the movement of Jesus possible.

Last week we looked at the word church itself and all of the baggage that it carries and how over the years church has come to mean like the place that you go once a week or twice a week, instead of the focus on people, the called-out people of God who are meant, as simply as we can define it, to meet together so that they can move together.

Today, we're going to look at the perspective that will either push you on towards being the created, powerful, purposeful individual that God made you to be, or the perspective that will keep you stuck, living in the status quo of culture, missing out on the significant life that God put you on earth to experience.

It all comes down to whether or not you truly grasp and apply this one perspective.

It sounds like pretty high stakes.

And so let's get to it.

My message today is that we were made to live with the end in mind.

We were made to live with the end in mind.

Would you pray with me?

Holy Spirit, we are here.

We believe that you are here, that you're wanting to speak to us.

God, I thank you for a community like MetaCurch for all people in all different walks of their life, all different parts of their faith journey.

I thank you for a place where people can find belonging, even if they don't believe all of the things that we believe.

And I just pray that we would do that.

We would humble ourselves and be willing to wrestle with the biggest questions of life and faith and spirituality, that you would challenge us, convict us, encourage us, and that we would leave here changed.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to live with the end in mind, say amen.

Amen.

Living with the end in mind.

Now we have a term for this.

This is how it shows up in our How We Live values.

We call this at MetaCurch a pilgrim's perspective.

A pilgrim is someone who is like painfully aware that they are not in their home.

Like wherever their citizenship is, they're somewhere else.

They are a pilgrim just passing through.

If you ask me to characterize the one thing that the great heroes of scripture and the great powerful men and women of God throughout the centuries have had, it would be this end-in-mind type perspective.

They knew that this world was not their final home, they were just pilgrims passing through.

And every moment of every day, it seems like these people were thinking about eternity.

To the point that when you read the Apostle Paul or James, the half-brother of Jesus, or the Apostle John or Peter, their future life in eternity with God someday, when you read the New Testament, that future life when our mortal bodies are no more, that life seemed realer to them than the life they were living when they actually pinned the words of Scripture.

And so this isn't a surprise to you, the church today, especially in the West, it continues to lose its power, its confidence, its voice in the culture.

And I want to suggest that that decline is directly connected to Western Jesus followers' inability to keep eternity in view.

Not only are we not thinking about eternity in today's culture, we're normally not thinking like five years ahead or five days ahead.

Like oftentimes in our Western culture, we're thinking maybe five minutes ahead.

We live in the culture of instant gratification.

We want it and we want it right now.

And part of this is the result of us living in such an advanced time in human history.

We are comfortable, our life is filled with convenience.

Your worst problem that you're dealing with is what we call a first-world problem.

Like it is a problem that basically every human for all of human history would have murdered to get to deal with our kinds of problems, you know?

We're not trying to survive every day.

We're not worried that anyone is gonna come and ransack our village.

We have very few concerns, and maybe one of the reasons that Western Christians have such a hard time focusing on heaven is because at some level we believe we've already created it right here on earth.

And I feel like God gave me a really good picture of this, and you know, living with the end in mind, this is the question that it begs.

This is the question our feature song today tries to get people to at least consider what kind of life will you live while you still have life left to live?

In a very real sense, you know, all of us get approximately 80 years here on planet Earth.

In a real sense, we're all visiting for about 80 some years, some much less than that, and some people quite a bit longer than that.

But on average, we get about 80 years to visit.

How are we gonna spend it?

How are we gonna navigate our relationships?

How are we gonna invest our time and our energy and our talents?

How are we gonna think about our role and our purpose around other people?

The picture that I got that I think really describes the state of the world, especially in the very comfortable and convenient West, is that people during their time on earth tend to live as a tourist.

Like that's that's our 80-year vacation down here to planet Earth.

And maybe you don't believe in heaven and the afterlife, but even if you don't believe in the afterlife, like when you die, time will go on after your life, you know?

How are you gonna live while you have time left to live?

I think we manage things as tourists.

A tourist is defined as a person visiting a place for pleasure.

When I go on vacation, there's like a switch that turns off.

I will not open an email, you know?

I do not think about anything I've left behind.

Like I am there just for pleasure.

To buy the t-shirts, to have the experience, to relax for a little while.

And largely that's how people are spending their entire life.

As if our time on earth is primarily based on pleasure.

There's there's a name for this.

Sociologically, you call this hedonism.

And hedonism is where all of your value for what something is or is not is based on pleasure or pain.

And the more pleasure something brings you on hedonism, the higher value it holds, and the more pain that it creates in you, the lower value that it holds, and you just live for pleasure.

People talk about marriage this way very openly.

It's like, yeah, I'll get married and I'll stay married, you know, as long as it still makes me happy.

You know, someday if we don't make each other happy, we'll just go our separate ways.

And sure, you know, we might have had some kids in the process and they'll have to deal with the trauma of that divorce for the rest of their life.

But if I'm not getting pleasure in the moment, then I'm out because my value system is just based on pleasure and pain.

And so if your sexual partner no longer is bringing you the right amount of pleasure, you'll find someone else, or if that's too much work, you'll just settle for pornography.

We we just we base everything.

You know, you talk to people about job satisfaction, and you know, they're polling on this all of the time.

And for most of human history, your job satisfaction was about the purpose that you were playing in your family, the purpose that you were playing in the world, the impact that what you're doing at work might have on your broader society.

That's how people would score their job satisfaction.

Now, as tourists on earth, seeking pleasure only, job satisfaction is just measuring our hedonism.

That's all it's doing.

Is your job making you happy every minute of every day?

We're not thinking about an investment into our work that might pay off two years or five years or 20 years.

Am I happy and am I happy right here and right now?

And we live in this world, a world full of tourists.

And like most things, it has bled into the Christian experience where we now often live as Christian tourists.

The time God has given us to visit Earth is spent collecting some nice Christian t-shirts, going to Christian gatherings, as long as there's not something more pleasurable going on that day, in which case you'll just show up next Sunday.

Following the parts of the faith that tend to like make your life better, and ignoring the parts and commands of scripture that would cause inconvenience or cause pain.

And so the idea of sacrifice, which is like a core condition of being a Christian and following Jesus, which remember he said to follow me, you deny yourself every day, that doesn't sound very pleasurable.

And you take up your cross, and that sounds quite painful, and then you follow after him.

We ignore those core tenets of sacrifice and denial and suffering for the benefit of others.

Taurus don't have long-term goals, they aren't trying to add anything to the place that they visit.

Their job isn't to improve anything or fix anything or have any kind of impact.

They are there simply to be served.

They're there to maximize their pleasure.

And remember where we started.

This is the key perspective that will determine whether or not you're able to begin taking steps into the life that God has created you to live.

This is the key perspective across this movement we call Metachurch that will determine whether we are impactful and powerful and reach our city and grow, or whether we will shrink back and settle down and live the way that everyone else is living.

And let me just say it clearly up front.

This is not the life that Jesus' followers were created to live.

We are not called to seek pleasure.

We are called to seek purpose.

Here in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul is explaining this new life that we are called to live in 2 Corinthians 5.16.

He says, from now on, then we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective.

Even if we've known Christ from a worldly perspective, yet we no longer know him in this way.

Notice, the first thing that Paul calls us to, as these new believers, from now on, now that you've put your faith in Jesus, from now on, we have to shift our perspective.

The first thing he doesn't call us to is to change our behavior, to change our life rhythms, to change the first thing, the preeminent thing is we must change our perspective.

We know a lot about the Apostle Paul, and he had a very worldly perspective.

He he measured everything off of worldly standards.

You were seen as valuable if you were wise and intelligent and wealthy and influential, and by the worldly standards, Jesus was impoverished and radical and humiliated and cursed by hanging on a tree.

That is how the apostle Paul even saw Jesus.

And he says, From now on, we don't see things from a worldly perspective.

From now on, things are shifting.

From now on, we're not seeing ourselves as citizens of earth.

From now on, we're living with the end in mind.

Paul's mind was changed, and he tells us why in verse 17.

He says, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away, and see, the new has come.

Christians see the world in a brand new way.

It says, we become new when we are joined to Christ, so much so that a believer becomes a new creation.

And the picture in here is the picture of metamorphosis.

It's the picture of caterpillar to butterfly.

Do y'all know that when a caterpillar goes in its cocoon?

Y'all remember a bug's life?

Like my whole life, I thought the caterpillar just kind of held its breath for a minute and popped wings out, you know?

Like that's where the butterflies came from.

Inside the cocoon, did you know this?

The caterpillar like disintegrates completely just back into goo.

Did you know that?

And then it's completely restructured.

Your heart's gonna break for every caterpillar you see, you know?

A bug's life was lying to us, okay?

Like, like it is completely new.

Every single fabric of its being becomes this brand new thing.

That is the picture that Paul has for a believer before Christ and a believer who is now in Christ.

A new creation, the old has gone.

How you think and how you feel and how you act and how you react, all of it, the very fabric of who you are becomes something new.

Your life is under new management.

You move from thinking about how much pleasure you can get in the next instance, and the next instance, and the next instance.

You move from that to having eternity in view.

No longer just living for today and you know, if all there is is right here and right now.

This is an atheistic worldview.

That you live for a little while and then you die and then you turn into worm food.

Like that's it.

And if that's it, if there's nothing transcendent, if my life today is not an investment into something that comes later, then sure.

Now, if all you seek is pleasure, you will ruin all your relationships and you ultimately won't be very satisfied.

And all of the things that give you the little highs today will give you low lows tomorrow.

It's actually not a great way to organize your life, but why not?

There actually is no meaning, there's really no purpose to any of it.

If all we have is these 80 years, then live them however you want.

But if we are eternal beings in temporary bodies, if these 80 years are a blip on the radar of eternity, eternity is not a measurement of time.

Eternity is the absence of time forever.

And every moment right here and right now is an investment into the realest version of your life, the place where your citizenship actually lies, that you become a new creation.

A pilgrim's perspective is held by someone who is living in a land but is not a citizen of that land.

And you have to understand that when Jesus died for us, when he paid the price of our sin and rose again from the dead, he not only gave us a future hope of heaven someday, he gave us a present hope.

You need to understand this.

If you've put your faith in Jesus, you're not a citizen of earth till you die, and then you become a citizen of heaven.

The moment you put your faith in Jesus, that day, as a new creature, a new creation, you became a citizen of heaven right here and right now.

We're not living, waiting to die, so someday we can go home to heaven.

Home has come to us, home is in our hearts.

The Spirit of God lives inside of us.

He has called us into the adventure of a lifetime, keeping our eyes on our destination and walking it out right here and right now.

We're not like vacationing on earth, tourist on earth, and then we're gonna go vacation in heaven afterwards.

Heaven is our home right here and right now.

And when you become a new creation, and eternity becomes the realest part of your reality, it frees you from the tourist trap.

It's a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking, shallow version of life that has become the status quo in our society.

And all of a sudden, you have the opportunity to live for something infinitely bigger than yourself, to invest your life in the kingdom of God in eternity.

And we talk about this a lot at MetaCurch because it is such a huge shift for our minds.

And to be honest, it's a shift that even believers in Jesus who really love Jesus and are so grateful for what Jesus has done in their life, can have a very hard time making.

To keep your eyes off of the here and now, to make your decisions based on eternity, to navigate your relationships based on eternity, to parent in light of eternity, to invest your time, energy, and resources in light of eternity.

But to understand a pilgrim's perspective, it is required to understand the rest of Paul's instruction.

Starting in verse 18, he starts really narrowing in on what our purpose is as these pilgrims, as citizens of heaven.

In verse 18, he says, everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

It's interesting, verse 19 is gonna repeat almost the same thing anytime.

Scripture says the same thing two times in a row.

You should really, really pay attention to it.

Verse 19, that is, like I'm gonna explain this to you, I'm gonna slow it down, make sure that you get this.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.

And he has committed the message of reconciliation to us, to the church.

The called out believers in Jesus.

Two things jump out at us.

The first I already mentioned, verse 18 and 19, like directly mirror each other.

And the other thing is that the word reconcile is used four times in three different ways in two verses.

Four times in three different ways in two verses.

When you see words repeated over and over and over in close proximity, they're trying to tell you something.

Reconciled, reconciliation, reconciling, reconciliation.

So what does that word mean?

To reconcile was a political term 2,000 years ago when Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians.

It's a metaphor that shows the substitution or the exchange of peace instead of war, or for friendship instead of anger, or love instead of being enemies.

This is what God did for us in Christ on the cross.

And this is the part that people get a little bit nervous to preach about because it doesn't maybe make us feel that great to talk about being loved by God or being enemies of God.

You see, there's an old saying like God loves the sinner, but he hates the sin.

And there's probably some nuance needed there, but we know that God loves you.

If you don't believe in God yet, you don't know God yet, you're not sure about all this, you need to know God loves you.

He loves you in a way that is the definition of love itself.

He loves you unconditionally, he desires you.

Like scripture tells us God loves all, and God desires that all.

Would be saved, that all would be reconciled, moved from enemies of God to being loved by God.

God hates your sin.

In the same way that God can love at a higher level than any of us can love, like the best love that we have to offer is a fraction of a fraction of the love of God.

God's anger can burn much hotter than any of our anger can burn as well.

And the reason that God hates your sin is because he sees how sin destroys the lives of the people who he loves so deeply and so desperately.

And God is perfect, and in his perfection, he cannot dwell in the presence of sin.

And it is our sin.

All of the ways we miss the mark on God's design and desire for our life, it is our sin that separates us from him.

Reconciliation was a political term.

Something had to be done, an action had to be taken for reconciliation to take place.

And what does he say?

Therefore, in Christ, in his body, on the cross, through his blood, God was reconciling all things back to himself.

God's fiery, hot, judgmental anger against our sin that destroys and decays the lives of his children that he loves.

That sin had to be put on something.

And this is the gospel.

This is the good news.

This is the core of what we believe that Jesus took that punishment for us.

Reconciliation is an exchange, it is a substitution.

And when you see the cross, the appropriate way to think about it is that is the cross that I deserved.

That is the punishment that my sin has brought on.

And Jesus took it for me.

That is what your sin deserved.

And Jesus took it for you.

And in him, in his body, in his blood, he reconciled us back to our Heavenly Father.

Jesus set things right.

It is through that that we get a new perspective.

It is through that that we become a new creation.

It is through that that eternity is now in view.

And the question is, as believers in Jesus, Jesus did all the work, all the heavy lifting.

All we have to do is believe in him.

That's it.

As believers in Jesus with eternal life, are we going to follow Jesus by actually keeping our eyes on eternity?

If you've believed in Jesus, eternity is now yours.

It's promised, it's guaranteed.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians and said, You're given the Holy Spirit, which is the seal, the down payment, the guarantee that you will be held until the day of redemption.

Eternity is yours.

Will you live with it in view?

Will you make your decisions through that lens?

Will it begin to change every fiber of who you are, every decision and action and reaction and dream and desire?

Or will we continue to follow the status quo even of the church and live as Christian tourists?

Keeping our head down, buying the Christian merch, seeking our own pleasure, following the parts of the faith that help us, you know, we'll come in, listen to good music, we'll get encouraged by a word.

Maybe we'll get in a team, you know, where we have people who care about us.

Maybe we'll go to a class and we'll work on ourselves.

Or are we going to go all in?

Be willing to sacrifice and maybe even suffer if that is what it takes to invest in the eternity.

That will be the realest version of our life.

You see, the old creation is caught in the Taurus trap by necessity.

There's nothing to look forward to after this life.

The new creation has an opportunity to live today as a citizen of heaven, to live today, following after Jesus and experiencing glimpses of heaven right here on earth.

But God has also given us freedom.

And in your freedom, you can be positionally a new creation headed for heaven and still live caught in the Taurus trap as if you never knew Jesus in the first place.

You know, one of the things that happens when you go on vacation, anytime you travel internationally, um, usually while you're up in the air, they hand out a little visa for immigration, and you have to mark on there whether you're going for business or for pleasure.

You know, we took a trip for our 10th anniversary and we were going over there.

I was not there for business, okay?

I was there strictly for pleasure.

I was there as a tourist.

And if we see our time on earth maybe 80-ish years, as this trip given to us by God to planet Earth, if you're a believer in Jesus, the moment you put your faith in him, it's like God takes that visa and stamps it, business.

We have work to do.

And that's exactly what Paul says next in verse 20.

He says, We are ambassadors for Christ.

Therefore, since we have a new perspective, and since we are a new creation, and since we've been reconciled back to God, therefore we are ambassadors for Christ.

Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

Therefore, Paul keeps tracking a pilgrim's perspective.

You're not just a citizen of heaven, you're not just a pilgrim here on earth passing through, you are also an ambassador for Christ.

In the ancient context that scripture was written in, uh, ambassadors involved three things.

To be an ambassador, it involved a commissioning for a special assignment.

A commissioning for a special assignment.

We saw last week the word church is the word ecclesia, the called out, a political term where people were called out and commissioned for a special assignment.

They would meet together and then they would move together to enact their commissioning out in the world.

Being an ambassador involved representing the person that sent you.

Mahatma Gandhi said, I love your Christ, I do not like your Christians.

Your Christians do not look much like your Christ.

We represent the sender.

For many people who we are here to reach, you'll be the only Bible they ever read.

You will be the only version of Jesus they ever encounter.

And if your head is down, living as a Christian tourist, your life will look no different than theirs, and they will have no reason and no incentive to entertain what your faith might offer them.

If your eyes are on eternity and you suffer with eternity in view, and you love with eternity in view, and you navigate life with eternity in view, every fiber of your being transformed by the reality of the eternity in front of you, the people who we are called to represent Jesus to will see something so unique and so different.

We will be a light, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, a beacon of hope to our city who is dying and desperate for the hope that we have inside of us.

We're called to represent the sender, and to do that accurately, being an ambassador also involved, having the authority of the sender.

Jesus told his disciples, I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you let loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

We represent the sender, we have the authority of the cinder, we have been commissioned by the sender.

In the ancient world, you couldn't just FaceTime the king of the country 4,000 miles away.

You had to talk to the ambassador.

They had to represent, they had to have the authority, and they had to understand the assignment.

Okay, pop quiz.

Do you know who the first ambassador from America was?

For 10 extra points, we're making up points now.

The fur take a guess, you'll probably get it right.

Benjamin Franklin.

Everybody clap for that man.

The one guy who paid attention in history class.

Benjamin Franklin.

It was very interesting when this newly formed American Congress sent him overseas, I believe to France, first of all.

Their assignment was very specific.

Their expectations were very specific.

You have to remember where your citizenship is.

This is what they told him.

They said, you have to retain your American cultural values.

You have to retain your identity.

They told him he was not allowed as an ambassador to invest into that foreign land.

He had to keep all of his holdings in his home.

He was warned that it would be tempting to try and fit in with this foreign society, but to not forget where his citizenship was.

We are ambassadors for Christ.

And yet, often when we think about ourselves, the first thing we think about is our earthly roles and our earthly identities.

And when we wake up in the morning and our feet hit the ground, our first thought is not on eternity.

And most days, none of our thoughts are on eternity.

And when you are an ambassador, every day the expectation is you are thinking about where your citizenship lies and how you can be the absolute best example of where you're from.

And as ambassadors of Christ, we have the most significant, the most special assignment that anyone could ever possibly have.

You have to represent your sender.

That's Jesus.

You have to exercise his authority the way that he would exercise it.

We are ambassadors.

We represent Christ.

And Christ always had his eyes on eternity.

We are Christian ambassadors, we are not Christian tourists.

And I know those are just these little, you know, statements that I came up with for this sermon.

If you get that and seek to apply it and take steps towards it, it will change your life, it will change your relationships, it will change your families.

And if we get that collectively, as the called-out individuals that make up meta church, it will change our movement and we will change our city.

We are Christian ambassadors, ambassadors of Christ.

We are not Christian towards.

We have work to do.

And here's the work.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ since God is making his appeal through us.

We plead on Christ's behalf.

Boy, if you have your eyes on eternity daily, if you know what's coming, you will beg the world around you to sit up and pay attention.

Your life will exude the love of Christ.

You won't be able to help it.

We plead, be reconciled to God.

Jesus, who stretched his arms and breathed his last to reconcile us to him, has now given us the ministry of reconciliation.

Jesus was God's ambassador to us, and now we are his ambassadors to the world.

Jesus was reconciling us back to God, and now we've been given the ministry of reconciliation.

Jesus was the sacrifice to God for us.

And now we are called to sacrifice of ourselves to reach others.

We are called to be willing to undergo pain, sacrifice, and even suffering in order to bring others to Christ.

And you will not do that if you are living simply for pleasure.

If you're living as a tourist, all of us, as a part of the human condition, are desperate for significance on the earth, and it can be found, and it is offered to you in the journey following Jesus.

But we must learn to keep eternity in view.

We must live with the end in mind.

Last October, Katie and I celebrated our 10th anniversary by going on like a lifelong dream vacation over to Ireland.

And man, we saw some pretty amazing and magical things.

But there was one moment, it was actually on day number one, that stuck out the most to me and it actually inspired me the most.

We went to St.

James Gate, which is the historic Guinness Brewery.

And uh, it was one of the coolest museums I've ever been to in the first place.

I learned that Arthur Guinness, he started this brewery and he only made one kind of beer.

It was the Dark Stout that Guinness is still famous for.

And everyone told him this was destined for failure.

You gotta offer a wide variety of choices.

He said, I'm gonna do this one thing.

This is the one beer that we're gonna make.

And I have so much confidence in this that he signed a lease with the city of Dublin for St.

James Gate that would long outlive him.

Signed a lease that would long outlive him.

And so, can you imagine how long he might have signed this lease for?

Like maybe a hundred years.

That'd be crazy, or two hundred years.

Like long after he's dead, this lease is still going.

He signed a lease for 9,000 years.

This was in the 1700s, a few years before America was founded, and Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease.

When you go to St.

James Gate, they say 250 years down, 8,750 years to go.

He was living with the end in mind.

It just created this belief in what they were doing.

It was something for people to organize towards and to believe in.

If you want to do something significant with your life, you have to live with the end in mind.

Stephen Covey wrote the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

One of the habits is begin with the end in mind.

You want to build a great company, begin with the end in mind.

You want to have a great relationship, begin with the end in mind.

But when we go to the spiritual level, it is the highest plane that we can have this conversation on.

If you want to live the life of purpose and significance that God created you for, live with the end in mind.

A pilgrim's perspective, understanding you're in a temporary body, but you are an eternal being.

And every moment of every day can be the shallow pursuit of pleasure as a Christian tourist, or every moment of every day can be an investment into the kingdom of God as an ambassador for Christ.

Would you pray with me?

Right where you're at, just bow your head and close your eyes.

There's something magic about that.

Just create some space for yourself to reflect on what God might be showing you today.

And I do want to challenge you with your head bowed and your eyes closed.

I want to challenge you to get really brutally honest.

That's why we come here.

We don't come here to play church, we don't come here to check a religious box.

Get really honest with whether you have been living as a tourist, living primarily for pleasure, or if you really do see yourself as a representative of Christ, having been given the authority of Christ, assigned and commissioned to real work by Christ.

Are you living for today?

Or are you aware that you're a citizen of heaven living with the end in mind?

Let me pray for you.

Jesus, you reconciled us, you moved us from enemies of God to children dearly loved by our Heavenly Father.

And now you have placed this movement in our hands, a world that is desperate and broken, and dying, and helpless, and hopeless.

A world that, whether they know it or not, need reconciliation.

And you put it in our hands.

And it is our job to plead to this world and demonstrate to this world, love this world, and show the world what it means to be a new creation.

I pray.

We would live with the end in mind, we would escape the Taurus trap, and you'd begin to unlock first in our lives as individuals, then in our families and friends.

And eventually, God, you would unlock in this movement we call Metachurch the power of what it looks like for people to deny themselves, take up their cross, and live as ambassadors for you.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' 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 videos 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.