Home Team: Injured Reserved with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

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

I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

If you're new, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here.

We are in a season of transition right now.

We bought this building a long time ago, it seems like.

It was just lot last October.

Bingo, lucky draw, bingo's been operating in here.

How many noticed when you drove in that the top of our building no longer says bingo?

Anybody?

Yeah, progress.

We're so thankful for bingo.

And for all of our history at MetaCurch, we have been a mobile church, which means we show up at 5 or 6 a.m.

on a Sunday and we turn a bar.

We were in a bar for a long time.

Now we've been in what operated as a bingo hall, and we turn it into an auditorium so we can have Sunday service.

And for the first time this morning in our history, we walked in and it was already an auditorium.

And that was a really beautiful thing.

And so there's a group of people that I just want to honor.

And if at any point in MetaCurch's history you have been on our setup team, and you got here at five or six in the morning, um, I just want to ask you to stand right where you are.

I know you don't want to, but please stand so that we can honor you.

I'm looking at some of you who are on the setup team.

You can go ahead and stand.

Awesome.

One of you, a few others.

It makes sense that our setup team all still comes to the early service.

That's great.

Um, but this is the power of volunteering in your local faith community.

Is I I would always make sure these people knew, like you're doing a lot more than just setting up chairs and stage pieces.

You're setting the table for people who are spiritually famished to come in and to get spiritually fed.

That you're creating the environment where over the course of our time as MetaCurch, hundreds of people have met Jesus, believed in him, and gotten baptized right here.

So our setup team is worthy of our honor and for all the time they put in.

And thank God we don't have to set up any longer.

So we're very excited.

I hope you guys are ready to get going.

We're still in our home team series where we're really focused on the power of community.

At MetaCurch, we believe that the church was meant to meet together and move together.

That's been our vision from day one.

And to be more specific, we meet together in order to move together.

And the movement piece is called application.

We're not just hearers of truth, we are doers of truth.

And if all we're doing is meeting, then congratulations, we're another religious experiment, we're another social club, we're making no actual impact.

We can feel better about ourselves because we checked a box, that we sat in the chairs and sang the songs and listened to a sermon.

But if the truth of God that we are learning in Sunday service does not turn into the power of God lived out in our everyday life, then we are missing the point of the movement that Jesus started entirely.

And so we're here to meet together in order to move together.

To get clear on that, we have to understand what the church is and what the church is not.

And so if you don't know this, what you're at right now, this service is not church.

This building is not church.

The staff here is not church.

When you study what Jesus actually started, what you learn is that you are the church.

The ecclesia, the called out people of God.

You are the church, you are the movement.

This is Sunday service, an opportunity for the church to come together.

This isn't church, this also is not community.

And a lot of churches get that twisted and they say this is our community and welcome home and all of this stuff.

This isn't community, this isn't home, and you need community.

Community doesn't happen hundreds of people at a time.

Community, Pastor Andy Stanley says, doesn't happen in rows, it happens in circles.

And so community matters because application matters, and application is what everything at MetaCurch is pointing towards.

You actually going out and moving with the power of God and the purpose of Jesus inside of you.

Why this matters and why we're doing this series is because application happens in community.

Community gives you like the secret sauce, all of the right ingredients for application to actually happen in your life.

And next Sunday, the end of our series, August 28th, we're gonna be launching our life teams.

And that is how you can get in intentional community.

Small teams of people who meet out in our city during the week for the express purpose of applying the word of God into their lives.

You need community because application happens in community.

And here's how we think this works.

Here's the ingredients.

To get community, you need real accountability, you need authenticity, and you need what we call alliance.

That is a circle of people you can trust, a safe space for you.

You need accountability, authenticity, and alliance, and that will lead you to application.

Now, last week we focused in on accountability.

You can go back online and check that out if you missed it.

Today we're gonna spend our time focused on authenticity.

What makes us real?

How can we take off all of the masks and all of the pretense?

We're gonna focus on authenticity in a message called injured reserve.

Injured reserve.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

I ask that we would give you this time to speak to us.

I thank you for Meta, a place for all people and all different parts of their journey, their faith walk, a place where people can come and belong in this community even before they believe.

And so, God, I pray that you would guide this time, speak to us, and we pray it in Jesus' name.

And everyone who's ready say, Amen.

Amen.

Authenticity, what does it mean to be authentic?

It can have a lot of different meanings, like if something is original, like if that Louis Vuitton bag you're carrying originally came from the Louis Vuitton factory or not.

It can mean your place of origin.

Largely, as a culture, we are very inauthentic, we're very fake, very plastic.

We're in the social media filter-driven economy, and so you can curate your life and you can send it out to billions and billions of people.

That's new in the scope of human history, and you know, I'm not like an old guy officially yet, but even growing up for me, your social circle was maybe 40 people.

That's all the people you knew.

That's all the people that you interacted with.

You went to church maybe with more people than that, you went to school with more people than that, but the people you actually knew and interacted with, it was like maybe 40 people.

And so you could like, this is crazy, my kids can't even understand this.

When you wanted to communicate with someone, you would handwrite them a letter, trifold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it.

The other day, my son, who's in middle school, asked me, Why are there flags on the mailboxes?

You know?

It's so foreign to them, the idea, and half of the room's not laughing because you don't know the answer to that question.

That's how you send mail.

And now we can just tweet it out, or we can throw it on the gram, and however many people want to see it can see it.

And we all hope we go viral.

But to go viral, you can't really be you.

You gotta be a version of you that is packaged in the way that you think people will accept it.

And so we're inauthentic, we're we're fake, and we're becoming faker by the day.

There's a I've talked about this before, there's this heartbreaking poll that goes out.

It's nationwide, and I think if they just polled Texas, we would get this right, but it's a nationwide poll, and and what they're asking is what is the most authentic Mexican food?

And every year they say freaking taco bell.

Like an authentic laxative, sure, you know?

Authentic Mexican food?

No.

We don't know.

We don't know what it means to be authentic.

Today, when we're talking about authenticity, especially in the context of getting in community with each other, what I'm really talking about is being vulnerable.

Vulnerable.

It's so interesting because even just saying the word vulnerable inevitably quiets a room.

We don't like vulnerability, and we don't like it at a deep biological level.

There's a part of your brain, it's it's the lowest part, it sits right on top of the spinal cord.

It's it's called the hippocampus.

And the hippocampus has one job, and that job is to keep you alive.

And the hippocampus isn't unique to humans.

It's in most animals, even reptiles, who basically don't even have a brain, but they do have a hippocampus.

And this controls your fear response.

And so there's three things you do when you're really afraid.

You know this.

You either fight, flight, or freeze.

Those are your options.

And when you're really afraid, when you walk in front of a car and they slam on the horn and everything inside you freezes up, fight, flight, or freeze, you can't use the upper parts of your brain.

You can't solve a math equation, you can't tell somebody your home address, you can't answer a complex question because you are now using the reptilian part of your brain whose sole job is just to keep you alive.

Now, here's where it gets difficult, because over time, this part of your brain that isn't all that intelligent can't always tell the difference between actual physical harm that will keep you alive and emotional harm or psychological harm.

And so a lot of us have this very real visceral reaction to being emotionally or relationally or mentally or socially or even spiritually vulnerable, because to be vulnerable by definition means you've put yourself in the potential of danger.

And so what we do is over time we learn how to armor up and keep people away from the vulnerable parts of our life.

My message is called injured reserve, and if you're not a sports fan, this whole series is kind of sports themed.

But if you're not a sports fan, to go on injured reserve, that's when you're still on the team.

They have reserved your spot on the team, but you are injured, so you are sat out of the game.

This is a way for you to keep getting paid and stay on the team, but not play through an injury.

Now, growing up, even you know, in the 90s, one of the things that we looked up to in sports was when someone would play through an injury.

Man, that was seen as a real man.

They had real courage.

They were so brave to go out there, two torn ACLs and a concussion, and still just march down the field, you know?

Now we know today that when you play on injuries, you compound those injuries.

That over time you will actually have a much worse experience.

And especially in leagues like the NFL, where people were playing with concussions all of the time, that you can actually shorten your lifespan dramatically.

What was seen as this very big, brave, bold, ambitious move by these athletes was actually a fear of vulnerability.

And when you talk to guys who have retired and now have serious complications in their health, what you'll find is that they felt like they would be vulnerable if they sat out.

They would maybe lose some of the respect of their team.

Or if they sat out a few games, the second string might really show out and all of a sudden they take their starting spot.

Or if they sit out too many games, the front office might see their injury as a liability.

They might not get the contract that they were looking for.

So they play on injuries and they compound their injuries, and they might get the contract the next year, but they'll shorten their entire career by five or six seasons.

And in their old age, they will have complications that could cost them their life.

I had a very old school coach in high school, and man, I love that guy to death.

Almost everything I learned about leadership, I learned from Coach Harrelson.

But he was old school.

And one time at a tournament in the early game, I sprained my ankle really significantly, tore some ligaments, it was really bad, and we taped it up.

And I'm telling you, this guy was old school.

So not only did I play the next game, and I still have weak angles to this day, not only did I play, but before we left the locker room, he said, When you leave, all the other teams are sitting in the stands.

And so as you walk out of this locker room, you are not allowed to limp.

They can't see that you're vulnerable.

It'll be like chumming the water for sharks.

They will gain confidence over you before you even step on the court.

It's hardcore.

It was a lesson, I don't know that it was the right lesson, but it stuck with me for most of my life.

Vulnerability is something to be avoided at all costs.

And so we've learned this over time, and you see in sports that people will put themselves on injured reserve.

They've begun taking care of themselves, they have a bigger picture in mind, they want long careers, they want to live a good life afterwards.

They're learning that in sports, but we are not learning vulnerability in our everyday life.

And all of us are injured at some level, and we avoid it with everything that we can.

What we believe here at MetaCurch is that you are born into some state of innocence.

And most of us get several years of kind of a nice equilibrium in our life where our needs are met, and really, when you're a very small kid, you're not afraid of being vulnerable because you really trust the people around you.

Like they're gonna take care of you and they're gonna give you what you need, and things are gonna be safe.

And if there's a problem, then mom or dad will come in and they'll take care of that for you.

But eventually, something happens in our life, and it almost always happens before you're 10 years old.

It happens when you're really young, and it's a moment that narratively is called the inciting incident.

And we believe this is like walking through a door that closes and locks behind you, that you can never go back to how you were before.

This is the moment when you realize that the world is not always kind, that you won't always be protected, that things aren't always in your control.

This is the moment that you realize that even though your parents have told you you're perfect just the way you are, that other people see some flaws in you, in your physical appearance.

And what happens is in this broken world, when we're born into it, we have some sense of a shape of completeness and innocence.

And some people get that for almost 10 years, and some people, like my daughter, who we adopted at four years old and lived in hell on earth from the moment she was born, they get moments of it.

And somewhere along the way, a broken world comes along and figures out how to break you as well.

And at that first moment of your inciting incident, when the world takes a chunk out of you, you realize something's wrong and something will never be the same.

And for some of you, this was massive.

For some of you, this was the first time that you were abused and realized that your life would forever be changed.

For some of you, you don't even like to talk about yours or even put yourself in this conversation because compared to someone who went through the trauma of abuse, yours seems kind of small.

For yours, you thought that you were just picture perfect.

Everyone in your life told you you were beautiful.

You believed that at two years old, you believed that at four years old, you believed that at six years old, but at seven years old, someone at school pointed a finger at one of your physical flaws.

And that moment and that part of who you are has been sitting in the driver's seat of your life from that moment forward.

And here's what we say at MetaCurch that suffering is scalable.

And so it doesn't matter if it's huge trauma or small trauma, it ends up leaving the same effect of being broken in a way where we really can never be put back together.

And for about 50% of you, your inciting incident happened the moment that you realize that your parents, who you thought were gonna be together forever, came and sat you down and let you know that they were no longer going to be married.

And that was the moment that you realize that things are not always right in this world.

It's the moment that a broken world took a chunk out of you.

And at that moment, here's what we actually realize: we realize we're vulnerable.

When we go through an inciting incident and we realize that the world isn't always safe and it isn't always kind and it isn't always in our control and things aren't always gonna protect us, we begin at that moment to build coping mechanisms, to make sure that no one's ever able to hurt us that way again, to make sure that no one can see our vulnerable pieces, to cover up and hide our weaknesses, to make sure we never get exposed.

And that's exactly what we do.

And so if you grew up in an environment where things were always scary, maybe you were impoverished growing up, you were always scared of where the next meal was gonna come from and where you were gonna stay that night, and whether or not mom and dad were gonna stay out of jail, and you were always scared.

And so you grew up and learned how to put on the armor of being scarier than anything that could scare you, of being angrier than anything that could make you angry.

And your anger and your intimidation, it is gonna keep anyone at bay who tries to see what's below that.

And for some of you, you grew up, and everything was always out of your control, and you never knew if you were staying with mom or you were staying with dad, you never knew what was up and what was down, you didn't know what school you were going to next year.

Everything was out of your control.

And so you grew up and you learned how to put on the armor of control issues, the armor of self-reliance, that you weren't gonna need anybody, nobody needed to help you.

Everything had to go perfect.

You were gonna plan everything out, dot every I, cross every T.

And if anyone got in the way of what you had planned and what you were controlling, you would burn them to the ground.

And some of you grew up, and your mom or your dad did not love you appropriately.

And so you set out to wear the armor of materialism or the armor of promiscuity, and you set out to prove that people could love you for who you are, and when you look under that armor, what you find is a little girl or little boy who never got the love that they deserved as a child, and so instead they would project something else to protect anyone else from ever seeing what lies below it.

We don't like vulnerability.

And so we figure out our armor, and our armor is lying, and we lie at the drop of the hat, and we can't even keep up with our lies because it just comes second nature, because we're afraid that if we tell the truth, that we'll get exposed for what we actually are, and maybe your armor is cynicism and you just know that everything's gonna go wrong, and it's not realism, it is pessimism, and it is a problem, and no one can ever make you happy, and nobody can ever please you, and and maybe for you it's it's achievement, and so you're always successful, you're always up into the right, but you don't ever actually enjoy any of it because you're not achieving out of your purpose that God has placed inside of you.

You are achieving, wearing it as armor to prove to the parent that you could never please that you actually are successful in life.

We wear the armor and we cover up, and we're all injured, we're all broken.

But we're not gonna let anybody see that part of us.

Not if we can help it, and this isn't new.

If you read the biblical narrative, it starts in a garden, and the garden was perfect, and man and woman were placed in the perfect garden, and there was only one rule, and everything else worked by God's design, and all they had to do was follow God's design for their life, and their life would go perfectly, but instead they broke the one rule, the rule that established relationship with God, and by breaking the rule that established relationship, they broke the relationship itself.

And what did they discover?

That in their perfection they never realized they were naked.

All of a sudden, they discovered that they were vulnerable.

And what did they do?

They hid and they made clothes, they covered it up.

We've been doing this since the beginning, and vulnerability is very natural, and it's an uphill battle because we're wired for it.

But if we want to truly experience a life that God has called us to, a life of real power and real potential, not a life of armoring up like everyone else in the world, then we have to find another way.

And there's some real problems with living this way.

One is a social problem, because what everyone sees and experiences of you isn't actually you, it is armor you have layered on top of yourself to hide yourself.

And so, in the best case scenario, you do become popular, you do have a friend group, you do have people who like and respect you and look up to you, and the problem is they don't actually like you or look up to you or respect you.

They look up to what you are projecting about yourself, they don't actually even know you.

And there's a deeper problem.

The deeper problem is that God created you.

You created your armor.

God created you and He placed a purpose inside of you, and for that purpose to truly live out, it has to be lived out by you, not by the persona that you are projecting or the mask that you are wearing to keep yourself from being being vulnerable.

If we really want to live a different kind of life and have a different level of impact, then we got to find out how to take the armor off.

And that is exactly what scripture teaches us how to do.

Today we're gonna be in a letter that the apostle Paul wrote to a church he had started in a town called Corinth.

And this is 2 Corinthians.

That's what the letter is called in our Christian scriptures.

And it's the second one because he already wrote the first one, you'll never guess what it's called, 1 Corinthians.

And in 1 Corinthians, he had kind of laid out how to live and how to be like Jesus.

2 Corinthians is a different animal.

He wrote 2 Corinthians because false teachers had come into the church at Corinth and they were throwing shots at Paul.

As a matter of fact, they were saying he was unqualified to be their leader, unqualified to be their pastor, unqualified to be their apostle.

And so Paul wrote back to protect and to bolster his credibility, but how he did it is way different than how you might think.

We start in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 6.

2 Corinthians 12:6

Paul says this if I want to boast, if I want to brat, I would not be a fool, because I would be telling the truth, but I will spare you, so that no one can credit me with something beyond what he sees in me or hears from me.

The Apostle Paul is a different kind of guy.

He really is like the top of the top across every category you can imagine.

He is a magnetic and charismatic leader.

He has been since he was young.

He is the top intellectual mind in his geographical area.

He studied in the best schools, he was at the top, he was mentored by the greatest minds of the generation ahead of him.

Of him, everyone followed him.

He was the premier church planter, planted more churches than anyone else.

Paul, even today, 2,000 years later, is probably the most significant historical figure, second only to Jesus himself.

Paul is a different kind of guy.

And he goes, Look, if we're gonna brag, I could brag, and I promise you, I can bring the receipts.

Paul is showing up like LeBron to Gold's gym, going, We can play if all of you five nine guys want to, you know?

Like it's no problem for him, but he's gonna take a different approach.

He said ultimately that wouldn't be helpful.

As a matter of fact, it would be making the very opposite point of what he's supposed to be making.

Paul was handpicked by Jesus to be an apostle, to plant all of these churches.

And in a part of scripture that's honestly difficult to understand, Paul was given a vision of heaven itself.

Not only that, but it's almost like God downloaded all of the truth of Scripture into Paul and he lived that out the rest of his life.

He had this unbelievably special experience.

He was an unbelievably special guy.

But instead of fighting fire with fire, he takes a completely different route.

In verse 7, he says, if I want to boast, I could, especially because of the extraordinary revelations, all of these things that God has shown him.

Therefore, so that I would not exalt myself, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to torment me, so that I would not exalt myself.

Paul says, instead of bragging about my accomplishments, and you better believe I have a few of those, instead of that, I'm going to begin this conversation by talking specifically about my weaknesses.

He says he has a thorn in the flesh.

It was given to him by Satan, and yet he sees it as a gift from God.

It's interesting how our world works because every one of us is broken.

No one is exempted from that.

No one is exempt from that.

And our brokenness, a lot of times we look to God and ask why he would break us, why he would allow that, why God would do that to us.

God, who is in control of all things, why would he do that to us?

And you see, God made a world and he made a world of cause and effect.

This cause and effect world has been broken by people sinning against God's design for his world.

And now the brokenness that we come under is usually not directly from the hand of God.

It's the natural consequence of living in a broken world filled with broken people.

And sometimes we are broken by our own bad decisions, and sometimes we are broken by the decisions of others that we had no hand in.

And so we don't know what Paul's thorn in the flesh was, but he sees it as something that the enemy meant to distract him, to derail him, that the enemies of God thought would be a detour for Paul, and instead he can see it as a gift if he gives it and puts it in the hands of God.

And you need to know this that whatever your thorn in the flesh is, however you're uniquely broken, whatever's under the armor that you've been trying your whole life to keep hidden, to keep under wraps, that that thing that you are so ashamed of and that you're just sure would ruin your life if anyone knew about it or it was exposed to the world around you, that thing that the enemy meant to derail you and detour you, God will use, if you will place it in his hands for your good.

Paul knew that, and if you can believe that, you can begin to crack open the armor and to allow God to begin to work in the midst of the most painful parts of your life.

This is how good our God is.

And we gotta get past it.

Says it was a thorn in the flesh, and it's like, okay, Paul, are we crying about a thorn?

You know, you think about a rose bush, like a little thorn, like I mean, it's not fun, but a thorn, like it's not that big of a deal.

Like, you got a thorn, I, you know, I've got a divorce.

You've got a thorn, I've got an addiction, bro.

Like, I'm not really too concerned.

We gotta understand the language here.

Did you know the apostle Paul was a tent maker?

He made tents, he made them by hand.

And the word here for thorn is the Greek word for a tent stake.

All around the Mediterranean rim, there on the plains, the wind would blow.

I mean, so significantly that to keep your tent in place, they would use 18-inch spikes.

Now, this is uh the biggest Lowe's had to offer, it's only 10 inches, but it's much more significant than a thorn.

We don't worry about a thorn, you know the great philosopher.

He said, every rose has its thorn, right?

No big deal.

A thorn is superficial, it doesn't even draw enough blood for a band-aid.

A tint spike?

What Paul was actually referring to, what his original audience would have heard.

Paul isn't talking about some little problem, some minor inconvenience.

He is talking about something in his life that is significant enough to pierce through the outer armor and down to expose what is most vulnerable inside of him.

Paul is going deep.

Paul is talking about a real struggle in his life, probably the same struggle that the false teachers were leveraging to try and discredit him.

And it's interesting how Paul views this, and he doesn't tell us what his thorn in the flesh is.

And for like a thousand years, people have guessed.

Theologians and scholars have said, you know what?

I think that it was a disfigurement.

I think he was disfigured when he was young, and that's why he had a chip on his shoulder, or I think it was like he was crippled in some way, or you know, I think that he had a physical problem, or you know, some really smart guy said, you know how how God got his attention, he blinded him and he never got all the way over that, so he couldn't see very well.

And some people thought that, you know, it was sin.

He had a temptation that just wouldn't leave him alone.

And you know what I think?

You know what I think?

I think we should quit trying to figure it out.

And here's why.

Because your problem, whatever your thorn in the flesh is, whatever your biggest obstacle is, the thing you love to do more than anything else is to explain away why yours is so much different than everyone else's.

As soon as you can detail it, you can dismiss it.

And if Paul would have said, look, I came under an injury, had to walk, had to walk with crutches the rest of my life, really inconvenient when you're trying to church plant all over the world.

If he would have said, Look, here's the sin, I just struggle with lust, it won't leave me alone, if he would have said, I've got some some mental health problems, I just can't get out of this depression, then what we would do, this is natural to us, because we don't want our own vulnerability.

We would look at his and compare and contrast and go, look, man, I know that Paul had a little bit of depression, but but I'm going through a spouse who had an affair, okay?

So top that.

You know, okay, I know he had a little health condition, but he doesn't know the kind of anxiety that I have.

We can detail it and we can dismiss it.

And scripture doesn't make mistakes.

And I think it's very intentional that we don't know what Paul's thorn in the flesh is, because it's not something that we're meant to take and compare and contrast, detail and dismiss.

It is something we are supposed to see in ourselves and recognize that the apostle Paul, the most significant man in history, second only to Jesus Christ himself, had a significant, significant problem.

Whatever your problem is, you can see yourself in Paul and in Paul's example see what it looks like to actually humble yourself, be like Christ, and respond to it differently than the rest of the world does.

You're meant to see yourself in Paul, and you're meant to see his suffering as your suffering.

And if you can see that, instead of just simply dismissing it, then you're on the right path to being able to handle it in a way that will change your life and change the world around you.

In verse 8, Paul says, Concerning this, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it would leave me.

Whatever this mysterious thorn in the flesh is, I pleaded three times with the Lord.

When I read that verse in isolation, I'll be honest with you guys, my first thought is that is such weak sauce, man.

The problems I've had in my life, I told y'all last week when I was 17, I was diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease.

I have been on my knees before God, not three times, three thousand times asking God to take that away.

What you're going through that is just causing your brokenness right now, you haven't talked to God three times about it.

You've talked to him three hundred times this week about it.

Paul, three times, man, pray without ceasing, not till God answers.

It's really interesting because the reason that Paul quit asking is because God gave him an answer.

And I wondered as I was preparing for this message, how many times in my life I have been praying for something, and sometimes I forget that praying is a dialogue, and so I end up doing all of the talking and none of the listening.

And maybe there are times where I've been praying so incessantly for something that if I would stop and listen, I would realize that God is looking down, going, Bro, I answered this a year ago.

I like telling this story because it's one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me.

I walked into a gym one time and it was just me and David Robinson.

I had like 15 minutes with the Admiral, okay?

In 15 minutes, I said seven and a half words.

You know why?

Because I had David Robinson in the room.

I've gotten the chance to sit down with some top theologians, people that I really respect and appreciate.

And I always remember just listen, just listen.

What do I have to say when I'm sitting in front of one of my heroes?

I know that when I'm in front of people I respect.

I know that when I'm in front of an NBA superstar, and yet I sit down in communication with the God who spoke the universe into existence, and so often I do.

And sometimes we are so busy asking why, why, why would you let this happening?

Why is this going on?

Why aren't you answering?

That we fail to stop and listen to what God is trying to show us in that season.

The reason that Paul only asked three times, pleaded three times, take it away, take it away, take it away, is because God answered the third time.

In verse 9, but God said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.

Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may reside in me.

Here's what's happening.

Your armor that you think is protecting you, it is actually hiding in it your purpose.

And this is what you think will bring success in the world.

You're injured, but you want to stay on the field.

You don't want anyone to second guess you.

You don't want anyone to know what's actually wrong.

You don't want anyone to know the extent of the inner uh the injury, you don't want anyone to second guess who you might be in their relationship with you.

And so you keep it hidden.

But your protection is actually covering up your purpose.

And what Paul says is, I will boast, but I will not boast about my strengths, of which Paul had many.

I will boast about my weaknesses.

And this is teaching us something, and it's displaying something to us that if we could pay attention to would begin to actually change our life.

And instead of living a life where you think you've had impact because a thousand people liked your post, there are seven billion people in the world.

A thousand people liking your post is the same thing statistically as zero people liking your post.

The actual significant thing that you can do with your life is live in a way where somebody who is tethered between heaven and hell with no hope in their life gets a vision of God through you.

When you join with God to help write the pages of history, when you join with Jesus on the ultimate rescue and redemption plan for the safety of humankind, somebody should clap your hands that you have the opportunity, in spite of the fact of just how broken you are, that God loves you and He wants to use you, not in spite of your brokenness.

God wants to use your brokenness.

And this is how we think.

We think the world needs Christians who are cleaned up and put together and Instagram filtered perfect, and we know all the words to the song, and we can quote all of the verses.

That's what we think the world needs.

And what the world actually needs is people who will stop leading with our resumes, stop leading with the flex, stop leading with the arrogance, stop leading with our armor, and actually get vulnerable because the world isn't impressed by you being good at what God already made you good at.

The world sees God when despite our brokenness, we allow him to work through it.

The world is impressed when they know because they know you and they know that your marriage is struggling, and they know what y'all have been through, and they know your kids are bad, and they know that you got that you got fired from your job, and they know things aren't stacking up the right way, and they see a difference in you anyway.

They see a real faith in you that God can use not just what you are projecting out to the world that you want them to see, but that God can use the realest, realist part of you.

In verse 10, he says, I take pleasure in weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and in difficulties for the sake of Christ.

For when I am weak, then God is shown to be strong.

And can I tell you a secret?

You may have noticed something about our armor up here, it's got some holes in it.

And so for our former Baptists who are all sitting in the back, this may look good.

You may not even see the little broken pot inside of here.

But once you get close, you can see every single problem, every single imperfection.

And you need to know this all that you're trying to hide, the people closest to you, they see it anyway.

They see the insecurity that is underneath the arrogance, they see the fear that is underneath your anger, they see the hurt that is underneath your promiscuity.

They see it.

We're not near as good at projecting and protecting as we think we are.

And you know when you really love someone and you really care about someone and you get close to them and you can see beyond the facade and the masks, how desperately you wish that they would just even crack that open.

Just let you in a little bit, let you help carry some of it, let you walk with them, let them see that they can be both fully known and fully loved.

That is how God feels about you.

You're not fooling God.

He sees right through your armor, he sees right through your coping mechanisms, he sees you because he made you.

And he sees what you've created, and he knows it's not what he created.

He didn't create you to hide from the hard parts of your story, he created you to trust him enough to take the broken pieces of yourself and to hand them to the only one who can actually do something about it, to uncover, to expose the parts that you tried to keep hidden.

And see as God works through those to move in your life in the lives of others in a way that you never thought was possible.

Here's what's true vulnerability is necessary for true strength.

You think that being vulnerable will make you weak, and the opposite is the case.

Vulnerability is necessary for true strength.

And just like those athletes who cut short their careers, and some even cut short their lives, playing through injuries, compounding the problem.

So many of us keep it hidden, keep it protected, and all the while we are hurting ourselves every step of the way.

There was a team in the late 90s who started doing something different, this very eccentric coach named Coach Popovich, and he took over the spurs, and instead of making his guys play through injury, he started sitting guys on injured reserve for like hangnails and stubbed toes and stuff like that.

As a matter of fact, one time he made Tim Duncan sit out, and for real, on the injured reserve, it just said old.

That's a real chart from a real game.

I think he got like a$20,000 fine for that.

But he created a culture at the Spurs where it was safe to be broken.

And if you notice, as we went on a 20-year run where we had more success than any team in any sport in history, winning championship after championship after championship, our guys would get hurt, but it would be short, and they'd be back on the court.

And it was because they didn't try to be something they weren't, they didn't try to armor up and play through injury.

They were in a culture, they were in a community where they were allowed to be vulnerable, and strength requires vulnerability.

And the kind of strength that you think shuts down vulnerability and plays injured is not strength at all.

It is pride dressed in fear.

You need vulnerability, and vulnerability happens in community.

You need a place where you are fully known and loved, regardless.

You need a circle of people who are on the same journey, who are willing to take off the armor with you, who are willing to accept you for whatever you are struggling with, who are willing to help you come under the weight of the application of God's truth into your life.

And watch, when you begin to apply without the armor, what you will see is God working in your weaknesses and ways He was never able to work when it was only about you and your strengths.

You need community because application happens in community, and you need authenticity because community requires authenticity.

A place where we can be real.

I recently learned about an art form in Japan, it's called Kinsugi Pottery.

Kinsugi literally means to be joined with gold.

And what Kinsugi pottery does is it takes a broken piece of pottery and it finds all of the pieces.

It takes the time to find all of the pieces.

And here's the deal: you can try to kind of fix your own life and work on your own life and think about yourself a lot, and you can find some of the pieces, and you can kind of like paper mache them back together.

You can't find all of the pieces because you don't know all of the problems, but God can.

And in Kinsugi pottery, they take these pieces and they carefully place them back together and they bond them together with a gold inlay.

And it is not the same piece that it was before it was broken.

And your life will not be exactly what it was before your inciting incident, but in the hands of God, it can be something stronger, even more beautiful, and even more significant because in the cracks of your weaknesses, in the cracks caused by your brokenness, is exactly where God's glory can come shining through.

A few chapters earlier, this is what the Apostle Paul said.

He said, For we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us.

We are afflicted in every way but not crushed.

We are perplexed but not in despair.

We are persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed.

Therefore, meta church, we do not give up, even though our outer person is being destroyed.

Our inner person, who we actually are, who God created us to be, it is being renewed day by day.

For our momentary and our light affliction, it is producing for us an absolutely incomparable, eternal weight of glory, vulnerability in the context of community.

It prepares you not just to live your best life here, but vulnerability in community prepares you for eternity.

It prepares you to meet Jesus someday.

That's happening here at MetaCurch, and it's happening on many of our life teams.

And we wanted you to see an example of that today.

Check this video out.

Heard about like things that meta I fell for it.

I got online and I filled out four and I did click uh like similar places in life.

I originally originally thought the live team I was asking about was guys only, and I was asking for my husband.

Funny enough, what I asked uh turned out to be um co-ed and for people in all places of life, and uh which is so cool.

It's so cool to be able to join together.

She was really excited.

I was a little intimidated, I didn't really know what to expect.

Not knowing what life teams were, I I did think that it was gonna be bringing a notebook and journal and having everything sketched out from the previous service, and I was just nervous I wasn't gonna be uh I guess worthy of going.

I wanted to put him at ease, uh, assure him that we're not a live team of pastors.

We're a life team of learners.

As his wife, I told him I wanted to do that together.

We absolutely pursue that we're gonna separate in a life team.

This is the first we've ever seen Christ together.

And our life team was the same.

I thought some of our issues were unique to us, and they're not.

And it's been really cool to meet with other Christians and realize they don't have it perfectly together, but they're trying.

They're they're doing their best and it's teaching us.

Being able to go into a community of like-minded people, it helps you become a better person, uh, being around the right kind of people.

Uh, coming to coming to the life team is just it's brought me around more people that I would like to be around rather than anywhere else that I was.

My encouragement to anyone on the fence about joining the life team is you will be pleasantly surprised.

Uh, it might not be what you're thinking, but in all the best ways, why is it just jump in?

We need community.

We need vulnerability.

It's time to dispel the lie that God needs someone who is enough.

Instead, God is looking for people who have had enough.

We've had enough of living fake lives, we've had enough of wearing all the masks, we've had enough of filtering who we are, had enough of putting on the armor day after day, hoping that we can keep hidden the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of.

God wants to use every part of you, and he wants to use this community of Christ followers to come around you, to circle you up, to hold you, help you along the way.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

And God, I know that uh in many ways we are broken vessels, and yet in your hands we are made whole, we are made new, we're made into something stronger, more beautiful, more significant, more impactful.

So, God, I pray we would do just that.

Take off the armor, give ourselves to you.

We love you, and 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 venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

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