Know God: No Chance! What are the odds this whole thing is real? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch 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.

Alright, well, I want to welcome you guys to today's service.

If you are new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

And so a few things I want to go over before we get into today's sermon.

One of the things we do is we try to stay really far ahead here at MetaCurch.

So we write our sermons a couple weeks ahead of time, we shoot our videos a couple weeks ahead of time.

And I want to really re-emphasize a couple of the announcements.

I'll do it now and at the end of my sermon.

Number one is our life teams.

Life teams are a huge component of our movement here.

It is how you get into real intentional community with other people who are a part of MetaCurch, who are out there trying to live out their purpose.

If you do not have that kind of Christian community in your life, I really want to encourage you, if you're even a little bit curious about it, to go out after service.

Nori and some of the life team leaders will be under a blue canopy out there.

Man, if you can get signed up for a life team, I think it would be really important on your faith journey.

I also want to let you guys know that uh as a staff, even our board of trustees, we all feel strongly that we need to find tangible ways.

We are not gonna discount prayer here at MetaCurch.

We think it is probably the most important thing.

And I know a lot of people are saying thoughts and prayers, you know, aren't enough or whatever.

And we are going to pray.

We also want to have tangible ways, and so uh we're looking for those opportunities.

Not all of them are readily apparent.

Um, we are going to do something though, and so uh we did want to let you guys know that um all of our offerings from last Monday through the end of day today, we're gonna give directly to the families affected in Uvaldi.

And so if you normally give, you give monthly, you've already given your offering.

I really encourage you to pray about giving this week as well, knowing exactly what it will go to.

If you've never given to MetaCurch, I understand a lot of people have hesitancy about that.

This would be a great week to give your first offering.

I want to be really transparent about this, so we'll let you know exactly how much money comes in.

Also, I wanted to let you know we have not landed on exactly how we are gonna get the money there.

We have three options right now.

There's a nonprofit started after Columbine High School, where they make sure that all the money given goes directly to families.

HEB is taking donations and giving them, and there is a bank in Uvaldi who is facilitating that as well.

I'm sure there are others.

You may not know this, um, but after big national tragedies like this, um, con artists pop up everywhere and make off with millions of people's dollars that are meant for good causes.

So we are going to be uh steady and judicious and make sure that the money that we all give is going to go to the right cause.

We're uh in a series called No God, and what we've been doing in this series is really digging deep to the core questions about our faith.

And tomorrow is Memorial Day.

I was really reflecting on what this is, this thing that we call church, and it we should really seek to understand it at a lot of layers of context.

The biggest layer of context is that we are a part of a movement.

Jesus started 2,000 years ago.

There are over a billion people, a very conservative estimate, over a billion people who are a part of this movement called church.

That's kind of the largest global view of it.

We also have a local view, local in the span of time.

We're in the 21st century, and where we are at here in the United States.

And the very fact that we get to meet publicly like this without fear really says a lot about the people who have gone before us and made those freedoms possible.

It's part of understanding the church in our local context, is being grateful for those who gave their lives in order to secure these freedoms for us.

And so I know Memorial Day is when we go to the river and we barbecue and we do a lot of things, but I wanted to make sure we stop for a moment here at MetaCurch, and I want to encourage you guys to stop tomorrow and really just express your gratitude and understand the context that we are living in.

And that I know it's kind of a cliche saying, but it is true that freedom is not free.

We're in Military City USA.

I know there are some of you who have lost loved ones overseas fighting in the military, giving their lives.

And so uh we honor them, we honor their sacrifice, and we honor those who are shouldering the burden who are left behind.

So with that, let's pray and then let's get into today's message.

God, we love you.

Um, we thank you, God.

We thank you for uh our ability to come together.

We know not everyone has uh those rights, and not everyone uh has those uh just those great gifts.

And um, so God, we just uh we honor those who have gone before and who have given their life for the cause of liberty.

And God, I pray that as your church and as your movement, uh, we would not take that for granted.

Um we would see the significance of who we are and what we are called to do.

And so, God, we come before you with heavy hearts.

I pray that you would give us focused minds for this message.

You'd give us open hearts.

We're seeking you today.

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

Amen.

Uh, we're in week five of this series.

There's been a lot of content.

We've been preaching on Sunday mornings, we've been streaming on YouTube and our Facebook page on Wednesday nights.

We're calling that overtime.

If you want to get caught up, maybe you're showing up for the first time, you can get caught up with all of that at metachurch.tv slash know God.

We've put all the content in the same place to make it easy for you.

Last week we looked at one of the major objections to the faith, which is people are discounting and losing faith in the Bible, and when they lose faith in the Bible, they lose faith altogether.

We specifically dug into the New Testament or the Christian scriptures.

Today we're gonna focus our attention on the Old Testament of the Bible, that is, the Jewish scriptures, and uh, I think that today uh will really challenge us and it will really build our faith.

My message today is no chance, no chance.

What are the odds this whole thing is real?

And I wrote this sermon quite a while ago, and I really, really wrestled this week with whether or not I should scrap everything and just simply address what is going on uh right down the road from us.

And those of you who have been with MetaCurch for years now, you know we have done that at times.

We'll step out of a series, and I really, really wrestled with this and prayed a lot about it, and God really impressed on my heart, He'd already given me the right sermon that the application just has to shift a little bit, which means we are gonna stay in this series about why we can trust the Bible and believe in God.

But I think this also has something to say to us about how we react and how we move forward in light of the tragedy that we just experienced.

No chance.

What are the odds this whole thing is real?

I really could have titled this a different title today.

I could have called it How to Have Hope in a Future That You Cannot Control.

It's one of the very difficult things about being human is that we make tons of plans for the future.

And I, you know, not to get all like uh meta on you, but the the present really is nothing.

You know, it's like as soon as you grasp that you're in the present, the present is gone.

The present is basically just a momentary transition from the past directly into the future.

The next word you say is ahead of you right now, but now I caught it.

I'm in the future.

Congratulations.

The future is always in front of us, so we always have to plan for the future.

We saw this, we're separate and distinct from the rest of creation.

We don't just go off of our biology, our wiring.

We're not just moving off of instinct.

We make plans for the future, we put strategies in place to get to those plans and bring them to fruition.

But making plans for the future, while it is essential to our lives and survival, also sets us up for significant disappointment because the fact is we are not good at predicting the future.

A few years ago, I had a yard that was really not doing well, and I like to have like nice grass in front of my house, but but I have this problem when it comes to chores around the house.

I've been given the spiritual gift of laziness, okay?

So I'm very good at it.

I don't want to brag, but I'm very good at it, okay?

And uh so my yard was just mostly dead, you know, and it was embarrassing.

And it's really embarrassing because, you know, like my neighbors right next to me had thick, luscious St.

Augustine grass, you know.

It's like, okay, well, I I gotta do something about this.

And so decided to put some money into it, and I went and bought fertilizer, and I brought it home.

I was so excited because it's like a cheat code, you know, you just throw some fertilizer out and then you get some good grass or whatever.

And so then I'm reading the instructions, and it's really involved.

Like you gotta spread the fertilizer out, and that's the easy part, and then you have to soak it in.

And it even made it clear like this doesn't mean just turn a sprinkler on.

Like you gotta go out with a hose across your whole yard and like count to 72 or something on each spot and soak all of the fertilizer in.

And that sounded like a lot of work.

So I checked the forecast.

It's kind of during the rainy season, and so I thought, you know, maybe I'll do the fertilizing and let God do the heavy lifting, you know?

A few days out, there was a 100% chance of rain.

Now, when I see that, my first thought is, man, that is a cocky weather, man, you know, a hundred percent.

But look, uh, I didn't go to school, I'm not a scientist, 100%.

I like it.

Not 90, not 99.

100% chance of rain.

It was gonna start like around 7 or 8 a.m.

So I was gonna beat the odds, right?

Work smarter, not harder.

So I woke up that morning, real early, got all the fertilizer out.

I'm like, all right, your turn, you know.

Got dressed, went to work, seven o'clock rolled around, no rain.

Eight o'clock rolled around, no, like no rain, no drizzle, like barely any humidity, you know.

I started getting kind of nervous.

Nine o'clock came, no rain.

At 10 o'clock, I saw something horrifying.

These little rays of sun poking through the clouds, you know, like you know where this is going.

I spent my lunchtime getting back into my work clothes with my water hose, soaking it all in.

And this is kind of how meteorology works.

It's a science of prediction.

It's it's it's not very precise.

And so, you know, if there's 5% chance of rain and you decide to go to the beach anyway, it will rain.

Like that's how it seems to work if there's a hundred percent chance and you need your fertilizer to get soaked in it.

It's not gonna happen.

And and this is tough because we are predicting people.

It's how we live.

We plan for our futures.

And we're not very good at this.

And maybe you've had a friend who swears they are good at predicting the future, and all that means is they have what's called a success bias, which means they're just as terrible as the rest of us at predicting the future.

It's just they forget all the ones they get wrong and remember all the ones that they get right.

And so we have to set predictions.

You know, you set predictions of how different athletes are going to compete throughout the season when you do your fantasy draft and you get all that put together.

Every dream that you have about what your life will look like in five years or ten years, or the promotion that you just know you're gonna get because you're gonna work your way there.

When you decide what to study in school or what trade to go into, you are predicting what your passion is going to be five or ten years later and what work you're going to want to do, possibly for the rest of your life.

We choose who to date, or at least we should be choosing who we date based off of who we can predict would be a good spouse for us someday.

We try to predict everything: elections and Oscar winners and fashion trends, where we are predicting people, and we're terrible at it.

Even things that we feel like 100% about.

Not to dig up old wounds for some of y'all, but y'all remember the 2016 election?

I don't really care how you fall politically, no one thought Trump was winning that election.

Even the people who were on like one of the certain channels who did say they thought he was gonna win, you could hear it in their voice, they didn't even believe themselves.

And everyone was shocked.

And this happens all the time.

We make into the world predictions.

Some of you are old enough to remember Y2K, all bunkered down.

Some of you are still using the toilet paper that you stockpiled for Y2K.

We're terrible about this.

And you know, predictions go wrong all of the time.

You meet someone, you have a great first impression, you think you're gonna be friends for life, a month later you hate them.

You meet someone, instantly you hate them, later you're friends for life.

We're bad at this.

And sometimes it's inconvenient where you gotta go home on your lunch break and soak in your fertilizer, and sometimes it is absolutely devastating.

And what happens when many of our predictions about our future goes wrong, is that with these predictions that we get wrong of substance, we begin to lose confidence in our future.

And so maybe when you were a kid, you predicted that your life would be like all of the television shows you watched, and your mom and dad were gonna be together forever.

When that prediction went wrong at a very young age, you began to lose confidence in the future.

Maybe where you're at right now, you imagined completely different five or ten years ago, you're gonna be in a different place in life, a different tax bracket, a different career, you were gonna be married with children instead of single with roommates.

You had all of these plans lined out, and when predictions fail, we lose we lose confidence in our future.

You knew that you would break the odds, you'd be different than your parents and the parents before them, and your marriage would stick together, and that prediction failed.

And this happens all of the time, and and we set these big plans for the future because we have to, because that's how we live, and and they fall apart, and we lose confidence in the future.

And what does that mean?

What does it mean to lose confidence in the future?

Well, you know who's in the future, right?

You are you know what the future is, right?

It's every second that you have left from right now.

The present is nothing, your whole life is future.

That means when you lose confidence in the future, you just lose confidence.

We're always making predictions, and we have what psychologists call heuristics.

It's like constant predictions that happen at the subconscious level.

It's how you always think the world is going to work.

On Tuesday morning, we we had an inbuilt prediction that by lunchtime our life was gonna be just about the same as it was Monday.

And I'm guessing the rest of the parents in the room, every time you dropped your kid off or they walked out the door to head to school this week, it felt really, really different than it's ever felt before.

Life is unpredictable.

We do not know what the future holds, and when the future does not hold up to our predictions, we lose confidence.

When we lose confidence in the future, we lose confidence in ourselves.

And we see this.

And so, what happens when you lose your confidence?

You settle.

It's not about plans and dreams and impact and significance and purpose, you settle.

The future is too unknown.

You settle into the status quo of how the world lives, you allow the world around you to tell you how you are going to think, how you are going to behave, how you are going to act.

You seek out these simplest answers because if it's a simple answer and it goes wrong, you don't feel like you have lost much.

And so we just allow ourselves to be swept around by the current of culture.

We don't make big, dynamic plans and dreams for ourselves because the world has shown us that our big dynamic plans and dreams don't always pan out.

How can we have hope in a future that we do not control?

How can we gain confidence in a life that we are so poor at predicting?

Today we're gonna be looking at the Old Testament, and specifically we're gonna be looking at the prophecies in the Old Testament.

And man, there are just some unbelievable prophecies that the Jewish scripture makes.

And what the prophecies are about is this coming Messiah, this coming Savior, this coming king, the one who will come and make all things right.

The truth of like all of human history is all of human history has been suffering.

All of human history has been devastating.

As a matter of fact, we are living in the freest, most prosperous time, prosperous time in the freest, most prosperous place in all of human history.

And look how many problems we still have.

The world that the writers of scripture were living in was like really unbelievably brutal.

I mean, something that we actually just can't even comprehend.

Every day was a tragedy, every day was a marathon just to get to the next day.

And they're making these prophecies about someone who is going to come and give actual hope, and the prophecies matter.

And here's the sermon I came to preach today in this no God series is the sermons uh the prophecies matter, because if the prophecies are true and the prophecies have been fulfilled, then you should probably give some legitimacy to the scriptures that prophesied them and the person who came and fulfilled them.

And if you have to give some legitimacy to those scriptures, then you should probably pay attention to the story that those scriptures are telling.

And if they actually do affirm, give a seal of affirmation to Jesus while he was on the earth, then we should probably lean in and take pretty seriously the claims that he made.

But there's more.

Because the message in the message that I almost threw out to do something else, the message in the message is that if we can believe the prophetic claims of the Old Testament of what would come to pass and has come to pass, then we can have confidence in the prophecy of the New Testament, of what still lies ahead of us, and that is where we find our confidence.

The Old Testament came before the New Testament, that's why it's called Old and New.

And you may not know this, but the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, they were finished 450 years before Jesus was on the earth.

It's not like Malachi put his last period and then three days later Jesus was born.

450 years, four and a half centuries between the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus, which is documented in the New Testament.

The Old Testament is also filled with predictions about the coming of Jesus.

There are over 300 of these prophecies.

Now, some of you are like, you know, not believers, you're at a different place in your faith journey, and we're so, so glad that you found a community here at Metachurch, and you're already kind of tuning out because we're talking about prophets and prophecy, and you know that there's a bunch of charlatans running around calling themselves prophets today, and you can watch them anytime you want on TVN or or one of these other Christian networks, you know, and and they give you these prophecies and they'll give you a prophecy.

This is so incredible.

They'll give you a prophecy and tell you about the rest of your life, and all you have to do is call the 1-800 right now for a limited time, only$49.99, and they will give you your prophecy limited edition.

They will give you two prophecies for the price of one.

Isn't that incredible?

You know what they don't tell you about religions, is that all the other religions have all kinds of prophets who made all kinds of prophecies about specific dates that have already passed and the prophecy didn't happen.

Here's how seriously the Old Testament took a prophecy.

A prophet is a mouthpiece for God, it is a person sent by God with a message for God's people.

And this is how seriously it was taken.

That if you gave one prophecy that didn't come to pass, if you gave one word that wasn't seen to be true, you would be stoned to death.

There was no playing around.

If that was applied to present-day Christian prophets, they could shut the Trinity broadcasting network down.

They're throwing stuff out all the time that doesn't hit.

It's crazy.

People have checked out of the church because of modern-day prophets, and the Bible does tell us as Christians to prophesy, but prophesy took on a new meaning after Christ.

Before Christ, they were prophesying about him.

Now, as Christians, we prophesy about what did happen.

And so prophecy is uh is intense and it's a good marker, it's a good measure, it's a good measure of religious veracity, it's a good measure of whether or not something is true.

And so there's this 450-year gap, and we talked about this last week, but the Bible wasn't written by one person.

This isn't one person giving 300 prophecies.

It was written by dozens of people over the span of thousands of years, some of them living on different continents, most of them never having corroborated their stories together, and still it tells one consistent, coherent story, and it makes prophecy about one specific person over 300 of these prophecies.

And there were some mathematicians that got together and they tried to figure out like what the actual statistical odds would be of Jesus coming hundreds and hundreds of years later and fulfilling these very specific prophecies.

And so let's kind of like set, let's set like a standard to understand these, okay?

The odds of you winning the Powerball Lottery is one in 175 million, okay?

If your retirement plan is the Powerball lottery, you're going to be broke, okay?

Like it here's the deal.

This isn't the church where if you bought a lottery ticket, you're going to hell.

As a matter of fact, if you're debt-free and you got life to live and you have fun, money, you want to buy a lottery ticket because it's$500 million, get some popcorn and sit around to watch yourself lose, that's great.

You know, you do that, but man, if you're struggling with your money and you're buying Powerball tickets, you are setting your money on fire.

One in 175 million odds.

Here's the odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket.

How many people do brackets every year?

You put$50,$100 in, and then you win some money at the end.

One in 128 billion odds.

Some of y'all are gonna save that money this coming March.

One in 128 billion odds of a perfect March Madness bracket.

These mathematicians, they said for Jesus to come hundreds of years later and perfectly fulfill eight out of the 300 prophecies, eight of these very, very specific prophecies.

The odds would be one in one hundred quadrillion.

That's one in ten to the seventeenth power.

If you had a hundred quadrillion dollars, you could give every person on earth almost twenty million dollars.

It is an astronomical number, which means for Jesus to fulfill eight of those prophecies, while it is logically possible, it is virtually impossible to fulfill these odds.

And here's where it gets crazy.

Jesus did not just fulfill eight of these prophecies, these predictions, he fulfilled over 300 of them.

Prophecies about Jesus are batting a thousand.

The mathematicians had to scale it down to eight prophecies because to look at the full scope of what Jesus actually did, this is so crazy.

There isn't a number to represent it.

It is odds beyond odds.

How is that?

When someone is able to predict the future, you know, every every year there's like someone who's they've gotten like the last 15 Super Bowls right, and so they get put on the news, right?

It's notable that they can actually predict that well.

Every once in a while you hear of someone in a presidential race, it's like they've gotten the last 20 presidents right.

It's like they weren't even alive that long, but somehow they got the last 20 presidents right.

And we pay attention to them.

300 plus prophecies, and we dismiss it.

As if it is just some fairy tale or legend.

The truth is, there is no way to get 300 predictions right unless they weren't predictions, they were promises, unless there is a God who is actually guiding all of it.

We're not gonna spend a ton of time today, because I want to get to the application, but I do want to look at some of these prophecies.

I want you to actually see some of them, and all of them are shocking, and some of them are are are maybe a little less specific, and some of them are so specific as to go down to the day.

The prophet Micah, who lived 700 years before Jesus was born, wrote this: But you, O Bethlehem, are only a small village in Judah, and yet a ruler of Israel will come from you, whose origins are from the distant past, the Hebrew that Micah wrote in.

The distant past could mean eternal origins.

And of course we know in the gospels.

We read, and because Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David's ancient home, and he took with him Mary, his fiance, who was obviously pregnant by this time.

And she gave birth to her first child, a son, and she wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger.

Bethlehem was a small, insignificant town, the last place you think a king would be born, much less the king of heaven.

But Micah called it 700 years in advance.

If you didn't listen to last week's message and especially last week's overtime, we talked about the almost irrefutable proof that the gospels, these historical accounts of Jesus' life, that these were written by real men who lived during the time of Jesus and wrote their gospels before 70 AD in the time of Jesus.

They could not have fabricated this, they couldn't have made up a census that gets Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem because the people were still alive who would have gone to that census.

It's an unbelievable prophecy.

In the eighth century, a prophet named Isaiah, one of the more famous prophets of the Old Testament, he got even more specific about the birth of Jesus.

He said this in Isaiah 7:14.

Isaiah 7:14

The Lord himself will choose the sign.

Look, the virgin will conceive a child.

The virgin will give birth to a son.

700 years before Jesus.

Isaiah predicts something that has never happened before, will never happen again, and that is biologically impossible.

And 700 years later, in the Gospel of Matthew, it says, Joseph, son of David, the angel said, Do not be afraid to go ahead with your marriage to Mary, for the child within her has been conceived by the Holy Spirit.

And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus.

A virgin birth is crazy enough.

Predicting it 700 years early borders on insanity.

Around 520 BC, another prophet named Zechariah looked forward to the day that the King of Kings would enter into Jerusalem.

But instead of riding a majestic white horse, like everyone would think, he predicted something kind of strange.

In Zechariah 9, it says, Shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem, look, your king is coming to you.

He is righteous and victorious, and yet he is humble, riding on a donkey, even on a donkey's colt.

Five hundred and fifty years later, this strange scene actually played itself out.

In the Gospel of Luke, it says, So they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their garments over it for him to write on.

And the crowd spread out their coats on the road ahead of Jesus, and all of his followers began to shout and sing as they walked along, praising God for all the wonderful miracles that they had seen.

And people write this off.

Well, they just wrote the they wrote the gospels hundreds of years later, which there's no evidence for, and all the evidence point to the contrary.

And they just made all this up and they took the Jewish prophecies and they just wrote them into the life of Jesus.

And we've seen that's not true.

We've seen these are early documents, some of the earliest documents in all of the ancient world.

And Jesus was not seen as fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Testament.

He was seen as a charlatan and a heretic.

The religious leaders who knew the Jewish scriptures backwards and forwards did not see the life of Jesus and realized that he was, in fact, the promised Messiah in fact, instead, they hung him on a cross.

Speaking of Jesus' crucifixion, the Old Testament even predicts his death.

King David wrote in Psalm 22: My life is poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.

My enemies surround me like a pack of dogs.

An evil gang closes in on me.

They have pierced my hands and they have pierced my feet.

King David wrote this about a thousand years before Jesus' crucifixion and about five hundred years before Roman crucifixion had even been invented.

Over and over and over again.

The Old Testament calls its shots.

They lay it out centuries beforehand, and all 300 plus prophecies are fulfilled in one significant life.

We'll look at one more.

To me, it's perhaps the most shocking of all.

It takes a little bit of math to understand.

The prophet Daniel, he predicted to the day when Jesus would enter Jerusalem during his crucifixion.

In Daniel chapter 9, we read this.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

Know and understand this.

From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, that is an exact date.

He's not saying a time frame or during the reign of this king, an exact date from the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until an anointed one, the ruler, will be seven weeks and 62 weeks.

In the context of Daniel 9, Daniel is prophesying about 70 weeks of years.

Now we always use week to mean seven days.

In the ancient world, a week could mean a week, seven days, or it could mean a week of years, seven years.

He's prophesying all these different prophecies about 70 sets of seven years, which equals 490 years.

He nails it down to the arrival of the king to 69 weeks of years.

That's 69 times 7.

And he's predicting this based on exact dates, the decree to rebuild Jerusalem.

This took place on the first of Nisan, not the car, that's what one of their months was called, which in our calendar would be March 14th, 445 BC.

Jesus entered Jerusalem on the 10th of Nisan, A.D.

32.

Now, we live under the Gregorian calendar of 365 days.

In the ancient world, they had a calendar of 360 days.

That's what comprised a year.

He said 69 weeks of years.

That's 69 times 7 times 360, the number of days in the year, and that equals 173,880 days.

That is his actual prediction.

And 173,880 days from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem, Jesus got on a donkey and rode in hailed as the king.

450 years later, Daniel called it to the day.

This would be like you and a group of your friends who have no degrees in future political forecasting, picking a date 400 years later, calling to the day who would be elected president.

You would know their name, you would know where they were born, you would know about their character, you would know how they grew up, you would know about their parents, you would know about their lineage, you would know the very day of their inauguration, you would know when they died and how they died.

You call all of it correctly 400 years in advance.

We lose hope because we don't know what the future holds.

And it's kind of funny how we are as humans because until something really happens, like tragedies, until something really goes wrong in life, the rug gets pulled out from under us, we kind of live like we know exactly how the future is gonna go.

It's easy as humans, I do it all the time to fall into this sense of arrogance about exactly what it's gonna be and what I'm gonna do and who I'm gonna be and how I'm gonna make it, where I'm gonna live, and how my kids are gonna act, and and and all these things you think you know.

And the bottom comes out, it always does.

We are not the prophets predicting our future, we are fallible people, getting it wrong all the time, slowly chipping away at our confidence that we can know anything about the future at all.

And it shows.

And so we fall right into the fray of arguing politics hours after a Mashun.

We fall into the fray of being further divisive when God has given us one call to bring all people in all places together.

Prioritizing our own ideas, our own policies, prioritizing our own beliefs over God's call to reach other people.

And so I wish I could tell you today, like some of the modern-day prophets will, things are gonna get better.

They'll predict it out for you.

They'll tell you all about how change is coming, and I can't make that promise.

I don't see any evidence of that.

The scripture seems to paint a pretty bleak picture of the state of the world right before Jesus returns.

And so, what are we going to do?

What is our call as believers in Christ?

If we can't have confidence in our own ability to predict our future, then where do we put our confidence?

Where is our hope?

What makes us different?

If the world looks at the church and all it sees is the same talking points of the world, the same reactions of the world, the same lack of hope in the world, then why would anyone come and be a part of Jesus' movement?

I get it, and I've read all about it online, and I've even seen pastors giving this advice like, look, don't get up and point to heaven and point to eternity.

It's not time for that.

It's time to just sit in the grief and look, you grieve until you're done grieving.

Jesus wept, you can too.

But we grieve while working through knowing there is glory on the other side.

And I will not apologize because I actually believe that what is coming is the realest reality.

It's not what we're living today.

That right here and right now is a perversion, a fabrication, it is a broken picture of what God actually intends and what God will restore for us someday.

And if I lose hope in that, I will lose hope.

Something else is coming.

And so the question is: are we living like that?

Are we living like there's actually something different?

Are we living like the Spirit of God is actually inside of us?

I was talking to my friend John, and what he said is right.

What Satan wants more than anything is for moments like this to fill the people of God with anger and hopelessness.

And if we really believe that the same God who prophesied of Jesus' coming has now prophesied of Jesus' return.

If we really believe that we have an eternity in perfection, if we really believe we are sons and daughters of the God of the universe, then our reaction must be different.

Moments like this, all of the grief and suffering and pain and confusion, it should build up in us and well out of us.

Love, unbelievable, unconditional, radical, world-changing love.

And people say it's too soon for that.

It's never too soon, it's never too late.

People say that won't change anything.

There were a couple dozen followers of Jesus.

They watched him die and come back to life.

And before he ascended back to heaven with a promise to return, he said, with you, it will be different.

All it took was a few dozen people actually believing that, loving their enemies, prioritizing Jesus over everything.

They had no social media, they had no mass communication, they had no way to get their message out except by loving people, one person at a time, and they changed the world.

You can too.

You can't control it all, you cannot fix it all.

We're kidding ourselves if we think we can.

We can choose how we love.

Here's the message for us.

It's from the Apostle Paul.

He said this in First Thessalonians.

Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with him in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

And thus we shall always be with the Lord.

If we believe that, it changes everything.

You may not be able to predict a week from now, five years from now, 30 years from now, but you can put your confidence in the one who holds your future.

You can know what comes at the end.

And if we have confidence in the destination, we can have confidence in God all along the journey.

We can react and act differently.

When things are good in the world, people should see God's children and see a difference.

In the darkest moments in our world, people should see God's children and see a difference.

The whole point of the series is it's real.

What are the odds this whole thing is real?

So far, Scripture is batting a thousand.

For me, I like those odds.

Would you pray with me?

God, we do believe you're real, that you're here with us, that your heart is grieved when our hearts are grieved, that you see us, you care about us, you love us, you are not unaware or distant.

You have given us the job of being your ambassadors on the earth, of being the hands and feet of Jesus, of living and loving like Him.

And the last, the last thing the world needs is another group of people just playing church.

We must be a movement.

We must show something different.

You are desperate for your love to be sent through a movement of people as a conduit for you to reach the world, and we are choosing to be those people.

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.

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

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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.