MetaPhor: Pay Gap 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 and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

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

I'm the lead pastor here, and we're in week four of a series where we're looking at some of the major parables that Jesus told while he was here on earth.

If you are new to church or maybe just new to church in a long time, we want to welcome you.

This is the perfect place for you to be.

We've defined a parable so that we know what we're talking about.

A parable is a simple story with a significant meaning.

A simple story with a significant meaning.

What Jesus would do is he would take things that were in people's everyday flow of life, things that they could easily understand, and he would use those as a metaphor to drive home the meaning of these parables.

And week one, Jesus told his disciples why he was speaking in parables, and it highlights just how significant these stories are.

Jesus said that parables teach us the secret of the kingdom of heaven.

The secret of the kingdom of heaven.

Now that's high, lofty spiritual language.

And if you grew up in church, you might have some misconceptions about what the kingdom of heaven actually is.

You see, heaven is something that exists in a spiritual realm and that we go to after this life.

But the kingdom of heaven, Jesus was offering right here and right now.

Also, these parables about the kingdom of heaven don't specifically tell you how to get to heaven or how to get saved.

These are written to people who already have eternal life, who are secure in where they are going about how to live in light of that promise you have been given.

One way we'll say it here at MetaCurch is we don't believe in Jesus and then just sit around waiting to die to go to heaven.

Instead, we live in a way right here and right now where we see evidence of the kingdom of heaven all around us.

When you live a kingdom of heaven kind of life, it is different.

It stands out in this world and it attracts people to the hope that you have inside of you.

Today we are going to unpack what is, to be honest, a difficult parable if you don't understand it in its proper context.

And my message today is named after the metaphor Jesus is using.

My message today is pay gap.

Pay gap.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you and we thank you for loving us.

We thank you for this series and just the opportunity to dive into these simple stories and try to just dive down into the depths of them and pull out the application of these significant, significant meanings.

And I ask that you would help us do that again.

Today, I have this sense that there's a concept that if we could learn it today, and if we could really just honestly search our own life, uh, that it could begin to change us in significant ways.

So I pray that you just help me.

You would guide my words, and you would just help all of us to be open and willing to hear as you're speaking today.

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

And everybody said, Amen.

Maybe you have felt like the workers in the vineyard in this story, trying to navigate life, and the parable really deals with the questions of what is fair in this kingdom of heaven.

What do concepts like equality and equitability, what do those things actually look like as we really tried to meditate on this parable?

We started imagining two different people.

One who was in the group picked up at 6 a.m.

They were up early, up at dawn, on their grind, doing the work, their frustration as people started showing up later and later in the day.

And at the same time, we tried to imagine someone that didn't get picked up till 5 p.m., a good person staying on their grind, struggling in life, trying to make ends meet.

It all raises the question of what is actually fair.

Before we can really get to those questions, we have to understand the context of this parable.

Why was Jesus saying this when he was saying this?

And a lot of people have struggled with interpreting the significant meaning of this simple story, and they've struggled because the context isn't obvious.

In all of the parables that we've looked at in the series, we go into a verse, we've been in the Gospel of Matthew the whole time.

We we go into a chapter, and there's usually verses that lead into the parable, and the verses show us what Jesus was dealing with or thinking about or feeling at the time.

This parable is unique because it's in Matthew chapter 20, but it starts on verse one.

Matthew 20 · chapter mention

And so you cannot find the context for the parable inside the chapter, because it is what starts the chapter.

You may not know this, but when the documents that make up the Bible, 66 different ancient documents, when they were originally written, they didn't have chapters or verses on them.

That is something that was added centuries, hundreds of years later.

They added chapters and verses to literally help everyone get on the same page.

The church is supposed to happen in a communal setting, in a congregation setting.

And so instead of saying going, hey, everybody turn to the parable of the vineyard workers, we can just say go to chapter 20, starting in verse one.

Here's what that means.

At MetaCurch, we believe that scripture is the inspired word of God, but we do not believe the chapters and the verses are the inspired writings of God.

They are arbitrary in some sense.

And when you don't realize that, they can be counterproductive because people don't know where to find the context of this parable.

The context for the parable of the vineyard workers is found in chapter 19.

In chapter 19, we see two different stories of people trying to figure out what is fair in the kingdom of heaven.

The first is a rich young ruler.

You may have heard this story before.

This guy was at the top of society.

He knew how to come in first place, and he wanted to stay at the top.

And so he came to Jesus, and the rich young ruler has like a Ricky Bobby mindset, okay?

If you're not first, you're last, right?

So he's gonna do what he has to do to secure his position.

He knows that Jesus is the most famous religious teacher at the moment.

So he goes up to him and starts a negotiation.

How can I ensure that I have the full experience of the kingdom of heaven?

How can I get the most with the least input?

Now that's just good business.

You gotta negotiate.

You gotta go in and work for your position and negotiate your salary.

He knows how to do this.

He's climbed to the top ranks of the business world.

This is in a Jewish context, and Jesus looks at him and says, Well, you're a good Jewish man.

You know that you're supposed to follow the commandments, and he's like, then I'm good, I guess.

I've been doing that like my whole life, and Jesus is like good, and he's like good, and Jesus is like good.

One more thing, though.

I need you to sell everything you have and give all of your money away.

And at that, the rich young ruler dropped his head and walked away.

Now, people have misunderstood this.

Some people have even said that we are all called to take a vow of poverty, and if we don't live in poverty ourselves, we'll never make it to heaven.

And they missed the point.

The point is that this guy was trying to negotiate his lease on life with Jesus.

He claimed to follow all of the commandments, but what Jesus knew is that he would prioritize his status, his position, and his wealth over the call of God in his life, which means, in fact, he's not even following the first commandment of putting nothing in priority over God.

And so we have the first approach, a negotiation with Jesus.

Shortly after, the disciples pulled Jesus aside and said, What does this mean for us?

We didn't have you sign any contracts, we didn't negotiate or bargain.

You called us out of our rhythms of life, and we dropped everything and followed you.

The disciples left their jobs, they left their friends, they left their family, they left their wealth, they left everything behind to go hard.

They submitted to the call of Jesus, and they wanted to know if that's how the rich young ruler's story ends, how does our story end?

And Jesus assured them in the kingdom of heaven that they would have great reward.

The very last verse of chapter 19 sets our context when Jesus said, But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

And this is the great gospel reversal.

The kingdom of heaven is the upside-down kingdom of our King Jesus, who taught that the first will be last, and the last will be first, that the humble will be exalted, and those who exalt themselves will be put low, that the weak will be seen as strong, and the strong will be exposed as weak, that those who are seen as unwise will hold the wisdom, and those who in their pride think they have all the answers will have a very, very rude awakening.

This is the context, the first, last, and the last first.

And to make sure that they understood it and could apply it to their life, Jesus told a parable.

In Matthew 20, verse 1, he said, For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.

Matthew 20:1

Before I moved to San Antonio, I worked for a furniture company.

And uh we sold like nice furniture, expensive stuff, you know, stuff that I would never have in my house.

And I didn't have a cool job.

I was the delivery boy, you know.

So I would drive all around the hill country and I would bring people this really expensive furniture, which, if you're wondering, when it comes to furniture, the more expensive it is, the heavier it is.

Like I don't know how that equation works, but I'd go all around the hill country, and you know, I had my box truck and the boys were little.

I had them convinced I drove an 18-wheeler, so I felt cooler than I was, you know.

And I'd go to these rich people's houses and I would unload like 800 pounds of furniture, and they would show me like what room they wanted it in, and it was full service, all right?

I'd put the whole thing together, the bed together, the dresser together, the side table together, and then they would walk in, you know, and go, can we try it in another room, you know?

And so I'd tear it all down and I'd move it down the hallway and I'd put it up, and then it was finally time to leave, and I was like waiting for that tip.

So I was walking out really slowly, you know.

And the tip would never come, and I'd get back in my 18-wheeler, and then I would go back to town.

And that was my job for for quite some time.

And and one day I came into work, you know, just ready to do my thing, and and it was fine.

I enjoyed the work, and something totally caught me off guard.

The owner of the store was good friends with the owner of a vineyard out near Burnett, Texas.

And he said, Look, my friend called me.

Uh, the harvest is ready, and so you're gonna go out to his field, and all day long, like your full 10-hour day, you're just gonna harvest the grapes.

And I was like, Bet, I cannot wait.

This sounds incredible, you know?

And I did, I went out all day and I learned a lot.

One of the things I learned is that grapes are like very fragile, okay?

And so when it comes to making wine, when the harvest is ready, you have to get the grapes off of the vine immediately.

24 hours could be the difference, and you being able to produce wine and you having acres of vineyard that is absolutely worthless.

And so I was out there with dozens and dozens of people all going through the acreage of this vineyard and gathering all of the grapes.

There's even a saying that comes out of that.

When someone says that something can spoil on the vine, that means you waited too long to act.

So back in the day when a vineyard would have its harvest and the harvest would be ripe, the owner had to go into town as many times as necessary to ensure that by the time the sun went down, they had all of the grapes gathered.

This sets the context for the parable that Jesus is telling.

And first, he goes out at dawn, right around 6 a.m., and he picks up his first crew.

In verse 2, it says, after agreeing with the workers, after agreeing with the workers on one denarius, he sent them into the vineyard for the day.

And this verse really holds the key difference that will show us the meaning of this parable for us.

It says that the owner had to come to an agreement with the workers.

In other words, there was a bargain struck, there was a negotiation process that they went through.

And here's the deal: he's the owner, he sets the terms of employment, but the harvest is ripe.

And the workers know this, and so they have leverage and they use that leverage to ensure that they will get paid a full denarius.

Now, back then, a denarius was one day's wage.

These guys knew what they were worth.

They were not gonna get short change.

It was a great business move.

They negotiated their salary, and only after, after agreeing with the workers, was he able to send them in the vineyard for one denarius that day.

This is a big contrast to the other four groups of workers that will end up in the vineyard by the end of the day.

In verse three, it says, He went out about nine in the morning, he saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing, and he said to them, You also go into my vineyard, and I'll give you whatever is right.

And so off they went.

No negotiation, no strong arming, no stall tactics, no bargaining.

He offered them to do the work and to trust him to give them what is right, and they submitted and instantly went off to the field.

Now, this is the difference between 6 a.m.

and 9 a.m.

of a 12-hour workday.

At 9 a.m., they still have nine hours of work to do.

In a business setting, they would be wise to make sure they're gonna get paid enough for those nine hours to be worth it.

But they didn't take that approach.

Maybe they knew something about the owner.

Maybe they had heard he was generous, maybe they knew something about his character.

Whatever it was, when nine o'clock came, they went into action.

This really will be the crux of us understanding this difficult parable today.

It's the difference in the response between 6 a.m.

and 9 a.m.

It's the difference between entitlement and submission.

The parable is a case study in entitlement versus submission.

The first workers were like, we know what we're worth, and we know what you owe us.

And we will secure the bag before you sign on our dotted line.

We will get it in writing, we will have it in a contract, and we will have something that we can hold you to.

We will get what we are worth.

The rest of the workers, starting at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., and 5 p.m., all of them simply submitted to the request to go and work and trusted the offer that the owner would give them what is right.

We see this in the next verses.

Verse 5, it says, About noon and about three, he went out again and did the same thing.

Then about five, he went and found others standing around and said to them, Why have you been standing here all day doing nothing?

Because no one hired us, they said to him, You also go into my vineyard, he said.

Picking workers up at six and nine was very customary.

That's when a lot of people started their work day.

Noon was also very traditional.

At noon, someone might have worked half a day somewhere else and be looking for another half a day, six hours and six hours.

Long, hard work days under the beating hot sun.

3 p.m.

though, not very customary.

At 3 p.m., the workday ends at 6.

You're pulling people out of the market to maybe do three hours of work.

And if that wasn't crazy enough, he went out again at five and found workers to come by the time they got there and got some training to do about 45 minutes worth of work.

It was really unheard of.

And I know the harvest has to get in, but all the back and forth to pull workers out at 5 p.m., it really goes to highlight that something unique is happening here in this parable.

That's what the rest of the workers thought.

When these guys hit at 5 p.m., they thought the owner's lost his mind.

I don't understand.

Are they gonna pay these fools in pennies?

Like, I can't wait to see what happens.

And then something crazy happened.

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard told his foreman, call the workers and give them their pay, starting with the last and ending with the first.

Now, when you read about the culture in that area at that time, it was always customary to pay people by when they arrived, which means the first workers would be paid first.

But this is a parable about the upside down kingdom of heaven, where the first will be last, and the last will be first.

And so he calls first those who had only been working for an hour, and he's going to pay them before he pays anybody else.

And I have to imagine the guys who have been there since 6 a.m.

were like, I cannot wait to see what is about to happen.

I cannot wait to see this fool drop some pennies in these guys' lap.

This is going to be hilarious.

And all of their assumptions were wrong.

In verse 9, when those who were hired, about five came, they each received one full denarius.

A full day's pay for one hour of work.

At this point, the guys there since 6 a.m.

start getting hyped.

They are so ready.

They can do basic math.

If he got one denarius for one hour, we're about to get 12 denarius for 12 hours.

Like this is working out beautifully.

They can't wait.

And they just assume that the owner will break their contract to then show his generosity.

In verse 10, we see they were sadly mistaken.

So when the first ones came, they assumed they would get more.

But they also received a denarius each.

Now there's two different responses.

There's the response of the first workers, which is the response of entitlement.

I know what I am owed, and I will not work for anything less, and we will put it on paper, and you will sign it so I can hold you to it.

And then there is the response of submission.

And these first workers who just watch the guys who worked an hour get a full day's wage, and then they got a full day's wage as well, are fully on what I am calling the entitlement track.

And here's how the track works.

And this is how our lives operate when we are unaware of our entitlement.

It starts with entitlement.

And if you're new with us, um, I just need you to know I have such good handwriting, okay?

You're in good hands here.

Um, also I'm lying.

It starts with entitlement.

And entitlement leads to expectations.

When you feel entitled, it means that you know, it's not that you think or that you've reasoned.

You know at the very fiber of your being that someone or something owes you.

You are owed something.

Maybe it's by your spouse, by your kids, by your boss, by the world.

Maybe you are owed something by God.

And when you are entitled, it leads you to expectations.

The workers were entitled to a full day's wage.

They believed that they were owed that for their efforts, and so they set that as an expectation, a contractual expectation on the owner of the vineyard.

We have no reason to assume anything other than the vineyard owner gave them the same offer as everyone else.

Come, work in my field, and I will give you what's right.

They were not interested in trusting the generosity of the owner.

They were entitled, and so they set expectations that they knew would get met.

However, as the situation changed, their expectations changed.

And as soon as the generosity was shown to the workers at 5 p.m., all of a sudden they knew that they should get more.

And the problem, the reason they didn't get more, was not because of a lack of generosity of the owner, it was because they had contractually obligated him away from his generosity.

They were getting what they were entitled to, what they had set the expectation for.

And as you can imagine, this didn't go over very well with them.

In verse 11, when they received it, they began to complain to the landowner.

And these last men put in one hour, and you made them equal to us who bore the burden of the day's work and the burning heat.

We're continuing down the entitlement track.

We are entitled, which leads us to expectations, and expectations led these workers to envy.

And envy is really a placeholder, and in its place, you can put any negative emotion.

Entitlement leads to expectations, which leads to anger or bitterness or resentment or for.

Frustration or disappointment.

This is the end result of the entitlement track.

And many of us are stuck cycling through this track every moment of every day.

We're an entitled culture.

We have this sense that just because we're here and breathing, we are on planet Earth, that we are owed.

We are owed influence.

And because of that, I have the expectation that if I can just get the right filter on the right post with the right caption, that it should go viral.

I should be an influencer.

I should have that kind of fame.

I'm entitled to it.

And what happens when entitlement creates expectations that don't come through for you?

It cycles you down to the end of the track, to your disappointment and frustration and insecurity.

We feel like we are entitled to a romantic relationship.

Like someone should just love us just because we're here.

We don't have to do any work, we don't have to improve ourselves, we don't have to treat them well.

We should have a romantic relationship.

Now there is an entire and growing movement of men who feel entitled to the love of a woman and who now have these expectations that have been broken and have a toxic view of women because they can't understand why they're not getting what they're owed.

We have a large percentage of the population of our country who think they are entitled to someone putting money in their pockets without them doing any work.

And so they have the expectation that without any work, they should be able to live the exact life they want to live.

It's a fantasy land which just leads you to the end of the track of anger and bitterness and resentment.

This is how marriages function.

You get married, and these are kind of stereotypes, but the statistics bear them out.

Men get married and they have a sense of entitlement for physical intimacy.

And so it leads to expectations.

We're newlyweds.

Dude, it's gonna be dim the lights in Marvin Gaye twice a day.

And I've got news, there's gonna be some off days.

And when that expectation is broken, all of a sudden you're resentful of a wife who is never meant to bear the burden of that expectation.

Oftentimes women get married and they feel entitled to a fairy tale type romantic life.

And so they have expectations.

Like every dinner is gonna be a candlelit dinner, and every date is gonna be a five-star date, and they're never actually gonna touch the porch of their house because he's gonna carry her across the threshold every day.

We have these expectations.

Your man can't meet that.

I'm gonna let you know right now.

And so what happens?

We end up in these negative emotions, and we think we have an emotion problem when really we have an expectation problem.

And we do this in all areas of our life, and it gets really dangerous because this is a parable about the kingdom of heaven.

And God is the owner, and the vineyard is his world, and the work he's invited us to is the kingdom work of building the movement that will change the world and bring hope to the hopeless and give people security in this life and the next.

And yet we are such an entitled culture that we even approach God this way.

And so we think that we have this quid pro quo with God.

I'll believe in you if you'll show up for me.

And we're telling God all the time, like, I know you've seen me the last three months, metachurch.tv, I pushed the give button, I said, I've been giving.

Time for the promotion, man.

Time to show up.

I've prayed about 17 mornings in a row.

Why am I still stressed out?

We want the end result.

We want to go from the mess to the miracle with no middle.

And so people are preaching the blank gospel.

We're filling in all of our adjectives: the prosperity gospel.

You know what?

If you just believe in Jesus and you just have enough faith, then your expectation should be cars and houses and clothes and stacks on stacks on stacks.

And so you do the right thing, and that doesn't come through, and you quit believing in a God who never existed in the first place.

It's a prosperity gospel.

You know what that adjective prosperity is?

It's entitlement.

The faith-healing gospel.

If you just have enough faith, God will heal you from any ailment.

You won't need your glasses, you will need your walker, you will need your medicine.

You know what that is?

That's entitlement.

Our God can heal you.

He asks to pray in Jesus' name, believing that.

But we always end our prayer with submission that He is better than we are, His plans are greater than our plans, His view is higher than our view, his ways are miraculously just outside of our realm of knowledge as finite beings.

And so we have this sense of entitlement.

I started like really following Jesus when I turned 18.

And I'd been wild.

For years, I'd been wild.

And I finally kind of got my faith together, you know?

And I was reading all kinds of different books, you know, everything I could get my hands on, all kinds of different theologies.

And somewhere along the way, I realized that at 17 years old, I'd been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that I still live with to this day.

And I had myself convinced that I was entitled to healing from that disease.

Now, could God heal it?

Absolutely, He could.

But B, it wasn't from a place of faith.

I thought I was owed it.

I text my uh my good friends, the people in my band, good friends.

I said, Hey, God's gonna heal me.

I threw out my pills, quit taking them.

And you know what happened?

I got sick.

I got physically sick.

That was my leap of faith.

The toss of the pills that were keeping me alive.

But more than physically sick, I got emotionally sick.

I felt entitled to a healing.

I set those expectations on God, they didn't come through.

And I fell apart.

And people will still tell me to this day, you probably just didn't have enough faith.

And what I say is, you are mistaking your faith for entitlement.

God owns it.

God sets the expectations, not us.

And until we can understand that, we will live in entitlement and we will live away from submission.

I wrote this sermon about two weeks ago.

It's been turning my world inside out for two weeks.

Because I don't know, I'm sure you guys don't, right?

Y'all have got your lives figured out, everything's good all the time.

But me, I end up with a lot of negative emotions day by day.

I find myself angry.

I'm more prone to anger than anything else because I have control issues.

So when something doesn't go the way I want it to, it pisses me off.

I get disappointed because I'm an unworldly optimist.

And so I think everything will always work out and it doesn't.

And you know what happens for the last two weeks?

God showed me this out of this parable, the entitlement track.

And every time that I've cycled in to these negative emotions, I've had to reverse engineer my way out of the track.

And God's like, you can preach it, but you better practice it.

And so I'm here and I'm angry, and this is the power of understanding that this is how your life works, is I could take my negative emotion and I could speak to it, and I could ask it what expectation that got broken that it was rooted in.

And once I could determine the expectations that I was putting on the people around me, on the processes around me, putting on God above me, I could then come to my entitlement.

What I believe I am owed.

What's so interesting is when you find your expectations, chances are you'll have never told anybody.

And so you're just growing more and more bitter towards your wife because she talks to you in a certain way that she has no idea bothers you, and you've never said anything about it.

You've never set the expectation.

Why should you have to?

She owes you that.

At least that's what you think.

And so you allow yourself to get more and more and more wrapped up into your negative emotions because you don't realize that your expectations, your emotions come from expectations, and your expectations are rooted in your entitlement.

When they received their denarius, they began to complain.

And the truth is, it was their negotiation, their entitlement that it actually limited God's generosity towards them.

And sometimes the greatest consequence God can give you is exactly what you have asked him for.

Your greatest expectations, your greatest use of your imagination cannot come close to the generosity and the blessings and the peace and the purpose that God wants to pour out on you, but you must be able to trust him.

Envy comes from expectation, expectation from entitlement.

And so let's look at the owner's response.

In 13, he replied to one of them, friend, I'm doing you no wrong.

Didn't you agree with me on a denarius?

And so take what's yours and go.

I want to give the last the same as I gave you.

And there's so much deep truth for believers here.

Because when you're on the entitlement track, it renders you incapable of celebrating the success of others.

And so, as the church, we can't even celebrate the good things happening in other churches.

As Christians, we can't even celebrate the successes of other Christians because we are so insecure and so caught in the entitlement track that we see other people's success, not as a gift of generosity from God, but as evidence of our own lack of blessing.

We're entitled.

I was a musician for years.

I had a Christian band, and every once in a while we'd get invited to a festival where we got to play with like real bands, you know, that you've like heard of and heard on K-Love and stuff like that.

And we would show up, and nobody knew who we were, you know, so we kind of flew under the radar.

And I'll never forget the first time that I got there, in my mind, it was just gonna be this like kumbaya, beautiful moment.

We're all just there to sing to Jesus, and you know what I found?

Entitlement.

It was competitive.

Who has the best billing?

Who's at the top of the flyer?

You know, there's different green rooms.

There's one where they're like grilling steaks to order, and then there's like one with cold pizza in it, you know, and then there's just snacks at our green room, you know?

And it's like, which one you're in?

Which one you're entitled to?

If we want the world to see something different in this movement of Jesus, we have to be different.

And probably the greatest bar in all of scripture in verse 15, the owner says, Don't I have the right to do what I want with what is mine?

Are you jealous?

Because I'm generous.

You see, there is another way, there is a path off of the entitlement track, but it starts with reverse engineering.

What are my emotions?

What am I feeling?

What expectations are those coming from, and what entitlement are those expectations pointing to?

And if you can find it, then you have the opportunity to decide whether or not you trust God with what you believe you are owed.

All entitlement eventually leads back to God.

And if you believe there is a God who is above and beyond it all, who orders the affairs of this world, then anything you think you are owed, whether you're pointing it at your spouse or your boss or your parents, anything you think you are owed ultimately points to God.

When we come face to face with our entitlement, we have to decide whether or not to get off the entitlement track, we are willing to submit.

And if we are willing to submit to what God has for us, if we can actually trust that he will really provide all that we need, if we really trust that he will deal fairly with us, if we can really believe him, even when life is hard, if we can fully submit to him, then we can lay down the great burden of expectation that we are carrying.

And instead of expectation, we can move to service.

And out of our submission, we begin to serve, and we serve with no strings attached.

And you don't want to tell God what he owes you for your service to him.

You will be locking yourself into one denarius when your father in heaven wants to give you the world.

Our submission leads to service.

And when we break our expectation, we break much of the weight of the negative emotions that come from negative places.

And our service will lead us to an unbelievable satisfaction.

The life of purpose and power and meaning and impact and significance, the life that we are all desperate to live.

It doesn't just start with changing your behaviors, it starts with changing your mind.

God owns it all and He owes us nothing.

In fact, we have sinned against the perfect God who is the creator and sustainer of it all.

And he loves you so much.

He wants you to believe that if you just submit and follow after him, he will take care of you.

And he proved it.

This is how we escape.

What we think are emotional problems are actually expectation problems that are rooted in our sense of overwhelming entitlement in this culture.

You want to make a difference?

You want to be that kingdom kind of light that shines out into your friend group and your family in our city, break the chains of entitlement.

If we can do that, people will want to know what is going on with these people.

Their life is different, and I can see it.

And they won't know this, but they'll see it because you've broken the entitlement track.

I want to show you where this lands.

Matthew 19, 30, set up the parable.

But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

Matthew 20, 16 ends the parable.

So the last will be first.

And the first will be last.

It's time to measure our success differently.

If your goal is to make yourself first in life, in the kingdom, you will end up on bottom.

You will be at the bottom of the entitlement track, and you will be at the bottom of an overwhelming flood of emotions that you can't figure out how to deal with.

But if you are willing to be last, to submit to God, to not demand and negotiate and bargain our faith, but to submit to the one who holds our faith and to serve him with your life, you will find the life you're looking for.

And God might be asking you today, Are you jealous?

Because I'm generous.

I see this in my life.

Since I wrote this two weeks ago, I've seen it every day.

God, I pray that we would reverse this course, that we would find the areas of entitlement in our life, that we would break the chains of a culture that tries to convince us that we are owed something by this world and we would realize that we owe you our lives.

I pray that we could submit, that we could serve you, and in that that we could find what our souls are longing for.

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

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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