Heroic: Invest in Eternity with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

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.

All right, MetaCurch, how you guys doing?

Yeah.

Hey, make some noise for our band one more time, just killing it week after weekend.

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

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

We're so so glad that you guys joined us here.

We're a gathering of ordinary people who believe that we can live heroic, extraordinary lives and really make an impact in our world.

Uh, if you're not new with us, uh I miss you guys.

I was out for a couple of weeks.

COVID hit our house pretty hard.

Uh, I just can't thank you enough for all of the prayers and everyone who reached out on social media.

Uh, but we are back in action and feeling great.

There are these times where we plan these series months in advance, and every once in a while God does this thing where we actually get into the series at the perfect time.

And I can't think of a time where we have needed so badly for a movement of people who are willing in our world among the chaos and the division and all of the unanswered questions to learn how to live out heroic lives.

There's a lot going on right now.

And so uh what we're doing in this series is we're acknowledging that as humans, we naturally look for heroes.

I think a great testament to this is the Marvel cinematic universe.

You guys know this.

I I love Marvel movies.

Man, I I it's like a thing we do in our house when they come out.

The the boys and I, we haven't missed one, except maybe like the couple R-rated ones, right?

I'm not I'm not trying to get crazy with it, but but we always go and they blow everything else out at the box office.

We have this deep desire, and we find ways to enshrine our real life heroes.

One of the ways we do this is we put together a hall of fame, like for everything, you know, and in sports, we have our heroes and we have the NBA Hall of Fame and the NFL Hall of Fame, and there's probably like a ping-pong Hall of Fame somewhere.

Like, we're just desperate for heroes.

We have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and Nashville, the Country Music Hall of Fame.

You can find a hero in any walk of life.

In Waco, there is the Texas High School Athletics Hall of Fame.

Like, we make these for everything, and and you may know this if you've been in this series, but Scripture has a Hall of Fame as well.

It's in the New Testament book of Hebrews, chapter 11, and it does the same thing.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It takes the great heroes of Scripture in it, it lists them out in what we're calling the Hall of Heroes.

This series is pretty simple.

Every week we are honing in on one of these great heroes of Scripture, and we're really examining their life, and we're finding these character traits and pulling them out and realizing that if we could add those traits to our own life, we have a real shot at living heroically as well.

And so we've been listing these traits and what we're calling our heroic template.

If you haven't been here, you can catch up on these messages really easily online.

We've learned four things so far.

We've learned that heroic lives have faith.

And I said in week one that everything else we learn will flow out of the fact that heroic lives have faith.

The word faith is used 23 times in Hebrews chapter 11 alone.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Heroic lives escape temptation.

They rely on God.

Heroic lives are open to change even when change is hard.

Today we're gonna stick right into Hebrews 11.

We're gonna look at the Hall of Heroes, heroes, we're gonna keep building out our heroic template.

We're gonna look at a great hero of scripture who was born into exile, who grew up in luxury, and then came to a moment of decision where he had to decide whether he was going to live surrounded by comfort or whether he was going to live pursuing his calling.

But first, there's quite a bit that we can pray about together today, and so let's do that before we get into scripture.

Father, we come to you today excited about what you have to say to us.

We also come in today with heavy hearts.

God, San Antonio is called Military City USA, and we're watching uh what seems to be maybe the end of a conflict, but the beginning of new conflicts and confusion and chaos.

And God, we lift up the situation in Afghanistan to you.

God, we grieve alongside the families of the lives that have been lost.

We pray, God, for protection.

We pray, God, for peace.

God, there is a hurricane close to making landfall in Louisiana, and God, we stand today in prayer, lifting that situation up to you, lifting up the people who are leaving behind their homes and the lives that they know, not knowing if there will be something to come back to.

God, we lift up an ongoing pandemic.

God, we we lift up heavy hearts, we lift up those who have lost their jobs.

God, we are here because we are desperate to hear from you.

We are here because we believe that the world is desperate for a movement of people who will do the hard work to live heroic lives.

We are here because you've called us to be your hands and your feet, your ambassadors on the earth.

We're here to do whatever it takes to reach people.

And I pray that today we would get one step closer to really defining our ability to be able to do that.

We love you, and God, as we come here from all different walks of faith, God, I thank you for MetaCurch, a place where you can belong here before you believe what we believe.

God, I just ask that we would be humble enough to be open, to lay down our preconceptions, to open our minds and our hearts, to allow you to say to us exactly what you want to say.

And we pray it all in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

We have been talking about the great hero narrative.

And the hero narratives are seemingly as old as humanity itself.

Written history goes back a few thousand years.

Our first really written-out heroic narrative, most scholars agreed, is the story of Gilgamesh, who was like the world's first superhero, and he did what superheroes do.

He was born kind of in these ordinary circumstances, he went through great trials, he found different strengths and perspectives within those trials.

He came to a climactic moment, he overcame it and made a difference in the world around him.

This was written over 4,000 years ago.

Marvel is not new.

This has been happening forever.

And in all these years, thousands and thousands of years of written history, people have always gravitated towards heroic journeys.

And the craziest part is in all these thousands of years, the baseline plot of every one of these stories has remained the same.

A couple hundred years ago, we've shown this before, but a guy named Freytag put the heroic narrative on a pyramid.

It's called Freytag's Pyramid, and it looks like a large triangle or like a pyramid or a mountain.

And this is every hero's journey all throughout time.

It starts with a seemingly ordinary person in ordinary circumstances.

This is the origin story or the background.

And if we then go to this moment where everything changes and the character is thrown into the rising tension.

And this rising action, this is where the suffering and pain, the frustration, the bad habits, the disappointment, the depression, this is where life gets incredibly hard.

In every hero's journey, they go through this season of tension and suffering.

It eventually leads them to a climactic moment.

And what a hero does is they take all that time of suffering, maybe months, years, sometimes decades of suffering and tension, and they draw strength from it, and they learn new skills and they gain new perspective to overcome that obstacle, and that leads them to the falling action.

And this is where ordinary people make extraordinary impacts on the world around them.

This is the hero's journey.

Whether it's Gilgamesh, Hercules, Iron Man, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whoever it is, this is their journey, and their story can be plotted on this graph.

Today I want to add one element to the story arc, to the hero's journey.

I want to focus on one very specific moment.

It usually takes place right when that tension grows to its highest point, right when you are in the thick of the suffering, right when the last shoe drops, when all seems lost, and you're nearing that point where if you could just turn the corner, you could get to the other side of the story and live a heroic life.

It is then when we run into the temptation trap.

You see, not every story ends as a heroic tale.

What often happens is in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of the tension, in the midst of the pain, we run into the temptation to take the easy way out.

And the world will always offer you a temptation trap.

Whether it is an addiction that will ease your pain or alleviate your suffering, whether it is overspending so that you can feel like you have some sense of control, whether it is finding a relationship outside of your marriage so you can finally feel powerful, whether it's using your words to gossip and put others down so just maybe you will be seen as a little bit more.

We all run into the temptation trap, and every hero narrative has a moment where the protagonist, the hero, is tempted to stay on the left side of the story.

Think about one of the greatest hero narratives of our last few generations, Star Wars.

There is a moment in the original trilogy where Luke is at his lowest.

He is being defeated by Darth Vader, fool just had his hand cut off, he's hanging on for dear life, and he just learned that the worst guy in the galaxy is his dad.

Like things are going terrible for Luke Skywalker, and it's right then that he gets the temptation.

What does Darth Vader offer him?

He says, Luke, if you will join me, this is the part where I mention uh I don't do impressions.

Darth Vader's just gonna sound like me, right?

Like me waiting to hit puberty still.

This is now Darth Vader.

He offers him, join me.

Darth has all the power, he's on top and together.

As co-equals, we will rule the galaxy.

And we know what happens.

We know he turns it down because we know at the end of the story he's the hero.

But in the moment, he gets to escape temptation, he gets to escape the suffering, he gets to rule and reign over literally everything in the galaxy.

He gets to join with his father and avoid being killed by Darth Vader.

We know the end of the story, but don't miss it.

Every hero goes through a real temptation.

And the temptation trap is incredibly powerful.

And it's very rare that someone can escape it consistently because it is very rare for someone to live a heroic life.

This moment of temptation is repeated, I'm not kidding you, in every single hero narrative that has ever been written.

So remember, the whole point of this story is that you were created to live a heroic life.

In the same way, you can take your favorite movie or your favorite novel and you can place it on that pyramid, and you can watch the character go from the left side to the right side of the story and become that hero they were destined to become, you can place your own life on that pyramid as well.

Which means that every time you get close to that climactic moment, the moment where you get to turn the corner and begin living as a hero, the temptation trap will present itself to you.

And it will be tempting.

It's very, very difficult to overcome.

In fact, we face some version of the temptation trap, if not every week, usually every single day.

We don't want to deal with the painful realities of life, and so we tap out, and life offers us plenty of opportunities to alleviate our pain, to mitigate our suffering, to help us numb or pacify our deep desires.

We've all experienced this.

The temptation trap is so powerful because living a heroic life is hard.

Pornography is easy.

Living a heroic life is hard, overspending is easy.

Living a heroic life is hard, escaping into our smartphones is easy.

The temptation trap is there, it's very real, and there's a reason that living a heroic life takes a heroic effort.

We all experience this.

And so what do we do about it?

How can we overcome the temptation trap?

How can we get to the right side of our story?

As we've done every week, we're gonna dig into Hebrews 11 and we are gonna look at one of the great heroes of Scripture.

Hebrews 11, verse 23 introduces our next hero.

Hebrews 11:23

It says, By faith, Moses, after he was born, was hidden by his parents for three months because they saw that the child was beautiful and they did not fear the king's edict.

Today we are looking at Moses, perhaps one of the most well-known figures in all of Scripture.

But what strikes you immediately is that the first hero in Moses' story is not Moses.

The first hero is his parents.

A little bit of backstory.

About 400 years before this, Israel had gone down to Egypt to escape a famine that surely would have killed them all.

And God was very clear, you can go to Egypt, but don't stay.

You see, God had given them a promised land.

Now, life in Egypt was good.

It was the temptation trap.

And they did get trapped.

First they stayed because it was easy, then they stayed because Egypt got paranoid and put them into slavery.

You see, we think that the temptations the world offers us will really take us where we want to go, but it's called a trap for a reason.

For 400 years they had stayed in Egypt.

For many, many generations now they had been in slavery.

And things got worse.

The king of Egypt, they called him the Pharaoh, he got really nervous because uh the Israelites were multiplying at a significant rate, and he was afraid that if enough men were born and if their population increased enough, that Egypt, or Israel could rebel and overtake Egypt.

And so he put out a new ruling that all male children born to the Israelites would be murdered at birth.

The first heroes in Moses' story were his parents.

They went to incredible risk to save their child.

Odds are that his mother actually hid her pregnancy for as long as she could.

She gave birth very dangerously without the help of any of the Egyptian midwives who offered the medical care to the Israelites.

They hid the child for over three months, and then in an incredible act of faith, and remember, heroic lives always have faith.

They built the world's tiniest boat, put Moses inside of it, and shipped him down the river towards the Pharaoh's palace.

God had a plan for Moses' life, and as he neared the palace, he was found by none other than the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt's daughter.

The daughter was overwhelmed by this beautiful Israelite boy and adopted him as her own.

Moses was born into slavery, born in exile, but now was going to be raised for the next 40 or so years inside the walls of the palace.

He would eat 12 course meals, he would have servants for his every single need.

Life in the palace was a good life, but God had a plan for him.

And this plan did not simply involve kicking back in the palace and wasting away his days.

For Moses, and for all of us, there is something more.

We read on in verse 24, it says, By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and chose to suffer with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

Think about the temptation trap in your life and what exactly it could be holding you back from.

Moses, arguably the most well-known hero besides Jesus in all of Scripture.

He is the key figure in the Jewish scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.

He was one decision away from simply being a footnote of a forgotten Egyptian lineage.

Who would have blamed him?

Moses made it out.

Moses is a rags to riches story.

No one would have been mad at this guy for staying in the palace.

Who wouldn't want to be in the palace?

And can you imagine the excuses?

It would have been so easy for Moses to think, I mean, these aren't really my people, you know.

Like, I mean, I get it.

We share some blood, but I was raised over here, and I mean, we don't treat them that bad, you know.

They eat every once in a while.

Besides, I don't even know any of these fools.

Like, if I show up, they're probably gonna be mad at me because I've been in the palace.

I'm kind of like half Egyptian now.

He had all the excuses in the world to just stay put and live out his days in absolute decadence.

The temptations were endless.

But please hear me.

Temptation is always a trap.

You think that you are expediting your journey, but you are really sending yourself into exile.

And so Moses traded the simple path for the significant path.

He traded comfort for calling, he traded the palace for his purpose.

The way that the Egyptian laws worked back then, even as an adopted Israelite, there was a chance that Moses could end up a Pharaoh of Egypt.

Moses gave up the opportunity to be a king in order to live his life for the king.

And so the question is how.

Because if we're gonna do anything at Metachurch, we're gonna be real.

The temptation trap is overwhelmingly powerful.

There are days where it feels impossible to overcome.

The question we must wrestle with is how?

How do you escape the temptation trap?

When most people seem to fall for it every time.

I read a story about a guy named William Borden.

He was born in 1887.

And he's not the uh Borden milk guy, you know, uh like the cafeteria little trace.

Um, he uh he was born, though, a multimillionaire.

His dad had made his money in the silver mines, and in 1887, being a multimillionaire was akin to being a billionaire in today's time.

It was an extraordinary amount of money.

When he was about seven years old, his mom began attending the local church, and even at seven, he would sit and listen intently, and these powerful sermons were going right to the core of his heart and beginning to shape who he was.

The Borden family was like rich, rich.

And he graduated high school at 16 years old, and for his 16th birthday, his parents gifted him a trip around the world.

This is some rich people nonsense right here.

At 16, I got an 18-year-old Chevy Cheyenne quarter ton.

You had to be able to leg press like 300 pounds to shift it, you know?

And I thought I was doing good.

A trip around the world, millions of dollars at his disposal, all of the best and most exotic places.

I cannot even begin to tell you at 16 years old with a million dollars, unsupervised around the world, how much trouble I would have gotten in.

Like it would have been party all day, party all night.

We have William Borden's journal.

And everywhere he went, he wrote about how God was breaking his heart for those who were living in poor conditions.

He went on a trip that his parents sent him on to get a little culture, to have a little fun, to go to exotic places, to eat great food, to give him a taste of the life he would live out the rest of his days pursuing.

And he came back and dedicated his life to leaving behind his fortune and serving the Lord as a missionary overseas.

Not what his parents intended, and it blew all of his friends' minds.

He came back and he uh went to continue his education, he went to one.

Of the top colleges in this in the entire country.

He went to Yale.

He wrote in his journal about the first time the president of Yale got up and gave his convocation, laying out a blueprint for the brightest young minds in America, and this was his takeaway.

William Borden said he neglected to say what our purpose should be and where we should get the ability to persevere and the strength to resist temptation.

William was raised like Moses.

He knew all about the trap.

He knew about temptation that you and I are like, maybe I'll just find out what that temptation is like for a day, you know, like a few million dollars, a palace, you know, like like we all have our temptations.

Theirs is on another level.

They'll never have to work in their life.

He goes through Yale and he's a top student.

He comes out of there and he's being offered jobs from the top businesses in the world.

Real temptation.

Once again, he's already dedicated his life to going overseas, but the temptation is back.

And who would blame him?

Look, man, I'm 22 years old.

I'll go when I'm 30.

I'll work 20 years and go a 40 years.

I mean, I'll be smarter then anyway, you know.

I'll have more money then.

I can do more work, help more.

You see, he looked around at everyone else falling into the temptation trap, and he was just determined to live a heroic life.

After university, he left.

He felt like God was calling him to Northwest China to try to reach the Uyghur Muslims, an unreached people group that now in 2021 are being boarded onto trains and put in concentration camps over in China.

He had his mind set there, and so he went of all places first to Egypt.

He went to Egypt, it was a safer environment where he could learn Arabic.

Once he learned Arabic, he was going to go over to China.

He really did it.

At 22 years old, he left it all behind.

He went and lived a very average life, and as he was in Egypt every day, he would go out, he would practice his Arabic to tell as many people as possible the good news of Jesus Christ, the person who had changed his life.

At 25 years old, before he'd ever made it to China, William Borden was diagnosed with cerebral meningitis.

And just a few weeks later, he died.

He never made it to China.

He never got to do mission work to the Uyghur Muslims.

In his Bible and in his journals, his family found three distinct statements, each of them only two words long.

The first one he wrote right after he came back from his world traveling and decided to give it all up to be a missionary.

His friends and family thought that he had lost his mind.

He wrote two words.

No reserves.

He was giving it all away and he was holding nothing back to pursue the heroic life.

After school, when he came under the temptation of job offers that you'd be crazy not to take, he wrote two words.

No retreat.

He knew that he had been called and there was no time for backpedaling.

The last statement.

Just days before the disease took his life, he wrote two words.

No regrets.

No reserves, no retreat, no regrets.

Even with a life cut so short, even with a mission unfulfilled, no regrets.

The temptation trap is unbelievably powerful, but I am telling you, a life where everything can go wrong and you can still close your eyes at the end of each day with no regrets about how you're living.

That is something that money and wealth cannot give you.

That is something that fame cannot afford you.

That is something that addiction cannot pacify out of you.

That is something that toxic relationships cannot come alongside of you.

This is something that only the heroic life that you were created to live can give you.

The heroic life is a life of no reserves, no retreat, no regress.

It is the life you want to live.

And so what makes that kind of difference?

How did William Borden, a man literally born with a silver spoon in his mouth, millions of dollars at his disposal?

How did he give it all up to live the life he was called to live?

How did Moses leave behind all the treasure of Egypt to go back into exile for 40 years with a group of grumbling Israelites?

Luckily we have scripture and it outlines for us the answer we are seeking.

Let's go back to verse 24.

It says, By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of the Pharaoh's daughter.

And he chose to suffer with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

And here's our key verse for he considered reproach for the sake of Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, since he was looking ahead to the reward.

And this verse says everything.

This is interesting because Moses lived about 1,600 years before Christ.

Odds are, unless God showed him something that's not recorded in scripture, he didn't actually know who Jesus Christ was.

But he knew the one true God.

And he followed him in spite of having every reason not to.

And because he was faithful, and because he went in, and because he freed the Israelites, and because he took them to the promised land, they were positioned to become once again the people of God who would one day give birth to the Savior of the world.

Here's what this teaches us when you truly live a heroic life, you are living a Christ-like life.

There's something so important, and it's been so hard to not bring this up.

Every single message of this series, I had to wait till now so you can see it clearly.

In this series, you are not learning how to be the hero.

In a truly heroic life, you are not the hero.

In a truly heroic life, you are not making your own name great.

You are not living for your own fame.

The most heroic life you can live is a life where it points to something greater than yourself.

The temptation trap will keep you stuck on the wrong side of your story, convincing you that it is your job to become a king.

And the heroic life is a life where you live with everything that you have for something beyond this life to make the name of Jesus known and glorified and to live to bring glory to the king.

A heroic life, a heroic life is not a life where at the end you are the hero.

In every temptation of this world, there's one way to spot it.

Is this path end with my glory or God's?

And if you cannot answer that question, then there's a good chance you are stuck in the temptation trap.

Let's keep building.

For he considered reproach for the sake of Christ, not his own sake, not even the sake of Israel, something bigger, to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.

And I want to suggest that we all, we all have an Egypt.

We all have that thing that keeps us trapped.

We all have that thing that right when we get close to living a heroic life, it pulls us back in.

When you're on the left side of your story, when life is really beating you down, when your marriage is really struggling, do you hang in and fight for your marriage, or do you give in to the temptation?

Do you head out to the gym to blow off some steam?

Do you head out to the bar just to get away from her?

Do you head out to go spin?

Do you head out to go gossip?

When things are really bad at work, what is your Egypt?

Do you stay in the fight?

Do you support the people around you?

Or do you bury your head in your phone?

Do you do the minimum amount of work to get by?

We are called to live heroically.

Moses gave up all of the riches in Egypt, and so often, we won't give up all the riches of Candy Crush.

We won't put down our phone to live a hero's journey.

We won't give up all the attention of Instagram.

We won't give up the habit that everyone that actually cares about us has pointed out in our life, and you've convinced yourself that everyone else is the idiot.

We won't give up our pride.

All of these little things, they become the Egypt that we end up in exile.

So, how do you do it?

How do you escape the temptation trap?

It comes right here at the end, and if you blink, you'll miss it.

It says he considered reproach for the sake of Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, since, here's your answer, since he was looking ahead to the reward.

Moses was looking ahead.

William Borden was looking ahead.

And if you want to live a heroic life, you must look ahead.

Moses, when he left the palace, was 40 years away from the promise.

He was born in exile, raised in luxury, and he chose to go back into exile.

But while he was in exile, his eyes were on eternity.

And so let's look again, real quick, at the hero's journey.

Let's pull it up again, that the temptation trap.

Let's actually see the pyramid.

Because if you're stuck in the temptation trap, you are stuck on the wrong side of your story.

And sometimes to get to the other side takes months, and sometimes it takes years, and sometimes it takes a lifetime.

The question is, are you moving towards the right side, or are you stuck in a trap?

We learned what faith is, and I said in week one, every other trait of the hero will come out of faith.

Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, and it is the proof of what is not yet seen.

I want you to see this pyramid because it is a simple picture of faith.

Moses was stuck on the wrong side of his story, but he was looking ahead.

What is faith?

It is the reality of what is hoped for.

It is the proof of what you cannot see.

How did Moses give up all of the riches of Egypt?

It's because while he was in Egypt, while he was in exile, his eyes were on eternity.

He believed in what was on the right side of his story before he could ever see it.

It is reality.

He was looking ahead to the reward and the promised land that God has for him 40 years later, was as real to him as the riches in his hand that day.

William Borden, while stuck on the wrong side of his story, while stuck trying to make his way to the heroic life, he was looking ahead.

He had faith in what was on the other side of his story.

And the riches of spreading the gospel was as real to him as the riches that he had inherited from his parents.

And if you lose faith, you can't see what's on the other side of your story.

And if you can't see what's on the other side of your story, you will give in to the temptation trap.

It's just how life works.

We all do this, we all get stuck here.

And sometimes we're on the left side, but we're moving, and we're moving for a long time, and we're letting God know I'm not really happy about being on the left side.

When's the right side coming?

And you can wrestle with God.

We learned that last week.

But while you wrestle, you hold on to your faith.

Even here at Meta Church, man, it has felt like 18 months on the left side, just trying to make up ground.

Like when will this pandemic ever finally reside?

When will people like finally feel good to come back?

Like we've been working for years on a permanent location.

We believe that God has something big for us, but it is taking a while.

And so we keep working.

And there's lots of temptations, and it's easy to cut your losses, and it's easy to try to manipulate it or to rationalize it.

But I need you to know, as hard as things are, and as unclear as the future might be, we have faith in what God is doing among this movement.

We have faith that He has something for us in our future.

And if we can hold on to faith, if the other side of our story is as real as the suffering that we are currently in, then God will make sure that He completes what he started in us.

We have to have faith.

And so when we bring up that heroic template, we see that heroic lives have faith.

This is the starting place.

Heroic lives escape temptation.

They rely on God, they are open to change.

And today, Moses showed us that heroic lives invest in eternity.

You see, there is a bigger picture to life.

Every day we have these little heroes' journey.

Are you gonna be a hero in your marriage, a hero at work, a hero in your parenting, a hero in your relationship with your parents, a hero overcoming your addictions?

But there is a larger story to life.

And the truth is that while we are on earth, we are always on the left side of eternity.

We are always in the pain because we are humans on a broken world.

And if you want to live a heroic life, it starts and it ends with Jesus.

And if you do not know him and if you do not trust him, then you cannot know what is on the right side of your life's story.

If you don't know Jesus, he left perfect heaven where he had existed for all of eternity.

He came down to our broken world, he lived the perfect life that none of us could live.

He died a horrific death, and he did it to pay the penalty of every wrong you have ever done and every wrong you ever will do.

He died.

He has been on the other side of life.

He rose again, he's been on the other side of death.

He ascended, he is now on the other side of eternity.

And if Jesus is already in eternity, if Jesus is already in your future, and if you know Jesus, then you can see what is coming before it is here.

You can have the proof of your hope and the reality of what is not seen.

You can have faith, and if you can have faith, you can invest this life, not trying to be king, but living the heroic life to make known the king.

Right where you are, if you'll just close your eyes and bow your heads, there's nothing magic about this.

It just creates some space for you and for the people around you.

What I just presented here at the end, we call the gospel, it just means the good news.

But to understand the good news, you need to know the bad news.

The bad news is that we are all sinners, we are ordinary, jacked-up people.

And that sin separates us from a holy God who cannot be in the presence of sin.

His very nature will not allow it.

What that means is that the God who holds your eternity in the balance, while you are in your sin, cannot be in your presence.

And yet, as harsh as that sounds, while God is just, God is love.

He loves you so much that he gave a part of himself, Jesus his son.

He traded Jesus' perfect life for mine and yours messed up, sinful lives.

He holds the key to the other side of your life.

And if you do not know Jesus today is an opportunity for you to simply trust him.

Jesus did all the heavy lifting, he did all the work, and all you have to do is believe that he is who he says he is, and he's done what he says that he's done.

He asks so little of us, and he offers us everything in return.

And if you have never had a moment where you have believed, I want to invite you right now to affirm that belief with a simple prayer.

You can say it out loud, you can repeat it in your mind where God can hear your thoughts.

But you'll pray something like this.

Jesus, today I choose to believe in you.

I know I'm a sinner.

I know my sin separates me from God.

Today I believe that you are who you say you are and that you have done what you say you have done.

And so I thank you right now for a new life.

I thank you for an eternal life.

And to the best of my ability, I will live to give this life back to you.

Let me pray for you.

Father, for anyone who has lifted that prayer up to you, I pray blessing on them.

God, you have promised that your Holy Spirit now lives inside of their life.

I pray that they will learn to listen and be guided.

I pray they will invest themselves in your word in this movement, that they will invest themselves in eternity.

God, I pray for those who already believe but are still getting stuck in these temptation traps, that every day, every morning, every noon, every night, we would look our eyes ahead, that we would focus on eternity, even while we are stuck in exile.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, 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.