Heroic: Escape Temptation 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.

I want to welcome you to MetaCurch.

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

I'm the lead pastor here.

And man, I would love to be in person with you guys, but like many of you are experiencing right now, I just recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Now, we've taken extraordinary precautions to get this video out.

I'm currently in a completely empty studio that will get sanitized.

I want to thank Marco, our media director, for making this all possible.

Without further ado, we are in week two of our heroic series where we're learning how ordinary people like you and like me can have an extraordinary impact on the world around us.

We're rooting ourselves in the Christian scriptures and a letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

We call this the Hall of Heroes.

It's this massive list of all the great heroes of Scripture.

We're looking across a broad collection of these great men and women to find the different traits and characteristics that we can add to our own life so that we can live as heroes ourselves.

Let's read a little bit of Hebrews 11 together.

It says, Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.

For by this our ancestors were approved.

By faith, we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God, so that what is seen was made from the things that are not visible.

By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain did.

By faith he was approved as a righteous man because God approved his gifts, and even though he is dead, he still speaks through his faith.

By faith Enoch was taken away, and so he did not experience death.

He was not to be found because God took him away.

For before he was taken away, he was approved as one who pleased God.

And here's our key text today.

By faith, Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen and motivated by godly fear, built an ark to deliver his family.

By faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.

Today we are looking at our second hero.

We're looking at Noah.

This is a pretty common story if you haven't heard it before.

All of the world was filled with wickedness, except for one man named Noah.

God decided that he was going to judge the world by sending a worldwide flood, and he told Noah that in order to be saved, he had to build a massive ark in the middle of the desert, nowhere near water, in a world where it had never actually rained before.

Now, what's extraordinary about Noah isn't just that he spent close to 75 years building the Titanic in the middle of a desert.

What's amazing is that while the entire world had turned its back on God, Noah stayed faithful.

We find his story in the first book of Scripture, Genesis chapter 6.

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

It says this: when the Lord saw that human wickedness was widespread on the earth, and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was deeply grieved.

And then the Lord said, I will wide mankind whom I created off the face of the earth, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky, for I regret that I made them.

Noah, however, found favor with the Lord.

In this series, we are trying to find those common characteristics across Scripture's heroes to help us learn how to live a heroic life as well.

Last week we saw that it all starts with faith.

Heroic lives have faith.

They live today in light of the trust that they have in God for their future.

Today we are getting a two-for-one deal.

The first trait that Noah shows us is that heroic lives have the ability to escape temptation.

Now, this is no small feat.

Noah saved not only his life, but all of humanity by being able to stay true to God when the rest of the world was in rebellion.

Noah was seen as a righteous man, a man who walked with God.

This is truly a startling feat because temptation is everywhere.

When we read the story of Noah back in Genesis, it's like every single person was going in one direction.

And somehow Noah was able to go against the cultural current, to swim against the flow, to escape all the ingrained practices of the people around us.

And right now, in the year 2021, it's not like we have escaped the temptations that plagued Noah's community back then.

In fact, our access and ability to be tempted has probably been heightened significantly.

We are tempted all the time by things all around us.

We are tempted towards pride, towards the misuse of our relationships.

We are tempted by habits that pull us away from God's desire for our lives.

We're tempted by countless different options and apps that we have on the smartphones that we carry around with us all of the time.

Temptation is lurking everywhere.

At MetaCurch, we're a place where you can belong before you even believe.

And so maybe you're kind of new to the whole church thing and scripture and this idea of God.

And perhaps, like many people, you view God as this old, angry man who wants to like stop at nothing to keep you from enjoying life and from having fun.

I was walking around the block last week, and um my younger son Paxton and I were talking, and he was talking about how as soon as all his friends find out that his dad is a preacher, they have all kinds of questions for him.

And he was saying how oftentimes they have this idea that as soon as you go to church, you basically have to stop doing every fun thing.

You know, you can't watch any bad movies, you can't listen to any bad music, you can't say any bad words, you can't have any bad thoughts.

It was confusing to him a little bit.

He didn't exactly know how to respond.

And so I got to talk to him about the hero's journey, the very thing we're learning about here at MetaCurch.

You see, God hasn't put prohibitions in place in our life.

He hasn't tried to guide us away from temptation in order to just ruin the party and take away all of our fun.

He has guided us in life because he's created us to be heroes.

He wants us to be on the heroic path.

And the truth is, most people simply settle for the status quo.

They are swept along by the current of culture, they give in to temptations to try and satiate and satisfy a deep desire, wishing that their life was more significant.

Heroic lives are uncommon lives because to be a hero, you have to live in ways that most people are not willing to live.

To be a hero, you have to escape temptation.

And so, how do we do that?

How do we successfully escape temptation so that we can live a heroic life?

I recently heard an incredible story from World War II.

Hitler's armies had surrounded and blockaded Leningrad, a Soviet country.

For over two years, no one and nothing was allowed in or out of the city, and that included food.

It wasn't long before the citizens of Leningrad were starving to death by the hundreds.

What makes this story so significant is a project that was happening in the city at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry.

It was there that scientists had been working tirelessly on breeding and producing new types of stable crops that could grow around the world in harsher climates and that could survive things like pesticides and pollution.

This work was a bigger deal than you can probably imagine.

Starting in the 1900s, the world's population began a stunning rise.

The average age of death rose dramatically, infant mortality declined dramatically.

This was due to scientific advances and better living conditions.

The Industrial Revolution had been going on for a while.

It really raised the amount of wealth people had, which raised their standard of living.

All of these factors and more led to unprecedented population growth.

Just to give you a clue how serious and significant this was, from the year 1800 to the year 1900, that's a 100-year gap, the world's population went from 1 billion to 1.6 billion.

So in 100 years, it rose from 1 billion to 1.6 billion.

Then from the year 1900 to the year 2000, the same span of time, 100 years, the world's population went from 1.6 to over 6 billion people.

This is unprecedented population growth in all of human history.

The problem with that pace of growth is that the world seems to have finite material goods.

Some of the greatest minds and experts of the 1900s were looking at this boom in population and were convinced that the world would quickly run out of food.

This would cause, of course, a sweeping plague of starvation and death.

A sweeping wave of biblical proportions.

Noah had a flood of water he was up against, and it seemed that the world was getting ready to drown in a flood of hunger and starvation.

And this is where the Vavilov Institute stepped in.

They were determined to change this course, to create pathways to harvest food, not just in the perfect climates where those food groups had always been grown in, but all over the world.

They were working on over 40,000 different edible plants.

And if they could build more robust plant systems, then we could exponentially increase food output.

And if we could do that, then maybe, just maybe, these scientists at this institute could actually help to save the world.

Now, all of that was up in the air.

Remember, because of Germany's blockade, the citizens of Leningrad were starving to death, including these scientists.

Meanwhile, any minute a well-placed bomb could level the institute and do away with all the years of work and research that they had put in.

Now, this is where the temptation comes in.

Think about the nine scientists who worked at that lab.

Not only did these brave men continue to come to work every day, but they were surrounded at work by thousands of plants.

They were starving and they went to work every day, literally surrounded by food.

And so the situation was they could either stay starving and protect their research, keeping their eye on the future and hoping that they could help to save people from mass starvation, or they could feed themselves and survive.

To be honest, no one, and I mean no one, would have blamed them for eating some of the rice, potatoes, corn, and every other plant that they were surrounded by.

And yet, these men continued their work.

When electricity was turned off, they began burning their own desks, burning their own books to keep the correct temperature in the labs.

They smuggled mature plants across frozen lakes and into the treacherous surrounding mountains to secure their work, risking their lives in the process.

All nine of these scientists eventually died of starvation.

They died of starvation surrounded by food.

They gave their lives for a chance to save others.

And some of the fruits and veggies that you and I eat today may have gone extinct without the heroes from Leningrad.

A life that constantly gives in to the easily accessible temptations around us is simply not a heroic life.

Now, this isn't a call to perfection.

None of us are going to live a perfect life.

We are quick to admit at MetaCurch that we are ordinary, jacked-up people.

It is not perfection that makes you a hero.

However, when the primary direction of your life is aimed at the world's temptations, you are off course from your God-given journey.

Every single hero in Hebrews 11, the hall of heroes, is flawed.

They are imperfect people, and if you read their stories, what stands out to you is just how ordinary they actually were.

However, when they would fall, they have the faith to get up and get back on the hero's path.

Instead of allowing temptation to run and to rule their life, they found a way to get back to God's work.

Let's look again at Noah.

In Hebrews 11 7, it says, By faith Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen, and motivated by godly fear, he built an ark to deliver his family, and by faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.

Let's look again at our heroic template.

It's not just a list of characteristics that stand alone.

They each build on one another.

What does it say that Noah was made aware of a future he could not yet see?

That is faith.

Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of the things that you can't see.

Faith is actualizing your future promises right now into your current reality.

This is what Noah did.

He went out every day with no power tools in the middle of the arid desert, nowhere near any body of water, and every day he continued and continued to build an ark.

He had faith in the future promises of God, and a life of faith is bringing into reality the hope that you cannot yet see in your future.

This is also every bit what the scientists in Leningrad did.

They believed that the work they were doing had promise for the future of humanity.

And that faith was the first key that allowed them to escape an overwhelming temptation.

One of the scientists named Dmitry Ivanov, he was the head of the rice collection.

He died in the lab, and it was discovered that he had thousands of packs of rice all around him.

None of us have probably ever truly been starving to death.

For these men to not give in and just eat a little bit truly is mind-boggling.

It truly required faith.

They had faith for the future of their work.

That is certainly the first step.

But I think there is one more.

Let's fast forward Noah's story just a little bit.

He spent seventy-five years building a massive ark.

Who knows how long, herding a bunch of animals inside, and finally the flood waters came.

In Genesis 6.11 it says, In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the sources of the vast watery depths burst open, the floodgates of the sky were open, and the rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

And those that entered, male and female, of every creature, entered just as God had commanded him, and then and then the Lord shut him in.

I've preached on this before because it strikes me as possibly the most important part of the Noah narrative.

Noah followed God into the hero's journey.

He built the massive ark, he loaded up the animals, he had faith, and then when the waters came, he was incapable of closing the door.

He had built an ark so big that required a door that he himself was unable to shut.

And this brings us to the last trait we are looking at today.

Heroic lives rely on God.

Not only did Noah build the ark with faith in the future he couldn't see, he built it knowing he would have to rely on God in the present.

Only God could shut the door.

He could do all the work in all the right ways, but at the end of it, it required God to move.

The scientists in Leningrad had to have faith in the future of their work, the lives it would save, the difference it would make over time.

They also had to rely on the present protection of all of their work or their sacrifice would be for nothing.

One well-placed bomb by the Germans and the whole project would have been doomed.

Heroic lives have faith in a future that they cannot yet see.

Heroic lives escape the temptations to trade our purpose for current pleasure.

Heroic lives rely on God in the present to see us through to tomorrow.

You were created to live a heroic life.

And you live in a world where you are constantly surrounded by temptations that are seeking you to draw you off course.

You know that temptations are all around you because even now you can imagine the temptations that have overcome you and overwhelmed you at different parts of your life.

Perhaps you are even under a bit of conviction about a temptation that you're struggling with today.

How do we escape temptation?

We must start by having faith.

Faith in the future promises that God has for our life.

If we can't trust in the reality of the future we have not yet seen, then the problems, pressure, and suffering of today will overwhelm us.

And when we are overwhelmed, we are susceptible to giving in to the temptations around us.

However, we can't just have faith in God for our future.

We must rely on God in the present.

Every day we must wake up seeking Him and serving Him.

In every part of our life, our career, our relationship, our finances, our well-being, our health, all of it, we must be dependent on Him.

You were created to escape temptation.

You were created to go on the hero's journey.

It is unimaginable what you could do with your life.

Nothing can stop you if you have faith, you rely on God, and if you can escape temptation.

Just pray with me.

Father, we love you.

And God, I thank you.

I thank you for the opportunity to preach this message.

God, I pray that it settles on someone's heart.

I pray that we can find something like this movement at MetaCurch, something to give our lives to, to have so much faith in that we are willing to go through whatever pain that we are capable of relying on you and escaping the temptations that so often plague us.

God, I pray that you would continue to speak to us and as we go through this series and look at more and more of the heroes of Scripture, that we would build these habits into our life so we as well can meet our full potential.

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