Heroic: Have Faith 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.

Man, it's so good to see you here.

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

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

Today we are kicking off a brand new series we're calling Heroic.

We're gonna take the next six weeks and really kind of plant ourselves in the New Testament, the Christian scriptures, a letter called Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And this is what's called often the Hall of Faith.

We're gonna call it the Hall of Heroes.

If you read chapter 11 in its entirety, which we'll do throughout this series, it is just this ongoing list of hero after hero after hero of scripture, people who made an extraordinary impact on the world during their time here on earth.

And if you really dig into these characters, what you find is that these were actually very ordinary people.

Sometimes we get into the Bible, and man, we see Moses, and we know about Abraham, and we read about Jacob, and we know about Joshua, and we know about Elisha, and we know about Elijah, and we get all these guys, and in our mind, they're like in the Justice League, you know?

They've got superpowers, they wear capes and fly around and stuff.

But when you read their stories, what you learn is these were ordinary people.

In many ways, they were jacked-up people just like you and just like me.

They had their problems, and yet there were these traits that show up in all of their lives that allowed them to live heroically.

We're gonna learn how to live as a hero.

And we all dreamed about being a hero growing up, you know?

Like maybe when you were really little, you actually dreamed of being a superhero, wearing a cape and flying around, and you get a little bit older and you realize that's probably not gonna happen.

And so you just wanna do heroic things, you know?

You wanna have a life.

When you're young, that's not just successful, but that is significant at the core of who you are.

I wonder if you've ever had a moment or maybe some moments where you've really felt like a hero.

Like maybe when you were young, you scored the winning goal or made the winning save, or maybe someone was choking and you were the only person around who knew CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and you were like the hero of that moment, maybe at work.

Someone had a project and there was no way they were gonna get it done on time, and you were the right person with the right skills, and you sacrificed some of your time.

You got that project across the finish line, you were their hero.

Man, there's nothing like it.

Uh, I've had a couple opportunities to feel this way in my life.

Uh, one of them I never would have expected.

Katie and I had just started dating, and when Katie and I started dating, everyone wondered the exact same thing.

Has Katie lost her mind?

Like, she was put together, she was successful, she was gorgeous, she had two young boys.

I was a struggling musician, and I was a white guy with dreadlocks.

Like, I did not have it together.

And yet, we it's not that bad.

Someone said, Oh.

Yeah.

Let's just say, like, I knew she loved me for me, you know what I'm saying?

I so uh so we get together, and everyone assumes she's having like a quarter life crisis, and and so I get real insecure because you know, everywhere we go, it's like, what in the world is she doing with this guy?

And and a couple of months into dating, uh, she invited me to her family reunion.

Now, like the pressure is on, and her family is awesome, man.

They're they're great people.

They're also like a lot of them are really successful.

They're entrepreneurs and business owners, you know, they've got their lives put together, these beautiful families.

So I got like the nicest clothes that I owned, which I promise you were not very nice.

I tried to put myself together, and I, in my mind, was walking right into the lion's den, and I showed up, of course, about a hundred people at this reunion, and I was the guy with dreadlocks.

I was the guy that Katie was living out her like life crisis with, you know?

And so we got there and everyone was nice enough, and we went down to the Perdinalis River, and the adults all stayed in their formal clothes, and the little kids got in their bathing suits, they got into the river, and the the rule was very clear.

You gotta stay right here in the shallow because there's a drop-off.

And if you go to the drop-off, you're not going to be able to touch.

It didn't take long for Paxton and one of his cousins to start wrestling over an inner tube, and pretty soon they were pulling so hard they pulled both of themselves off of that ledge, left go of the inner tube, and both of them instantly went under the water and started drowning.

I happened to be the closest person to them.

And the only option was fully clothed to jump into the water to grab both of them.

I could touch there, so it was no problem.

Stood them up and brought them back to the shore.

And you know what happened?

I went from being the guy with dreadlocks to the guy who saved the kids.

I was the hero.

And you gotta hear my heart.

I'm not glad that Paxton was drowning, okay?

But it did kind of help me out in that moment he's fine now.

We all want to be the hero.

Maybe we've gotten glimpses of that.

We've gotten little tastes of it along the way.

Maybe you can't think of one single time where you have felt like that.

What happens over time as we grow up and reality sets in and we encounter the world and we run up against it is eventually the world kicks us in the teeth enough times, we run into uh enough walls that we start looking back about these dreams of being heroic and being special and making a difference.

And instead of like dreams that speak to the core of our hope for our life, we look back and they become these naive fantasies.

The fantasies of someone too young to know how the world actually functions.

It's like, forget being heroic, we're just trying to survive.

Like the world is falling apart, everything's in chaos, there is more unknown than known.

We're battling our addictions, the plans that we made for our life haven't come to fruition, our relationships are strained, our marriages are hurting, we've got addictions that we've picked up along the way just to try and get some sense of control or calm or relief in our life.

And yet, over and over again, scripture seems to be making it clear that we were created on purpose, we were created with a purpose.

Our lives are meant to matter, that we, following the ultimate hero, Jesus, are meant to live a heroic life.

And what would that actually mean for you if you, right where you are, with all the baggage that you bring, all the mistakes that you've made, all of the ways that you fall short, if you right now could begin living a heroic life, even in the midst of life's sufferings?

We're gonna spend six weeks in Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

We're calling this the Hall of Heroes.

And Hebrews is an interesting book of the Bible.

It's actually a letter, and a lot of the Christian scriptures are letters written by apostles, these people who started the church, to these early churches, these new baby believers who just put their faith in Jesus.

And here at MetaCurch, man, we have such a high baptism rate that we have new baby believers among us all the time.

And maybe you grew up in church environments where it's like, good, you've put your faith in Jesus, now go through seven years of training, and then you can do something with the church.

What happened in the actual start of the church is people became believers and got to work immediately.

And so the apostles would write these letters and they would encourage them.

And being a Christian back then was very different than it is today.

There are some areas where we can feel sort of persecuted for our faith, certainly ridiculed by popular culture for believing that there is a God who created it and that there is a savior who has a plan for our life.

But the persecution they were under in the first century was costing people their lives.

The letter that we call Hebrews was written to these new believers, and they had come under persecution where their property was being repossessed, their families were disowning them, they couldn't find employment anywhere.

Some people were being jailed for their faith in Jesus, and they had even heard the rumors of people in their area who had died just for doing what we're doing here today, claiming the name of Jesus.

And so at first they understood their suffering, they had faith and hope that there was a way out of it, but as the suffering persisted, they lost faith.

They began to try to find a way out.

And so what they did is they went back to the religious context of their area, the accepted cultural norms.

They started practicing false religions, hoping to be covert Christians.

We'll do what we need to do to escape persecution, we'll still believe in Jesus in our hearts, we'll just try to have our cake and eat it too.

The author to Hebrews wrote them, encouraging them to hold fast to their faith.

We're gonna be in Hebrews 11 for uh all six weeks of this series, but as we're starting, we need to get some context in the preceding chapter.

Hebrews chapter 10, verse 35 says, So don't throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.

Hebrews 10:35

For you need endurance so that after you have done God's will, you may receive what was promised.

The author is reminding them that their suffering is nothing new.

The only thing that has shifted their confidence is their own shifting perspective.

The author then quotes the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, verse 37.

He says, For yet in a very little while the coming one will come and not delay, but my righteous one will live by faith.

And if he draws back, I have no pleasure in him.

And then the writer gives the encouraging conclusion of chapter 10.

He says, But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed.

We are those who have faith and are saved.

And this is a powerful, powerful word that I feel like God has on my life right now, that I feel like God has for our movement that we call metachurch, that we are not those who shrink back and give in and give up and lay down.

We are those who have faith, who stand up, who stand firm and trust that God has something for us in our future.

And here's the truth.

When the author of Hebrews wrote this, and he said collectively, he said as a statement of fact, we are the ones who have faith.

He was writing to a bunch of people who had abandoned their faith.

More accurately, he could have said, if you guys will pull it together, quit being idiots, quit chasing every temptation the world has, have some endurance, get it together, be strong, be courageous.

If you can do those things, then we will have faith.

Much more accurate statement.

But what is he doing?

He is even exercising faith in his conclusion about those believers.

It's so powerful because we all fail and we all fall short and we are all jacked up and we all have our worst ways that we revert to, and none of us perfectly have faith every single day of our life.

And yet, we can say with confidence that we are God's people, and when we are living in accordance with our created purpose, we are not those.

Maybe you shrink back every opportunity you get.

Maybe if you look at your last 24 hours, your last seven days, your last six months, your last five years, maybe the truth is you shrink back almost every time things get hard.

But I can tell you with confidence who you are at your core, who God created you to be.

You do not shrink back.

You stand firm, you have faith, you make an impact, you pursue your purpose, and you make a difference in this world.

That is who you are.

We are not those who draw back in our destroyed metach.

We are those who have faith.

It doesn't mean we get it right every time, and maybe you barely ever get it right, but we are gonna learn how to live as heroes, and no matter what the world brings our way, no matter what's suffering our persecution, we will learn to have faith.

Throughout this series, we are going to look at the heroic template.

We're starting today right at the beginning, and this is the most critical part.

Heroic lives have faith.

Heroic lives have faith.

In Hebrews chapter 11, that same word faith is used 24 times in one chapter.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It is the defining feature of all features of all of the heroes of Scripture.

Heroes have faith.

And so if a heroic life requires faith, then what is faith and what does it actually look like in our lives?

I want you to see the transition because Hebrews 10.39 is the end of that chapter, and it leads us into the beginning of Hebrews 11, the hall of heroes.

So again, Hebrews 10.39 says, But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are saved.

In Hebrews 11:1, the very next verse says, now faith, we're gonna define it.

Hebrews 11:1

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

This is the most explicit definition of faith in all of Scripture.

And it's a very familiar verse.

Uh if you spent any time around church or Christianity at all, there's a good chance you have heard some translation of this verse that faith is the reality of what is hoped for, it is the proof of what is not yet seen.

And it strikes you as so obviously right that it's easy to just zoom right past it.

However, it's important to understand exactly what this definition of faith is saying to us.

Number one, it is saying that a heroic kind of faith is not a passive faith, it is a faith that affects and infects every single area of your life.

Faith is both internal and external.

Internally, it is the things that we hope for at the deepest core of our being, and externally, faith are the things that we will see in our future, but we cannot see yet.

You may not realize this, but faith in our future, when we exercise that faith, it actualizes what we are hoping for down the road where we are living today.

What does this actually look like?

The reality of what we hope for, the proof of what is not seen.

Take any area of your life and ask what it would look like to have faith in that future.

The day that you stand at the altar, exchange your vows, and say, I do, there is a hope inside of you for what that marriage will one day become.

That you will be in a relation of deep love, affection, and intimacy, that you will not only love your spouse, but you will like your spouse, that together, this person, you will push each other closer to God, and in doing so, closer to your God-given purpose, that you will come together to shoulder life's burdens together, that you will challenge each other, that you will help each other in the good times and in the bad times, that this will be a relationship that will push you towards a life you would not have been able to accomplish alone.

That is the deepest hope for a loving God-honoring marriage.

And so faith is the reality of what you hope for.

That vision of marriage that you so desperately want.

Faith is the reality of it.

But it's the reality of it in a future that you cannot yet see.

Faith is being able to walk and live in your future hope by actualizing it right now, today.

And marriage is hard.

And so you get in marriage and you might say you have faith in your marriage.

I believe good things for our future, but are you actualizing that by walking out an active faith?

What happens all too often is people get into their marriage, and instead of being a hero, they live as a victim.

And they assume if it can go wrong, it will go wrong, and instead of living and operating by faith, you operate in your marriage by fear.

Others decide to live as villains.

They decide if their marriage is going to go well, it is solely up to them.

If someone's going to get hurt, I'm gonna hurt you before you can hurt me.

Or you can live a heroic marriage.

You can have faith in the reality that what you hoped for the day that you said I do will come to pass in a future that God has already set for you.

And by doing so, you can walk out in the trust and the confidence, living as a hero, giving your life away to your spouse.

There are things that you hope for in your career.

Not just a successful career, but something that is significant, something that you wake up every day and you feel a sense of purpose to go to, something where you get along and enjoy the people you work around, a work environment of peace, healthy conflict, all of those wonderful things.

Faith is the reality of what you're hoping for in a future you cannot yet see.

Active faith is walking out of the confidence of that future.

Are you a victim at work?

Are you assuming everyone is against you?

Everyone is out to get you, all of your bosses hate you.

Anything that goes wrong is never your fault because you are always the victim.

Are you a villain at work?

If you're gonna make that money and get that position, you're gonna have to step over some people to do it.

If you're gonna get it, it's because you're gonna put your effort towards it.

Or are you a hero?

Can you walk in faith?

Can you serve the people around you?

Can you put others first?

You can do that if you trust that God has your future set for you.

This is the hall of heroes.

Starting in verse 4, it's like hero after hero after hero after hero after hero after hero after hero.

And all of them have one thing in common.

Verse 2 tells us it says, For by this, that this refers to faith, by this our ancestors were approved.

By living a life of faith, not shrinking back from the trials of life, embracing their suffering as a hero, they lived a life that impacted the world.

These are our biblical heroes.

They're very jacked-up people, they are very ordinary people.

They lived extraordinary lives, not because of their accomplishments, not because of their exploits, not because of their season or situation.

They lived an extraordinary life right where they were because, number one, they had faith.

Now we have to be very careful because this definition of faith, when we really understand it, that faith is the actualization in your present of what you are hoping for in your future.

This can start to feel really loose and really weird.

It can start feeling very new age, you know, like you just believe it and you'll see it.

You just name it and you'll claim it, you know.

Start feeling very like Oprah the secret, you know?

If you can just will it into being and just direct all your vibes and energy towards it, then goodness is coming for you because you deserve it.

That's not the gospel.

Scripture doesn't say that faith is you putting your faith in yourself to accomplish your future.

Faith is believing that there is a God who holds your future and has a plan for you in it.

And it's a critical difference because sometimes you live as a hero, sometimes you walk in faith, and your life does not go the way that you expected it to go.

Sometimes you live as a hero and spouses still cheat, and jobs still end, and people still die, and addictions still surface.

It can be so difficult to know how to have faith when life is so full of suffering.

And that leads us to our first hero.

Our first hero is almost a footnote when you look at the totality of scripture.

In all of Scripture, he gets maybe four verses, and by any modern reading, this hero's story actually ends in tragedy.

In Hebrews 11:4, it says, By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain did.

Hebrews 11:4

It was 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.

If you're unfamiliar with the story of Cain and Abel, they were the first naturally born humans according to Scripture.

We don't know a lot about Abel.

He gets very, very little ink in scripture.

But what we do know is that he had faith in God.

We know this because God asked him and his brother, Cain, to give an offering, to make a sacrifice.

And Abel sacrificed his absolute best.

He gave to God what he needed today because he had faith that God would provide for him in the future.

And what did he get?

What was his reward for this righteousness, for this great faith?

His brother was infuriated, he was jealous.

And so Cain invited him into a field and murdered him in cold blood.

And scripture says that Abel still speaks to us today, and he certainly does.

He set the entire parameter for our series on sacrifice.

Just a few months ago, and Abel has more to say.

Today he has something to say to us about how to have faith, how to live as a hero when life is full of tragedy.

In 1942, a man named Victor Frankel was arrested by the German Gestapo.

He was put on a train packed tightly with hundreds of other civilians, and he was sent to a Nazi death camp.

For almost four years, Frankel would endure day after day of conditions too gruesome to imagine.

By all accounts, Victor Frankel was a great man.

He was a therapist, a clinician.

He spent his life meeting people who were at the end of their rope and giving them the tools to get their lives back together.

And what was his reward for all of his charity and all of his good service?

He was rewarded by being sent off to a concentration camp to live in quite possibly the worst conditions that humans have lived in in all of human history.

By definition, all of the people in concentration camps were the ultimate victims.

They were brought in, all of their possessions were taken away, they made sure to separate you from anyone you knew and anyone you loved.

They shaved your hair.

They took away your name and replaced it with a number.

They stole your identity, they dehumanized you and then put you in the worst conditions imaginable.

Every day, you would wonder if that was the day that you would starve to death.

If that was the day that you would be shot for no reason, if that was the day that you would get sent to the gas chambers.

The pictures of the Holocaust are almost too haunting to even look at.

Victor Frankel ended up surviving the Holocaust.

Upon his release, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, in my opinion, one of the greatest books ever written.

It was during his time, and written in this book, two major discoveries that Victor Frankel made that would forever change the way he perceived humanity and the way that he practiced therapy.

It was during this time that he realized that there was one human need that supersedes all other needs, that on the hierarchy of things we need to stay alive, things like food and water, sanitary conditions, things they had very little of during the Holocaust.

There was one differentiating factor.

He said it like this.

The prisoner who lost faith in the future was doomed.

With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold.

He let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.

The men and women in concentration camps were on death's doorstep every moment of every day.

They were being deprived, starved, and worked to death.

And yet, what he saw over his four years is that there was one factor that could keep somebody continuing to push forward.

There was one factor that when someone let it go, a countdown began to their eventual passing.

And that was whether or not they still had faith in their future.

For some of the men, they had a project that they were working on in their real life.

They had a business that they had started in their real life.

They still had passion for it.

And they just knew if they could hang on another day and another day and another week and another month, someday they would be set free to return to the meaningful work that they were doing for many of them.

They chose to have faith that someday when they were released, someone they loved was still alive.

That just maybe their wife had made it, that just maybe their grandkids had made it.

And if they can just hang on, they just know in their future they will get to hold someone that they love again.

But the moment that they lost faith that they had a future was the moment that Victor Frankel said they began to die.

These prisoners who were living in hell on earth had a fighting chance as long as they had faith.

It was a startling discovery.

Not only did he discover that people in life's worst circumstances could hold on to their faith in the future, he also shockingly discovered that they could still live as heroes.

The definition of a victim could still live as a hero.

He wrote in Man's Search for Meaning we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof.

These men prove something to us that everything can be taken away from you, but one thing.

It is the last of all human freedoms, the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

The ability to choose your own way.

I say it all the time.

Suffering is scalable.

Just because there are people starving on the other side of the world doesn't mean that you don't get hungry from time to time.

Just because people live through concentration camps doesn't mean that what you're going through today somehow doesn't count.

Suffering is scalable.

In your marriage that's on the rocks, it's heavy and it hurts.

And the job that you lost made you question everything, it is heavy and it hurts.

Your suffering, it is scalable.

However, what Victor Frankel proved in his experience during the Holocaust is that in any given circumstance, we get the freedom and the right to choose whether or not we will hold on to faith in our future.

And if we can hold on to faith in our future, in life's worst circumstances, we can live a heroic life right in the midst of them.

One more quote.

He said this just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm.

Whereas a large fire is enhanced by it.

Let me explain that quickly.

If you walk out into a windstorm with a box of matches seeking to light one off, you will not get flame.

It will be extinguished immediately.

However, what happens when a forest is already on fire and a windstorm comes?

It spreads exponentially.

Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm, where a large fire is enhanced by it.

Likewise, in the same way, a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes, where a strong faith is strengthened by them.

Whatever you are going through, however you are suffering, and let's just call it what it is, the world is in chaos.

There are more unknowns than knowns right now.

We are divided in our culture like we have never experienced before.

Mental health is decreasing drastically, alarmingly, suicide rates are up.

We are suffering.

In some ways, similarly.

And as unique as every one of you are, you are also suffering uniquely.

And how can you have faith when life is full of suffering?

It was about a year ago that I felt like God was leading us as your staff at Metachurch into a season of pruning.

Now, I've preached a lot about pruning because let me remind you, I'm never preaching at you.

I am learning and being challenged right alongside of you.

I preached a lot about pruning because it wasn't some theoretical ideal to me.

It was something I was living, it seemed like almost every day, we learned about the power of pruning, how it shapes us and molds us, how it gets into us the things that we need to fortify us for the journey ahead.

And it gets out of us the things that are holding us back from our purpose.

We learned about the power of pruning, but we were also honest about the incredibly painful process of pruning.

I didn't know why God seemed to be saying that and leading us in that direction, but over the next year it was revealed.

You know, you want to follow someone who practices what they preach, and they're not gonna do that perfectly, and certainly neither do I.

There are a lot of days that I feel quite like a failure, and so we get up and we're transparent about it.

But I am challenging all of us in the midst of our suffering to find the significance, to stay close to Jesus, stay in his word, to live with the end in mind and believe that God has something for us on the other side of it.

And you don't get to follow me around in my day-to-day life and watch the different ways that I suffer and see if I'm actually doing what I'm encouraging you to do.

But from time to time, it's interesting the dynamic of the church.

You see, when we started Metachurch, we were very, very clear on one thing.

The church is not a building, it's not an organization, it's not a service, and it's not the staff.

The church is the gathering of God's people, and that means you are the church.

You are the movement.

And so the way that our church is organized is we have pastors and staff, and you are the church, like we are the church.

We just have a role in helping to organize it and pastor it.

From time to time, there are big changes and difficult seasons in our staff.

And those seasons, I promise you, are not fun, but they are an opportunity for us to demonstrate the best we know how as ordinary jacked-up people ourselves.

How to suffer and try to still be a hero.

I felt like God was leading us into a season of pruning, and the last year has proven that to be so.

To be completely honest with you, this has been a very heavy, difficult season for our staff.

It's been a season of suffering, suffering through the same pandemic that all of us have gone through.

It's been a season of a lot of change, and it's been a season of a lot of loss.

We have had staffing changes at both the staff level as well as the board level.

And we're a small staff.

We don't have 50 employees, and someone leaves, and you might know them, you might not.

We're small, we're friends, we know each other.

Every change hurts, even the good ones, and some of them have been beautiful.

People have moved into new seasons, they're still a part of MetaCurch, they're leading with us as volunteers.

But I'm always gonna keep it real.

Some of these losses and some of these staff changes have been incredibly difficult.

And I wish that I was concluding my sermon, letting you know that the season of pruning is over.

But it's not.

Pruning is powerful.

It's the only way to get where God has us going.

But pruning is painful.

You are the church, and when there are changes happening in the church, we tell you.

We tell you because you are the movement, and we trust you.

There are two big changes that have taken place.

One is at the staff level and one is at the strategic level.

We hope to lead by transparency and vulnerability, and we ask that you would do the same.

Many of you know that Pastor Tony and I have been friends for going on 15 years.

We actually started in ministry about the same time.

We were in a band called One Less Stone, and that band was not very good.

We uh, I don't know how we got any opportunities, but we did.

We played a lot, and God blessed it.

I think because he saw our heart and our deep desire to make a difference.

Pastor Tony has also been huge.

His leadership has been key in both starting Metachurch and in growing it to this point.

However, today I need to let you know that while Tony will, without a doubt, always be a part of the Metachurch story, he is no longer a part of the Metachurch staff.

Over the last couple of weeks, some patterns in his leadership came to light.

And we did what we always do.

We look into these things, we bring in our board of elders who hold us accountable.

They are our spiritual oversight.

We dug into it, and here's the thing it's human nature to try to fill in all of the gaps, and it's also human nature to assume the worst.

And I'm asking you, as members of this movement, to fight that urge.

These were largely issues of self-leadership.

I do want to make a few things clear.

Tony has not done anything to harm anybody else, including anyone in his family.

His marriage is strong and his family is strong.

However, these patterns were significant enough that we knew it required a change in his leadership.

Myself and the rest of the board tried for quite some time to find any option for Tony to have a redemptive path that happened while still being on our staff.

Ultimately, and after much thought and prayer, we were convinced heartbreakingly that in this season we could not responsibly offer that to him.

On a personal note, I've met with Tony since the separation, and Tony is doing exactly what I would expect him to do from years and years of knowing him.

He is taking this painful path like a hero.

I want to remind you, heroes are not defined by the mistakes that they make or the seasons of their life.

Heroes are defined by allowing the painful processes and the painful paths in life to push them closer to their purpose.

He has owned what he has done and he understands the direction that we are forced to take.

Tony has not lost his faith in his future.

That's why he can still be a hero.

On a personal side, he has given to me one of the greatest gifts I've received in life: the gift of his continued friendship in this next season.

God is already showing up in big ways.

As a matter of fact, this weekend, Tony was offered a position, full-time ministry in a different organization, and he did accept that role.

He's not only gonna get a fresh start in his leadership, but he's told me that they are giving him a season of time to use his tools and to use his resources to dig in and try to find out the issues that came to light during the season.

Tony and I are still friends, and I want to say this as your pastor.

If you have a relationship with Pastor Tony, this does not change that at all.

This does not negate the incredible work that he's done and all the ways that God has used him.

I'm going to miss Tony being around.

But I am excited for this new season of ministry, and I am thankful that he is navigating this like a hero.

Now, that is a staffing change.

We also have a strategic change that we wanted to announce.

The big question after a season of hardship, loss, and change is how do we move forward in the future and how do we ensure that we are moving forward in a healthy way?

I feel the weight and the position I've accepted, not of just shepherding the congregation, but my first responsibility is to the staff that I work with, to making sure that they get healthy and that they stay healthy.

I do believe our staff is relatively healthy right now.

However, they are stretched very thin.

I've been praying for quite some time about how we move forward, having faith that God has something big for us in our future and making sure we all arrive there healthy and intact.

It was during these months of praying and seeking about this that I was in half-price books, and I happened to see a book on history, some American history, and I just got it to read for pleasure, find out some things.

And the climax of the book is Custer's Last Stand.

This is when General Custer took U.S.

forces to the Black Hill Mountains, which were currently occupied by indigenous Americans.

General Custer had all the manpower, he had all the firepower, and he should have had all the strategy at his disposal.

However, he made some crucial mistakes.

The first thing he did is instead of stopping and letting his men rest, he pushed through.

They marched day and night.

And by the time they finally got to the battle, everyone was emotionally depleted.

Their energy was zapped.

Then it was time to engage.

Custer decided, instead of fighting his one force, to begin to divide.

A good strategy that has been used time and time again.

However, after the initial division, both parties then divided further.

General Custer actually divided his section of the army three different times.

By the time the battle started, there were over a half dozen different battle formations, all fighting.

Together, there's no doubt they would have won.

But they were depleted and they were divided.

And they got beaten handily.

I got to the end of this chapter, and it's it's interesting.

You never know where God is going to speak to you.

You never know where God is going to affirm a word.

I didn't buy this book to help set the direction of our next season of time, but it was obvious.

God was showing me.

We've been through a very heavy season.

Our energy and our emotions are depleted.

We don't feel the need to apologize for that.

We're ordinary people trying to live extraordinary lives.

Not only are we depleted, but we are divided.

And we can handle depletion when we're all together, and we can handle division when our resources are there, but we cannot be depleted and divided.

We're divided among three major initiatives.

We are every week planning and preparing for a Helotus venue, planning and preparing for this venue, and we are still putting a tremendous amount of energy and effort to securing a building as a permanent facility for the future of MetaCurch.

I simply cannot, in good conscience, continue to allow things to be spread so thin, I cannot shepherd my staff directly off of a cliff.

We need to consolidate, to be healthy as individuals so we can be healthy as an organization.

To do this, we are going to pause our Sunday services at our Holotus venue.

I want to make something very clear.

We are not closing Helotus, and we have no intention to do so.

We are going to keep our lease active, and Meta Youth is still going to meet at the 4-H.

This is a pause.

Starting next Sunday, we will not be having Sunday morning services in our Holotus location.

This is going to allow us to consolidate our people and our resources and to continue to push hard towards the future that God has for us.

When the time is right, we will reopen Helotus.

When the time is right, God will open the door to a permanent building for us.

In the meantime, we will have faith.

We are following Jesus, the ultimate hero, and that means that we are on the hero's journey.

And the hero's journey always, always goes through painful paths.

You're not a hero in spite of your pain, you are a hero because of how you handle it.

Your favorite movie, your favorite novel, that character, the main character, goes through the painful path.

They all do.

And if they allow it to shape them, mold them, get in and out of them what they need for their future, they will be a hero.

If they allow the suffering of life to overcome and overwhelm them, if they allow the suffering of the painful path to lose faith in their future, those books, those movies, are called a tragedy.

Right now, we're on a part of the painful path, and so how do we move forward?

That's the question of the entire sermon.

How do we have faith when life is full of suffering?

I want to remind you that faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the reality right now, actuated in your present, the reality of what is hoped for.

It is the proof of what is not yet seen.

If all of this change is simply too much for you, I truly understand.

This has been the hardest and frankly the most heartbreaking season of ministry that I've been through.

But I do need you to know whatever we have to go through, whatever it takes, I refuse to allow the pain of the present to cause me to lose faith in the future that I know God is in.

And if we can hang together and if we can fight through, if we can allow God to do the work that only He can do in seasons of suffering, I have no doubt that we will see amazing, amazing things in the future of this movement.

We're following Jesus.

We are on the hero's journey.

And heroes have faith.

Father, we love you.

I thank you for this gathering of people that we call Metachurch.

There is no doubt that all of us are suffering in different ways, in different measures, and different seasons of our life.

God, I pray that we would believe again that we can live a heroic life.

That we can have faith that you have put us on this earth for a purpose.

God, we pray for Tony and the Marquez family, and we thank you for the years we got him here.

We thank you for the work that he's done in the lives that he's impacted.

And God, we pray blessing on this next season of ministry.

We thank you for the time that we have had at our Holotus venue.

Over a dozen people who have put their faith in Jesus, their lives changed eternally.

Over a dozen people that we baptized in Holotus, and God, we are already expectant as to what you will do when the time is right to open it again.

God, we trust that what you have started in our lives and what you've started in this movement, you will continue.

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

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

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

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

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