Re_boot: Re_solve 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.

Want to thank you for joining us and Holotis, those of you who are streaming with us at the 151 Saloon.

It's a beautiful thing when this movement gathers together.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton, and uh we're right in the middle of a seven-week series that we're calling Reboot.

Now, it's a simple idea behind this.

We just lived through 2020, which was full of all kinds of pain and frustrations.

It was a year like nothing we've ever been through.

And now we're coming to the end of the first month here, 2021.

We've walked into all new tensions, new heartaches and frustrations.

And what if there was a way for us to kind of reboot our lives?

What if there was a way for us to live a life of purpose, to live out a significant story right here in the middle of all the tension?

It's what we've been looking at over the past four weeks.

Now, I haven't had a sermon title for any of the weeks so far.

I try not to force it.

If it happens, it happens.

Today I'm making an exception to that because there's an analogy that's gonna take us all the way through today's message.

And so I'm calling the message drive time.

Drive time.

Over a year ago, I started planning a road trip for our family.

It's something that we hadn't done before.

We normally take vacations somewhere here in Texas.

We go to the beach or we go find something to do in Austin or in Dallas.

But I had a desire for my kids to start start seeing a bigger part of the country.

I was an army brat, so we moved all of the time.

I kind of took for granted the fact that I got to see a lot of the United States and even beyond into some other countries from time to time.

We wanted to prioritize that, and so I put together an epic trip.

Eight days, six states, thousands of miles, all kinds of great destinations.

And we got really excited about it.

I can remember the morning that we left, we we got all packed up, all five of us, we piled into our miniature van.

That's right, don't let the tattoos fool you.

I am a mini van dad, all right?

Proud of it.

We were pumped.

Had that adrenaline high, thinking about all the destinations, all that we were gonna see, from the mountains of Colorado to the trails of Utah, the Vegas Strip, the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, Tombstone, Arizona, and the crown jewel of it all.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Walter White's house from Breaking Bad.

Yeah.

We were gonna see it all.

And that's what we get pumped about.

The destinations.

What are we gonna see?

What are we gonna do?

When can we get there?

Of course, I grew up going on really long trips.

Our first move, I was three years old.

We moved from Fort Rucker, Alabama to Fairbanks, Alaska.

We drove like the whole world.

It was crazy.

It was long and it was painful.

That's that's the drive time.

That's the port where we get so focused on the destination that we forget about the drive time, which is the painful path in between.

You know the feeling three hours into that first 10-hour drive where you're trying to figure out if your leg is causing your foot to fall asleep or your foot's causing your leg to fall asleep.

Like, how do I need to move to get out of this?

Painful.

30 minutes into a 12-hour trip, and your beautiful angel baby in the back says, Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

We're on 1604.

What are you talking about?

We haven't gotten out of San Antonio.

That sinking feeling when you think you're halfway through and you look and you still have eight hours left.

We don't look forward to the drive, all cramming in a car, the bickering and complaining, the whining, the constant pit stops.

We focus on the destinations, but the drive, the drive is essential.

It's how we get from spot to spot.

So far in this series, we've looked at four different truths that if we really add to our life, we believe we can see a reboot, that we can really live out the significant life God created us to live.

We looked at what it meant to revise.

This idea of revision, finding the broken parts of our story, revising and editing, exposing and correcting.

We looked at responding properly to God, of retaining what God has given to us.

And last week we looked at living a life of renewal.

And a thread throughout all of these is that living the life God calls us to live takes some grit.

It takes some determination.

It takes walking the often less walked path.

It takes resolve.

Today I want to talk about what it means to live a life of resolve.

This is the grit and the determination to actually get where you are trying to go.

You see someone with resolve, and that's someone who's able to stick with it, to dig and crawl their way forward, no matter what it takes.

The idea is simple.

You must have resolve to experience a reboot.

You must have resolve.

You have to be able to stick in there on the drive time, the painful path in between your destinations.

And this has never been truer than right now.

We are living in extraordinary times, and they will require extraordinary resolve.

Today I want to use this analogy of drive time to challenge us on how we navigate the painful paths in our life.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you, and we readily admit that we all experience suffering in this life.

That we all go through pain.

We all go through setbacks and disappointments.

God, sometimes these painful paths last for short seasons, and sometimes they drag on for what feels like an eternity.

I pray that, like we attempt to do every week, that we could lay down our own ideas, our own biases, that we would have open minds and open hearts.

And God, we would let you speak to us and to say whatever you would like to say.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and everyone who's ready for a resolve, say amen.

Amen.

We tend to think of our lives, much like we think of our road trips, in terms of the destinations.

And it goes without saying, but you have to go through the drive time to arrive at your destination.

We measure who we are and what we're becoming by what destinations we've reached.

And so let's fill in this picture a little bit.

Destinations are things like milestone birthdays, right?

Your first birthday, I'm sure you don't remember it, but it was important for the people around you.

At that point, you're trying to get to double digits, right?

The big one zero.

You hit that 10, it's a destination.

The next one is 13, teenager.

Lord help us all.

That's a big one.

16, you're finally driving.

18, you're finally an adult.

21, you're finally able to drink legally.

And then you keep going, and 40, you're over the hill, and we name some of these birthdays.

Your golden and your silver and your platinum, and these are milestone moments.

We have educational destinations.

We have a lot of firsts.

First day of pre-K, first day of elementary, first day of middle school, first day of high school.

For some, the first day of college.

We have graduations, we have homecomings, college applications, acceptance letters.

There's all of these different destinations, ways that we measure where we're at in life.

There are career destinations, your first job, your first paycheck, your first raise, your first management position, your first business that you started.

You have your maybe ultimate career destination of someday retiring.

In our relationships, there are destinations.

Places we're trying to get to.

First boyfriend or girlfriend, first dates, first kiss, first time meeting the parents, engagement, marriage, children, all of these things that are out in front of us.

And we tend to think of our lives in terms of the destination, and yet the majority of our life is spent on drive time.

It is spent on the often painful path in between.

What's interesting is how we end up at destinations and what we actually do when we get there.

Paxton, my son, is in fifth grade.

That means top dog.

He's the big man on campus.

He is at the top of elementary.

And I remember my last year of elementary school.

I don't even know if I enjoyed it because I was so focused on what was next.

Middle school, baby.

I could not wait.

I could not wait to be a full-grown man in middle school, you know?

I could not wait.

And I got to middle school and I enjoyed it for about 12 and a half seconds.

And then, here comes high school.

It's like we have this thing that is so ingrained in us that as soon as we make it to a destination, instead of enjoying it, we almost immediately focus our eyes on what's next.

You see this maybe most obvious in relationships.

It's like you're single and all you can think about is to start dating.

And when you start dating, all you want is to get serious, to go exclusive, going steady.

I'm sure nobody says that anymore.

And then it's like, what's the next step?

Now we gotta get to engagement.

Once we get the proposal, we're engaged.

Once we're engaged, we gotta get married.

Once we're married, we have a little bit of a honeymoon period.

For some it's months, for some it's years.

And then here come the children.

Once we have the children, we wanna go back to the honeymoon period.

It's like there's always something else.

There's always another destination, and that's that's assuming that you make it.

There are some of the painful paths that we get on that never seem to end.

The staggering loneliness of having a desire for a relationship, but not being able to find somebody that you're compatible with.

The heartbreak of applying to school after school and no colleges or universities accepting your application.

We have no guarantees in life that we're actually gonna make it to the destination.

And then sometimes, even if we do, we get to the destination just to find out it wasn't exactly what we thought it would be.

There are so many people in this last year who experienced really digging in and climbing the ladder at work just to find themselves when the pandemic hit, the easiest person to fire.

Back to square one.

Back to the drive time.

Marriage, perhaps the ultimate relational destination.

In our country, over 50% of them end in divorce.

Sometimes through some fault of yours, and sometimes by no fault of your own.

Back to square one, back to the painful path in between.

It almost feels hopeless.

It's so interesting that we measure our life by these destinations.

Some of them we're never able to make it to, some of them are incredibly disappointing when we do make them, and for the most part, when we finally achieve one, we immediately start looking towards the next.

There's not a lot of guarantees in life, but one thing you can usually count on is that life will not work according to your agenda, and it will rarely work according to your timelines.

It's been unique over the last year to watch the entire world on the painful path in between pre- and post-pandemic.

In between two different destinations.

Drive time is this painful path that represents the valleys of life.

And most people spend most of their time trying desperately to avoid it or to get through it.

But what if God offered us something more?

What if he actually had a purpose for these painful paths in our life?

What if resolve, the kind of resolve it takes to navigate this life, isn't simply getting through it, but is an ability to actually grow through it.

Today we're gonna look at the Christian scriptures, what we often call the New Testament here.

And the guys who wrote the New Testament were experts at drive time, and here's why.

Just by following Jesus in the first century, you put a giant target on your back.

The earliest Christians were persecuted for their belief in Jesus as their savior.

Not only were they imprisoned, not only were some of them killed, but most of them, with less extreme measures, were just distanced from the rest of society.

People who owned businesses found it far too risky to have a Jesus follower among them.

They might draw the ire of the public officials, and Christians who owned businesses couldn't get non-Christians to come work for them because they didn't want to be associated, even family, kin.

They didn't want to be related or associated with their fellow husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children who were following Christ.

It was an incredibly painful task.

And the life following Christ was sure to be a life of suffering.

They have an incredibly unique view on this, a view that if we could apply it to our life, we could see monumental differences in how we're living and the purpose that we are experiencing.

Today, we're gonna let Peter, who was one of Jesus' closest friends and one of his 12 disciples, kind of guide us through with some other stops along the way.

In the Christian scriptures, he has a letter we call 1 Peter.

We're gonna look in chapter 4 today.

It says this Therefore, since Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same understanding, because the one who suffers in the flesh is finished with sin.

Now, there's a lot of hope and a lot of wisdom in this one short verse.

The first thing that we see is Peter showing us that Jesus, while on earth, went through incredible suffering.

And you know, we like to think about Jesus' life often in terms of the destinations.

Those are the moments that we celebrate, like Christmas when he was born, and Easter when he rose again.

Those are the destinations.

We forget about the incredibly painful path in between.

Jesus lived a life of suffering so extreme, you and I will never experience it ourselves.

We look back with somewhat of a revisionist history at the first Christmas.

This Christmas that we sing about.

What was silent about it?

This was a pain-filled, dark, and lonely night.

This was a night of suffering.

Jesus lived a life of incredible resolve.

It takes resolve to be rejected by your own people, your own culture, to be mocked by your own family.

It takes resolve to live a life of poverty when you just came from all of heaven's riches.

It takes a life of resolve for the political and religious leaders to be actively planning your assassination, not to mention the painful path in between that took him to a cross where not only did he physically bear Rome's cruelest form of execution, but the spiritual separation between God the Father in heaven and God the Son on a cross, Jesus suffered.

And this is just a fair warning because this is your movement.

At Metachurch, we are modeling this movement, and we are modeling our lives off of our leader who was nailed to a cross.

Jesus suffered, and yet we often assume that we will be exempt from suffering in our own lives.

Peter's first point is simple.

The one who suffers in the flesh, the one who's willing, who makes the choice to suffer for Jesus, is finished with sin.

Now, what is Peter saying?

Is he saying we can live a sinless life?

We can actually attain perfection.

And this is where we have to let scripture interpret scripture because the Bible is very explicitly clear that we all sin, we all fall short of God's glorious standard for our lives.

In first John, it says, if anyone says they are without sin, they are deceived and they make God a liar.

Peter isn't saying that we can live a sinless life, he's pointing to a deeper truth.

Peter is not someone who thought about suffering theoretically, he is someone that actually suffered in real life.

And we see this same idea across all of the different authors of the New Testament of the Bible.

For example, the Apostle Paul says this.

And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions because we know that affliction produces endurance.

Peter calls it suffering, Paul calls it affliction, and he's pointing to a path in our pain that ends in purpose.

Affliction produces endurance.

Verse 4, endurance produces character and proven character produces hope.

And how interesting is it that the majority of people live their life doing everything they can to actively avoid suffering.

And Paul says that suffering is actually the first step in making your way towards hope.

We put our hope in not suffering when scripture says that suffering produces endurance.

It has a purpose.

Suffering is an opportunity, it builds our character, it leads us to hope.

James, the half-brother of Jesus, said the same thing.

He ups the ante.

He says, consider it a great joy when you encounter various trials.

Peter says suffering, Paul says afflictions.

James calls them trials, trials that we should be grateful for.

Verse 3, because you know the testing of your faith produces endurance.

And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

The first thing we have to understand is that there is opportunity in what most of the world sees as an obstacle.

That suffering, your drive time, the painful path in between your destinations in life, can either be an obstacle to where you're wanting to go, or it can be seen as an opportunity that does something inside of you that prepares you for the future purpose that God has for you.

This is a huge shift for us to take in our thinking.

Paul says that your endurance produces character.

It's what James says is maturity and being complete, fully living out your God given purpose.

I wonder if you could think about for a moment, not your character, but a character.

Like your favorite character from.

Your favorite movie or your favorite novel, or maybe you're into drama, your favorite character from your favorite play.

I'm guessing they're a well-rounded character, that they went on some kind of hero's journey, that where they started in the movie and where they ended in the movie, that they had matured, that they were more complete.

Their character had been developed.

And every great character from all of literature and movies, every great character is developed through suffering.

No one will watch a superhero movie where the superheroes win in two and a half minutes and the credits roll.

That movie would make zero dollars.

We want the tension, we want the conflict, we want the suffering, we want to see it go somewhere.

I'm a huge Marvel fan, I haven't hidden that.

I've done entire series based on Marvel movies.

In 2008, we met Iron Man, egocentric, fully selfish, fully arrogant, living the Playboy life.

At the end, we see him sacrifice it all in a Christ-like gesture to save all of humanity.

And in between those two moments, we watch for 10 years as he suffered and suffered and suffered.

Suffering, if we allow it and give it to God, develops our character.

It develops our maturity.

It grows us and it completes us.

It has a purpose in our life.

Another way to say this is the reward of the destination.

The destinations you have, the goals that you have for life, the things that you want to accomplish, the things you want to be, the things you want to do, the reward, how you actually experience and manage those, the reward of the destination is determined by the resolve of the drive.

By the resolve of the drive.

You see, Peter isn't saying that we can live a sinless life.

What he is saying is that most of our sins are shortcuts from suffering.

We don't want to suffer, and sin is almost always a useful way out.

And it's just much easier to lie than to have the fight.

It's much easier to lie than to have to admit what you've actually done or actually caused.

We don't want to suffer.

It's much easier to just log on the website and satisfy your lust than to do battle with your lust.

That's suffering.

On the painful path in between destinations, we want relief.

We want a shortcut.

We want to avoid the suffering.

We go to our addictions for even temporary relief of the pain because we can't find the purpose inside of it.

And the reward of the destination, the ability to enjoy it and be able to use it for good purpose, is determined by how you navigate that drive time in between.

I'll give you some real-world examples to maybe help this cement for you.

It's like the difference between someone who started from nothing and really like clawed and dug their way with tons of resolve to success and wealth.

You know what you'll often find?

They drive nice cars, but not crazy nice cars.

They do their own yard work.

They wake up and work out in the morning, even though they could just dine on fine foods until the day that they die.

You compare that to what would be the stereotypical trust fund child.

Someone who's had everything handed to them and took a shortcut to their destination.

The ones we think about who feel entitled to everyone and everything, and why wouldn't they?

Everyone and everything has always been handed to them.

They never got the opportunity to build resolve along the painful path.

They were almost born at the destination.

Here at MetaCurch, we do premarital counseling, and one of the things that we have found statistically is that if couples date for at least two years, they are over 20% more likely to stay married.

In other words, if you date less than two years, your odds of divorce go up dramatically.

Why is that?

Well, if you think about it, anyone can be on their best behavior for six months.

Most people can be on pretty dang good behavior for a year.

But after a year, it becomes very difficult to keep what is inside hidden.

You see, by purposefully lengthening the painful path between dating and marriage, you are allowing each other to go through real moments of pain and to see whether or not together you have the resolve to see it through.

If you do, then as a couple, you can not only get through things, you can grow through things and you can feel confident that God will use your marriage to grow both of you closer to the purpose that he gave you.

How we suffer matters.

How we view and navigate the painful path between our goals and destinations will determine whether or not we actually make it to them, and once we do, whether or not we'll be able to manage them.

So the question is, how do we grow our resolve?

How do we actually navigate the pain well?

How do we live in a way where we see the purpose inside of it?

Let's go back to Peter.

He says this, dear friends, don't be surprised when the fiery ordeal comes to test you, as if something unusual were happening to you.

Now, he's in the middle of a letter and he throws in this dear friends.

This is an attention grabber.

Like, hey, what I'm about to say, friends, amigos, here we go.

Everyone, listen up, pay attention.

Don't be surprised when suffering comes your way.

Surprise magnifies our suffering.

Surprise magnifies suffering.

It's the difference between an 87-year-old dying and a 37-year-old dying.

When you watch someone at 87 who has lived a long, fulfilled life pass away of old age, the same heartbreak is there, but not the surprise.

We know at some level that everyone dies.

We all have an expiration date, and when people get close to those ages, we start pre-processing.

We have a level of preparedness for it.

Gosh, it still hurts.

But we're not surprised.

When someone tragically is taken in the middle of their life, the same heartbreak of loss is there, and it is magnified by the surprise, the lack of preparedness, the inability to get ready.

And I think this is important because Peter's words to us here are very, very difficult to pay attention to in our culture.

We live in a Western culture of comfort and convenience where the vast majority of people have bought the lie that you are actually entitled to a life that is void of suffering.

We're not ready, we're constantly surprised when something doesn't go, how we think it should go, to add to our comfort and add to our convenience.

And so when suffering comes, we're not prepared.

I think one of the easiest examples is um, remember we used to talk about first world problems?

Remember when that was like a trending topic all the time?

Pre-pandemic life, we would talk about first world problems.

They still exist, they've just been masked by a global pandemic for a little while.

You can always tell this when someone in America goes into a building or into a house or gets a mile into a drive in a car where the air conditioning is broken.

It is like you just banished this person for life to a third world island.

We cannot believe it when it's 78 and not 72, like we like it.

It's unbelievable to us.

You realize that for like all of human history, if it was hot outside, it was also hot inside.

This is new.

And we are so conditioned to entitlement that we feel entitled to have our air conditioned.

That's suffering to us.

I had to sit in a meeting that was eighty-one degrees.

That's our suffering, that's our ceiling, and so all of suffering is a surprise.

It's why our suffering often feels so suffocating.

Because we feel like we are entitled to a life of comfort.

Peter understood this not just in theory, he understood it in practice.

He's imploring us to quit being surprised, to open our eyes to the reality that following the guy that was nailed to a cross might just lead to some suffering in our lives as well.

One day, soon after Jesus had died and risen again, ascended back to heaven, Peter couldn't stop telling people about it.

He went into the temple right in front of all the guys that had plotted to murder Jesus, and he began to teach all of the people about who Jesus was and what Jesus had done, and for his troubles, they arrested him.

Now they knew better than to kill Peter and his friends because they thought they might have a riot on their hands, so they let them go, but they told them never to say the name Jesus again.

It was understood the consequence that they did.

So, what did Peter do?

He got back to the temple as quick as humanly possible.

He doubled down and he preached the name of Jesus with even more fire than he had before.

How did God reward this incredible act of brazen, defiant faith?

Did he open up the ground and swallow up Peter's enemies?

Did he reward him with wealth and riches and fame?

No.

Peter was like immediately arrested again.

He was brought in.

Beaten.

Beaten so bad that they hoped they would literally beat the Jesus out of him.

Peter said, Don't be surprised when you suffer.

Quit acting like suffering from following Jesus is something unusual or unexpected.

I want you to hear how Peter and the fellow disciples reacted when they were finally let go after their second arrest and their first whipping.

In Acts 5, it says they went out from the presence of the Sanhedrin, those are the religious leaders, rejoicing.

Fresh off of a beating, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to be treated shamefully on behalf of the name of Jesus.

Rejoicing that they were counted worthy enough to suffer for their faith.

Over and over again, we see these first century Christians finding joy in the face of their persecution, not just allowing suffering, but embracing it.

To Peter, suffering for Christ was evidence that you were part of the journey that Christ was on.

It was evidence that you were using your life and living out your purpose in a way that was actually making a meaningful difference.

How do we get this kind of resolve?

How do we shift our minds and our perspectives away from seeing suffering just simply as a way to punish us and actually embracing it as a process to purify us?

Peter ends his thought this way.

Instead, don't be surprised when you suffer.

Instead, rejoice.

Now he's got some credibility because this is exactly what he did.

Rejoice as you share in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may also rejoice with great joy when his glory is revealed.

Those last five words, when his, meaning Jesus, when his glory is revealed, they point us to a key fundamental truth.

That if we do not understand, we will always struggle to see our suffering as an obstacle to our destination instead of an opportunity to build our character.

We've heard Peter talk a lot about Jesus today.

Today, I want you to hear Jesus talk about your suffering.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus said this, you are blessed when they insult you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me.

He's talking about suffering for your faith.

In verse 12, he says, Be glad, and there it is again.

Rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven.

We talk a lot about the birth of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection, even the ascension of Jesus back to heaven.

But there is another truth about Jesus that is as fundamental to our beliefs as anything else, and that is his return.

Scripture has promised that one day Jesus will return to raise both the living and the dead who are in him.

And our first experience on our entrance into eternity will be to stand with our Savior and to look back on our lives.

Now, if you've believed in Jesus, you're standing before Him on your entrance to this new world, it will not be to decide whether or not you go to heaven.

This will be to see how you lived during your time here on earth.

And we will all have the same question to answer.

What did we do with the life that we were given?

What did we do with the life that we were given?

How do these early Christians have so much resolve?

How did they keep the faith during these massive amounts of drive time, during this painful, painful path between destinations?

They saw not just the bigger picture, the biggest picture.

These were men and women who traded the priorities of this world for the priorities of eternity.

And here's where it all hinges on.

The understanding and the new expanded perspective that your destinations, good things, your destinations, your goals, your dreams, your ambitions, who you want to be and where you want to go, your destinations are not your destiny.

Your destinations are not your destiny.

These Christ followers in the first century were living for something bigger than this world.

They had what we call at MetaCurch a pilgrim's perspective, the deep, deep-seated belief that this world is not our home.

We are simply pilgrims passing through, citizens of heaven, and that everything we do and everything we have, all that we are in this life, is to invest in the life that is to come.

Back in 1918, Helen Lamel wrote a famous hymn.

The song says, Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

Look full in his wonderful face.

And the things of earth, we could say the destinations of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

Peter and Paul and James and John, their eyes were fixed on Jesus.

Their priorities were not for this world, but the world that is yet to come.

And when you gain an eternal perspective, you realize something key: that even your destinations are actually a part of the drive time.

Even your destinations are a part of the painful path between here and heaven.

Last year we took an epic road trip.

44 hours in our miniature van.

You put five people in a minivan for 44 hours, and the van, I'm telling you, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

It's the craziest thing.

And we were so excited about the destinations.

We saw so many cool things.

We were also excited about the drive time.

You see, we started our trip.

The reason we even planned it, we had a bigger picture.

The destinations were not actually the trip's destiny.

And uh I I uh I missed some years with him when I met Katie.

He was already five years old.

And so by 16, I've had 11 years to pour into him and love him and grow him and discipline him, and and we've got two years left.

It's gone so freaking fast, man.

Two years with him under my roof, in my house.

I can't wait for him to be an adult.

I'll be honest, I think he'll be one of my closest friends.

But time is limited for me to be in this role, in this place.

I realize that with all of our busyness and all the hectic activity of the last 11 years, we haven't traveled much.

And so we just made it a priority.

While he's still in my house, I'm gonna show this guy some of the country.

There was a bigger picture to our trip.

And I gotta tell you, it went from dreading the drive time and it made it easy to find the resolve for the painful path in between our destinations.

This is what eternity does for us on the grandest scale.

I have such little time left to pour into my kid.

We have such little time here on planet Earth.

What difference are we gonna make?

And we can be assured that on our paths to make a difference, there will be pain and there will be suffering.

And if we give it to God and we look in light of eternity, eternity scales the suffering.

It's no longer obstacles to earthly destinations that your hope is in.

It is now opportunities to be grown and matured, to be given character and completion, to more and more live out your purpose so that when you make it to your destination, you can even use that to continue to build God's kingdom.

You must have resolve to experience a reboot.

You must have resolved.

It takes resolve, grit, and determination to not just get through life, but to grow through life, to do every single other thing that God has been teaching us in this series.

We must have resolve.

If we lose sight of our destiny, if we lose sight of our home in heaven, we will lose scale on our suffering.

The pain that we experience is very, very real.

But if the path is only leading us to things in this world, then the suffering is not worth the trip.

But if God is in it, if the drive time of life is leading you to something greater, and if our worldly destinations are just other tools that we can use to build God's kingdom, all of a sudden the suffering seems very manageable.

And I'm telling you, the more that we can turn our eyes to Jesus, the more we can not only accept suffering, but we can embrace it.

And maybe, maybe, like the disciples, someday we could even rejoice in it.

And if you can rejoice in your greatest suffering, what else does the world have that can stop you?

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

And maybe we're sitting here today, and 10, 20 years ago, we imagined we would be somewhere far different.

We thought we would have conquered more destinations along the way, or we would have managed some of our destinations that we did accomplish a little bit better.

Suffering just trips us up.

It stops us in our tracks, and we see today in your word that it doesn't have to.

God, I pray that we would not take shortcuts in life, that we would be willing to suffer, to find purpose in pain.

God, we're asking you to grow our resolve.

And God, we are choosing to lift our eyes past the things of this world and to focus on the world you have for us to come.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, just a couple of things before we head out.

Uh, as always, if you need someone to pray with or you have questions, we have our connection area and our prayer team that's right over in the cafe.

As always, we invite and we invest.

I'm gonna continue praying that you guys have the courage to think of people in your social circle and to just offer an invitation to come out or to stream with you online.

We also invest in what we believe in.

It's the last Sunday of January, so make sure that all of us are doing our part to give to what God is doing here.

If you're here, you can give in the lobby, and anyone can give online anytime at metachurch.tv.

You guys are almost off the hook.

Last thing.

You guys have been hearing us talk about our dance with your daughter event.

I want to add my two cents.

This is one of the funnest events you're gonna go to, and it's a lot of dancing and a lot of cake eating, both of which I'm a huge fan of.

However, um, this is deeper than that.

I believe that with all my heart.

And so if you are a dad who has a daughter, um, no excuses, move what you have to move, show up with your daughter.

Um, if you are a man and you know a daughter doesn't have a father figure in their life right now, um, we're military city USA, we have a lot of dads deployed, and let's be honest, we have a lot of dads who just aren't in the picture.

I'm asking you to step up and to take someone that you can be a positive male role model to and show up to this dance.

And here's why.

Because this is not just dancing and cake, this is an opportunity for us to show our young women how they should expect a man to treat them on a date someday.

That is a tremendous opportunity for all of us men to do.

And so let's make sure that we step up and we do our part.

It will also be fun with cake and dancing, but a great, great, tremendous opportunity.

Let's make sure we're all doing our part.

We're gonna continue this series next week.

I love you guys and I hope to see you there.

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.