Reboot: Re_vision 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.

We're glad that you joined us over in Holotus or if you're streaming with us online.

When we were thinking about how to really walk into this new year with a fresh perspective and to walk in with power and purpose, we put together a series called Reboot.

Now, it would surprise those who know me that at the Tiner House, I'm kind of our IT specialist.

Now, for anyone who has worked with me, I'm definitely not the person who is giving tech support.

I'm normally the person who's actually in need of tech support.

However, I have discovered the one solution to like 99% of tech problems.

It really just comes down to me asking my family one question.

Did you restart it?

Like that's it.

Did you turn it off and then turn it back on?

Most things just need a reboot.

It's amazing how things just seem to fall into line with these pieces of technology when you give them a little bit of a break and turn them back on.

I remember when growing up, our family got our very first computer.

And at the time, we thought we were living in the future.

Like we are right on the edge of time travel with this bad boy.

Now, looking back on it, it was a complete piece of junk.

Like there's a whole generation now who will never know what it means to dial up to the internet and the awful noise that you could use to like torture prisoners as you're trying to get onto the web and can't make the connection, so you have to walk your whole house trying to figure out who's using the landline, which they'll also never know about, but I digress.

That computer was a piece of junk.

It froze all the time, it would buffer, it would crash.

And it didn't take us long as computer owners to find this magical keyboard combination.

Control, alt, delete.

Push it and hold it, your computer will reboot and most of your problems will be solved.

Maybe your entire life felt like it was buffering all of 2020.

Maybe you felt frozen.

Frozen on your path to maturity or to financial freedom, your path to a relationship or a marriage.

Maybe you feel like in 2020 your life completely crashed.

What would it mean for you to get a reboot moving into a new year?

Something quite extraordinary is happening at churches all across America today.

Many, for the first time sitting in their church services or streaming them online, are going to get their first ever honest new year sermon.

Year after year after year, we come to the first couple weeks in January, and the sermons that we get are sermons about how this is going to be the year, the year that all your wildest dreams come true, the year that the Lord's favor is upon you, the year that everything works together and falls into place if you just believe, if you just have enough faith.

Pastors like to cherry pick a verse out of scripture, devoid of any of its context, a verse that really cheers you up and casts some vision.

Maybe you didn't even grow up around the church.

There's still a decent chance that you know Jeremiah 29, 11.

This is one of the favorites of the new year vision messages.

It says, For I know the plans I have for you.

This is the Lord's declaration.

Plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and to give you a hope.

Year after year after year, we get to the first, second Sunday of January.

We pull out our Jeremiah 29, 11 or some equivalent to say that the Lord has got your back.

Whatever you are wanting for and desiring, God is desiring it for you as well.

And there was never a greater opportunity to cast one of these pseudo-vision sermons than last January.

If you can remember all the way back to January 2020, before the pandemic had completely engulfed our world, things were looking up.

Unemployment was at an all-time low, the stock market was at an all-time high, income had risen significantly across all demographics, things were looking up.

Not only that, but the year was 2020.

The sermons wrote themselves.

This year you can have 2020 vision, and for the first time you can see all the miracles that God has in store for you.

It's interesting when we hear these kinds of sermons that what God wants for your life is strikingly similar to what you want for your life.

Isn't it odd how it always seems like God roots for our sports teams?

It's like it's obvious that God roots for the Spurs.

It's obvious that God is a Cowboys fan.

Like we always have this idea that God is on our agenda and that our dreams are his dreams.

These sermons turn God into little more than a genie there to grant our own wishes.

And yet, by the end of April in 2020, these very quaint predictable vision 2020 sermons seemed so far away.

As a pandemic touched every part of our culture and every part of our lives, as people desperately tried to figure out how to put their lives back together, how to hold their marriages together, how to keep their finances together, all of the broken promises that we were expecting shook many people's faith.

Today we don't really have the opportunity to give a feel-good message about how everything will be just the way that you want it to be.

As we move into 2021, we are now forced to call for something deeper, something more authentic.

A real path so that we can really move forward.

My goal is always to lead with transparency, to be authentic.

And this year we're not playing any games.

This year we're not making any empty promises.

As we walk into the first week of 21, we're not going to be casting a big, grand, self-centered vision.

This year, I want us to focus on a revision.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you, and we have just lived through a time that we will never forget.

2020 will be written about in the history books for the rest of time.

God, many people have been broken.

We've gone through a lot of pain.

Shattered expectations.

God, we are ready for a reboot.

We're ready for a restart.

We're ready to see something new.

We need a fresh perspective.

God, we want life to go our way, but today we humbly recognize that we need it to go your way.

So I pray that you would challenge us today.

We ask all these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

How do we reboot from this last year?

Because here's the thing: January 1st is not miraculous.

The virus is still here.

Division and tension is still here.

All of our social unrest is still here.

We're right around the corner from what is sure to be a drama-filled inauguration.

2021 will still be very challenging.

We are still going to suffer.

It is still going to be hard.

And that's what this series is about.

How can we take all that the world threw at us in the year 2020 and use it to our advantage?

How can we thrive even though there is no promise of some crazy turnaround immediately because it's 2021?

Today I want to start with a simple, but what I believe to be a profound idea.

To reboot, we need a revision.

We're not talking Vision 2020.

We're not talking about empty promises, genie God.

We are talking about a revision.

Now, if you're like me, just the word revision gives you like some very minor English class PTSD.

You remember how it went late middle school into high school, where you would be given the task of piecing together some intelligible paragraphs about a book you didn't read, that's about a subject that you don't care about, and after you'd given it your very best shot and written a couple of pages, you would come to class, and then you would pass your paper to a partner.

And this was always so embarrassing because their job was to take your work that you'd put all this effort into to get a red pin and to bleed all over that paper to find every mistake, every spelling error, every punctuation, every grammar error.

It was like, oh, heaven forbid that the cute girl in class gets my paper and has to weed through all my run-on sentences and all of my misspelled words.

I don't want the fine girl in class seeing my dangling participles.

Like, like, please just let it go to my homeboy, and he can barely touch mine, and I can barely grade his.

It was revision.

They would give it back to you, and you would see all of the changes and you would edit, and this is how it would go revise and edit, revise and edit, revise and edit.

That was the drill.

It was painstaking at times, it was very embarrassing.

It took some courage to hand your paper to a classmate or maybe even a stranger to let them look at your work, your story, and to suggest all of those changes.

But what you learn over time is this is how you write a great story.

A revision is simply to re-examine so that you can make changes so that you can improve.

It's a re-examination to make changes so that you can improve.

To reboot, we need a revision.

After a million vision 2020 sermons a year ago, we now need revision.

We need to go back and re-examine all that 2020 offered us, all that it brought our way.

We need to revise and edit.

And we can start with the very scripture we brought up earlier.

Jeremiah 29.11.

The verse that everyone goes to to tell you that things are about to go your way.

Jeremiah 29.11 is maybe most famous for showing up at graduation ceremonies.

You graduate high school, you'll probably get a couple of gifts from religious relatives that have Jeremiah 29.11.

Let's read it again.

It says, I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.

Plans for your well-being, not for a disaster.

Plans to give you a future and a hope.

This is a verse that says, God has got your back.

But today we are looking at revisions.

We are re-examining to make changes, to make improvements.

Now I always struggled with English.

I especially struggled with grammar.

I still do to this day.

I'm so glad that I write sermons to be heard and not to be read because all of these are chopped full of mistakes.

However, I know enough to notice something right at the beginning of Jeremiah 29, 11.

If you'll notice at the end of the first statement, for I know the plans I have for you, there are quotation marks.

These are ending quotations, meaning they're bringing a quote to a close.

There's nothing unusual about that until you try to find the beginning quotation marks.

What you will find is they're absent, they don't appear anywhere preceding you.

We can go all the way back to the first word, which is for, and you won't find them.

So what does this tell us as we revise and edit our vision?

It tells us that this is the middle of a quote.

It means that whatever the Lord is saying has been taken out of its context.

And a great rule, especially for handling scripture, is that text without context is pretext.

A verse without the surrounding context is pretext, and pretext means that you can take a statement and make it say, not what it's meant to say, but whatever you want it to say.

To find this context is pretty easy.

We just have to back up to verse 10.

In verse 10 it says, For this is what the Lord says, when seventy years for Babylon are complete, I will attend to you and will confirm my promise concerning you to restore you to this place.

When seventy years are complete, then verse 11, for I know the plans I have for you, plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

This is written to a specific group of people at a specific time.

And the plans in verse 11 that are promised to come to pass will take 70 years before they start, according to verse 10.

This means that if we really want the context of Jeremiah 29 to apply to the high school graduate that we're quoting this verse to, their promised future will not come until they're 88 years old.

We simply don't understand exactly what the verse is saying when we remove it from the complete picture and thought of what God intended to be written.

Why does all this matter to me?

Why does it matter that most Januaries preachers get up on their stages and give you a bunch of hope about a magic genie, God, who's going to grant all of your wishes?

Why does it matter if people with good intentions take Jeremiah 29, 11 and use it out of its context?

It matters because number one, it builds a narrow and an unbiblical view of life, but when you look at the application of that, it builds people up for failure.

When you preach Vision 2020, that all of your wildest dreams are right on the horizon, and then what's actually on the horizon is freaking coronavirus.

It destroys people's faith.

And the shame of it all is that if we look at Jeremiah 29 in its actual context, it meets us right where we are.

Not just today, coming into the middle of a pandemic, but it meets us right where we are as human beings, living in a world that is filled with suffering.

That's actually what I want to spend a little bit of our time today doing.

To dive into the actual context of Jeremiah 29.

Not pulling it out of context to try and sell you something that makes you feel better about today, but to put it in its real context and give you something that will not only get you through today, but help you thrive tomorrow.

Jeremiah 29, verse 1 gives us the context.

Jeremiah 29:1

It says, this is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining exiled elders, the priests, the prophets, and all the people Nebuchadnezzar had deported from Jerusalem to Babylon.

This is a letter from the great prophet Jeremiah, and he is writing to captives of Israel in Babylon.

Babylon had come into Israel, they had defeated them, they had taken many of them captive, they left a good number of people in Israel, but they also deported many Israelites into Babylonian captivity.

Jeremiah is writing to these captives, and he has something specific to say to them.

See, there were two different narratives that were being pushed forward.

The first was from Babylon to Israel, and the narrative was you are here forever.

Babylon had no plans of failure.

They thought that their dominance would last into perpetuity, and they needed Israel to give up, to relent, to know that you are now Babylonians.

You'll live the way we live, you'll dress the way we dress, you'll worship the way that we worship.

Quit thinking about going home because it's not gonna happen.

That was the first narrative.

The second part of the tension came from within Israel.

There were some self-proclaimed prophets who claimed that they had heard from God.

And their message was the opposite of Babylon's message.

They said, any day, no, you know what?

In fact, any moment, God is going to deliver us.

These false prophets told the rest of Israel, don't get comfortable, don't unpack your bag, don't find somewhere to live, don't make any plans, because any moment our deliverance will come.

We will not be in Babylon for long.

These two parts of the tension represent the natural reaction to anyone who finds themself in seasons of suffering.

When you are in exile, when you are taken captive, the status quo, the temptation is to either rebel or resign.

To rebel or to resign.

These are the extremes that the world naturally tries to push us towards.

Rebel or resign.

The false prophets were calling for rebellion.

Don't follow any of the commands, don't do anything, stay the course.

In rebellion, you live with a false sense of optimism.

I love optimism.

I'm an incredibly optimistic person, but when your optimism does not match reality, you are setting yourself up for heartbreak.

They disregarded all the signs around them.

When you're living in rebellion, you foolishly believe that by your own power you will change the circumstances around you.

You refuse to listen to reason and you distance yourself from anyone who disagrees.

The other track is to resign, to give up, throw in the towel.

This is what Babylon demanded.

When you resign, you just assume this is how life will be forever.

Things will never get better.

You live in defiant pessimism, you refuse to see the hope or the purpose in any of the pain, you become a victim and you disassociate with anyone who may try to help or to bring aid to your situation.

The false prophets in Israel wanted to rebel.

The Babylonians wanted them to resign.

But Jeremiah has a better way forward.

He does not fall into the trap of shifting to the extremes.

It isn't rebel and it isn't resign.

Instead, Jeremiah offers a revision.

In verse 4, Jeremiah writes, This is what the Lord of armies, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon.

Build houses and live in them.

Plant gardens and eat their produce.

Find wives for yourselves and have sons and daughters.

Find wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage, so they may bear sons and daughters.

This is key.

Multiply there in Babylon.

Do not decrease.

Pursue the well being of the city I have deported you to.

Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive as well.

This is incredible.

Right in the middle of exile, right in the middle of enemy territory, God tells them to build homes, to build families, to build community, to build trust, to thrive not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the land that they are living in.

You see, Jeremiah knows that there is something coming in their future.

We've already read it in verse 10.

For this is what the Lord says when 70 years are complete.

You see, it's not going to be forever, but they're not going to be rescued right away.

The truth is rarely ever found at the extremes.

It is normally found in the space in the middle.

I will attend to you, I'll confirm my promise concerning you, to restore you to this place, meaning Israel.

And then verse 11 for I know the plans I have for you.

This is the Lord's declaration.

Plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

You see, God had a future.

Restoration was coming.

They would be foolish to resign, to give up.

You see, if they resigned, they would cease being God's chosen people if they just gave up their customs, if they gave up their heritage, if they gave up their God, if they just became Babylonians, they would be giving up their future and their legacy.

However, if they just lived in rebellion, they'd be giving it up as well.

Don't build houses, don't unpack, don't get comfortable, don't settle in, don't thrive, stand in solidarity, stand in protest against this.

To rebel would mean that quickly Babylon would act.

They would wipe them out.

Neither of the extremes are viable options because, yes, it's gonna take some time, 70 years, a couple of generations.

And yes, you can't give up who you are as Israel, God's chosen people.

But in the middle, build homes, plant gardens, get married, have kids, have your kids, get married, have more kids, multiply, do not decrease.

A plan is coming.

What God was showing them was how to manage the middle, was how to stay committed to who they are, not resign and become Babylonians, but how to avoid this false sense of rebellion.

Over here, you give up on God altogether.

You seek after other gods to try and fulfill your life.

Over here, you try to become God, you take the power into your own hands, you shape your own future.

God was calling Israel not to resign and not to rebel.

He was calling them to a revision.

You see, over here it is despair, and over here it is destruction.

Resign, rebel, in revision, it is not despair, it is not destruction, it is the ability to design the life that God has given you based on the purpose that He's placed inside of you, even in the midst of incredible suffering, even in exile.

This last year has felt a lot like exile.

Israel was taken captive by Babylon.

We've been taken captive by an invisible virus.

We went from thriving to barely surviving at the end of the year.

Hopefully, you began to connect some of the dots between Israel's exile in Babylon and our last year trying to manage COVID.

Jeremiah wrote to break them out of this false dichotomy, this false two-option lose-lose situation, rebel or resign.

We have seen these same two extremes, these same two options all year long.

If you were with us when COVID very, very first hit, like the very first week that we had to close our in-person gatherings, we put out a video and God had given a word for that season.

We will not live in fear, and we will not live in foolishness.

We will manage the middle, which requires faith.

To resign is to live in fear, to rebel is to live in foolishness.

What we need is a reboot, desperately.

Everyone feels it.

But in order to reboot, we need a revision.

2021 will be hard.

Muer than later.

However, as you look back on the last year, I'm gonna say something that's gonna sound a little bit crazy, and I just need you to stick with me through the explanation.

In 2020, the virus was not your biggest problem.

I'm not saying it wasn't a very real, very big problem.

I am very well aware of all that it caused.

What I'm saying is it was not your biggest problem.

You see, what the virus did to us is it took all of our issues, our worst ways, our negative patterns, our toxic habits, our unhealthy relationships, our frivolous finances.

It took all of our struggles that existed before the virus, it put them on steroids and highlighted them to the point where they were inescapable.

The virus exposed us.

It forced us to come face to face with the hardest parts of ourself and the hardest parts of our life.

And here's why the virus was not your biggest problem.

Because all of the problems that pre-existed the virus that were highlighted by it will still be there when the virus inevitably goes away.

2021 will be hard.

You will suffer.

I can guarantee it because we live in a very broken world, a world of suffering.

And suffering tries to force us one way or another.

The real question is: when suffering comes, will you shift or will you sift?

Will you shift or will you sift?

These two words are the key to whether or not you will be able to start a revision.

Here's what I mean.

Suffering, if left alone, naturally shifts us.

This is an idea that God began showing me during the Christmas season.

Suffering shifts our life.

And it shifts us all the way to one extreme or the other.

The world wants us at those extremes.

You've seen it played out all year long.

Give up forever or fight back now.

There is no virus, or the virus is going to kill us all.

The vaccine is a conspiracy, or the vaccine is our savior.

No lockdowns, no masks, no distancing, no rule followings, no protocols, only lockdowns, always masks, live in fear, bunker, no relationships.

It's extreme.

It's extremes.

And the truth is rarely ever found in the extremes.

Suffering, if left alone, shifts our life.

And it shifts us to one extreme or the other.

However, suffering does not have to shift us.

God has given us the power, He's given us the mind, He's given us the spirit to be able to fight back.

He has given us some autonomy and control in our lives.

And if we don't want to live at the extremes of life, instead of allowing suffering to shift us, we can allow it to sift us.

Now you might not be familiar with what it means to sift.

Perhaps the best word picture would be panning for gold.

Maybe you've seen the old school videos or pictures of men and women in streams, and they have little sifters, and they're bringing in all that the river has to offer them.

They're shaking out the excess, and then they are examining and digging through.

When they find the gold, they keep it, and the rest they discard.

Sifting, quite simply, is to thoroughly examine something.

To sift your life is to thoroughly examine all of the aspects of who you are, where you are, and what you're doing.

Sifting allows you to see what is useful and what is useless.

Suffering, if you allow it, can give you space to see your life accurately.

It brings to light things that were previously hidden.

We've seen this all last year.

Suffering exposes us.

When the gyms and the bars closed down, there was nowhere to run from a broken marriage.

When the schools closed down, there was nowhere to run from your lack of relationship or your lack of discipline with your children.

When industries closed down, workaholics had nowhere to find their worth.

When money got tight, people who spend to ignore their anxiety had no outlet.

Suffering exposes us.

We don't like to be exposed.

We see it as a curve, a curse, and not as the gift that it actually presents us.

So what do we do?

Do we shift or do we sift?

Shifting forces us to the edges, it pushes us to the extremes.

It happens naturally if we are not aware and fighting back.

Because living at the extremes is actually the simplest place to live.

When suffering comes, life gets complicated.

At the extremes, all you have to do is exist.

You don't have to think for yourself.

It doesn't require a lot of faith.

You just have to talk back the sound bites that are given to you by the people who established the extremes in the first place.

The extremes are distractions.

They keep you from acknowledging and dealing with the pain in your time of exile.

One shift is to rebel, and one shift is to resign.

One is to despair and one is to destruction.

And we have seen people pushed to the edges all year long.

I believe that 2021 is a time for revision.

If we see suffering as an opportunity to sift out of our life the things that are bankrupting our souls and distracting us from our purpose, then the suffering that comes in times of exile, a year like 2020, can actually be seen as a gift.

A gift that gave you the space to deal with the parts of your life that have been exposed.

And if you have the courage, you can take what has been exposed, you can sift through it, you can re-examine it, go through it thoroughly, throw out what is useless and prioritize what is useful.

How do you write a great story?

It's not magic.

You have to start, you gotta put some paragraphs on paper, and then you revise and edit.

Revise and edit.

Revise and edit.

This is how you write a great story.

And revision is how you live a great story.

Can I tell you a secret?

We um we feel like we're in exile because of the virus, and I get that.

We've been taken captive, all the rest.

The secret is that we were in exile long before the virus got here, and we will continue to be in exile when the virus leaves.

In the Christian scriptures, Hebrews chapter 13, it says, For this world is not our permanent home.

Hebrews 13 · chapter mention

We are looking forward to a home that is yet to come.

This world is not our home.

We are in exile.

This is how I can guarantee that there will be suffering in your life.

And so, what if we cast a revision for this year?

How powerful would your life be if you quit waiting for everything to line up according to your plan?

If you quit thinking that all the suffering in your life is just some form of punishment towards you, and realize that it could actually be a gift for you.

James, the half-brother of Jesus, said, I count it for joy when I encounter suffering.

You see, suffering creates space to sift, to lay out all the exposed parts of our life, to re-examine them closely, and then to have the courage to do the hard work, to revise and edit.

Revise and edit.

See what God is doing, see where God is calling you away from, see the parts of your life that are living in opposition to how God has designed your life to live and work.

Make those changes.

Revise and edit.

Revise and edit.

If you can find a revision this year, then you can live out an incredible story right here in exile.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

We thank you for the words of Jeremiah.

We thank you, God, that you do have plans for us.

God, Jeremiah 29 was not written to us.

We know who it was written to, the Israelites in bondage in Babylon.

But God, we see in your word that you do, in fact, have a plan for our lives, that Jesus is coming back someday, that we have a role to play right now in history.

We have a mission to do whatever it takes to get as many people as possible to Jesus.

And God, we have a unique purpose that takes who we are, how you've made us, what you've given us, and uses it for your kingdom.

God, nobody likes to suffer.

But I pray that we would take up the powerful position of seeing even suffering as a gift.

God, we're not praying for a new vision.

We're calling for a revision.

Doing the work this year to look critically at our life and see how we can move it and mold it more to who you've created us to be.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

This is what we're gonna be doing for the next six weeks.

We're gonna be looking at different aspects of your life to help you revise so that you can reboot.

We're gonna dig into scripture.

We're gonna look at all different ways where we can start truly living.

To reboot, we need a revision.

And so really stick with us for these six weeks.

And in this series, I believe you will have the opportunity to do that very thing.

Now, something very exciting we're offering right now.

Many of you need some revision in your finances.

2020 has been very difficult.

If you were carrying debt into it, there's a good chance you're carrying debt out of it.

If you're living paycheck to paycheck, if you find yourself wondering, where in the world does all of my paycheck go, you need some help.

And here's the thing: there was a time in my life where I could not answer any of those questions.

And Katie and I went to Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University.

This is life-changing, and this is a course that we're doing online.

So this will be uh through a digital platform.

You don't have to leave your house to do it, but you will be given the tools to revise and edit your financial life.

You will learn how to live like no one else today, so you can live like no one else tomorrow.

If you are desperate to be generous and to be wise with your finances, you just don't know exactly how to pull it off.

You can go to metachurch.tv slash FPU.

Please get signed up for this.

This is an incredible and life-changing program, Financial Peace University.

As always, make sure that you're following us on social media, on Facebook and Instagram.

And listen, it is the first Sunday of 2021.

Give generously to what God is doing here.

Let's start the year off right.

You can give online anytime at metachurch.tv or by downloading the MetaChurch app.

We love you and we can't wait to continue learning how to reboot in this new year.

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.