Life Uncommon with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medichurch 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.

Out in Holotus, or if you're streaming with us online, I want to welcome you to the last Sunday of 2020.

And most of us are so ready.

We are ready to put this crazy, awful year behind us.

And it's always interesting for me when we get close to New Year's because there really is nothing magical about the clock rolling from 11:59 to midnight on December 31st, all of a sudden transforming us into January 1st of a new year.

There's nothing magic about it.

You're still the same person sleeping in the same bed, next to the same spouse in the same city with the same job.

We've got all the same problems.

The virus will not magically disappear at midnight.

There's nothing magic about it.

But it does feel a little magic.

It feels like a new beginning, like an opportunity to set new goals for yourself, to dream new dreams.

Feels like a blank slate, like whatever happened in the last year, we can start anew.

This is a particularly interesting new year.

Usually around this time, you hear nothing but New Year's resolutions.

And it feels like I haven't heard near as much talk about that.

And I think it's for the simple fact that we all have basically the same resolution that hopefully 2021 is when we can just get back to normal.

Like, can we just get back to the way life used to be?

And that's a really odd thought.

It really struck me that this year, our goal for the new year is normalcy.

If you stop and think about it, it's almost the exact opposite of every other year.

Normally we get towards the end of December and we think about all the things that we want to change.

We don't want normal, we want something new.

Usually we get to the end of the year and we're honestly sick of normal.

We're sick of our normal job where we don't make enough money and our very monotonous marriages and our disobedient children and our houses that are too small and our cars that are too old and our social media pages that have too few followers and our depression that's too high and our debt that's overwhelming.

It's like normally we're desperate for something new, and this year we're just desperate to go back, to go back to normal.

It's difficult being a human sometimes because it almost feels like you can't win.

We're always being pulled back and forth.

And it seems like whatever season we're in, we end up craving the opposite of it.

In seasons of normalcy, we want something new, uncommon, extraordinary, and extraordinary circumstances like we're living in today, we're desperate for something that just feels normal.

It makes the old adage really come to life like the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence.

And so it's difficult because there's something deep in all of us that wants to live a special life.

We want something significant.

We don't want to go back to normal in 2021 to stay in normal.

We want to get back to normal so we can stabilize in order to move something towards something that is special.

All of us have an idea for a life that means something, that has value and worth, that gives us influence and allows us to set ourselves apart from the rest of the world.

I grew up with some amazing leaders and teachers, mentors, some really amazing coaches as well as great parents.

And the one thing that became clear to me as I grew up, and I caught on pretty early, is that if you want to stand out, if you want to be special, you have to put in the work.

I had a coach who would talk a lot about being one in a hundred.

I would think about that a lot as I got older into middle school and high school.

I would think if there's 99 other dudes sleeping in today, I will be the one who gets up and goes to the gym.

If there are 99 people taking it easy and partying over spring break, I will be the one who stays disciplined and in shape.

If there are 99 people slacking off, I'll be the one who stays true to my training.

I I wanted to be uncommon.

I wanted to do something extraordinary.

I wanted to live a special and significant life.

I carried this belief that if you just work hard enough, you can achieve extraordinary things.

And if you achieve extraordinary things, you'll live an extraordinary life.

I carried that with me into adulthood.

No one wants to live in the status quo.

Even if we have been beaten down and kicked down enough by the world where we've settled for the status quo, nobody desires to be there.

We all want our life to matter.

The message that I'm gonna preach today, I first preached about eight years ago.

It was the first sermon that I ever gave after we lived to San Antonio.

And this sermon came at a time in my life where God was challenging my built-in conceptions of what it actually means to live a life uncommon.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you, and you have placed something inside of us, something that is desperate to live a special, significant life, a life that really matters, a life that rises above the mundane and the status quo.

We're at such an interesting season.

We're so done with this year, God.

We're so ready to move into something new.

We want normalcy so that we can stabilize and get back on track with the goals we have to do something with our life that will leave behind a legacy and a lineage.

God, today I pray that we would have open minds and open hearts for you to challenge all of the metrics we've used in this world to determine whether or not our life is indeed uncommon.

And so guide us today.

We pray all of this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Everyone wants to live a special life.

And maybe you're wondering how exactly I can know that.

Because I don't know every person and I can't be inside of every person's brain.

I can only observe.

Here's a good hint that people are desperate to improve and do something significant.

Every year, Americans spend over 11 billion dollars on self-help materials.

Most of these are self-help books or audiobooks, some of them are conferences, some of them are webinars or podcasts, over 11 billion dollars in America alone on self-help, on improvement, on moving your life from here to there, finally living the life of your dreams, finally being the envy of all of those around you.

11 billion dollars.

Like at this point, with that much money, year after year after year, over a hundred billion dollars in the last decade, a hundred billion dollars in the last decade on self-help materials.

Like, how are we not all married, happy, obedient children, rich, skinny?

Like, how have we not improved?

As a matter of fact, if you look at all the trends in society, it's like we're getting more obese, more in debt, less happy, our mental health is deteriorating, our children are falling behind in education compared to the rest of the world.

It's like all of the signs that we've spent a hundred billion dollars in the last decade to improve, are actually decreasing.

In our fervor and in our really like true attempt to try and improve ourselves, somehow society continues to move backwards.

One of my favorite authors, Will Mancini, suggests that this desire to improve, a$11 billion a year desire, can be best understood by looking at what he calls the bookends of history.

This is where all of history started and where all of history is headed.

And by nature of those being the bookends, it means that we are living in between the bookends.

We're living in the middle.

When he talks about the bookends of history, he is talking about the idea that we believe as Christians that things started in perfection and they are one day headed towards perfection.

Things started in perfection with creation in a garden where God placed man and woman and allowed them to live and prosper.

He had a plan for them.

They were designed for perfection.

And of course, we're talking about the perfection of a coming kingdom where Jesus will return to begin to heal and restore us and the creation back to where it started.

What this means is that we were created for a state of the world that we no longer live in.

It's almost like we were created to live underwater, but we've been placed now on dry land.

It's like we've done this for so long.

We know something's wrong, but it's hard to exactly put our finger on.

We were made to live in perfection.

Heaven on earth.

Perfect relationship to God, perfect relationship to creation, perfect relationship with each other.

All of that has been broken by our sin.

In order to create a world that actually functioned perfectly, God created humans with freedom, real freedom.

It had to be that way because part of perfection is love, and love requires the freedom to choose whether or not you actually love.

If love is coerced, if we are forced to love, it ceases to be love at all.

If there is no love, there is no perfection.

And in our freedom that was required, we rebelled and we continue to rebel.

We go against God all of the time.

Now we live in an incredibly broken world.

We're so far from the perfection we came from, and every day feels so far from the perfection of where we're headed.

We're just in this messed up, jacked up, broken middle.

This perfection brings a longing, a desire.

And if we don't know exactly where it comes from, then we have no other option but to look for it in all the different things that the world has to offer.

We want to live a life uncommon.

We want to live an extraordinary life.

And so we go after it in all of the different avenues that the world sells us and tells us and manipulates us and coerces us and forces us and leads us to believe that if we can just attain a certain amount of wealth, a certain amount of celebrity, the right kind of relationship with the right person, the right children who are in the right sports at the right time, succeeding at the right level with the right grades.

When that doesn't work, we turn to things to just alleviate the pain of being stuck in the status quo.

We turn to drugs and alcohol and sex and addictions and pornography and we try to go through all these routes, no longer actually trying to achieve anything extraordinary, but to just dull ourselves from the heartbreaking reality that we are stuck in our brokenness?

How do you live a life uncommon when half of all marriages are ending in divorce, when society is failing, drugs are rampant, sex is up for sale, finances are in shambles?

How do we live a life uncommon when a global pandemic hits?

When governments are divided when there's racial unrest all around us?

How do we live a life uncommon in between the bookends of perfection?

How do we actually do something that matters in the messed up middle?

Maybe you're wondering if it's even possible at this point.

You've lived long enough and you've tried enough things that you're not sure that you were even created for something more.

Today I want us to look at a key figure in scripture, someone who, by all worldly metrics, lived an extraordinary life.

And yet, although it was extraordinary, it was common.

We're first introduced to Saul of Tarsus in the New Testament book of Acts.

Now, at this time, Christianity was brand new.

It was just getting started.

It wasn't long after Jesus had died, rose again, ascended back to heaven, and now these followers of Jesus are spreading the gospel, the good news of what Jesus has done, and it's spreading like wildfire, but it's also being heavily persecuted.

The Jewish religious leaders saw this new Christianity as a real threat to their power, as a real threat to their religion.

And so they were doing whatever they could to impose their will, to round up Christians, to beat them, imprison them, even kill them.

As a matter of fact, the first time that we see Saul, he is at the stoning of Christianity's first martyr.

Stephen would not relent.

He would not deny his Savior.

And so he was drugged into the middle of town and he was stoned.

Saul was a young man.

He was standing by, and it says in Acts chapter 7 that he held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen.

Acts 7 · chapter mention

This was his first taste of blood.

And it just got him going.

In the next chapter, Acts 8, we read that Saul was going everywhere to destroy the church.

This is his mission.

He went from house to house, dragging out both men and women to throw them into prison.

Saul was on a mission.

He would not stop until he had eradicated this movement of Jesus.

If Saul were alive today, he'd be considered a top international terrorist, persecuting people, even killing them based on their religious beliefs.

Now, this isn't to say that Saul was a slacker.

He was actually quite the opposite.

Saul excelled in everything that he did.

He was quickly climbing the ladder in the Jewish religious circle.

He was the top of every class that he ever attended.

As a matter of fact, we know from scripture that Saul was taught by the greatest Jewish mind of his time.

He had influence, he had power.

And because of his passion for eradicating this Jesus movement, he was gaining even more influence, more power, more notoriety and celebrity.

Saul was not a guy to be messed with.

The next time we see Saul, he is on the road to a city called Damascus.

His goal is the same as it always was: to go to Damascus, to search out, to find every believer in Jesus, every Christian, to round them up so that they could be beaten, imprisoned, and maybe even someday executed.

However, this was the day that Saul would encounter something that would forever change his life in between the bookends.

As he was going with his caravan of people, all of a sudden, a light shone down from heaven, so bright that it stopped him in his tracks.

This was the moment that Saul met Jesus.

Jesus called him out and asked, Why are you persecuting me?

He sent Saul on his way to Damascus, but as the light disappeared, Saul realized he had been struck completely blind.

His men helped him on the way to Damascus, and little did he know that God was already arranging things for when he got there.

God spoke to the prophet Ananias and told him to go and find Saul of Tarsus, to lay your hands on him, and God would heal Saul of his blindness.

Ananias was beside himself.

Why would I do anything to help this persecutor?

Why would I do anything to come to the aid of the man who has done everything he can to stop God's movement?

And God responded to Ananias, go.

For Saul is my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings, as well as to the people of Israel.

What an amazing word.

I mean, Saul has gotten his uh his attention in like a huge way, like literally blinding light.

God spoke directly to him.

There was no denying this, and Saul, who has gone and done everything he can to come against Jesus, has now been chosen by Jesus.

That's what the text says.

Saul is my chosen instrument.

This is what I am going to use, notice, to spread my message, not just among the Jewish people, but to the Gentiles, to the rest of the world.

Saul, the one person who was most adamant about stopping the message of Jesus, was now going to be the very person that God would use to expand the message of Jesus in unbelievable, unimaginable ways.

God was calling Saul out of a common life, and don't miss us, it was a common life of extraordinary achievement.

He was calling him into something bigger.

He was calling him into a life uncommon that had eternal achievement.

Saul was chosen.

The question was, what would this look like?

This is obviously a radical transformation.

In verse 16, God continues and says, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.

Did God really intend to use suffering as the path to significance?

Was he going to use struggle, hardship in order to move Saul into a life uncommon?

If we follow Saul's life throughout scripture, we see that he was imprisoned, he was beaten, he was shipwrecked not once, but three times he was run out of towns, he was homeless, he was stoned multiple times, betrayed, starved, stripped, abused.

He lived a life of unbelievable suffering.

This was the path to his life uncommon.

Now at this point, you're probably really excited to get going on your own uncommon life.

Like, sign me up.

I'm gonna get the crap kicked out of me for the rest of my life.

Like, like, where do I go to get involved in this?

You see, what you may not know about Saul is that along the way he became known as Paul.

And the suffering is definitely a thread throughout his entire story, but it is not the theme of his story.

The theme of his story is taking the message and the hope of Jesus and spreading it so far, so fast, that he's second only to Jesus himself and how he got the message across all of the known world.

The work that Paul did changed history forever.

Paul went on to write half of the Christian scriptures.

He started churches everywhere that he went.

And he is known today as one of the greatest sources of theology and Christian understanding in all of the Bible.

Saul, who became Paul, was able to live this way.

He had an extraordinary life, but it was extraordinarily common.

He left everything that he had worked for and everything that he attained behind in order to move in to something new.

He was able to do this even in the midst of incredible suffering.

And if Saul was able to live this way, why is it that we struggle with such common temptations?

Our addictions, our gossip, drug and alcohol abuse, grudges, abusive tendencies, infidelity, greed, jealousy.

Too many temptations.

To list.

We struggle with common things because we choose to live a common life.

You see, you can live an extraordinary life.

However, you want to uniquely measure that.

You can use any of the metrics that the world puts in front of you to achieve things that are special and unique.

Accrue tons of wealth or massive fame, celebrity, influence, power.

You can have extraordinary accomplishments and still be living an extraordinarily common life.

This is what you have to know.

The common life.

Even an extraordinary one.

The common life ends when we end.

But the effects of a life uncommon will last for eternity.

This is the main difference between a common and an uncommon life.

This is what$11 billion in self-help could never buy you.

This is what my idea of if I just work hard enough, if I'm the one who will outwork the 99, then I will achieve something extraordinary.

I will live a life uncommon if I just buckle down and work hard enough.

This is what all of that misses.

A common life is a life that is dictated and decided by people.

A self-help book will allow you to grow whatever metric you are wanting to grow in your life as measured by the world around you.

Your life will always be on a moving scale based on the moods, the trends, and the ideas of the community and culture that you surround yourself with.

It is a losing battle.

It's how we can spend$100 billion in a decade, and all of our sociological markers continue to be down and to the left.

We are putting our significance.

We are putting our uniqueness.

We're putting it all in the hands of the people around us.

A common life is measured by the people around you.

A life uncommon is not measured by people.

It is measured by purpose.

What did Saul do?

He traded in all of the metrics of people.

He was climbing the ladder quicker than anyone else had ever done in the Jewish religious circles.

He was gaining more influence, more power, more acclaim, more celebrity every time he went to a new town, rounded up a bunch of Christians, and hauled him back to throw him in prison.

His stock would rise.

He was insatiable.

He was hungry.

He didn't just outwork the 99.

He outworked the 999.

He was smarter than them.

He was more intelligent.

He was more voracious.

He would go for it.

And yet it was common.

The common life that comes from the common lie that our life is only worth the value that people around us assign to it.

He traded the common life that is measured by people for the life uncommon that is measured by purpose.

He no longer lived in celebrity, acclaim, influence, and power.

He now lived in suffering.

But he suffered for a purpose.

And his purpose did not end when he ended.

His purpose is still guiding us and leading us today.

His purpose is still influencing and building the church, the movement that he once in a common life tried to defeat.

He is now still 2,000 years later helping to prop up and push forward.

A common life ends when you end.

But a life uncommon will last forever.

The first time that I preached this sermon, years ago, I was very nervous.

I'd come from a very small town.

I was now in a much larger church.

I got to preach for the first time.

God was showing me some things, teaching me some things, challenging me on what it meant to follow purpose, on how to really live an extraordinary, significant life.

Things I still struggle with to this day.

It's a constant reminder, it's a constant decision to wake up, not for the common life of the common lie, that my life is measured by people, but a life uncommon, pursuing purpose with everything that we have.

I preached this message.

And when I was done, after the first service, there was a man who wanted to come and talk to me.

And we prayed together, and he was living a very, very common life.

He was miserable.

His finances were all askew.

His marriage was on the rocks.

His children were successful by all worldly standards, but he had not led them as a man of God into any kind of spiritual idea or identity.

He felt like he was at the end of his rope.

He was in between the bookends, stuck in the messed up middle, living in the status quo, taking things one day at a time, each day more miserable than the last.

He was done.

He heard about Saul.

And he could see himself in it.

We prayed together, and that day, George Ramirez told me, I am going to live a life uncommon.

He said it with a resolve that I have rarely heard a human being possess.

In the last eight years, I have watched George Ramirez do exactly what he told me he would do that day.

He switched from having a life that was decided and measured by people, and he got on a path to pursue and understand what his purpose actually is.

This led him to take a few different jobs.

And each one, God would put someone in his path to help define and refine the purpose that he was here on earth for.

Eventually, he felt called to pursue a theological education.

And not only did God open the opportunity, but he provided the funding.

All of a sudden, George found himself not only leading a successful ministry here in town, but starting a ministry all the way in Liberia, Africa.

He has shared the gospel, the good news of Jesus with hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

He has walked alongside and mentored people.

His family has followed him as they each now have their own God-given purpose that they are exploring and living out.

His marriage is bulletproof.

His children no longer were measured by their success on an athletic field or in the classroom.

They were measured by how close they were growing to each other, to their parents, and to God.

Everything had changed.

Every time I sit down with George Ramirez, he has a new story of a new miracle that God has worked in his life.

He told me that day that he was gonna live a life uncommon.

And that is exactly what he's done.

And the story.

The story doesn't end there.

A few years later, I felt God calling me to come out west.

And after taking that leap of faith, I began preaching week after week, and pretty soon, most weeks, I was praying with a guy after services, and he found himself living a very common life.

His relationships were in shambles, he was in some legal problems, he had some addictions.

He was living a difficult life.

And we would talk and we would pray.

And about a year ago, God got a hold of his heart.

He came up to publicly declare that he was moving from a common life to an uncommon life, a life uncommon.

He declared it by going through the baptismal waters.

What I didn't know for the longest time is that Mark, Mark Ramirez, was the brother of George.

And I always thought about George.

And he's always been such an encouragement to me because I actually saw someone do it.

Come up to claim that they were going to move from common to uncommon and do it.

Every aspect of their life transformed.

And how amazing is it that I saw it again, not just by anybody, but by his very own brother.

His life has been transformed.

His addictions have been kicked, his relationships mended.

He's been promoted at work.

You cannot talk to Mark without hearing about how good his God is.

George and Mark are exceptional human beings, but they're not superheroes.

They're not the apostles and prophets.

They're not angels.

They're dudes who were living very hard lives, who found themselves exactly where many of us are right at the end of 2020.

And yet they believed that there was a real option for them to move from common to uncommon, to move from ordinary to extraordinary, to move from a life that is measured by how the people around you assess how you're doing to a life that is measured by a purpose that was placed inside of you by God Himself.

You are living between the bookends.

You're living between perfection and perfection, and you're right in the messed up middle.

And it's hard as hell because you were meant to live in perfection.

And we cannot magically escape this world.

And we are not the church that closes our doors and tries to make our own little utopia until Jesus returns.

We are a powerful movement that believes that the God who created us has placed a purpose inside of us, and if we will pursue that purpose with all that we have, that while we are in the middle, we can live a life where we begin to see evidence of heaven right here on earth.

Perhaps today is somebody's Damascus Road moment.

Perhaps today is the day that you will admit to yourself that you are living a common life, that you are stuck in the status quo, that you work hard, you do all of the right things, but at the end of the day, your life is being measured by people around you who at the end of your life cannot hold the weight of your eternity.

Maybe today is the day that you get on a new path.

Today is the day that you quit allowing the common temptations of our life and our world to dictate the path that God has placed you on.

We will all struggle.

Every day is a decision.

Will today be a common day?

Will today be a day that I pursue another self-help option to help raise my own stock in the eyes of the world?

Or will today be a day that I pursue what God has for me on an uncommon path in a life uncommon?

This is your life.

You are chosen.

How will you choose to live between the bookends?

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

Life is hard.

This year has been so incredibly difficult.

But as we are just days away from a new year, nothing magical about it, other than a representation of a new beginning.

God, I pray we would find the areas where we are living a life that is common to this world, and recognize that we have been called and a purpose has been placed inside of us to rise above it, to live an uncommon life.

God, that we would not measure our success by any of the metrics of this world, that we would measure our life by how well we listen and respond to what you are calling us to do and who you are calling us to be.

God, I pray for greater things in 2021.

I pray that even if it comes through suffering, that God, we would live a life that matters both now and in eternity.

We love you.

And we pray all of these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to thank those of you who have been streaming with us for months and months now, really hanging in there.

And uh man, our hope is that in the next few months that things head in a direction where you feel comfortable coming back to our in-person gatherings.

A reminder that both of our venues are open.

We have these new service times at our Holotus venue.

Our service times are 9.45 and 11.30 at our 151 saloon venue, 9.45, 11.30, and 115.

You guys be sure and follow us on social media.

Stay up to date with what we're doing and take in encouraging content that we try to think through and put out for you guys.

This is the last Sunday of 2020.

We have a few days before the new year.

We are asking you to help us in this year strong.

These last few months have been a struggle for us financially as people are losing work or being furloughed, as people are getting a little bit tight with their money and all of the things that are just unknown about the future.

We're asking for you to do your part to really help us in 2020 in a strong financial position.

You can give any time online at metachurch.tv.

You can also give by downloading the MetaCurch app.

Man, we love you guys so much.

We hope you have a fantastic new year and we will see you in 2021.

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.

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