Emerge: Week 1 - 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.

Well, hey MetaCurch, we want to welcome you to our online service.

Man, we are so glad that you guys continue to join us, that you guys are continuing to invite friends to these live streams.

Man, we had a wonderful Easter.

So many of you came on and interacted with us, and God really used this interesting time, we believe, to reach a lot of different people.

Now we're moving into a new season.

And really, there's this thing about me, there's this thing like inside my personality where I'm pretty much unable to not address if there is an elephant in the room.

I've kind of always been this way.

It's gotten me in a lot of trouble before.

Right now, the elephant in the room is that there's nobody in the room.

We're all quarantined.

We are isolating, we're sheltering at home.

It's just an unprecedented time in the history of our country, in the history of our world.

And at this point, anyway, I really didn't know how to just transition into the next series that I had planned for.

So I'm I'm sure it would have been a fine series, but it really feels like this is an opportunity for us to very simply dig into God's word every Sunday and see what He has to say to us specifically about this time that we're living in.

And so we're gonna continue on that route.

We're gonna just take this season and week by week see how God is speaking to us about this season that we're going through in our life.

And until really we feel God leading us to do something differently, that's what we're going to do.

Everything changed the Sunday that we first had to close our venues.

And there's so much uncertainty.

We talked a lot about uncertainty last Sunday.

We didn't know if we'd be closed for one Sunday or two Sundays, and now we're going on uh over a month of being closed.

But what we have learned so clearly, and what MetaCurch was founded on, is that you can close a building, but you cannot close the church.

I've been so unbelievably proud of my staff here who has just jumped into action, who really turned the ship 180 degrees almost instantly, jumped into action, connecting with people online, jumped into action with missional activities all over the city, standing in the gap, especially for those who are food insecure.

We do whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes to get people to Jesus, whatever it takes to help people find hope.

We're even willing to change our long-held motto, albeit for hopefully a short amount of time.

You guys know how it works at MetaCurch.

We meet together so that we can move together, and that's what we do.

We meet and we move, and we meet and we move, and we meet in Sunday services and we move together, and we meet in our life teams out in the community and we move together, and we meet in life classes where we get healthy and we go out and we move together.

Well, right now we are unable to meet together, and so we're even going to shift our strategy just slightly.

We are now going to stream together and serve together.

Stream together, serve together.

And until we can get back in our buildings, we will stream together and we will continue to serve together.

And so many of you are serving.

And many of our life teams are still meeting over Zoom and uh other video chat platforms.

We have life teams, just one life team, who put together 150 face masks and went out and they were delivering it to different fire stations in the area.

We have others who are going out and serving at some of our partner ministries.

You guys are meta church, and you are not going to let this time slow you down.

We will stream together and we will serve together.

We will acknowledge what's going on right now and see how God is leading us through it.

We're gonna start that today, but before we get into it, would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

And we're thankful for you, and I thank you for how you're continuing to build your movement.

God, and actually, we believe that you are doing things right now that we won't see the effect of for years, maybe for decades, maybe even for generations.

And so we trust you and we keep our faith in you, and I pray for those who are struggling.

God, I pray for those who have been affected physically, who have been affected financially, people who are struggling relationally.

God, I just pray that this time you've given us every week to come and just open your word and let it speak to us, God, that that our minds and our hearts would be receptive to whatever you want to say to us.

And so we lean on you and we look to you, and it's because we love you and we thank you, and we pray this in Jesus' name.

And everyone at home said, Amen.

We are in an unprecedented time, and we're seeing certain parts of our country who we think may be hitting the peak of their cases of COVID-19, places like New York, and then right here where we are in South Texas, uh, experts are saying we might still be a couple weeks away.

And of course, we have uh all of our kids at home, and we're trying to learn how to partner with their teachers to really educate them and make sure that they don't fall behind.

And so far, there's close to 20 million people who have filed for unemployment, which means that there are probably even few million more than that who are actually out of work.

It is it's unprecedented.

And to say that it's anything other than an emergency is to downplay the severity of what we are in.

We haven't seen anything like this really in the history of our country.

We've had plagues come through, we haven't known how to respond, we we haven't had the infrastructure shut down, we haven't had the job shut down, we haven't had the family situations.

This is an emergency.

A simple definition of emergency is a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation.

I have found myself in a couple emergency situations throughout my life.

At the end of 2016, right before I got to come out and be the pastor uh out here, I uh I was in an emergency.

I got a little bit sick and then more sick and more sick and a lot of it sick, and finally I ended up in the hospital, and I ended up there for a couple of weeks.

And one of those nights, right after Katie had left to go home and take care of the kids, all of my vitals began to spike.

And they couldn't get my pulse down, and they couldn't get my temperature down, and they tried everything that they could, and everything kept rising.

And pretty soon the team of nurses that are there to deal specifically with emergencies.

I've been in the hospital a week, I've never seen any of these people before.

And they come in and they've got like the paddles, and they've got like the squeezy breathy thing, and they've got all the things that I've seen like on ER, and I don't really know what they are, but I know that they're bad things, and they're trying to keep me calm, and they went right into action.

They knew exactly what to do.

The one thing I left, and we're seeing again right now, I left those two weeks in the hospital, just unbelievably grateful for our nurses and our doctors.

I really have seen them ever since then as like superheroes in my eyes because they're they're always on point, they're always on time, and and I'm sure they're uncertain often, but they come in with compassion and confidence, and they take care.

They know, they're trained of what to do in an emergency.

And I was thinking about this movement that Jesus started so long ago, the movement that we call the church, and I was wondering what is our role in this emergency?

One of the hardest things is to not know what to do.

You know, just to be transparent, one of the most frustrating aspects of trying to teach the kids at home is when I get to a part of their work that I honestly don't remember.

I don't remember doing this kind of high school math.

I don't know how to do it.

And the uncertainty of how to step in to the emergency leaves me feeling so helpless and so hopeless.

And we keep saying over and over again that in this opposition there is opportunity.

In this emergency, there is a role for the church to play, but what does it look like?

How do we engage as the movement of Jesus in the emergency happening in our world right now?

You know, before we begin to consider our own unique contribution, we've got to get clear on where God is in our disasters.

This is a question that a lot of the world is asking right now.

Where is God during all of this?

Why would God allow for this to happen?

You know, the reason I keep saying over and over again that there's this incredible opportunity in the midst of this pandemic is because there are so many people who, for the first time in years or decades, or maybe the first time in their life, are beginning to consider what it looks like to have spiritual hope.

See, pandemics affect everybody.

No one is left out.

And all of a sudden, the things that we have put our hope in have failed us.

The reality of an emergency, the reality of a pandemic shows us that at the end of the day, the world we live in doesn't really care about our wealth, it doesn't really care about our influence, it doesn't really care about our celebrity, it doesn't really care about the security that we find in the things of this world.

And so many people were living, whether they knew it or not, with hope in their job.

They had hope that there would be a job to go to tomorrow, and now that reality has changed.

So many people have lived, whether they know it or not, with the hope of having a school to send their kids to to be educated in.

And all of a sudden, that has changed, and so many people had their hope in their social status and social influence, and social status doesn't get you very far when there's social distancing.

And all of a sudden, people begin to consider whether or not they need hope that is outside of the things of this world.

I want us to walk through a few different stories in scripture to begin to paint the picture of God's role and our role in the midst of emergencies.

We're gonna start back in the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures.

In 2 Kings chapter 6, the king of Aram is trying desperately to defeat the Israelites, but there's a problem.

2 Kings 6 · chapter mention

The prophet Elisha keeps hearing from God exactly what the king of Aram's plans are.

And so Elisha is going to the king of Israel, telling him their plans, and they're always one step ahead.

The king of Aram thinks that there is a spy in his ranks.

Finally, someone lets him know.

It's not any of us, it's Elisha, this prophet, this man of God, he hears your thoughts.

It's like God is showing him our plans before we ever step into battle.

And so the king of Aram goes to where Elisha lives, surrounds him.

And 2 Kings 6 13, the king said, Go and see where Elisha is, so I can send men to capture him.

And when he was told Elisha is in Dothan, he sent horses, chariots, and a massive army there.

They went by night and they surrounded the city.

Elisha is gonna wake up to find himself in the midst of emergency.

And when the servant of the man of God got up early and went out, he discovered an army with horses and chariots surrounding the city, and he asked Elisha, Oh, my master, what are we to do?

And Elisha said, Do not be afraid.

For those who are with us outnumber those who are with them.

And the servant was like, Come again?

Where are the people?

Like, I'm looking, and it's me and you, Elisha.

Like, I woke up, I walked out, you woke up, it's just us and an army.

What do you mean those who are with us are more than those who are with them?

And Elisha prayed, Lord, open his eyes and let him see.

And so the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he saw that the mountain was covered with horses and chariots of fire, all around Elisha.

There are a couple of key truths that we learn in the story of Elisha and the army from Aram.

The first is that we are not just fighting a physical battle.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, the book we call Ephesians, and he says, we do not fight against flesh and blood.

Coronavirus is attacking flesh and blood.

It is coming against our physical bodies.

And because of that, we can become transfixed on the physical reality surrounding us in this emergency.

And yet, there is a spiritual battle that is raging.

The church is built on the belief that there is exponentially more to life than just our physical existence.

That we are spiritual beings, and as much as we need to be careful and social distance and do all of the right things for our physical health, that there is one thing that has come against our spiritual health, a thing that we call sin.

And because of sin, we are all headed towards eternal death and separation from God.

But God is with us and God is spiritual, and God emerges.

This is what God does.

And the same God who showed up with his army of angels and chariots of fire that was with Elisha, that same God is with us today.

When I was a young worship leader, I was coming up and I was looking for mentors, and I began to be mentored by this incredible guy named Justin Cofield.

I was talking to him last week when I was trying to put this sermon together, and I told him how incredible this song he had called Emergency was, and I thought I was gonna write an entire sermon out of it.

I'll never forget how the chorus began.

The chorus says, You emerge in emergency.

You emerge.

This is what God does.

I I want us to see it today.

I want us to get clear on it today.

What is the role of God in the midst of a pandemic?

What is the role of God in the emergencies of our life?

Right in the word emergency, we see the word emerge.

And this is what God does for us.

He emerges in the midst of our emergencies.

He is with us when we are most desperate.

He sees us.

And if we could, for a moment, like the servant of Elisha, if we could open our eyes to the spiritual surroundings of a God who loves us so much that He gave His only Son's life for us, we would see that we are constantly surrounded by the angels and the armies of God who has got us, and the reason that we can have hope.

And the reason that we can have what scripture calls a peace that passes beyond our understanding in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic emergency is because our God will emerge in emergency.

We see it when we go to the New Testament because we see God incarnate, God in flesh.

We see Jesus.

And one evening, after a long stretch of teaching and preaching and miracles, Jesus and the disciples they got in their boat and they were going across the Sea of Galilee, which is in this just super unique geographical location where there's super like warm wind and really cold water, and these massive, crazy, gnarly storms come all of the time.

And in Mark chapter 4, it says, On that day when evening had come, Jesus told them, Let's cross over to the other side of the sea.

Mark 4 · chapter mention

And so they left the large crowd and took him along since he was in the boat, and other boats were with them, and a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking over the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.

And Jesus was in the stern.

He was sleeping on a cushion.

So they woke him up and said to him, Teacher, do you not even care that we're going to die?

How many of us have prayed this prayer already to God, asking where he is in the midst of our emergency?

Do you not care?

Are you not aware?

Are you sleeping?

Where are you?

The storm is raging.

The Sea of Galilee is known to swallow up small vessels.

Teacher, don't you care?

That we're all going to die, and death was certain in their mind.

They knew it was going down.

In verse 38, Jesus got up.

He rebuked the wind.

He said to the sea, silence, be still.

And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

And then he said to them, Why are you afraid?

And I've preached this passage before because it's such an interesting contrast.

He doesn't say, Why are you afraid?

Do you have no courage?

Why are you afraid?

Do you have no bravery?

Why are you afraid?

Are you that weak?

No, he contrasts fear with faith.

Why are you afraid?

Do you still have no faith?

Where is God in your emergency?

Where is God in the storms of your life that you're facing right now?

In your financial storm, in your relational storm, in your health storm, in your anxiety, depression storm, where is God?

What does it change?

When our spiritual eyes are open, when even though we're afraid, we hold on to the faith that God will emerge in emergency.

And I know that it doesn't make sense right now.

And what is the song that we sing?

We we say, even when I can't see it, even when I don't feel it, you are still working.

It's just what God does.

He will emerge in emergencies.

He does it over and over and over.

And you can read the Bible from the front all the way to the back.

God will emerge in emergency.

He has never left us alone.

He will never tempt us beyond what we can handle.

He will never send us out into a storm that he is not with us in.

Jesus didn't become in charge of the storm when he woke up.

He was able to sleep peacefully because even in his sleep, he is the God over it all.

And what difference would it make for you right now?

What difference would it make for you in the midst of pandemic, in the midst of emergency, to hold on to the faith, even though you're afraid, and even though you're uncertain, and even though you can't see it, and even though you can't feel it, if you could really believe that he's here, that he's got you.

You emerge in emergency.

It's such a beautiful promise.

It's so full of hope.

It's the foundation for peace.

Such a beautiful promise.

But how?

Like practically, how do we see God emerging in the midst of our emergency?

You know, in scripture, we often see God operating in supernatural ways.

It's not a regular occurrence for somebody to be in a storm that is about to capsize a boat, stretch out their arm, rebuke the wind, and the storm to die down.

That is what we call supernatural, like beyond what is natural.

And we see it over and over again throughout scripture.

But I want you to consider a few things about miracles.

When we look at scripture and when we look at history, there is a purpose and a place for signs and wonders.

And when we read through the Bible, we see a very condensed collection of what we would call supernatural miracles.

And you can kind of start to get the idea that it was the norm.

But it wasn't the norm.

The normative way that God operated, and the normative way that God would emerge in the midst of emergency was through the empowering of the people of God.

Why do we have so many miracles recorded?

Well, first of all, because we believe that they're real.

The second reason is because it's the miracles that are worth writing about.

Nobody took the time to record for us in the pages of scripture that Jesus cut his sandwich in triangles and not rectangles.

It just wasn't gripping enough for someone to get out their quill and find some ink and write down for us.

When Jesus calmed a storm, that made the book.

And so the condensed version makes us feel like every answer to the problems in our life have to come through a supernatural means of God miraculously intervening into our world.

But even in biblical times, I want you to understand this.

God can still do miracles, God can still snap his fingers and heal your spouse, God can still do whatever he wants.

But the normative way that God operates is by emerging through the empowering of the people of God.

After Jesus left earth, ascended back to heaven, he started a movement, the movement that we call the church.

A movement that has spanned 2,000 years under persecution practically the entire time.

You don't want to know what the miracle is?

You are the miracle.

It's you.

You standing in San Antonio, Texas, you sitting in Houston, Texas, you watching on your phone in Dallas, Texas, on the other side of the world, from where a couple, this small group of uneducated, jacked up human beings started a movement that you are still a part of.

You are the miracle.

And the world needs the movement of Jesus.

It is through us.

That the world will see God emerge in the midst of emergency.

The movement, right when it started, came under severe persecution.

Persecution from Rome, who saw it as a threat to their political power, persecution from Judaism, who saw it as a threat to their religious power.

And one day, Peter and John, some of the men who started this movement, they found themselves in hot water for preaching and healing on the Jewish leader's turf.

And in Acts chapter 4, it says, while they were speaking to the people, the priest, the captain of the temple police and the Sadducees confronted them.

Acts 4 · chapter mention

And because they were annoyed that they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead, they seized Peter and John, took them into custody until the next day, since it was already evening.

Now these very normal, uneducated dudes were now going to face the most elite Jewish scholars and religious leaders.

And they were going to face the same men who just a couple months earlier had crucified their leader, Jesus.

This was an emergency.

In verse 7, after they had Peter and John stand before them, they began to question them by what power or in what name have you done this?

And Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit and said to them, Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today about a good deed done to a disabled man, by what means he was healed, let it be known to all of you and all of the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, that's a big deal.

He's going, Remember the guy?

Remember the guy?

Remember Jesus?

Pissed all you guys off?

You remember him?

We are standing in his name.

And if you think Peter is wilding out right now, listen to what he goes to now.

In the name of Jesus Christ, if you don't remember the guy that you crucified and that God raised from the dead, by him we have healed this man.

Not only does he have courage, but he has wisdom.

In verse 11, Peter goes on.

He says, This Jesus, this is the stone rejected by you builders, which has become the cornerstone.

And that is Old Testament Jewish prophecy.

And Peter, an uneducated, most of the time in scripture, idiotic fisherman, is standing before the most advanced scholars of Jewish law and scripture.

And he is quoting to them their own prophets in verse 12, their salvation and no one else.

For there's no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.

And when they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed and they recognized that these men had been with Jesus.

God works in the midst of emergency.

It's just what he does.

It's who our God is.

Not only did this moment embolden the church, not only did they start getting clear on the movement, but even some of the religious leaders, some of the same men who cried out, crucify him by the next chapter, are changing their mind and beginning a path to follow Jesus.

This moment is really the very beginning of the church, the movement of Jesus.

And it's a template for how emergencies are handled right here and right now.

In the New Testament book of James, he says that we should rejoice in suffering.

It is suffering that produces endurance and pushes us closer to our purpose.

And Hebrews, even though they are being persecuted and their property taken away and they're coming under all kinds of just suffering, he says, don't quit.

Stay strong.

Peter and Paul over time come into relationship with non-Jews, what they call Gentiles, and the message spreads and spreads all the way to 2020 in San Antonio, Texas, where we're going from meeting together and moving together to streaming together and serving together because an emergency cannot stop the movement.

In fact, every time throughout history, emergencies cause it to grow.

And what we are called uniquely to do, God will emerge in emergency.

And he does it when his people are willing to emerge and see in an emergency.

We are called to emerge, to rise above the emergency of the moment, to rise above the opposition and find the opportunity.

And Peter and John would have been well within their rights to stand in silence or to beg forgiveness.

The same men that they had seen put Jesus on a cross, now had them in front of them, had them on trial, they could have just survived.

But they were able to emerge and see in the midst of an emergency, they were able to see the opportunity, to see the way forward, to see the purpose, to see God at work.

As the church went on, it grew and it spread.

And these apostles, like Paul and Peter, and John and James, they went all over the known world and they were starting these gatherings of believers, what we would call churches, and these churches were growing, and eventually the gospel, the good news of Jesus got to Rome.

And in Rome, it was under severe persecution, and Rome was like the wild, wild west, man.

Anything went, and there was a form of infanticide, the murder of babies and children that they called exposure.

Now you couldn't like physically kill your child, but what you could do legally in Rome is you could walk them to the outskirts of town and just leave them there exposed to the elements.

The elements would kill them, not you, and so you would be found innocent.

And this happened all the time.

It happened especially with baby girls who were seen as not quite as useful.

They couldn't really make a living at that point, they couldn't serve in the army, and so there were thousands and thousands of little girls and little boys who were being exposed to the elements, and nobody cared, and it was just a way of life, and it was actually so common that really people's conscience became kind of seared to it, and then the Christians came and they started adopting every one of them.

And daily they would walk the outskirts of town looking for children, they would find children exposed to the elements left for dead.

They'd bring them in, they would love them, raise them as their own.

It was such a startling contrast.

They were able, even under persecution, the Roman Christians were being fed to lions in the Roman Colosseum.

It was an emergency, and yet they could emerge and see the opportunity to be the hands and feet of God in the midst of it.

It took about a hundred years, and the entire Roman Empire became known as an empire of Christianity.

And there was part of it that was political.

But even prior to the political, there was evidence of the miraculous.

Not the supernatural miraculous, but the kind of miraculous where normal, everyday, untrained, uneducated, jacked up, screwed up skeletons in our closet, people like you and like me, like Peter, John, and Paul were able to emerge and see the purposes of God in the midst of emergency.

And you are often the only Jesus that many people will see.

Can we emerge?

Can we rise above it?

We are in an emergency.

It's unique, it's unprecedented, and it's affecting the entire world.

And here's where I'll land because the other reason I believe there is so much opportunity for the movement of Jesus right now is because of the worldwide nature of this pandemic.

I heard just the other day that every country on earth now has had at least one person who has gotten the virus.

Worldwide.

But this is not the first worldwide pandemic.

The first one has been around since the beginning.

It affects every single person, and it is an absolute death sentence.

This is the disease of sin.

And the disease of sin creates separation between you and God.

My friend John says that disease is actually dis-ease.

And we see it right at the beginning, the very beginning of the book, we see Adam and Eve at dis-ease.

They wanted to be their own gods, and so they rebelled and disobeyed, and there was separation.

A worldwide global pandemic that affects everyone, and every single person who has it dies, and there is only one cure.

In Galatians chapter 4, it says, in the same way, we also, when we were children, were in slavery under the elements of the world.

Galatians 4 · chapter mention

Emergency.

What does God do?

He will emerge in emergency.

When the time was right, he came down with the cure.

There's more.

And because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.

And so you are no longer a slave, but you are a son.

And if you are a son, then God has made you an heir.

This is how it works.

Because God emerged and came into our emergency, He has now equipped us to emerge and see in the midst of the emergencies in our life.

We have the Spirit of God living and dwelling inside of us, if we're just willing to open our spiritual eyes to what he's showing us, and our spiritual ears to what he is telling us, and open our spiritual mouths to speak his truth all the way, speak his truth right into the midst of darkness.

If we are willing to open our eyes like the servant of Elisha, if we are willing to have faith over our fear that Jesus is with us even in the storms of our life, if we are willing, even if we are unqualified to follow Jesus into whatever emergencies he might be calling us, if we're ready, then we, as a meta church, more importantly as the movement of Jesus, we can emerge and see, and there is opportunity all around us.

If we can rise above it, if we can see past the storm, past the armies, past the opposition, we will see the opportunity.

And we will come out of this pandemic having made a real difference in our world.

Would you pray with me?

God, we don't really know what else to do.

I don't really know what else to do except to stop, acknowledge where we are, look into your word, find truth, and apply it to our lives, and I believe we still have a job to do.

We're just streaming, but we can stream together and we can serve together.

God, we might be able to make more of a difference under these difficult circumstances than at any other time in our life, and I don't want to waste it.

And so I pray that we would trust you, we would know you're there, we would know you emerge in emergency, and by trusting in that we would be able to emerge and see, we would be able to rise above our current circumstance, follow you, listen to you, see you, be led by you.

That we would be willing to do whatever it takes, especially in an emergency, to get people to you, Jesus.

And we pray it in your name.

Amen.

We're gonna keep going, week after week.

We're gonna dig in, we're gonna see what God has to say to us.

And I'm so excited about it because I feel like God has been showing me some stuff in Scripture that will be really specific and helpful to this time of quarantine and pandemic and everything that is going on in the world around us.

Man, as always, we are so incredibly grateful for those who are continuing to fund this movement, continuing to exercise your generosity out of who you are and what God has done for us.

You can give online, you can give on our app.

Man, follow us.

Follow us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram.

Just keep updated with what we're doing and how we're serving together, streaming and serving.

We're gonna continue to connect with you guys as much as we can through these digital formats.

I love you.

Man, I love you guys.

Be safe and be the movement.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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