The After Sermon /// What do you do when you can’t hear the beat?

Welcome back to the after sermon.

Thanks so much for being here.

Uh, we get to sit down with a very special communicator today, Keith Norman.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Appreciate you literally walking up the stairs right after your sermon's over and talking with us.

My pleasure.

I've got a couple quick questions.

Um, but before we jump in, uh give us a kind of an outline of where you went with your sermon today.

Well, um, long story short, a lot of people make John 21 about Peter and the crew.

Um, I wanted people to see that it was about Jesus being resurrected and revealing himself.

Um, and what we see in Peter and the boys, uh, I don't know if it's disobedience or disorientation, but they're in a season of transition where they don't seemingly know the beat or hear the beat.

Uh, and all it's meant to do is show them that they need the risen Christ.

Um, that that's where I tried to go.

And they need the risen Christ um during transition for instruction and for provision.

Yeah.

When they have nothing uh for the little things and for the regular things, you they've got to have the risen Savior.

I love that.

We have to have him.

No, absolutely, absolutely.

So when you talk about the absence of the beat or when they can't hear it, can you explain a little bit about what you mean by the beat?

Yeah, I think again, the scholars that argue that they're living in disobedience, and the scholars that argue argue that perhaps they're living not in disobedience but disorientation.

Um the text doesn't tell us, but for sure they are in an in-between season.

And life is not normal for them.

The one that has been the greatest rabbi ever is not with them in the way that he has been.

Uh, so if they needed fish and it's thousands of people around or a meal, for thousands, he could provide it.

What they needed, he could provide.

He was a hundred percent man, a hundred percent Christ.

He could provide.

Now they're in a season to where they know life's not over, but the rhythm is a bit off.

They don't know what's next.

It's like a lot of us.

They live in, I called it in the sermon in-between season.

And in the in-between season, you have to be comfortable with with not hearing the rhythm or the rhythm shifting.

Ah, yeah, yeah.

No, I love that because so often we are creatures of habit, and they had a pretty darn good habit of being with Jesus, and all of a sudden they're just thrown off.

And he he wasn't leaving them alone, he was empowering them.

Yeah.

And for lack of a better way of putting it, they were next up.

Right.

As hard as that is to believe, these, and I don't say this pejoratively, maybe it is, but uh, these knuckleheads, these guys who clearly, when you read the scriptures, never seem to get it, but uh they were next up because he would he would empower them.

The problem is, not the problem, but the the truth of the matter is he who would empower them, they hadn't encountered in that way yet.

When I talk about the numerological season, the Holy Spirit Pentecost hadn't happened.

Right.

And so they're in that in-between season where the rhythm, they're unsure of it.

Right.

Yeah, so many of us can find ourselves in that season.

Um, so you talked about uh doing the little things, the little things being so important.

Um why do you think we tend to believe that like wholesale changes are progress and the little things aren't?

Wow.

How do we how do we navigate that?

I hope I answer this in a way that doesn't offend.

Um I I'm glad I'm American, so I'm not here to bash America, but we're Americans.

We we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

That's what we've been taught, even in the church milieu.

And and so we make six figures doing it our way.

Yeah.

Um and so when when you those guys, they were in boats.

Peter was in the water taking his outer garments off.

They knew what they were doing, they knew how to fish.

Yeah, and so I think that we have the same default mode that they have.

We depend on ourselves so much that even salvation, okay.

All I gotta do is have faith in his grace.

That's it.

I don't have to do it's like, what else do I have to do?

Yeah, there's gotta be more.

And we're accustomed to having to do to get somebody to love us.

That's kind of that's not just an American thing.

With Jesus, Tim Keller has a book called The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness.

He says the verdict for the Christian comes before the performance.

Uh, and so we're accustomed in life to performing, then we get the verdict.

Uh, with Christianity, the verdict has been already determined.

We're innocent because of what he did, and now we perform not for something, but from something.

And we're not accustomed, and then I'm a preacher, I'm a pastor, I read the scriptures daily, but I can forget that I just told somebody downstairs to not fight.

Stop fighting, let God fight for you.

Yeah.

Sounds good when I'm telling somebody else that it always is.

And I do believe that that's what he wants.

Yeah, he gave them fish like that and way more than they needed.

Right, right.

Okay, so you ended your sermon, I think, in a unique way because and it aligns so perfectly with the series we've been in.

Um the way is I think what we've been learning over these past four weeks is like it's not so much the things that we put in place to try to like get ourselves close to Jesus, it's just being close with Jesus.

And I think the way you put it so beautifully at the end is like Jesus is already saying, Come on, like, I want you to be with me.

Why did you feel like it was so important to land there versus like putting all these different things?

Great question.

Um I I wrote this sermon a couple of weeks ago at a hotel in Denver.

Um I won't tell you the whole story, but when scripture makes me cry, yeah, that's uh I want people to feel what I felt.

I can't make that happen.

Right.

But I would be naive to ignore, to ignore that.

I I prayed, I prayed this morning.

I pray almost every time I preach.

Uh you you spoke this word, Holy Spirit.

Will you illuminate it in me and will you help us to apply it?

So to me, he was doing that at that hotel in Denver.

And there were ladies sitting to the side of me, but it was what it was.

Yeah, so I always pay those moments attention.

Um, I try to exegete not the text, but exegete myself.

And so um when scripture moves me like that, and I'll be honest with you, it's rarely a week goes by that scripture doesn't move me when I'm studying it.

Yeah, I'll yell to my wife and say, Oh, you gotta hear this.

And I'll go downstairs and preach it to her, and we'll have church at the crib.

No way.

For sure.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so that's why I landed there.

Uh, I didn't initially have that testimony part in there, uh, but yeah, I just felt felt like that's what changed my life.

I came to him as I was.

I love that.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

We so love having you here.

I love being here.

Awesome.

It's always a joy here.

All right.

Well, you guys know the drill by now.

If you'd like to hear the entire sermon that this message or this conversation was based on, you can head to our YouTube channel and get it wherever you get your podcast.

Until next time, thanks so much.