Everyday Mission -- You're Always Being Formed

If you need a Bible, you can open them up. We're going to be bouncing around a little bit this morning. We're just taking our next step in this series. And maybe if you've been following along, it feels like I've been moving a little slowly because like the series of this title is Everyday Mission. And you might think that we're going to just get really practical and talk about really practical stuff. And we will get there, but I'm just taking my time. I really am.

I'm taking my time. we spent a long time actually in the first, like, I think like three messages of this series talking about, well, just like our spiritual lives, but also just our relationship with the Holy Spirit, which I think makes a ton of sense.

And I'm really just spending a lot, a long time and slowly moving in there and emphasizing that because as we've discussed already, I'm not going to redo the whole thing, but in the narrative of scripture, in the way that the church unfolds, in the way this missional move built around Jesus plays out in the story of the book of Acts and then beyond it through church history, there is just a really close relationship between the presence of the Holy Spirit

and the power of the mission moving forward into the world. And the mission of the church, the mission of spreading the gospel and inviting people to know God and to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, through faith in Jesus Christ, is rooted in this relationship, this dynamic that we're invited to through Jesus by the Spirit.

And I just don't think we can forget that. You know, I think it would be silly of us to say, all right, we're going to go out and tell people about Jesus and not be concerned about our own relationship with the Holy Spirit. Because really the power of the mission, the power of the gospel that goes forward, it's as the Spirit leads the church, that's when there's success in the mission of spreading the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christ and so I don't think we can neglect our relationship our ongoing dependence upon the spirit our ongoing dependence upon the Lord in the work of spreading the gospel and of sharing the gospel because this relationship is I think I think it's really key for us like as as people to resolve the tension that all of us I think bump up against as we want to follow Jesus that That is that there is a tension between the Great Commission,

and I have a slide, between the Great Commission and what I'm calling the Great Invitation, if you can get that first slide up there, right?

So the Great Commission is that call to go from Matthew 28, 9. It's where we derive the idea that we're sent on a mission, right? Where Jesus tells his disciples right before he ascends into heaven, he says, Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I've commanded you.

That's his marching orders for the church. It's where we understand that there is this ongoing mission, even for us still today, right? Because he goes on and says, it's always to the end of the age, kind of the command of the commission of the church. Even now we have this thing, we have this desire, we are sent on a mission. And like, so we're called to go and we're called to do something, right? Which takes energy and effort and focus and intention.

And yet, so that's the great commission. But I think we also have the great invitation, which is the foundation of Jesus's ministry, right? It's what made him so compelling that he said, if you want to know God, then come to me, you who are weak and heavy heavy burden, and I'll give you rest.

And there is, I think, a tension as we set out to be people who are used by God and who want to tell people about Jesus between going and doing and telling and resting and abiding and hoping and having peace, right? It's just a real tension, I think, that we all experience if we want to go out and live on mission for Jesus. How do you live on mission? How do you be intentional? How do you go? And yet, how do you also rest?

And I believe that that tension can only be resolved in the kind of relationship that we're called to have with the Lord. This kind of abiding in, trusting in, receiving in, being filled with, depending upon the Holy Spirit. And that as we do that, He is just like filling us up. He's giving us rest in the midst of our work. He's giving us hope in the midst of our challenges. He's pouring out love in the midst of a conflicted world.

I think that there is a resolution to this tension if we would continue to lean into the relationship that we're called to. And we've just been talking about that a lot. And I think that we're called to build our lives around pursuing and deepening that relationship in order to be the sort of people who can go out and be on mission. It's not just so you can just, it's not, come, I'll give you rest, and you can just lay by the beach and just never do anything and just be lazy.

It's, come, I'm going to give you rest, and then your life's going to come alive. Then your purpose, and you're going to be sent out on mission, and it's just going to flow out of you because you are so enjoying this relationship and this peace and this rest that comes to Jesus, and it is supernatural, and it's from the Lord, and it is filled with the Spirit.

That's what happens. There's a pretty famous, if you're a nerd like me, famous Danish theologian named Soren Kierkegaard, which is just a great name. And he was alive in the 1800s. And he talks about the kind of relationship we have with Jesus and what that looks like. And I was going to give this quote last week, but I didn't have time. So I just wanted to share it this week. And I did update it into to modern language.

And by I updated it into modern language, I mean, chat GPT updated into modern language for me. And it did a great job. I did take the part about obey your robot overlords out because I didn't think that was appropriate, that that was a mistranslation. I took that part out, but this is a great thing. Sorry. I had to make that joke. It was just too good to not make.

So this is what Soren Kierkegaard commenting on this kind of invitation to rest, he says, And I just love this. He says, I will give you rest. Wonderful. These words come to me should be understood to mean stay with me. I am that rest or staying with me is rest. Unlike other situations where a helper says, come here and then has to say, go there, showing each person where to find the help they need, the remedy that heals or the peaceful place where they can stop working or the

better place where they aren't burdened. Jesus doesn't do that. Opens his arms and he invites everyone. Oh, that all who are weary and burdened came to him. He would embrace them and say, stay with me for staying with me is rest. The helper is the help. Usually a doctor has to divide his time among many patients and he can't help everyone at once. He prescribes medicine and gives instruction and then moves on to the next patient. Or if the patient visits him, he lets them leave.

The doctor can't sit by one patient all day, and he definitely can't have all his patients at his home while sitting with one of them all day without neglecting the others. In this case, the helper and the help are not the same. The patient keeps the prescribed help with them all day to use it constantly, while the doctor sees them only occasionally, but when the helper is the help, he must stay with the patient all day or the patient must stay with him.

If we mistake the relationship that we have with Jesus, it's like it's a pill that we can take. Then we misunderstand, I think, the nature of it. Jesus invites us to rest. And from that place of rest, he helps us in his presence, in his abiding with us, in our abiding with Him. We are like remade and given new purpose and given new vitality and life.

It comes by the Spirit, and then we can go out into the world with Him, with His power, with His presence, continuing to rest in Him, continuing to abide in Him, and yet being able to encourage others, and minister to them and care for them. Our helper is our help. And if we want to go, if we want to be the kind of people who can go and share Jesus and be on everyday mission, then we need to. Let him help us in the way he says that he's going to help us.

We need to be people who are resting in and pursuing in and living in this relationship. That help, that ability, that power, that strength to be on mission comes from him. And we cannot neglect our helper. We do at our peril. And we're just kind of silly if we want to go out and just say, okay, Jesus, I've got it from here. We need to rest because our help and our helper are one in the same.

And so as we're talking about mission, I mean, we've talked about, I think that in so many different ways over the last couple of weeks, but I just want to make that so clear. We need to get this straightened in our minds. If we're going to be out there and living for Jesus, we need to rely on him and be present with him. And so when we're talking about mission, right? We're talking about how we rest and abide with Jesus.

I think there just have to be one and the same because you guys know what it is. I think you guys, you are mature enough. I know all of you guys, You guys are like trying to proceed to Jesus and you know what it is to be exhausted in doing that. Because it is exhausting to try to go on mission without the relationship being intact. It's exhausting. We lose our vitality. We lose our energy. We lose our focus. We get focused on other things if we are not abiding in him.

And we talked about that a lot last week. So we'll keep going on. We know, I think that we all know that tension though, like of not resting, but trying to do things for the Lord. I think most of us, when we, if we feel like we aren't on mission, if we feel like we're not able to go out, we are identifying a problem of abiding and resting. And you know, it's just, it's a problem that I know intimately.

It's a problem that you know intimately. And it's It's something that I want to talk about for the rest of the day, you know, as we get in here.

I want to tell you a story, okay? So here's a little bit of my life story. People like when I tell stories. I hate telling stories, but they've told me enough times that they like it, so I have to do it. Anyway, so here we go. I graduated college in 2007. Hello, those many years ago. And I did not know, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. My parents are here. They can attest.

I really did not know. And my parents, who are here and so kind, graciously made some calls to some people they know, and they got me a job at a senator's office. Thank you. Thank you for that. But I turned it down. And they were very mad. I think they said, not mad, disappointed, not mad. Okay. Okay, there you go. And I had gotten this job, but as I thought about it and I prayed about it, you know what? I just got scared about taking this job because I felt that if I moved to D.C.

And took a job in politics or whatever, I just knew myself well enough at that point, though I was very young, that I knew that I would have gotten caught up in that whole world. And I literally woke up fearing and thinking about the fact that probably I would have done that and then like a decade or two would have gone by in an instant. and I would have unreflectively kind of thrown myself into this thing.

And I would have felt, I dreaded at the time that I would have felt like I had wasted my life over at least the early stages of my life. And when you're 20, a decade feels like a long, long time. Because at this point in my life, God had been doing things in me. He had stirred something in me. And I had a desire. I really wanted to be on mission. I wanted to serve the Lord. And I had been praying about going into ministry, but I just wasn't sure.

I did not have a ton of clarity, but I thought it was a possibility. And so I did something drastic and probably disappointing to my parents. And basically, and this is how I thought about it, I just hit the eject button on my life. And I have an illustration. This is me after college. I just said, I'm out of here. I cannot like jump into these things. And so what I did is for two years, I moved to Central America and I taught math and English at a prison.

And it was like, it was totally out of nowhere and everyone was surprised that I was doing it. But I just like, I just couldn't, I couldn't envision what it would look like for me to go on. And it was a great and a formative time and God used that in important ways for me. But in hindsight, here's something that I've come to realize about that time. While a lot of people, I think, would hear that story and think, oh man, look at that commitment, committed to the mission, wants to go.

And he wants to go serve those prisoners. And here's just what I want you to know. Here's what I know now. I took the easy road. I was not driven by a great sense of mission and commitment. I just could not envision living for Jesus in that environment. And so I took the easy road. I just hit the eject button. It was not my spiritual strength that led me there, but my weakness.

Because the fact is, I could have, it would have been possible to move to DC or whatever, any other life situation within the United States to take a more normal kind of job and to pursue a more typical vocation. And I could have lived on mission for Jesus. I didn't have to leave the country to do that. But I just felt like I had to leave because the The truth is that what I lacked entirely was any abiding skills.

I didn't know how to be a person in the world and to rest in Jesus in the normal stuff of life. As a 20-year-old, I had not been equipped with this. And I don't know where that comes from. I think maybe I'm just kind of like a weirdo and that's okay. I was not equipped to go into the world and rest in the midst of it. And I was so afraid of what was going to happen to me if I stepped into something like that.

I just didn't know how to be in the world and not get caught up in ambition and power and career and distraction and all that stuff. I knew that it was not going to go well with me. And so I took the path of least resistance. Honestly, this was the path of least resistance to go out on mission because I did not know how to rest. And so I just look around at all of you, right? Who are just like trying to live for Jesus in your everyday jobs.

You're trying to live for Jesus in the normal stuff of life in corporate America or as as teachers or a lot of therapists. We have a lot of therapists here. You know, you're doing that work wherever you are. And I see that you are doing the very thing, or at least trying to do the very thing that I did not have the strength to do. And so I'm really proud of you. I applaud you for stepping out to do that because it was easier for me to live for Jesus by just hitting the eject button.

But you guys have stuck in there and you're trying to do the difficult thing of figuring out how do I live in the world? And yet, how do I also live for the sake of mission? And it is challenging. Now, I'm sure that some of you hear me say that and you think, if only you knew the amount of shame I feel about how caught up I get into my stuff and how little I think of Jesus. And if only you knew how defeated I feel in living for Jesus, like how clueless I feel.

If only you knew how much I wish I could hit the eject button. That's what you're thinking. But let me just say, you guys are doing great, and I'm super sympathetic for you, but you do not need to hit the eject button. I have learned this through my way of doing it, which I don't think was exemplary. I've learned there is a way forward without doing that.

There is a way forward for you guys to get over that feeling of not really feeling like you can serve Jesus in the midst of your everyday life. And I really believe that part of what God was doing in my life when I made those choices places was to equip me to help all of you figure out how it is to just live your normal work. Family, life for Jesus. That's the reason why that tagline is on the front of our church there, that we are everyday disciples.

It's because really the biggest thing that interests me is helping people to be disciples in your normal life, because I just had no idea. I had no idea do this.

And I just bailed. And what I want to do for the rest of the time this morning is just. Share some things, at least one thing that I learned about what is necessary to abide in Jesus while living your normal life, while having your normal job, while being with your family, so that you can be on mission and you can just hang into this relationship. And this morning, I'm actually just going to share one thing that I learned. And then actually, it's going to be like a two-parter next week.

We'll go a little bit further into this. And so here's this one thing that I learned by bailing out of my life. And it's super important as I've tried to come back into life in the United States and learn a few things. And this is it. This is my one-point sermon for today. Actually, there's been other points, right? But this is the one thing I want you to take away from today.

It's this, account for the fact that you are always being formed. Account for the fact that you are always being formed. Back in 2007, when I dropped out of my life and I hit the eject button because I felt so much dread, because I knew that if I stepped into this other kind of life, I knew I had the sense that it was going to do something thing to me. I had a sense that my character could not stand up under the pressures of that

kind of work environment and that kind of place. That was just super clear to me. When I went to. I had some insight into this because for those of you, have any of you guys been to Belize? It's like a vacation destination. You've been. Yes, yes. You can visit me. Thank you. Yes, yes. So Belize is like, it's in Latin America, but it's like essentially a Caribbean culture. And I'm not sure if looking at me, you think that guy's got a lot of Caribbean vibes.

I do not I do not have I I stuck out like a sore thumb in Belize I am not chill I need a plan, I don't like loud music and that's that is Belize all over can I just I mean guys I I'm a guy who wears pants to the beach I do not fit in in Belize right so like so so here's the thing like so I'm I'm like in this world where I'm like, I'm just, I just don't know how to stand up into this culture because I'm constantly, I'm going to go like move to DC.

I'm going to be formed all the time. Like I just had this dread. And so what God did, and he's hilarious, is he moves me a place where it's like, where it's like might as well have been a desert island because I had no friends. And I was just like, I was so weird. I stuck out like a sore front. Guys, I was so bored. I started to run.

Me, never since, never before. just out of sheer boredom and totally being feeling like an outsider like i started to run like miles i think 10 miles i would run so you know i must have not been well, But here's what happened as I stepped outside of my culture. I didn't have a phone. I didn't have internet. I didn't have any money. I didn't have any friends.

It was like being on a desert island. What I found was this, is that because I was removed from my culture and set into something that was so foreign, God was able to use that time to uniquely shape and form me in the midst of those two years.

And why is that? In hindsight, I realize it's because I just had a break from this environment that I had been living in. I was constantly being formed by my culture, by my environment, by the college that I went to and by the culture around it and by the ambitions that were just kind of being fed into my mind as a college student in the United States.

And I knew like I was just so susceptible, but then I got put into this foreign place where nobody thought the way I thought and nobody like was, I'm sure that place was forming me, but it like didn't really take because I was so different. And because I felt so isolated in that culture, I just had all this time to pray and the Lord just like did these crazy things.

And here's what I just realized. I just realized that I was trying to seek Jesus back as a college student and I was like moving and doing the things. I was using my willpower. I was trying to follow after him. I was trying to pray, but I was always finding resistance and the resistance came from the fact that I was in this environment and it was forming me in ways that were like it, not like Jesus.

It took me leaving that environment entirely and being sort of in this cultural neutral space in order to realize, my goodness, my whole life, I am constantly being shaped. And that's what's hard about where you guys are, is that you are constantly being shaped. We are constantly being formed by our culture or our environment or our family or our friends.

We are being formed in ways that we have accepted are normal and inconsequential, in ways that we actually don't even notice because they are so normal to us. They're so common. Everybody agrees that this is just how life is.

And it would be the sort of thing that if you were to suddenly be removed from this place after a little while and just seek the lord like i think you would start to realize some of this stuff isn't normal right but you don't get to do that i did that so that you don't have to you get to stick in here but here's the thing is like it's like you have to start to account for what is your culture and what is

the environment around you doing to you and in what ways is it trying to shape you after its image? And in what ways is that contrary to what Jesus wants to do in your life? You have to account for that. I'm not saying you need to bail out because that's not how it's going to work. It doesn't have to work that way, but you do have to account for it. You are being, Jesus wants to form you into his likeness. And that is a competitive process with the world that you're living in.

Our world is not, does not value the things that Jesus wants. Our world, and it's not like uniquely our world, all cultures and all places in different kind of ways are shaping the people in those cultures in ways that are contrary to Jesus.

Like we in the Seattle area have, I think, our particular set of idols, and we'll talk about those in a minute. And that can be fun. We're going to talk about our idols. It's going to be great. But you are really actively and constantly being shaped by your environment. And I was too and I continue to be. But it's especially, I think, true for us, that is, Americans in 2024. Because we live in just the wealthiest. Most technologically advanced, most media culture, media saturated culture ever.

Like these things are forming us. Every day you're being messaged and sold something. And I'm not trying to say, ah, the world, you know, it's so, it's so awful. I'm just saying, we just have to account for the reality that we are being shaped and sold a set of values and a set of things that is contrary to what Jesus wants to make us love and wants to lead us into. And we just have to account for it. That's the simple thing. We just have to account for it.

James 4.4, probably a passage you know, says this, don't you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again. If you wanna be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God. Do you think that the scriptures have no meaning? They say that God is passionate, that the spirit he's placed within us should be faithful to him. He gives grace generously. As the scriptures say, God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.

So humble yourselves before God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come close to God and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world. Look, I mean, what James, I mean, we can read these things and feel really condemned, right? But I think what James is just talking about, he's just talking about the reality.

The reality of the culture 2000 years ago is that it is easy for us to have a divided loyalty to want to serve God. And yet in ways that we are unaware of and we don't oftentimes take account of, we are having our loyalties split and our hearts split, and we want things of the world while simultaneously wanting things of God. And what James indicates here pretty clearly is that those two things need to be adjusted. We need to turn from the influence of the world.

And I know the world is like, oh, what does that mean even? But I think it's this set of values and hopes and forming that is contrary to the things that the Lord wants from us. But what do you do with it, right? I mean, what do you do with that? Okay, enmity, friendship with the world is enmity with God. So I'm going to stop being friends with what?

What relationships am I going to break up? Like, how does that work? Do I just hit the eject button and get out of here? No, I don't think that's what James is saying. What does he do? He says in the end, he says, wash your hands, purify your hearts, look to your loyalty.

How do you decide how to live? how do you know you're being friends with the world and especially so in our culture right i mean our culture has changed so much we don't have a lot of it's hard to look back in history for examples because the world we live in is so different and just wait five years as ai comes in the world it's going to be just as different as it was from you know 1990 to 2005 like when when the internet came in and shaped everything.

We are about to go into this hyper change thing and it becomes really difficult. We live in a difficult time to decide how we should live and what it means for us to be, to not be friends with the world and just to seek the Lord. We do not have, this is unprecedented, right? To use a word that is overused. This is an unprecedented time to live. We live in such a pluralistic, technologically driven world where everything is new and everything feels intense.

You might remember this quote. I gave you this the first week of this series four weeks ago from Adam Nieder. And he says this, the human condition is such that you have to choose how to live from among options that rule one another out. That has always been the case. But during times of rapid cultural change, the range of competing visions of the good broadens and contrary ways of thinking and living multiply and exist alongside one another.

During such periods, the need to consciously decide what to believe and how to live becomes more pressing and more difficult. In a pluralistic context, committing oneself passionately to one option among many may seem arbitrary, irrational, and absurd, but the inevitable alternative is to drift along in the current of contemporary society and thus always from a life of integrity and coherence. What Nieder is saying is that, man, like, we don't have examples. We don't have traditions anymore.

We're in such a rapidly culturally changing, pluralistic kind of society that we're left scratching our heads and thinking, how do we live for Jesus in the midst of it? It's a difficult time to live. And to think that, you know, like, you know, like, that's not prescriptive. Like, you can't act like you don't live in Seattle in the mid-2020s.

Like, you do. And it would seem irrational and arbitrary to go backwards, right? But what he's saying and what I think we have to understand is that we have to choose how we're going to live. And if we don't be intentional about how we're going to live, then we're just going to be surrendering ourselves to the formative power of our culture.

You just need to think through it and decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to make some particular choices in order to account for the fact that I am always being formed and shaped. I am, I am always being formed and shaped by the media and by you and by my family and by the things that are around me, by the culture. There is a war for my love constantly going out and constantly going out in your life. Things are trying to win your loyalty.

The world is trying to win your loyalty. Jesus is trying to win your loyalty. And you're having to decide, how am I going to live? And what am I going to pursue? And what kind of life am I going to have? And so we need to be intentional about how we live. That's how we account for the power of a culture that is constantly forming us.

And I think specifically, you need to adopt a lifestyle that accounts for and resists the the formative power, the negatively forming power of culture, because not everything in culture is bad, but the things that are negative, that are embedded in your culture and the things that are. Because there's so much in a particular place, like different places, like different cultures, even different cities have different idols.

Like I moved here from Connecticut and actually it was just at a party the other day and people were like, oh, how's the East Coast different from the West Coast? And I'm like, well, let me tell you. It's really different. Like people are into to way different things in the east coast we're snobs and we're like we are proud of it. We love being snobs on the east coast people like brag about how they work 65 to 70 hours a week can you imagine anyone here saying that.

Be like, when do you mountain bike? How are you alive? It's like, yeah. So there's, there's just like different things going on.

And I think there's some particular things that are happening in our culture. And like, again, these are the things we stopped noticing. We stopped noticing over time on the East coast. People just think it's normal to work 70 hours a week. It's not, it's terrible. It makes you miserable. It's not normal. Right. But people think it's normal because everybody's doing it and they're all bragging about it, right? But here we have some things going on.

Do you want to know what I think our idols are here in the east side of Seattle? Okay, thanks, Bob. Bob wants to know. All right, well, Bob, these are the things that I've noticed, right? So I've been an outsider. I've moved here recently. And here's the things that I think that we're super obsessed with. And I think maybe we don't always take account of. Number one, And it's money, but not so much money. It's financial security.

And I think, I'll just say, I think it's because they're so far to fall when things are so expensive, the risk of falling is great. And so it's like, if I'm up on a high wire without a rope, I'm going to be real careful. And I'm going to be in a lot of control about how I'm placing myself, right?

And I got to tell you, and I'm not like asking for sympathy here but I'm probably one of the least wealthy people in the room, and these are my life choices and I'm happy with them but I feel this all the time, because it's just in the air there is so much anxiety in this culture about not having enough and not being able to secure our needs. And I'm not sure if we notice it all the time, but even as a person without much, I feel it all the time, like this imposed pressure and anxiety.

Warring for my love, warring for my loyalty, trying to just constantly message me that I need something I don't have. And that does something to me. It's doing something to me. And I can't just act like it's not there. That's not how I fix it. I actually have to account for it. And then I have to start to form a lifestyle that says, okay, I know the world is shaping me to be anxious about money and to pursue financial security above all things else.

And so I need to subordinate that shaping, forming desire. I need to counter it with something intentional to undo that. I can't just stop. I cannot through through my willpower, just stop being anxious about money. Because again, it's like I could stop for a moment and then the next moment something else is going to come along because I'm just around people and that's the world we live in. And it's okay. I'm not saying, oh, tsk, tsk, tsk.

I'm saying just account for reality and say this is what it is and then build in a type of lifestyle and some lifestyle choices that are going to counterform me against that thing, against that influence. You don't have to bail. You don't have to move to a foreign in country. You can stick it out, but don't be so cavalier or so bold to think, ah, I don't have that problem because you do. And if you don't, you will, because that's the environment we live in.

So money, autonomy, you guys love your autonomy. You guys love to be your own people, individuals. I really like that too. I like that about the West Coast. I can do my own thing. That's why I look like a weirdo because I'm like, I can get away with this here. I don't have to comb my hair except my wife says I do. So I guess I'm not as autonomous as I think I am, right? Yeah, but we like love to be free. We live, we like our West Coast people got that free lifestyle, man. We can do what we want.

I don't have to show up to everything, work. I'll be there if I want. I was at that party the other day and this guy was talking, he was on this, this, like he worked at Amazon. He was on his team and his boss was working on a project. And he's like, guys, we really need to buckle down on this project. I need it for the next two weeks. I need you to let me know right now, if you're going to miss any, any time in the next two weeks.

And he said, and one guy was like, well, I don't know when I'm going rock climbing in the next two weeks. It's like, really? Well, the rocks will be there in three weeks. Maybe you just don't go for the next two weeks, right? But there's this culture that's embedded and we're just like, well, we just gotta be free people and I don't know how I'm gonna feel today. And so I wanna be free to do my thing and we do it and it's great.

And this is an amazing place to live because there's so much that's so close and we can just go do our thing and it's great. And I'm not saying that's bad. I am just saying though, if we're called to be loyal to Jesus Christ, then our autonomy is gonna have to find a balance.

We're gonna have to figure out what does it mean to be shaped into that culture and to love our autonomy and our freedom and yet also love the great commission where Jesus says, teach them to obey, all these things that I'm telling you because obviously our great freedom and our loyalty to Jesus are gonna come into competition at some point.

Probably not in everything, but in certain things, things you are being shaped in and being sold on the vision of just being a free autonomous person with a ton of money and you can do whatever you want. And that is the, that is the virtue. That is, that is the Uber man here in Seattle, right? And everybody wants to be that guy or that lady, you know, totally free person.

And I'm not saying that's necessarily bad. I'm just saying you have to account for that and what that's doing to your life spiritually. And then also like, man, we love our experiences. We just want to experience life. We are sucking the marrow out of the bones of life. We are just going to do all the fun things. And that's why we live here. And, you know, that, I mean, obviously that has a lot to do with autonomy. But what do you do when your life is just boring?

Because honestly, I'm turning 40 in 11 days and life is boring sometimes. And is that gonna make you freak out? and is that gonna make you ditch your marriage and your family and your job?

Because for a lot of people, that's exactly what happens. Because we think we just like get so hopped up on our experiences and think that everything needs to be this mountaintop experience that we can't deal with the fact that sometimes life is just about putting one foot in front of the other and being faithful, that we're just called to certain things. If we get hooked on our experiences and doing the next big and exciting thing.

It's not that we can't do those things. I'm not saying, oh, so stop it. I'm saying just take account of what that is doing to your soul over time and then work in a kind of counter-formative lifestyle. Does that make sense? This is not wild stuff. This is really practical stuff. But we want to say, well, money isn't bad. No, money's not bad.

Love of money is bad. autonomy is not bad no autonomy is not bad but too much independence is bad experiences aren't bad no they're not they're not bad but like living for those like they're gonna be what satisfies your soul they'll disappoint you every time we just have to take into account the reality of life and what we're being sold and what's really true and we're we're called to live after what's really true now this is the thing and i've talked about this before and i'm

gonna just keep talking about it. I've told you guys, I've talked about this idea of becoming everyday disciples, and we have the little sign out there, and I have kind of this. What I am encouraging us to do is to take on these habits.

And you will notice if you pay attention that these habits, and we'll talk about them here in just a second, they are things that I'm asking all of us to try to like over the next course of whatever, some time, try to grow into these habits because these are habits that I believe will be forming us in the midst of a culture that is forming us in its image. And they'll be forming us.

I think a lot of these habits are actually coming up against the idols of our culture here. All right. So like, I'm just going to walk through this. You might not have heard this. It's probably been about four months since we went over it or something like that.

And we'll continue to talk about this more, but here's some, some things that I am asking us to do that as we intend to become everyday disciples, I'm saying these are just like, like life choices that I want us to make, because I think that that they're going to be the sort of things that will secure our loyalty and our direction and our orientation towards Jesus. So the first is to bless one follower of Jesus and someone who does not know Jesus every week.

So that's like the simplest thing. And it is simple. It's difficult to do all the time. It's difficult to do consistently, right? This is the problem with culture is that we aren't that intentional about the lives that we live and we're being sold something else, but we have to put in practices in place in our life in order to care about the things that Jesus cares about and be people who are being caught up into his vision of our life.

And I do think that this is a simple thing that we can do to just bless two people, one person who knows Jesus and one person who doesn't know Jesus every single week. And all that looks like it could be something so simple as maybe you have a co-worker who is not doing well and you can go out of your way and just like give them a present or a note. Just bless them in simple ways.

Just like care intentionally about other people, which do you understand like when it comes to autonomy, how this is just calling you to be other people oriented? Because that's the thing. I'm going to be constantly shaped and sold on the idea that I'm autonomous and that my interests and my wants and my desires are the most important things. But if we put into practice things where we're saying, no, other people,

they actually matter. and that I'm going to intentionally be an agent of blessing for other people, if we put that practice into place, that's going to counterform us. That is going to counterform you. It's going to work against the influence of culture in your life. So if we just go ahead and bless other people intentionally, it's going to come up against that. And I mean, honestly, this might also impact our financial side of things.

A lot of times we can get, especially as mature Christians, we get our generosity on autopilot. it. I think that's actually not a great thing. A lot of my life, things are divided up and my tithe money, that just goes automatically. But I think I still sometimes need to make choices that hurt me financially to bless other people in order to watch out for my own love of money.

Because every time I'm presented with the thing of, I see somebody with a need and it's like like a thousand dollars or something, or like, it's like a good bit of money. And I, I sit and I say to myself, my first thing is I don't have the money for that. I couldn't possibly. Right. But the truth is if I were to open up my bank account, I do. And so what do I do with that? Because everything in me and all the people around me, and I'm just like, that's not personal or anything like that.

The whole culture around me says, no, you need more wealth. You need, you need more than enough so that you'll be secure. So I'm constantly being messaged by that. And yet Jesus says, like, look at the sparrows. Like, doesn't God care about them and take care of their every needs? Doesn't God clothe the flowers in the most beautiful clothes? Like, why are you worried about money? And do you see how these two things play against each other?

And sometimes I find in my own life, I need to make an intentionally stupid decision, stupid by the messaging of the world in order to remind myself that despite the fact that I would just feel so much better and like literally like have less anxiety in my mind, I would have so much less anxiety if I had more money. Sometimes it's like, I just need to not have that money so that I can face my anxiety and I can trust in Jesus in the midst of it.

Like we are, this is the thing, like by living this kind of lifestyle, you are confronting. The anxiety that is being sown in you by the culture, that you have to have these things and do these things in order to have the kind of life that you want, because it's just not true. And what Jesus says is that we can trust him and trust looks, it looks real. Yeah. John Wimber says, it's one of my favorite quotes, he says, faith is spelled R-I-S-K, which spells risk.

Faith is risk. Faith is risky. We're called to a kind of life that comes into a confrontation to my self-secured security. We're called to trust. We're called to faith. We're called to do risky things, not dumb things necessarily, but intentionally risky things, things that might amount to nothing. And I might regret later because, man, I don't have something. But that when we give those sorts of things to Jesus, when we put our lifestyle

choices in Jesus, like it is good. Like that is how we grow in faith. I'm talking too much. We need to keep moving here. The second one is to just eat. Eat with someone you don't normally eat with just twice a month, two times a month, just like share or a cup of coffee. Coffee's fine too. Share a cup of coffee or share a meal with somebody you don't normally eat with, you know? Like just, other thing about Seattle is like we get in bubbles.

This is a very bubbly town, right? We just kind of stick with our own people. We don't get out. But here's the thing, especially for the church, we have to understand that the future of the church in Seattle is like, it's reaching the nations. The nations are here. I mean, you go to the Ridge, you go to Issaquah, half the people, not half the people, I don't know, maybe 15% of the people are from probably India or Pakistan, right?

Like just invite people to coffee, get to know people. We want to stay in our bubbles. We have a tendency in our culture, in America in general, like to be told that we should just stay with people who are like us. Come on, just get to know other people and talk about Jesus. We have so much opportunity around here. People are genuinely curious. People who immigrate to a country want to learn everything they can about the country that they come to.

So if you know people around you, you know, and they're not from here, like you have no idea how much they would appreciate it if you ask them out for lunch or for coffee, just to get to know them.

Can I just encourage you to do that? And not even people who grew up around here, you know, who, who, who are integrated fully into the culture, like, like those people too, but get out of your bubble, spend some time, just, just, just talking to people, getting to know people. Because here's the thing, you want to have mission and opportunity to share Jesus with people, you have to do it relationally. You don't get to do that throwing airplanes down, or passively,

right? You just got to get around people. Confess to God and others once a week. I mean, to be honest, we need to be doing this spiritual work of talking about and identifying and knowing what are the things that are getting in the way of our relationship with Jesus. If we are going to get rid of this enmity or this friendship with the world, then we have to do these things. We have to confess our sins. We have to confess it one to another.

Protestants don't like confessing sin because we think that feels like what the Catholics do. Well, it's actually just what the Bible tells us to do. So let's do it. I'm not going to absolve you of anything. That's Jesus's job. That's all. So you're good. You're good. He's already forgiven you, but we're still called to confess our sins to each other and to the Lord. And we need to do that intentionally because otherwise it's just drift.

Otherwise, it's just drift. If you're not sitting here accounting for the fact that you're a normal person who gets caught up in sin, just like everybody else, if you're not being honest about that and saying what it is and just bringing it to the Lord and saying, thank you, Jesus, for forgiving me. Thank you for taking that stuff away, putting it away far as east is from the west.

And so now I can have this restored relationship with you. And I don't feel shame anymore because I rest upon your work, Jesus, not upon my, how great I am and how sinless I am because I'm not. But I come and I confess this thing before you and I lay them down and I can move deeper back into relationship with the Lord. When I do that, just open your mouth. That's another one. Just talk about Jesus. just talk about Jesus.

The truth is, guys, if you have a relationship with Jesus, you're going to have something to say about him. I talk to friends, you know, you just come up, you're in conversation, you're like, oh, let me tell you this story about this thing that happened with my friend. It can be just as natural as that to talk about Jesus. Stuff that happened at your church, stuff that the Lord is showing you, stuff that you're being encouraged, just talk about what the Lord is doing.

Open your mouth and talk about it. Don't Don't be autonomous, don't be cut off, don't be like too into yourself, just talk about with people. Meet with God. Guys, you got to have a prayer life. You got to have a prayer life. If you don't know how to pray, learn to pray. That was my biggest problem. That was why I had to hit the eject button. I had no idea how to pray. And in like just this total vacuum, God taught me a lot about prayer.

It's so important. We have to pray. We have to meet with God. We have to spend time studying the word. And you know what? I think honestly, the biggest obstacle that we have is is that, especially the church has said, well, it looks like this. It's this like, it looks like 15 minutes at this time, you know, and you have to do it that way. And I think some people are helped by that kind of structure, but a lot of us aren't. I don't pray that way, just to be really clear,

because I'm too independent and special, you know? You know, I have ADHD, that's all. But like, just find a way that works for you to pray and just do those things. Be faithful, continue to seek the Lord, just, you know, seek those experiences with him. And then the final is just to examine your life, by which I mean to just sit at the end of your day and reflect on where God was showing up in your life.

This is just like, we need to be aware and become aware and live a lifestyle of being present with God and working against the idols of our culture. And the funny thing is like, worship team can come up here I'm closing out here the funny thing about that stuff is like it's not. The reason I think so much times that we don't take account of the formation of our culture is because it just doesn't feel exciting. And it's not very emotionally satisfying.

It is not. It's not like going to be a little clip on YouTube to talk about, you know, a 60-second pump-you-up speech to talk about living your life in an intentional way to form yourself self against the values of a culture which is trying to form you and like you know in our culture where we don't have a ton of attention span and stuff like that like like this stuff can be really hard but it's honestly it's it's the thing that i realized as i left and as i've

come back to the united states it's the thing that this is just just so neglected we are just oftentimes drifting along in life and to do the simple thing of building in habits of seeking after the Lord, habits that are going to form ourselves, going to work against the formational power of our culture and of the world, that will just unlock, I think, so much power and and relationship, and missional opportunity for us, but it doesn't feel exciting.

It actually feels really boring. That's every time I get up and I want to give sermons on this stuff, because I talk about this a good bit, I feel like, oh, it's just going to be kind of boring. But I'm telling you, it is the most exciting thing when we start to realize that my joy and my my success in mission and relationship with God isn't going to rest on my willpower in any given moment. Because that's what we do when we understand, oh, I need to live a certain kind of life intentionally.

What we're doing is we're saying, because I have very weak willpower, in the moment of difficulty, I don't make the right choice because I don't even understand the conflict that's happening. And so instead of trying to become a person with greater willpower, which you don't have the ability to do in a short period of time, you say, okay, I'm actually going to become a person who has habits.

And habits are not sexy, right? There's nothing exciting or with pizzazz about habits, but I really do think we neglect them to our peril, right?

We need to, if we're going to be disciples, right? That's why when Jesus came and he called his disciples, he didn't just say, here's a handbook to discipleship. What he said is, follow me, look how I'm living my life, look how I am acting, look how I'm praying, look how I'm engaging with other people, and just do it like this.

He taught his disciples a lifestyle that was living in the the kingdom of God, to use Jesus's language, that was about engaging with the Lord and staying focused on him and seeing what he's doing in the midst of a world that's kind of a mess and that doesn't really understand. He invited his disciples into a kind of a lifestyle.

And so that's all I'm saying. I'm saying you are called into a lifestyle, a lifestyle that takes into account the fact that we are being formed and being powerfully formed in this culture. And so we need to meet that formation with even stronger habits and even stronger things that are going to bring us into this relationship and keep us in this relationship and teach us to abide and to trust in him. So there's nothing really amazingly like rah-rah about that.

But I'm telling you, it's the thing. It's the thing. Your habits are the thing. They are going to be what helps you to overcome sin. Your habits are going to be the thing that help you identify where you are not walking with the Lord. Your habits are going to be the things that are going to help you expose the idols in your life and figure out where you're being formed. You need to build habits into your life. And it can be so much more simple than you think. I have those six things.

I'm encouraging us all to do that. Maybe you have some other things. That's great. But be intentional about it. That is the only thing that I want to tell you this morning. So we're going to worship. Awesome. Hey, why don't we just stand up? We'll worship the Lord together here. Take some time and probably pray in just a minute.