Everyday Mission: Re-Narrating Your Life

Continuing on, continuing on this everyday mission series. We've got one more after this, so it's a longer series. And the goal has been throughout this series is to think through how we can become people who are on mission. And I think that's sort of a buzzword that Christians used often, certainly pastors use a lot, to be on mission. I mean, I think we sort of get it. It means like to just be a part of what God is doing, to be a participant and not somebody who sits on on the sidelines.

I think this is really essential for Christians. If we're going to have a satisfying life of faith, then I think we need to be people who are at least attempting to move towards being people who are living on mission every day, because it's just like partaking in what God is doing. But I also want to keep in mind, I've been trying to kind of center this at the beginning of each of these messages, the fact that we're not called to be on mission as anyone but the person that we are.

You know, I think a lot of times we have ideas, we have certain ideas about what it'll take for you or for me or for us to be effectively a part of God's mission in the world, you know, and we usually think it involves having certain type of skills or maybe even a certain type of personality. And so I think it can be hard for grasp to us what it could mean for us to be just just normal people, kind of the people that we are, but on mission, partaking in what God is doing.

Because for us, I think particularly in our culture as Americans, we love heroes. We're really into heroes. It's really a part of every part of our life, from the movies we consume, even from the sports. We love to wear the jersey of the heavy hitters, the high scorers. And we think that if we're really going to make a difference or if someone on a team or doing something is really going to make a difference, they have to be like the upper echelon of performers.

So like the, and I'm sorry about this, but the Tom Brady's, I'm sorry, the Tom Brady's or the LeBron James's or the Abby Wambach's, depending on what sport makes sense to you. And I don't know if you don't like sports, I'm sorry. Those are high scoring kind of clutch much players in their different, in their respective sports. But we tend to think that unless we can be like that upper echelon of top performers, then really we're not contributing much. And it's not really worth trying.

It's not really worth us even being a part of the team. Like we leave the work oftentimes up to the best performers, the top performers. And if we don't think we can cut it, then we don't participate in it. But I just think when it comes to mission, I have to make sure that we all understand that that's just not the way it works. I don't think that is how mission moves forward in Scripture. I don't think that's how mission has historically moved forward in church history.

It just doesn't work like that. I don't think to be effectively on mission, to be a person who's participating in that in your everyday life, that you need to be a superstar. I think that you can live on mission effectively and help people come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ just as the person that you are in the life that you're living. Sorry, that's bothering me. I'm a little OCD sometimes. You can just live your normal life and be a part of mission. I really think that's true.

So I'm not approaching this series with a prescription for a Steph Curry-level workout, who's obviously the better of the basketball players I've mentioned this morning. Controversial. I know. I am not saying that we all need to train to that level and achieve that level so that we can just always be nailing our three-point shots, and then when we do that, then we'll be good.

Actually, what I'm saying is I'm just trying to encourage you to catch a vision for your normal life, just your normal life, going to work, being among your friends, being in your community, and what it might look like for you just as a normal person to be a part of God's mission. And I think that's not nearly as much of a reach or as far off as you might think it looks like. And I think it's the call of every Christian to just be a part of the mission.

I like how Peter says it in his first letter. 1 Peter 2, 1 through 5 is what we're going to pick up today. And we're going to be spending some time, a good bit of time in 1 Peter today. So if you have a Bible, you can open it up or you can go ahead and just follow along on the screen here. but he says this, 1 Peter 2, verse 1, Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander.

Like newborn infants, desire the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow up into your salvation, if you've tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone, rejected by people, but chosen and honored by God. Christ. I just love the imagery here that Peter uses. He's telling the church, he's trying to paint a picture for them, who they are, what sort of people they are. And he's telling them, the church is, you guys are just like a pile of rocks.

Which I really like, so you guys are a pile of rocks. We can apply that to ourselves. We're a pile of rocks, and in fact, not only are we a pile of rocks, we are the reject pile. That's basically what he's saying. You guys are the reject pile. People in the world kind of picked you up, looked you over, turned you around, and said, no, I can't do anything with this. Throw you in the rock pile. Throw you in the reject rock pile.

But in this image, he says something else has happened, actually, something really special has happened. It's that God has gone to the reject pile, and he's picked up these rocks, and in Jesus Christ, he picks them up, and he looks at them, and he says, you know what? I can do something with this rock. Through the power of Jesus Christ, through his salvation, through his work, through his grace, God can take this rejected rock and actually build it into into something that is for his glory.

Make it a part of his house, into his spiritual house. And what he's doing is he's taking us, this is what he says, this is what the church is. It's a rejected pile of rocks, a bunch of nobodies, a bunch of underperformers, a bunch of people who aren't that impressive. And he's taking them up and he's building them together to be a part of something, to be a part of this priesthood that is giving glory to God through Jesus Christ, that is really that is really moving forward his work on earth.

And so it's not, I mean, right here, I think in scripture, it's not about you becoming a better rock. It's not about you becoming a top shelf performer. It's about you. It's not about you not messing up. Instead, Peter's picture that he's painting with his words here, his encouragement to the people of God is that they would just see that they're being just simply built up and being built into a part of something whose glory is from God.

God is using them. He's turning this old stuff and he's making it valuable because he's making it a part of his work. And I love that because it's just so vividly clear that it's not about how great you are and it's not about how great of a performer you are. It's all by grace that this is happening.

It's all by grace that we get to be a partaker of this thing, of this work that that we can be integrated in a part of God's household, that we get to be a part of God's household because he's chosen us. And he said, no, I can do something with it. Despite its flaws, I can make it a key part of what I'm doing in the world.

And Peter's encouragement, right? He's saying, obviously there's a strong emphasis on grace, strong emphasis on what God is doing, but he's also just encouraging them to participate in that a little bit by encouraging them to do a few things, right?

He encourages that these people of God as they're being built into this house to do something simple, to just turn away from the old way of being, to turn away from their, what he says is malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander, and to replace those things, those practices with a desire for the pure milk of the word.

And so, I mean, as if the imagery of rejected stones wasn't enough to kind of knock us down and get us on board with the idea that we're not that much, then he draws, well, Well, prior to that, an image that you were just like infant babes, you know, can't even feed ourselves. We just can't even like, we can't cut up meat. We're just like little babies who need milk to have us grow strong and to nourish us. But you know what? So if you're like a person who's like saying,

like, I don't know how I can just be like a normal person. I don't know how I can live like a normal life and be used by God. I mean, those are the only people who really get used by God. People who are being nourished and grown up into maturity by repenting of sin, starting to walk according to this other greater revealed plan. So you become a person who like leaves aside malice and then takes in the word, seeks the Lord, understands that they're a part of something,

and then they start to develop love instead of malice. Malice is another word for hatred, right? So you start to develop love instead. You become a person who's given up on deceit and then commits themselves to honesty and integrity and everything. You become a person who forsakes hypocrisy and aims for consistency. You become a person who's laid down envy and celebrates others when they're doing well, even when it's something that we would like to have excelled in ourselves, right?

We can root other people on when we lay down envy. We cease being people who speak slanderously, and then we become people who speak encouragement and blessing and build people up. And that's not something these people, the church, and I think us, need to do in our own strength. It's something that God has invited them into. It's something that God has invited us into. It's funny, this list. Sometimes you read lists of sins in the Bible and you're like, I don't know, that seems hard.

But this list, you're like, I mean, I think we could probably avoid slander and malice. That is within your power to not slander someone. You really could do that. you know? And it's not like by not doing those things, then you're becoming this great, awesome clutch player in the Christian faith.

It's like, man, if you just stop pursuing these things, these things of the world, and you start getting cued into what the Lord is doing, and you start to let the Word have its work in your life, then you're going to find that those things are going to go away as you just say, I'm just not going to live that way. I'm going to live towards this other thing. Like love and peace and joy and all these fruits of the Spirit are going going to come out in the place of those things.

As I was preparing this, 1 John 1 came to mind. I'm just going to read it. I'm going to read it kind of slowly because I felt like, I mean, I was just like super convicted of this. Okay. So 1 John 1, 5 through 10. This is the message that we've heard from him and declare to you. God is light and there's absolutely no darkness in him. If we say we have fellowship with him and yet we walk in darkness, we're lying and we're not. What I see pretty consistently in Scripture is.

Is that we are called to something, I think, that is fairly ambitious by any standard, which is just, we're called to this idea that we can have fellowship with God. We're called to be having a transformed life, to be repenting of sin and bearing fruit of righteousness in our lives, to be a part of just the everyday mission of God in the world. That seems ambitious, but the way toward that, the pathway towards that ambitious goal for Christians is simple and it's totally within reach.

It's not becoming better people. It's not trying harder or working more or being more morally pure. The pathways, like it's laid out here, it's confess your sin, know that God's gonna forgive it and just keep coming back to the Lord. keep walking in light. He's saying, don't even delude yourself and act like you're not going to sin. You will sin, but God is faithful and just to forgive us when we sin.

And so the constant work of Christian maturity is not do better, don't do this, don't do this, just do these things. It's aim for the good, aim for mission, aim for hopefulness, aim for transformation, know that you're going to err along the way, confess your sin, confess your error, confess your mistakes, and then walk in the grace, walk in the forgiveness, walk in confidence that Jesus Christ isn't just going to throw you back on the reject pile.

Keep turning from sin. Keep letting the word get into our lives, the word of grace, adoption, reconciliation, and forgiveness, and let it grow up into spiritual maturity. The way forward for the Christian is just laid out before us. And it's not the hard path.

That's the thing. It's not the hard path. What would be hard is for me to tell you that you guys just need to get better in your own strength and that you need to just become like Steph Curry, LeBron James level performers just by working harder because that would be really terrible for you because you know what? There's like one in a million people is that good. And so we would have a very small church.

If I were telling you that, I would be telling you that because like, you know, we just can't cut it in that respect. But the way forward for Christian maturity is not do better, perform more. it's aim high and understand that you are being supplied grace and kindness and mercy at every stage. And that God is already meeting you even when you're going to be failing. Don't let that discourage you. Don't let the fact that you probably aren't going to be like this top performer get in the way.

Actually, you become somebody who's so much a part of the mission of God as you are just continually being aware of your sin and bringing it before Jesus Christ and just saying, God, I can't even get rid of this stuff anymore. It's so deep inside of me. And Jesus says, yeah, I know. Isn't it great that my abundant grace and forgiveness is made so available to you, that it's a constant source of strength and encouragement and cleansing.

Isn't that so wonderful? And then we start to just depend on that in our everyday life. The way forward for the Christian is not the hard path. It's just confession. It's desiring the things that will make for our maturity. It's desiring to walk in the word. It's turning from sin, but it's not anything that's beyond you because it's turning to the supply of grace in Jesus Christ in the word and by what he's done on the cross. That said, I think there is something very difficult about this.

And this is like, let's be honest, like, because I could say this. Oh, yeah, it's so easy. I just confess my sin and I turn from grace. And yeah, I really 100% believe that. And when I'm doing my best, that's exactly what I'm doing. But I'm not always doing my best, right? Because I do have a hard time in this some way. And the hard part is the coming back over and over again. It's just being honest about my persistent failures.

It's being honest about the fact that I am in need of grace every single day. And that even though I desire to live this transformed kind of life, like I find myself still dealing with my own selfishness and my own sin, the hard part is just being bothered enough by your own sin to persistently confess it and to rely on grace. That's the hard part. It's the hard part for everyone. It's not just you.

It's not just me. It's the hard part for all of us because we think, oh, awesome, grace of God, forgiveness of a sin. I'm walking in this new kind of life. And then we say, thanks, God, I've got it from here. And then we go off on our way and we delude ourselves into thinking that we do have it from here. But I mean, actually, the call is just to constantly come back and to rely on, to confess our sin, to turn from it and to depend upon grace, to depend upon His forgiveness.

And the challenge with that is that. It depends upon you to a degree to have enough awareness about your sin, to go back, to confess it, to turn back to Jesus. That depends on me to be tuned in enough to what God is doing and what he's up to and what he's telling me and what he's revealing and tuned in enough to the Holy Spirit who's convicting me of my sin, right? To be available enough and attentive enough to God to actually do that stuff. It does depend on me to a degree, to a degree.

And the one thing you should know about me, probably most of you know this about me, is that I am, I like to joke, but Bob always tells me, don't say that. I'm going to say it anyway. Bob's not in the room. Is that I am very lazy. Bob says, no, you're not lazy. You have ADHD. I'm like, well, okay. I think I'm lazy. But which is a nicer way of saying I'm lazy. A nicer way to myself would be to say that I am extremely aware of the limits of my willpower.

Sorry, that's a really nice way of saying I'm lazy. I am extremely aware of the limits of my willpower. Now, I am not in a position to tell you if you have more willpower or less willpower than me, but I'll just say that one thing that bothers me so much is pastors coming up and hyping us up and hyping the church up to just work harder and have more willpower because it's like to a degree. Yeah, I get it. Like, like we do need to have the desire to change.

We do need to have the desire to lean on grace. We do need to have the desire and the willpower to, to confess our sin. But I just don't find that to be super helpful. I think there is a disturbing amount of prescriptive willpower in evangelical Christianity in America. And it's not that willpower, like I say, it's not that willpower isn't a part of following Jesus. There is willpower. Of course, there's willpower.

But my biggest problem with this kind of approach is that we're not honest about where willpower comes from, where we develop willpower. I've shared this Dallas Willard quote in the past with you guys. I'm going to share it again because I really like it. He says this, it's part of the misguided and whimsical condition of humankind that we so devoutly believe in the power of effort at the moment of action alone to accomplish what we want.

We cannot behave on the spot as we did, as he did, as Jesus did, and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. It's probably one of my favorite ideas that the Dallas Willard kind of illuminated to me, and it's probably why I really like him. He understands that as Christians in the world today, we just put a ton of stock in our own willpower. We think, I just need inner strength to persistently follow Jesus.

I just need to rely on some source of strength that I've developed and cultivated over time. And a lot of times our plan for the cultivation is just that I'm going to be ready when it comes. I'm going to grit my teeth. I'm going to be, I'm going to walk it around and I'm just going to be so prepared when sin and temptation comes. I'm just going to power through and I'm going to honor Jesus with it. You know, that seems to be our plan.

And I think our plan to live the Christian life usually comes down to, yeah, powering through temptations to be like a star performer, a superstar when things get hard. That's it. I'll just turn into LeBron James or Superman when I'm tempted. That's my plan. It's a terrible plan. You're not Superman. You're not Superman. Most of us aren't superstars. I am definitely not a superstar. Again, limited willpower.

So then the question is, how do non-superstars like me, and perhaps like you, I don't know, some of you guys are pretty impressive. Maybe you guys can do it. But how do non-superstars like me make it through? How do we live our everyday life on mission? How do we persistently turn to grace? How do we persistently confess our sins? How do we persistently walk in the true strength that it is to just know Jesus and to be filled by him.

I think it's just going to give you, I'm going to reduce it down. This is not the only way, right? But I'm going to do this pastor thing that's so annoying, okay? You know what the answer is? It's go to church. Go to church. I have a slide for that. Go to church. That's, ha, ha. But you guys all did it. Good job. Good job. You guys are here today. You did it today. I know that sounds lame, but let me explain what I mean.

Because of course, just being in a building on a Sunday morning from 9.30 to 5, I don't know, 1045, is not going to address your willpower alone. I get that. You get that. But here's the thing is something should be happening at church that should be helping you develop something beyond willpower that's going to help you persist in the Christian life. Let me show you this little quote by, it's actually a guy named William Goheen quoting Leslie Newbigin.

So I put both of them on there, and that's fun. He says, from Burr, we're narrated into our cultural story, but the work of the church in formation is the difficult and intentional task of re-narrating the church to live faithfully in the biblical story. I just love that. Indeed, if the biblical story is not the one that really controls our thinking, then inevitably we shall be swept into the story that the world tells about.

I love this idea because it's saying, you really want to live as a Christian. You really want to be the sort of person who has awareness enough of their own sin to be convicted enough of what's going on. The prescription is not become a person who has a great willpower. The prescription is be a part of a church or be around fellow believers who are helping you re-narrate your story. To help you understand what's really going on in your life.

And for me, this idea of re-narration, I mean, it's really powerful. I love the phrase.

At church, the reason you should go to church is because ideally, and there's some aspiration here for us collectively, church, we'll talk about that in a second, but ideally at church, you are surrounded by other believers, and ideally, what you should be doing with and for one another is helping you re-narrate, re-contextualize your struggles, your joys, your aspirations, your hopes, helping you get caught up into the biblical story and not some story that the world is telling.

Because you know what? The world is telling us a story. I was talking to Luke yesterday. We were just joking a little bit about news channels and how they're always spinning a story, right? And you can get whatever story you want on depending which news network, right? You want to go to Fox News or Newsmax or, you know, you can go to MSNBC or CNN or whatever, you know, all across the spectrum. But they're all narrating the story of America today, right?

But it's funny because they're all totally different. Same country, talking about the same political situation, talking about the same world, but they're all telling a story in such a way to get you concerned about this thing or concerned about this thing. They're trying to paint the world in light of a certain story. They're trying to narrate your world. And of course, we respond to it. We get anxious when we get into the story or we get hopeful.

We respond emotionally and we get tied up into these narratives. Here's what I'm saying. saying, what if the church, and I think this is what the church should be, what if the church was like doing that for the kingdom of God? What if we all together, we're sharing life together, hearing about the struggles that we're going through and saying, you know what, here's what God is doing.

And I know this because we're a part of this bigger story. And when we've already been talking about recently, and we'll talk about it again in a second, right? What if we were able to help each other re-narrate our lives so that our hopes and our expectations and our joys were caught up in Jesus. The thing is like, I could do that to myself, but I don't have the willpower. So I need to come here sometimes and be around Christians and be around fellow

believers because I need you to help me do that. So can I just ask you to help me do that? And I'll try to help you do it too, because I think that's what the church is really called to do. By the way, it is precisely what scripture does constantly. You won't be able to unsee this now. I'm really, you're welcome. You won't be able to unsee this now. Like even in 1 Peter, right? He goes on, here's a top shelf example of Peter doing re-narration for the church.

He says this, 1 Peter 2, 9. I skipped a couple of verses just to stay following this thread. 1 Peter 2, 9. You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praise of the one who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. I mean, this is just re-narration.

It's saying you might think of yourself as just a big, ugly pile of rejected rocks, right? You might think that your life doesn't amount to much at all. You might think you're a person who just doesn't have the willpower to turn away from their own sin and walk into grace. And it's like, maybe all that's true. He says, but I want you to locate yourself and I want to narrate your story according to what God says about you. And here's what God says about you as people who follow Jesus.

You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.

People for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. There's a calling, there's a story that you're a part of. God is doing something among you, and it has so that's attached to it. It has implications. The fact that we live in a particular kind of story that God is telling and that he is integrating us into, it has implications for us.

That's why we would turn away from malice and deceit and slander and envy and all this stuff. We would turn away from those because God is doing something else among us. He's sowing seeds of righteousness. And so if he's sowing seeds of righteousness, is that we participate in that by just letting him do the work of maturing us. We let him turn us into holy nation, people for his possession, people who are proclaiming praises instead of slandering.

And we're reminded, Peter is reminding them of a story. He says, you, once there was a time in your life, let me tell you the story of your life. There was a time in your life where you weren't God's people. There was a time in your life where you were just sitting in the pile and and you had very little hope, and you're maybe trying to buy into the story of the world for what useless rocks can be and their potential, right? It says, you once were not a people, but now you've received mercy.

Now you've received mercy. You were once not a part of that story. Now you're a part of that story. And all Peter is doing to encourage them, he's not telling them in a very simple way, these are principles for living your life. He's saying, here's the story that you're located in. Let me kind of narrate to you what's been going on. Let me kind of narrate to you what it means to be the church.

Let me remind you of your story because all the things that you ought to do, all the invitations that you have as the people of God to be a part of what he's doing. They come from the story of what he's doing in your life. You shouldn't be a person who's full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, because you choose to do it as if you have that strength. That's not your calling. You get to do those things because he's adopted you into a good, beautiful story.

We talked about that story last week, right? I have a slide to kind of visualize it, you know, like we are finding ourselves in the midst of this unfolding, big meta-narrative, big narrative about what the whole world looks like, right? The world begins with creation. God created the world good. Sin comes into the world, living in this time of the fall, right?

Where we are, we are stuck. Like we're called to great things, called to fellowship with God, but because of sin, like we are persistently drawn away from in fellowship with God. And like, we are looking for and anticipating the redemption of all things when the Messiah is going to come back, right? But what we know, because as Christians, we know that there's this other part of the story.

What the gospel is, is that there's this other part of the story, and I have another slide for it, is that the time of redemption of all things, because of Jesus Christ, has come into the present. That we are living in the future here in this moment. We are living as people of God here in the midst of a fallen world. That's the story you find yourself in.

You were once not a people. Jesus Christ came into the world for the sake of forgiveness, redemption, adoption. Calling people in the midst of a fallen world to live as if he is the king, as if he is Lord, as if all things have been restored, because for us, it has been. And so we're like living in this in-between time, this like we talked about last week. If I'm going to make a few references, if you want to know more about that, go back to last week.

This kind of already not yet thing, where we've already known like the power of God, his salvation, we're adopted into his kingdom, we're adopted into his plan, but we have not yet come into the full consummation of all things where Jesus is gonna be ruling and reigning and bringing peace over the whole world. We're not there yet, right? But we're in this first fruits time. We're in this time where we get to experience the care and the attention and the love of God.

Like we need to know the times that we're in and we need to be the sort of people who help each other live from that story. Because again, you are constantly being told, nah, that's not really the true story of the world. That's not really what's going on. Really, the true story of the world is the person with the most money and the most power is the happiest, which is so funny because it's so obviously not true.

But we tell ourselves that. We tell yourself that long enough and you'll live that way and you'll think it's true. Sorry, Sorry, I'm catching up on my notes. This is not a deep, reflective pause. This is a guy who's lost in his notes. I'm narrating. I was narrating there. So you're like, oh, you don't want to mistake it. I'm just less lost. Lookit, what I need to be somebody who lives on everyday mission, I don't need more willpower.

Again, my hopes are not very high for that. What I need is to wake up every morning and know what story I'm living in the middle of. Because that alone will give me the motive to seek after the thing that I need. It's really that simple. So you want to say, no, no, no. I'd rather just work harder and be like a better person. You know what the truth is? You aren't. You were made to be dependent on grace. Even at creation. Adam and Eve were not people of great integrity.

We kind of see that in the story. Right? The minute they're tempted, they fall, right? Because there's turning away from dependence upon God. So you're not actually supposed to be a person who has this great well of integrity in you. You're actually supposed to be a person who has the strong habit of dependence upon the grace of God, who just goes to God every single time, who's learned to walk that path over and over again, to walk the path of grace, to be dependent upon him.

And that's what I need for every everyday mission. I need to understand the story that I'm living in because as I understand that, then the implications of that, I'll start to want in my life. If I really understand, no, today as I wake up this day, I might feel sad or I might feel anxious or I might feel powerless. If I understand and said, actually, no, though I feel this way, That's a symptom of a broken world.

I am living in such a way that I'm anticipating the work of God here in my life right now because of what Jesus has done. Like I can anticipate and expect him to show up because of what Jesus has done. I can anticipate and expect God's faithfulness and forgiveness because of what Jesus has done. That's my faith. And so I operate according to that faith that I don't need to be ashamed when I sin. I actually can just walk right into the presence of God and just say,

God, I messed up. I did it again. again, I'm not going to choose shame. I'm not going to let shame narrate my story and then turn me away from you and to just like try to hide from you the way Adam and Eve did when they sinned. Instead, I say, I do feel bad about my sin, right? But I come to you with that shame and I understand that you take shame away every single time. That is the story of your life. You once were not a people. Now you're God's people. You once didn't have mercy.

Now you're people who know mercy. you know the mercy of God and so you can walk and depend on him in everything and I need to and I think you need to surround yourself with people who will narrate that story to you. And who will tell you about what is good for you to hope in, who will tell you and help you understand what it looks like for you to be a person who is called and adopted into this story. And it looks like so much more than just getting by. Like we're called to this.

I mean, the language that Paul uses sometimes is so gratuitous talking about like how we're being led into a procession of victory. Like that's what we are in Jesus Christ. Like we should be like, well, I don't want to be a part of the victory parade.

And Paul says, tough, that's the story you're in. you are receiving grace you're receiving the power of God like how are we so feeble and how are we so disinterested in being a part of what God is doing like it's just because we don't understand that we're really invited into something that's truly amazing and so we need to be people who are learning that ourselves and then sharing that with other people we need to be people who are telling the story to one another,

I need that from you and you need that from me and I honestly I don't think I do that that great I'll talk about the weather and I'll talk about all kinds of dumb things. So that's my bad. What I need to do is I need to learn the skill and we need to learn the skill of like artfully and lovingly helping each other reorient into the true story. That's the one thing. That's like the only thing there is, I think, for the church that we could work on. Newbegin, right?

I'm really into that. to that, that theologian, but he kind of lays out six things that the church does in order to, to just kind of navigate towards this. And I just love these things. So I have them up here. Oh, well, no. Yeah. This one. So what, no, no, go back. Go back. One more. Thank you. That one right there. Thanks, Caleb.

So we are to be, this is, I think how we sort of step into this and like, like, have some values that are in keeping with the story that we're living in. And I just love these, a community of praise in the culture of a suspicion, of culture of suspicion. Like we build each other up and we encourage each other. We don't slander, right? We encourage in the midst of a culture where everybody's doubtful and everybody thinks everybody's got a motive.

We can be people who praise in the midst of a culture of suspicion. We can be people of truth, of truth, a community of truth in the midst of a culture of relativism. We just say, you know what? Yeah, we understand that we live in a world that tells a different story about what's valuable and good and beautiful in human life. And it's like, man, we love people who see the world differently. At the same time, we're just people who just said, we're going to do it Jesus's way.

We're just going to stand on what Jesus has said is true and good and beautiful for human beings. And we do that humbly, right? But we encourage each other to do that. Man, we are surrounded by so much of the narrative of the greater Seattle area is, why does it really matter? Everyone can be a good person. And it's like, our message isn't, you're a bad person. Our message is, nobody's a good person. I'm not a good person. You're not a good person. We're all lying to ourselves. The way is grace.

And so we just stand on truth. We receive what God tells us. And we just say, this doesn't always make sense to me, but I'm taking it as the true story. And so I'm just going to live my life on this foundation of God's word and what he's told me. And I'll try to explain it the best I can. But sometimes I just say, in the midst of relativism, I'm just going to stand on truth. I'm just going to say, this is the choice I'm going to make.

And I'm going to going to plant my flag in here and it's okay. We can be a community of selfless involvement in the concerns of the neighborhood in the midst of a culture of selfishness. It's so funny, like you look at our world and it's like everyone would agree, oh, we got so many societal problems, even just within Seattle itself. A big problem with homelessness, big problem with housing prices, a big problem with, you know, whatever the thing is, right?

But yet so many few people are willing to do anything about it, right?

And so we can be called to be people who are just involved. involved we're just going to be involved and to know what our neighborhoods need our local areas need we're going to be a part of those things and we're going to we're going to understand that we can engage in the world and in our communities as if we're people who are living out this big story and what god is doing in jesus christ is he's raising up a nation of priests in the midst of a generation that doesn't know anything

about him and so we can be the sorts of people who are even in the public square, in our public lives, saying, hey, look, I'm just a Christian. I believe that God loves people. I believe that He cares about the poor. I believe that He wants to see human life flourish. And so I'm going to step in and be involved in my community in order to make that difference happen.

And we can be encouraging each other to do those things. We can be a community of people who live out your vocational callings for the sake of the world. So that is to say that you can just live your life as the Amazon programmer or nurse, doctor, whatever it is that you guys do, teacher. And you can just say, I am in this place to serve people, to better the world by what I'm doing in my everyday life.

And one of the hardest things, one thing I see a lot around here in Seattle, especially among younger professionals, is that everybody's like, yeah, I hate my job, but it pays a lot of money. I'm just going to do it for a while until I can retire and not do it anymore. And I totally get that. It's really the big reason I was never able to get a real job. Ministry is a real job, but you know what I mean, right? You know, like, I just, like, I couldn't get over that.

But I think there is so much more for us to do, guys. And there's probably some work we need to do. I smell a sermon series coming on of how do we do work, secular work, work in the corporate America here on the east side of Seattle in a way that is glorifying to God and that is rooted in the gospel even in the midst of, A world that is maybe a little bit opposed to the gospel. There, you can do beautiful work to the glory of God, and that's difficult sometimes.

Isn't that story so easy to forget when you're in another dumb meeting? Totally out the door. I do not want to be here. I do not think this is important, but you can be there and you can be a presence in your workplace for the sake of the world, for the sake of the gospel. And just be a sort of person who's able to be a light in the midst of your workplace. We can be encouraging one another to be a community of mutual responsibility and a culture of individualism and autonomy.

That is to say, people who look at problems and people who are hurting and just say, you know what? I'm going to be the solution to this thing. I'm not going to say, oh, somebody else will care about this person. Somebody else will do the thing. I'm I'm going to be the sort of person who's a part of that. Why? Because I once wasn't a person. I once was not a recipient of mercy. God did this for me.

And so how could I not be in the world as a giver of mercy, as a person who cares about other people and who takes the initiative and the responsibility to reach out to them. And then we can be a community of hope in the midst of a culture of despair. And man, like, this is the thing, like we live in this pluralistic society.

Society everybody's got a slant everybody's got to read everybody's got a narrative a story to tell about the world but none of them are very hopeful about them and the way that people just exchange one hope for a next hope it gets demoralizing over time you know you like i'm i just turned 40 i know you you've noticed the wisdom right you notice suddenly he's like oh you know he's not he's not quite as dumb as he used to be i'm not supposed to say dumb sorry Sorry, one of those words.

When your friends turn 40 along with you, you start to realize they're grasping at more and more straws. In your 20s and your 30s, things go pretty well for the most part. Obviously, some people deal with tragedy early on in life. But most people, for the most part, are doing all right. They're moving along in their careers. They found their spouse, and it's great, and everything's great.

But then people start to get older, older and you hit around your late 30s and your early 40s and people start to get divorced and people die. People get cancer. Again, all this stuff can happen when you're young. People's careers start to just kind of fall apart. They get fired. They don't know what to do with their lives anymore. Their marriages become unsatisfying. They start fighting with one another.

You know, You know, people like, like couples start to drift apart, like the, the euphoria and all the, the chemicals that, that bonded you guys together in the early days, they just start to, you just kind of get down to, to stasis and then you just start to pursue other things. Right. At some point in life, like you, people just start to realize that I was living this story and I thought it was going to satisfy me and it doesn't anymore. more.

And so people start to just grab this thing and the next thing and do this other thing. And we just see it all the time. I mean, I see it here sometimes. I don't want to call anybody out. Like it's the normal human condition. The older we get, we're looking for hope. We're desperate to grasp onto something, something to fix our problems, something to give us the satisfaction that we think we deserve and that we need in life.

And so we just try other things. And then people get get into their 50s and 60s, having tried every solution, and they finally realize nothing's going to satisfy. Nothing's going to satisfy. Some people get there earlier, but we can be the people who just say, you know what? Yeah, you're right. All of these other stories that you're trying to live after, they're not going to satisfy. There's only one thing that's going to satisfy. Knowing the Lord, walking in life, being forgiven.

We can be people who are handing out hope in the midst of a culture of despair. And I think we've gotten to this place where we think that it's kind of rude for us to share our story. And it's not. It's actually the kindest thing. You can do it. I mean, you can do it in a rude way. Don't get me wrong. Some people are telling a story and like, I'm not sure if that's the Jesus story, buddy. The way you're telling it, like you're pretty angry about it, right?

But if we can be people who are one, encouraging one another to hope, but being in the the world as people of hope and who are holding up that hope for other people saying, Hey, look, I was once a person who didn't know God. I was stuck. I was, was, was alone. I was like falling after these, these things that the world told me, but suddenly God found me and he forgave me. And it's so good. Like there's, there's hope. And it's not, it's like, it's not like it's immediately satisfying.

But God is faithful. We can invite people to be a part of that hope. Peter wraps things up, and the worship team can come up here as we're wrapping up here as well. He wraps things up in 1 Peter 2.11. He says, Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from the sinful desires that wage war against your soul.

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day that he visits. So he leaves them with this instruction, right? To act yourself, act as strangers and exiles and to abstain from the sinful desires that wage war against your soul. What he's saying is like, yeah, like the world has a story it's telling.

In fact, in our world, there's multiple stories being told and we're told that we can choose anything, that life is like a all-you-can-eat buffet. He says, but you need to be people who know that all-you-can-eat buffets are gross.

Like, you need to be a stranger, a pilgrim who knows, like, man, we have a certain diet that we want to partake in as Christians. We have a certain thing, a certain story that we're standing on, a certain set of truth. We have the word of God and we're standing on it, and we're wanting to let that thing be what nourishes us. I mean, it's like exactly how Daniel was when he came into Babylon. He was a stranger in an exile.

And what the Babylonians wanted to do is to train up this captive Israelite group of younger people and make them good Babylonians. And what Daniel said, you know the story, I think it's Daniel 2. Daniel comes in and they're trying to give him a bunch of food that is unclean food for Jewish people to eat. And he says, I'm not going to eat that. I'm going to just eat stuff that we're allowed to eat. And you test this, whether it's good, right?

So he's there, he's kind of sticking out like a sore thumb in Babylon and saying, because I'm just going to stand on what I know is true. And I'm going to stand on God's word because I actually believe that by doing that, I'm going to be. A flourishing human being. And that's how Daniel 2 turns out. They're shocked that Daniel is so healthy and so vital in the midst of all of that. But I mean, being a stranger in an exile involves being a little strange, right? I mean, that's what it is.

Part of being a stranger is that you're a little strange and you're okay with not jumping into the stories and the narratives that other people are doing, right? It's just because, as Peter says, those things are actually you're warring against your soul. You're warring against your soul. If you want to have a fruitful life, you have to live in the story.

You have to live as a citizen of the country which Jesus has adopted you into, as the sort of person who you've been made because of the mercy and love and grace of Jesus Christ. And so we're to conduct ourselves with honor. We construct ourselves in a way in keeping and in consistent with what God has called us to. And he says, and the result of that will be, I think like he says here, it's just going to be mission.

He says, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day that he visits. So, I mean, like that's the invitation. That's the invitation. It's not, again, to just drive it home here. It's not be a good Christian, like do a great job in your own strength and in your own power, live into this other narrative.

It's surround yourself and let's be the sort of a church who surrounds ourselves with telling ourselves the right story and helping ourselves get oriented and live into our true calling as people of God, live into the story that God has called us to. We can be bold enough for that, but we need one another for that.

As we jump in next week, we're just going to talk really practically about how we can be people who share that story with one another and who share that story with other people, not believers and stuff like that. Because I think that actually does take a little bit of thoughtfulness and a little bit of work and a little bit of instruction. But as we just get into worship here, all I want us to do is to invite the Holy Spirit come here and convict us, right?

If there's things that we're doing, if we're living into some other kind of story, then we just want to be aware of that, right? And do what we're called to do, which is just not try harder next time, not be a better person. It's confess our sins. He's just to forgive us. He's gracious. He's faithful. And he'll call us into something better.

So why don't we stand up and we're just going to pray for a moment here and ask the Lord to build us up. So come Holy Spirit, Lord, we thank you. We thank you, God, that we stand here together, Lord, and we stand in your presence, God. We thank you, Lord, that we're a people, Lord, a people with a story, with a common narrative. And Lord, we want to be excited about that.

Lord, would you tell us how to live in this new story, the story of grace, mercy, see forgiveness, empowerment from your spirit, Lord? Would you tell us how to be people who are overflowing with joy and praise? This is not by our willpower that we're going to do these things, but it's by... It's by you showing us, Lord, through your people and through your word, where we live, what time, what is the time that we're living in here, Lord.

In this time right before when you're going to come back, whenever that is, Lord, we expect it and anticipate for you to come and to establish your kingdom and to wipe away every tear and to reconcile all things for you to be on the throne, Jesus. But even as we stand here in this moment, Lord, we know that you are Lord of all.

And so we, as people who confess that, Lord, we want to be people who are living into that story and living in these times, Lord, expecting you to move among us. And so God, if we've been caught up in another story, Lord, we want to repent of that. But Lord, we want your conviction. We want you to reveal to us what it is, what it is that we've been hoping in that is not worthy of our hope. What it is that we've been seeking after that's just not in keeping with what you call us to.

God, root us into your story. Root us into what you've done, like to be people who are just so excited about this, Lord, and to be people who are being used by you to build one another up. God, we need your presence among us and we need each other in this walk. So God, would you move among us, we pray. We worship you right now, Lord. We wait upon you. Would you lead us? All right, let's go into some worship here.