Teaching | What Does It Mean To Be Human? | Garden City E01

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Homer teachings podcast. My name is Inga Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to have you with us. We're starting a new series today as we celebrate the re-release of John Mark's book, Garden City, in hard copy. Garden City is one of our favourites among our staff at Practice in the Way, so we're excited for this new edition.

It's available for pre-order now, but will officially release on November 18th of this year. John Mark originally taught these series at Bridgetown when the book first released. For this first teaching, John Mark asked an important and ancient question. What does it mean to be human, encouraging us that our lives and callings are deeply significant? Here's John Mark.

Hey, tonight we kick off a brand new series, which is always fun. I had a book come out a couple of weeks ago called Garden City, Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human. And a while back, the elders asked me if I would do a little bit of teaching around the ideas in the book. So I said, sure, but you already have the book. want it, it's out there for seven bucks, I think. So the series will not be a carbon copy. We will cover the basic ideas in the book, in particular this weekend and next.

But then we will take that as a launching pad to jump out into a whole bunch of extra stuff on Sabbath that I'm really looking forward to, as well as a conversation around kind of the essentialism movement right now and the idea of living an unbusy life.

life and a well-curated kind of life with our possessions, as well as the whole conversation around labor ethics. So it should be a really great fall. And I think the next step forward in growth and maturity as Bridgetown Church for a lot of us is really... really living into our identity and our calling who God made you to be and what God made you to do. Because when you figure that out and then when you live after it, that's when really beautiful stuff happens. So the plan for tonight...

night is basically to frame the series with a biblical theology of work. That phrase biblical theology is actually a technical term in scholarship. What that means is when you take an idea and you trace it all the way through the scriptures from generate from Genesis all the way through to Revelation. And as you read the library that is scripture, author after author, you start to get a big picture of what God behind it all is actually saying. So that's the plan for tonight. Genesis 1, turn.

in your Bibles if you want. And let's pray. Jesus, thank you so much for my church family. It is such an honor to be one of the leaders here, just to live in this city. in this time in church history, to live and be a part of Bridgetown. What a gift, and I thank you for it tonight. And we invite you, Holy Spirit. I have all sorts of... thoughts in my head and notes on my iPad that I want to unleash into this community. But God, at the end of the day, we need you to speak.

And over the next week or two or three, I pray, God, would you, in a fresh, creative, new way, maybe for the first time, maybe for the thousandth time, Would you speak identity and calling over every single man and woman and even teenager and child here? And would you shape this church into the people of Jesus for this city, for this time?

Amen. No matter what your ethnic or religious background, or how old you are, or where you come from on the socioeconomic spectrum, we all ask the core question, what does it mean to be human? Or put another way, what is the meaning of life? Or what is the purpose of life? Is there any?

And every religion and form of spirituality, and in fact every ism known to man, comes up with some kind of an answer to this primal ancient question. Even atheism has an answer. There is no meaning or purpose to life. is a glorious accident therefore it's what you make of it and no more.

Now in the church, we usually come up with a spiritual sounding kind of answer. I think of the famous, and if you did not grow up in the church, maybe you don't know this, but I think of the famous Westminster Catechism, the chief end of man. is to glorify God and anybody know? Enjoy him forever.

Sure. I mean, of course, if you're a follower of Jesus, who's going to disagree with that, right? Who's going to stand up? No, it's not. Like, no, we would kick you out or at least glare at you or something, right?

But the scriptures, here's the thing, the scriptures actually open with a very different kind of answer, one that is a lot more down to earth. Literally, Genesis chapter 1, look down at verse 26. Then God said, let us make mankind... in our image notice that language in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground so

God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them, remember that for later, and said to them, be fruitful. and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves along the ground. There it is on page one, staring you and me in the face all along. Why did God create human being? Well, we read flat out, so that they may rule.

In Hebrew, it's even more explicit. It can be translated, in order that they may rule. Now, this language of ruling is a bit odd to you and me in the modern world. I doubt that the last time your boss asked you what you were doing, you said, I'm ruling over my email.

Or, honey, how was your day? I'm just ruling over my child right now. Or you're ruling over Excel or ruling over this latte or whatever it is. It sounds a little 80s, so maybe if that's your gig. But other than that, it's not language that you and I employ on a regular basis. Now, the word rule in Hebrew is radah. Can you say that? Well done. And it can be translated rule or reign or have dominion. It's the language of royalty.

Adam and Eve in the story here are created as God's king and queen to rule over the world on God's behalf, gathering up the creation's praise and worship and somehow giving it back to the creator himself.

This is what it means to be made in the image of God. And make sure you catch that. Over the last three or so decades, there have been all sorts of shifts in scholarship around this idea of the image of God. People used to say, and I remember this from when... I was growing up, that to be made in the image of God means that we are like God.

But more recently, scholars have started to say, actually, that's wrong. That idea is right. We are like God. But we get that from the word likeness, not from the phrase, the image of God. In the ancient Near East, that phrase, the image of God, was a well-known idiom, and it was used for one person and one person only, for the king. For example, in Egypt, Pharaoh was called Amun-Ra, or image of Ra, the sun god.

in the Egyptian pantheon. Ramses, in fact, means Ra is the one who begot him. The king was thought of as quasi-divine, a priest-like mediator between God or the gods and Egypt or Assyria or Babylon. or whatever. Now think about the implications of this. This meant that everybody else was not the image of God, which, it turned out, meant that everybody else was essentially slave labor to do Pharaoh's bidding.

Set over against ancient Near Eastern culture, the Genesis story was, and still is today, provocative and subversive. It says, no, we are all made in the image of God. This is the democratizing of humanity. It's God saying, I want all of you, not just the king, not just the oligarchy or the elite of society, not just those educated at an Ivy League, not just rich white men. I want all of you together as humans.

humanity, male and female, to rule over my fledgling world. And this is a call that most of us feel deep in our DNA. Why is it that every single Disney movie is about the exact same thing? A street orphan or a child from abject poverty or whatever does something heroic, something selfless, something whatever, and becomes a what?

A prince, not just a hero, but a prince or a princess becomes royalty. And it's not just Disney. We see this in story after story from Chronicles of Narnia to epic after epic, like The Lord of the Rings, even Star Wars, everything. at the end of the day comes back to Star Wars. What is Luke Skywalker, right? He is a poor, dirt poor, orphan, stuck.

with his aunt and uncle as a moisture farmer on an empty, abandoned planet at the edge of the outer rim. He's nothing. But he does something heroic, and it turns out he's actually royalty. Like why? It's the exact same story. Movie after movie, book after book, song after song. Why is that? I would argue because it taps into a deep incumbent part of our humanity.

We were born with a desire to matter, to live a life of meaning and significance. Where does this drive come from? It's not evolutionary. It doesn't make sense by that paradigm. So where does it come from? I would argue that God put it there deep in our bones, that you were made in the image of God.

Every one of you, if you're a follower of Jesus or not, either way, you have an inherent dignity and self-worth to you and purpose over your life. You were made in the image of God, made to rule over God's world.

and ruling is one heck of a job. One Hebrew scholar that I love translated the word radah this way, to actively partner with God in taking the world forward. So it turns out that ruling is a lot like what you and I in the modern world call work. Now, when I say work, please don't just think about your job. Okay, it's that. But work is way broader than what you get paid for. of work is unpaid. If you're a parent, is that work?

Absolutely. And you don't get paid a dime. In fact, they charge you a lot of money. If you volunteer here at Bridgetown or in foster care or refugee care, that's all work that you don't get paid for. Plus, there's all this stuff of everyday life. life, cooking dinner, cleaning up the house, yard work, making art or music, writing a blog or a novel, all of this falls into the category of work. So over the next month or two, as we think and talk in depth about work, please don't

Just think about your job. Yes, that front and center, but don't just think about Adidas or Why Didn't Kennedy or your living room or wherever it is that you work. Think about all the work that is set before you. Does that make sense? Yes?

Great. Now, that said, it's not just any kind of work that we are called to. Turn the page over to Genesis chapter 2 and skip down to verse 8. The story goes on. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east. in Eden. That's a Hebrew word meaning delight. And there he put the man that he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food, beauty and functionality.

In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, stay with me. This next paragraph is a little bit dense, but don't wander. Stay with me. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden. From there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon. It winds with the entire land of Havilah where there is gold. The gold of that land is good.

The name of the second river is the Gihon. It winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris. It runs along the east side of Asher. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put... him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Notice all the random odd stuff in that paragraph from verse 10 all the way to verse 14. The gold of that land is good. Apparently there's gold that's not good. I'm not sure.

Aromatic resin and onyx are also there. Have you ever read that? You read through the Bible in a year. It's January 1. You're fresh into a brand new set of, you know, whatever, goals for the coming year. You get to that paragraph. Have you ever thought to yourself, in all honesty, Who freaking cares? Why? If you're honest with you, why is that in the Bible? Like, why do I need to know about...

aromatic resin and onyx and the gold of that land was good and there was a river here and there was a river there. The whole thing's gone anyway, right? Why is that there? Listen, the writer of Genesis is saying that the garden is made up of raw materials, a tree, a forest, a rock, a river. Precious minerals down beneath the earth's crust, energy in the wind, raw materials. And human, in the story here, is called to work it and take care of it.

Let's take each one of those in turn. First off, he is called to work it. That word work is abad in Hebrew, and it can be translated cultivate or develop or draw out something's potential. The one and only Tim Keller... defines work this way, rearranging the raw materials of a particular domain to draw out its potential for the flourishing of everyone. How good is that?

This rhythm is found in all sorts of work. When a farmer, for example, takes soil and seed and water and wind and sun and rearranges it into a crop teeming with life for people to eat. eat and live off and celebrate and enjoy. When a graphic designer takes a shape and a color palette and a typeface and he rearranges it into something coherent and catchy and beautiful.

When a mom or a dad takes a body and a soul and food and exercise and care and education and rearranges it into a human being who can actually contribute to society. All of this is the work of cultivation. In fact, our word culture comes straight out of this idea of cultivation. Good culture is the result of even better people hard at work to rearrange, in colorless language, the raw stuff of planet Earth into a place of...

of delight. So first, we are called to work it. Then secondly, we are called to take care of it. In Hebrew, that word is shamar, and it can be translated guard or watch over or protect. The first human being was an environmentalist, and we should be too, wherever you land on the sociopolitical spectrum. We live in this ongoing tension, never more acute than right now in human history, to both work the earth and...

take care of the earth. This fine line between development and stewardship is at the heart of the human vision. So work it and take care of it. This means that we're not just called to any kind of work, just to pay the bills or whatever. Some work isn't creative at all. In fact, it is destructive.

to the earth or the environment, to the human brain, to the economy, to the developing world, to sexuality, to marriage. I think of the ongoing conversation that we're right in the middle of around labor ethics, the fact that most clothing in the United States of America is made by slaves. We're now at a point where one in six human beings on the planet is a garment worker, almost all of whom make less than $2 a day. So slavery sounds a lot like 30% off.

This is not creative work. This is destructive work. We are called to a very specific kind of work to make a garden-like world where image bearers can flourish and thrive no matter where.

what part of the world they were born in, no matter where they land on the socioeconomic scale. After all, you and I are just supposed to continue what Adam and Eve started in the beginning. And here's what you have to understand. The garden was dynamic. not static. Or put another way, it was a project, not a product, meaning the garden was designed to go somewhere. When you think of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, like conjure that image up in your mind's eye, all right?

Please don't envision Adam and Eve, you know, sitting on the beach in a hammock, sipping Mai Tais and reading Vogue or whatever, or whatever your image of the, maybe that's my like weird, whatever, but whatever your image is. All right. No, instead, imagine Adam hard at work, sweat on his brow, Eve right there, smile on her face. And when you think of the garden, don't think of a garden in the sense of a public park.

play set in the middle for the kids and a nice tidy lawn. And then there's a path that goes around the edge. And God says, okay, Adam, here's a lawnmower and some weed eater and some, you know, like all like good environmental like stuff. Like here, keep it tidy, will you? No, imagine a wild, vast wilderness teeming with life and beauty and potential, but no order.

No infrastructure, no road, no bridge, no city, no government, no society, no civilization. And God says, Adam and Eve, together, go make a world. That's the idea. That's why when you get to the end of the Bible, to the Revelation, in fact, turn there right now, all the way to the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22.

The last two chapters of the Bible are all about the future. And this is so beautiful. They are dripping with allusion after allusion to the Garden of Eden. For example, let's read one paragraph. Revelation chapter... 22 verse 1. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life.

As clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the Lamb.

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city and his servants will serve him. They will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. You will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And listen to this. They will reign, or that can be translated rule, forever and ever.

Notice all of the language, the tree of life, the river. No longer will there be any curse, end quote. They will reign or rule forever and ever, end quote. This is Genesis language. This is king and queen language. This is Garden of Eden language. The writer John is saying that the future is the return to the past. It's the return to the Garden of Eden. But notice, listen, it's not exactly a garden anymore. It's a garden-like city.

Why? That's a little bit odd to me, right? You would think that if Jesus' agenda is to fix everything that's gone awry in human history and in the universe, that the story would end back where it started with everybody in the Garden of Eden, naked and unashamed.

Instead of just Adam and Eve, now there's like a billion, two billion, however many people there all together. But that's not the ending of the story at all. Instead, it's similar but different. It's not a garden. It's a garden-like city. It has culture. It has art, if you read chapter 21, and architecture and food and drink and music and fashion. And when you get to chapter 22, it has walls and gates and streets and dwellings and measurement and urban planning. Why?

is that it's because the garden was never supposed to stay a garden it was always supposed to become a garden like city that's what human was created for That is our meaning and our purpose in life. That is what it means to be human. Now, are you doing okay out there? You alive? You awake? You look a little sleepy. I can't tell if it's me or if it's the rain.

but I'm going to play the victim card and say it's the rain, all right? It was a wet, soggy day. I went for a run and a swim at the same time this morning in Forest Park. It was fantastic. And here you are in the cold. Now, let's take a step back and talk about what all this means for tomorrow morning when you wake up and you go about your work or whatever it is you do with your life. First off...

I think this means that work is a blessing, not a curse. And that is the starting place for this conversation. On a semi-regular basis, I hear people mutter something like, you know, work, it's the curse. You ever hear that? No? Okay. I think maybe you say that a lot, and that's why you're quiet. I don't know. Maybe that's just me. But nothing could be further from the truth. Work is cursed, yes, if you know the story. Genesis 3, after sin comes into the picture, we read this.

this just gut-wrenching paragraph. God speaks over Adam and Eve this, cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. And the story goes on. Something is now off in humans' relationship to the ground. What was once life-giving has become painful toil. Thorns and thistles are symbolic for all the frustration and angst and ennui. that plague now all of human endeavor.

Around the world, most people live hand to mouth. They work all day long just to eke out a living. We're going to talk a ton about your dream and your calling and what you feel like God made you for. That's a conversation that most of the world doesn't have. even get to have.

Even here in the U.S., the middle class is fast disappearing. Portland is now the most, you remember that story from last year, Washington Post? We are officially now, by statistics, the most over-educated city in America, which is a weird stat, because educated 20 and 30...

somethings are moving to the city in droves. The reason that your latte tastes so amazing is because your barista has a PhD from Stanford. Like that's why it's so dang good, you know? This is the world that we now, and not to make light of that, this is now the world.

we live in. Work that you love is a luxury that very few people, even here in the U.S., get to enjoy. Even those of you who are in your dream job, it's still marked, you know this, by office politics and stress and the nonstop nature of the digital age and an email on Sunday morning and the quest for contentment and materialism. All of this work is cursed officially. Unemployment or underemployment, ibuprofen, workplace gossip, I need a vacation.

more days until the weekend. All of it is living proof of that. But listen, work itself is actually blessing. In fact, if you think back to Genesis 1, it's the first blessing in all of the Bible. God blessed them and said, quote, be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over the world that God had just.

made. This is exactly, if it helps at all, the same as childbearing. So if you know the story, childbearing is also cursed, but we don't say that children are the curse. I mean, maybe you say that if you're a mom or a dad, but you should not. That's not a great thing. We'll talk about that offline. That's a whole other teaching.

The reality is that children are a blessing, but because of sin, childbearing is now painful, and parenting is hard, and it's difficult, but it's still a good thing. The same is true with work. It's a blessing that has been twisted out of shape by sin, for sure. But it's still beautiful.

It's easy to lose sight of that in between email and staff meeting or another hour to clock in or getting up at 5 a.m. for your morning commute on your bicycle in the freezing cold rain, whatever it is. But work is a blessing. that we need to thank God for every single day.

People who know this better than anybody are the unemployed or people who are on disability who want to work so bad but can't. Even people who retire young. I know a number of people who made a ton of money at an early age and said, I'm out, like to do whatever, golf or whatever my thing is at 30, 40 years old. And to a T, not all, but almost every single one of them is grouchy. No offense if that's you.

and cantankerous and angsty. It's like they lost this part of who they are. And it's because whether you need the money or not, God created you to do more than play. golf, like God created you to rule over the world, to unleash your creative potential into the human story. Secondly, if you're taking notes, I think this means, if this view of humanness is right,

It means that what has been called the sacred-secular divide needs to be smashed into a million pieces. The sacred-secular divide is something we talk about on a regular basis here, and it's this Neoplatonic idea that goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers. It predates Jesus. Basically, the idea is this. This is a gross oversimplification, but here's the basic idea. There is a sacred or a spiritual divide.

world, and then there is a secular or a physical world. The sacred world, the spiritual world, matters to God and in the grand scheme of heaven and hell and eternity, but the secular world really doesn't. The problem is, by this definition, most of life is secular, right? And thereby, by default, most of life doesn't really matter. Most of life is spent not in prayer or Bible study or at church or in worship, as beautiful of all that stuff is, but most of life is spent grocery shopping.

or walking your dog or brushing your teeth or reading at the park or doing yoga with your wife or eating a burrito and then feeling bloated afterwards, but less so if you just finished doing yoga. This... is the stuff of everyday life. And the damage that the sacred-secular divide has done to the church, in particular in the U.S., is nothing short of catastrophic. And here is why all of life matters to God.

hear nothing else tonight, hear that. All of life matters to God. That is the problem with the sacred-secular divide. It breaks up life into a thousand tiny compartments. You have your God box and it's over here. And then you have your work box and your money box and your entertainment box and your sexuality box and your friendship box and your schedule box. And God becomes just another compartment in your already overcrowded, over busy life.

another line item in your budget, another slot in your iCal, Sunday night, 6 to 8 p.m., 5 to 7 p.m., like I said. So many people don't see the connection between following Jesus and engineering. or design, or project management, or parenting, or whatever. They think of work as over here and following Jesus as over here, as two separate things that never really intersect other than maybe tithing.

or something like that. So their work is usually not shaped by the way of Jesus. In fact, for a number of good, well-meaning people, their work is actually at odds with the way of Jesus. Or vice versa, their faith and their spirituality, their understanding of what it means to be the people of Jesus has little or no bearing on their everyday life, what it is that we actually give the lion's share of our life to, which for most of us...

us is our work. And this is basically, this is not to blame you. If anything, this is the church's fault. It's the responsibility of guys like me. Often in the church, we spend the majority of our time teaching people how to spend the minority of their life. life, teaching you how to do all this beautiful, meaningful, important God step, Jesus step, which is fantastic.

but not necessarily how to be an accountant and a follower of Jesus, how to be a banker and a follower of Jesus, how to be a teacher and a follower of Jesus, how to be a psychologist and a follower of Jesus, or whatever it is. And so we have to get... back to this wide, panoramic, holistic view of life. But oddly enough, there's actually a lot of pushback. Whenever I teach on this, there's a lot of pushback on this idea. Some people, it turns out, actually like to have a God box and a work.

box that are separate and held at arm's length for all sorts of different reasons. But that is just not the life that Jesus had in mind. One of the things that I love to tell people who push for the sacred-secular divide is that in the Hebrew language, there is no word for spiritual. And a lot of you know this. If you look up, if you go to BibleGateway.org or whatever tonight when you get home and use such a search engine for the...

Bible, and you search the word spiritual in what we now call the Old Testament, which was the Bible of Jesus' day, Genesis to Malachi, search the word spiritual, zero results. Like, it's not there. There's not even a word in the Hebrew language for spiritual. And when you get to the New Testament, it's there. It's really only used by Paul, not by Jesus. And Paul means it in a very different way than most people talk about spiritual.

spirituality today. It's a whole other teaching I don't have time for. My point is that if you had, I think, John Mark's opinion here, I think that if you had asked Jesus, hey Jesus, how's your spiritual life? I think he would have looked back at you really confused, for starters. Spiritual? First, I'm not familiar with that word. What exactly do you mean by that? Oh, weird. Okay. Well, do you mean my life? Because by that definition, all of my life is spiritual.

Now, that doesn't mean that all of life is good. A lot of things are evil. It doesn't mean that everything matters to an equal degree. Some stuff matters a lot more than other stuff, for sure. But all of life matters to God. For Jesus and the writers of Scripture, the point of...

life isn't to escape planet earth and go somewhere else called heaven, even though that's maybe even the dominant theme in the U.S. No, it's to join in the garden project here to get dirt under our fingernails as we work for a garden-like world. It's about spiritual life crashing into all of life. And it's about waking up to the fact that we live in a God-saturated world, that he is all around you, closer than the air you breathe.

So that. And finally, if you're taking notes, and then we'll be done, I deeply believe this means that we, every single one of you, if you're a follower of Jesus, we need to dream and to work hard and to wait patiently. for whatever it is that God has buried deep inside of us. This next part might feel a little self-helpy and just give me a little grace, all right? But I really feel like this is from the Spirit for Bridgetown Church.

The odds are that deep inside of you is a dream, some kind of a desire or an idea or a vision or an ache or a longing or an anger or a passion, something that you just can't shake, some whisper in the back of your mind. essentially says, this is who you are, and this is what you are called to do. This is your future, but it's not your present. And a lot of the time, I think we don't really know what to do with that whisper, right? So we ignore it or we push it out or we justify it.

Or we give in to fear and fear drowns it out. Or we idolize it and we chase after it, you know, to an extreme degree, whatever. But what if that whisper is actually the voice of God speaking your identity and calling over you? If so, then think about it. You actually have a responsibility before God, before your church.

in your community, before humanity itself, to be who God made you to be and do what God made you to do. And we'll get into that more next weekend. For most of us, this will mean years, if not decades of hard work. and dedication and long hours and success and failure and patience. I think of that beautiful line in the book of Hebrews, quote, be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherited what had been promised.

So many of us give up before we ever realize the promise of God. In that exchange between what God's promise promised over your life and are at the same time human free will and autonomy and responsibility. I think often in that exchange, so much is lost because we give up. a year too early, or a decade too early, or however long it is. What has God promised you? And what I mean by that is when you are alone with God,

What is it that you feel like to the best of your ability to know in your community around you, the Holy Spirit is stirring deep inside of you? Is there a whisper? Some of you might say, no, there's nothing. But others of you know there is a whisper. There's something deep in you. You just get this sense. This is it. All I want to say tonight is let that out and keep after it and don't give up. Most of us, I think, are too scared to dream.

Because the odds of letdown are really high, right? In particular, as we talk about job and work, you come of age during, say, the Great Recession. Like, it's hard not to be cynical. A lot of us, in particular in a city like Portland, and I love this city so much. But it is a cynical city. I think we're kind of just a cynical generation. And Portland's just extra good at it, you know?

Like there's a lot of realists which are just, you know, pessimists in denial, right? Like there's just so, you all know that by the way, right? There's no such thing as a realist. But like there's so much just angst and cynicism and ass. In particular, in this city, there's such a spirit of laziness, right? It's such a city that's, and I love this city. So I can critique it as an insider, but there's such a spirit of just kind of a hedonistic, eh, why try? It's not going to happen anyway.

Like that's just not the way of Jesus. And that's not the heart of the father over his son and over his daughter. I'm a dad. I have two little boys. I'm exhausted right now because both my boys have a birthday six days apart. Moses was yesterday. We did a birthday party and slumber party last night. And sleep just was a rare phenomenon last night. And stress was just all over the place. It was fantastic. That's sarcasm. It was really stressful. But they had a great time. They had the time.

of their life. But as I think about my boys, I dream over my boys. And I don't want to mold them into my own image. I want to figure out who did God make Jude to be and who did God make Moses to be. And I want to unleash that latent potential into the world. That is a good father's heart. I want more than just food and shelter, and I'm happy. I want them to be who God made them to be and do what God made them to do.

How much more so is the Father who made all of creation exactly the same over you, his son, or his daughter? Whether you're a follower of Jesus and are a son or a daughter, or not a follower of Jesus, and I've yet to become that, that is still the heart of God. over your life. And if that's you tonight, I just want to give you the freedom tonight to dream. I really don't think I have that authority, but what the heck, I'm just going to go for it and see what happens. All right?

I just want to give you that freedom to dream and to dream again. And then just one last word before we wrap up. When you dream, please, and please listen to me, don't dream flat, one-dimensional American dreams about more money. or a hot spouse or more followers on Instagram or whatever your thing is.

Like that is just so tired and cliche and overdone. We just don't need any more of that. There's plenty already. Dream actually not smaller than that, but larger than that. Past your own personal tower of Babel. to Jesus and his vision for the kingdom of God. Dream for great things. Please dream for great things. But redefine greatness around the economy of the kingdom and a new reality where the last are first and the first. are last. So to end the night, tomorrow morning...

When you crawl out of bed and you go to the office or the job site or the classroom, if you're a student, that's your work for this season of your life, that's your calling, or the kitchen or whatever it is you do with your 24 hours of oxygen. May you see your... work, not, and this is how a lot of people think about it, not as a job to make money so that you can get off work and go do something else. Man, what a miserable way to live. But may you instead As you wake up tomorrow,

May you realize that you're not just making a new app for Urban Airship or looking after an account for Verizon or designing a new shoe for Adidas or raising a child or pouring a cup of coffee or building a house. You, whatever it is you do, you are ruling. over the world.

You are being that king, that queen, that image of God that you were created to be all along. Your work as a nurse or an engineer or a barista or a teacher or a full-time parent might not feel like much in the grand scheme of things. It might just feel like another diaper.

or another class, or another latte, but it is. You together with the other seven plus billion people on the planet, and together with God himself, with Jesus at the center of it all, you are pushing and pulling the garden project forward. And you are not alone in your cubicle tomorrow. Anybody here work in a cubicle? Can we just have prayer and ministry time for you afterwards? You're not alone. Any checkers here behind that counter? Yeah, that's right. Trader Joe's. TG, my man. Thank you.

Where else can you get wine for $2.50? It's just the best. I'm just so yuppie over here, you know? Yeah, it's really bad. I know, but it's cheap. It's okay. Anyway, I get paid monthly, so by the last week, it's always two-but-chuck. That's a whole separate conversation. As a student, their math class, math 65 at prison community college or wherever you're at. Like... It feels so in the moment, it can feel so empty, but it's not. You are not alone. God is there with you right at your side.

And all of your life is spiritual. And all of your life matters to God because we live in a world with no compartments. Let's pray.

What an inspiring teaching. We'll talk more later in the series about discerning our identity and calling and what that means for what we do. But our calling isn't just about what we do. It's also about how we do. In Colossians 3 verse 23, Paul says, Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters.

Whatever our work is, how we do it is an important part of our calling. So today, let's wrap up by asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us about how he's calling us to live and work. If you'd like, pause and take a few deep breaths with me. Bring in your awareness to God's presence. Then... Bring to mind the next thing you have to do today. Whether it's a task to complete, a conversation to have, an errand or something else.

And with that thing in mind, ask this with me. Holy Spirit, how do you want me to do my next thing? It may be an attitude to adopt, like do it with joy. or an idea like start by saying a prayer or try it this way. I'll leave 30 seconds here for you to listen and close with amen. Amen.

This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks to Little Thoughts for our show music. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit, so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Ashley from Drapery, Utah.

Jennifer from Melbourne, Florida. Rebecca from Leicester, Leicestershire. Landon from Prescott, Arizona. And Ethan from Valrico, Florida. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or to learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Be with you all.