Every day, we face so many different philosophies of life. A lot of them are kind of hippy-feel-good ones. Sometimes, you’ll come across quite heartless ones. But the philosophy you cling onto will make ALL the difference in life. A bad one will wreck you beyond imagination. But the right philosophy will make you into the greatest and most fulfilled version of yourself. The person God made you to be.
And our bible passage today gives us really good tools, signs that help you know you’re on the right path. And it has to do with being willing to reject and ditch the philosophies of many people around us.
Our focus today is this question:
What are some signs that show us we’re on the right track in life?
1 – The right track is narrow and rare. 2 – The right track is led by excellent role models.
Think about the ideas that we buy into; not just believe but actually live by:
“Retail therapy” “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong.” “Prove them wrong with your success” “Work smarter, not harder as an excuse to never work hard.”
Victim mindsets and blame shifting. There’s something attractive about these things. They are ways of maximizing pleasure and comfort and minimizing pain and discomfort. While these ideas don’t seem harmful at first… They slowly make Christians ineffective and eventually useless for God’s kingdom.
The late philosopher Dallas Willard once observed, “The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.” The quote is saying that, a lot of people call themselves Christians, but a lot of those people do not follow Jesus and live by his way. If they did, the impact on the world and its issues would be revolutionary. Heaven on earth.
So today, we are going to explore what’s making so many Christians ineffective for God’s mission and his kingdom.
A lot of us, if we are honest, feel this kind of skepticism towards ALL prayers.
But no matter how you try to avoid it, prayer seems to be a huge theme throughout the Bible and therefore, a part of our Christian faith. We’re encouraged and even commanded to pray. Jesus, the one we’re following and imitating, has prayer as a core rhythm of his life and he even teaches us HOW to pray.
The reality, however, is if you ask any Christian about their prayer life, we kinda just look down, twiddle our fingers and say, “Oh yeah… I know I should pray more… but I don’t.”
What if prayer isn’t this dreadful chore but a way to access the source of life and joy, connecting with the one we’re made for. How can we approach prayer in a way that is life-giving instead of life-draining? Because for Jesus, as well as the New Testament writers, prayer was a source of joy! What do they know that we don’t? Let’s explore that today.
We’re halfway through our series on the Thessalonian letters, and Enoch has given me a special task to look through Thessalonians to see what we can learn about prayer because prayer is weaved throughout the entire letter. In the letter, Paul prays for them. Paul brings up the fact, he prays for them. Paul commands them to pray. Paul even asks them for their prayer. So a lot about prayer here. What does it have to do with anything?
Let’s be honest. We all know Christians who are the least loving, or most judgmental, or even the ones making the most harmful decisions in life. We look at them asking, why isn’t it working? Or maybe for yourself even, you’ve been going to church for years, serving, reading your bible, part of a small group, baptized, all of that and you still find that you’re perpetually unsatisfied in your everyday life. Stuck in the same cycle of brokenness. You don’t look any more like Jesus than you did on the first day of following him. You don’t have a sense of the abundant life Jesus promises.
It’s easy to start thinking, “is this all a hoax? Is it even real?” Across the Western World, people are leaving the Christian faith because they’ve tried it and it doesn’t deliver the way they expect it to. One stat shows that the western churches decline by 10-15% every year. Another stat reveals that Post covid, the average church only has 85% of their original attendance. What’s going on? I think these people leaving have come to the conclusion… this whole Christian thing doesn’t work.
And so that is what I want to focus on today.
“Why isn’t it working?”
Now this is a huge question with probably hundreds of different angles and factors to consider but we’re going to look at it through our bible passage today.
Now because this is such a deep and rich passage, we’re actually going to split this into two weeks. This week, I get to privilege of doing the theoretical big picture stuff and then next week, Pastor David will dive into the details of the practical stuff and the list of virtues.
Through our passage, we get a glimpse, a diagnosis of why this whole Christian thing isn’t working for so many people.
We’re starting a new series on one of the best literatures on suffering. It’s an ancient epic collection of poems called, the book of Job.
Now the way Job is written is that major themes are drawn out and weaved throughout the entire book, and so its conclusions are all found at the end of the story. And so because of that, our series won’t really be going through the book chronologically because then we’d have 5 sermons with zero answers to our questions and the one sermon with 5 answers. So instead, we’re going by themes.
AND SINCE this is the case, I’m starting all the way at Job 38, which means we have to summarize the previous 37 chapters. So let’s do it!
What truths do we need to hold in order to suffer positively (meaning, in a positive trajectory).
The Bible gives us instructions for a good life under the reign and love of God, BUT it has a lot of rules. And no one likes rules. For example, there’s something very wrong with my soul here but if I was about to grab an apple to eat, and my mom said, “Yeah! Good! You have to eat apples everyday”, I will not eat that apple anymore. I hate rules.
But what if God gave us rules because he knew what he was doing? Let’s say God isn’t just powerful and divine and stuff, what if he was also smart? Smarter than any business person. Smarter than any scientist or influencer. Smarter than Andrew Huberman and Elon Musk and whoever else you look up to. Would we dismiss his rules and his words as fast as we do, IF we assumed God was smart?
What if, instead of being a list of restrictions meant to oppress us, Jesus’ way of life and God’s rules for living with Him and with others was made for us to thrive in the best life possible?
What if? Let’s explore that today.
How can God’s rules lead us to abundant life? The answer that we find today is when we honour the INTENT of God’s rules because:
1. Rules use wrongly are weapons 2. Rules used rightly are gifts
What is the worst thing that you could miss out on? I think to answer that question is: we have to look at what we were made for! I believe the Bible shows us that we were made for a relationship with God that informs all our relationships with others, and we were made to join him in the work that He has done and is doing and will do. I just think of the Genesis story where God creatively and wonderfully made everything from nothing and then He made humans and told them to do what He just did, turn raw material and chaos into beauty and order. We’re made to lovingly join him in his work and represent him to the rest of the world.
But the tragic thing is, even though everyone has access to this extremely valuable calling, we often forget about it and miss out on it. This will probably be what we’ll regret most looking back.
See, God is always always working in and around and through our lives, every single day. But because His ways are not always our ways, we won’t see it if we’re not intentional. And if we’re not intentional about it, we could be missing out on the greatest thing happening in our lives and not even know it.
And so how do we avoid missing out on all this?
Or in other words, how do we join God in his work?
We’re zoning in on Barnabas in this series, a man described as good, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and we’re using him as a model for how we can join God in His work! And this is what we see from him and what we’ll spend the rest of our time focusing on.
We are always being invited to something. As you watch youtube ads or see other people wearing certain brands or following trends, those are invitations to buy in. To say yes. To follow. Some invitations are great. And some are meant to be turned down. And we have to be really careful with our responses to these invitations because every yes, is a no to a million other things.
But the Bible talks about an invitation that is so great, it’s worth dropping everything to respond to. What is this greatest invitation? In this week’s verse, we see that there are three parts to this invitation:
We are all in the process of becoming someone. Whether intentional or not, We are all in the process of becoming someone. At every single moment of your life, every decision and action you make or don’t make is an investment towards a future version of you. Hitting that snooze button in the morning. Reading everyday. Sneaking onto the transit without paying. Working out 3 times a week.
All these things shape you but it does so in a slow compounding way that you don’t really notice until one day, you realize, this is just who you became and you can’t pinpoint how you got here! And that’s a bit scary! Because I live a lot of my life on autopilot which means I’m probably becoming someone I don’t want to be.
The good news is that we’re not these helpless puppets that have no say in the way we’re formed. God has given us a lot of freedom to shape who we become 5 years from now, 10 years. 50 years. But where do we start?
That’s our focus today.
How do we grow well? In all ways, spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, financial even. How do we become Christians mature in Christ?
The answer I want to show you today is that to grow well, we need to honour God above all else, in order to:
There’s a prevailing idea in our culture, that as long as there’s consent and as long as you’re not hurting anyone (DIRECTLY), you should do whatever makes you happy. This is the kind of freedom that we celebrate!
And it’s not that bad of a rule. At first glance, the only ones in danger of getting hurt are people who have agreed to it or yourself. And so this is like the main idea of our time. You do you. And everyone has to accept it. And it’s even become a trait of our churches. We turn a blind eye and let people do what they want as long as they’re not hurting anyone.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but today, I just want to make the case that there’s a point when tolerance and compromise becomes harmful. When it’s no longer loving, but just apathetic – “I don’t care what you do or what happens to you, just don’t involve me.” When it’s no longer freedom but it’s slavery – “I can’t NOT do this. I MUST live like this. My heart needs it.”
And so here’s our question today. For ourselves, for our friendships, and for the church…
WHEN MUST WE CONFRONT WHAT IS WRONG?
Our answer is:
1) When INTEGRITY demands it 2) When INFLUENCE demands it 3) When INHERITANCE demands it
We get this from our passage today as we continue our series in Revelations.
