Peace Full

Message Transcription

01-30-22.mp3

Good morning, Broadway. I'm sorry, I'm not able to be with you this weekend, but I felt like this series was too important for me to not be able to preach this last sermon in the series. So thank you for your grace and being willing to put up with a video this Sunday. We're finishing up our four week series on anxiety, where we've been wrestling with Jesus words in Matthew Chapter six. Don't worry about your life, but seek first the kingdom. You know, each week we've tried to grow in our understanding of anxiety, something we all deal with at some level. No matter where we fall on that anxiety spectrum, that's not an indication of our spiritual or faith capacities. We can only begin where we are, and we can only take our next step into the life of peace and freedom that Jesus offers to us. You know, in week one, we talked about how anxiety is a warning signal. It's not the storm. It warns us that a storm is coming. And so as we get better at recognizing that signal anxiety can become a sort of grace in our lives because it can point us to a couple of things. First, to the things that we think we need, but we don't actually need. But it can also point us to where we're following a false gospel, the gospel of self-reliance. We, too, we followed up with Paul's teachings in Romans Chapter six about the false self and the importance of giving ourselves to God and not to sin, and how that choice daily can impact our life.

You see, Jesus has set us free, so we no longer have to try and fill that perceived need or take control of our lives. Instead, we start by practicing this prayer. Jesus died, so I don't have to blink anymore. I don't have to fear rejection or fear this health diagnosis. I don't have to try to avoid conflict or power up on someone who's threatening to me or fear of financial insecurity, no matter what triggers our anxiety. We can remind ourselves that the most important need in our lives is Christ, who has freed us to walk in peace. Last week, we talked about the difference between training and trying. Following Jesus is a call to die to ourselves, and by doing so, we can manifest Christ rather than mimic him. You see, a disciple who manifests Christ is one who allows the same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead to give life to their mortal body. You see, following Jesus and trusting in the gospel of Grace has way more to do with training our minds and our hearts, our attention on him, rather than trying to live this perfect life. Because we all know we can't walk on water or feed five thousand people with a happy meal or even solve a simple list of the world's problems, I I can barely manage getting out the door in the morning.

God, all I can do is offer up to you, my life, my real life, and place it in your hands. My school life, my work life, my financial life, my relational life, my physical life, my church life. God, I don't want to settle for a cheap imitation. Instead, I want the real thing, and that only comes through the power of your spirit. So how do we live into that power? Well, this morning, that's what we're going to be spending our time talking about, but before we do so, I invite you to pray with me. Father, as we enter this time of study, I pray that you would open us up to this power of your spirit. Yet as we finish our study on the anxiety and how to live a life that's anxious for nothing. Yeah, would you give us your grace and your piece, your wisdom and your power? That only you can give. Father, even now, we are mindful of the places, the people, the circumstances that that just tend to bring that anxiety up in us. And, father, our tendency is to want to chase after some need. Or some control. We don't really need so God. Would you do in us today, would only you can do. Father, we pause right now to open ourselves up as best we can, as honestly, as forthrightly as we can to you and to the work of your spirit in us, God, would you hear us as we offer our hearts to you in prayer? Thank you, father.

Thank you for your amazing Grace. Thank you, father, for the freedom that we have that we can walk in peace, oh god, would you grant us your peace again today? And now, Lord, May the words of my mouth and the meditation of each and every heart be acceptable and pleasing unto you, oh god. Our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Amen. Well, if you have your Bible with you this morning, I invite you to turn over to Paul's words in Romans Chapter 12. I want to begin in verse one, and this is the message translation. So here's what I want you to do. God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life, you're sleeping and eating and going to work and walking around life and place it before God as an offering, embracing what God does for you is the best thing that you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, focus your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around, you always dragging you down to its level of immaturity. God brings the best out of you. He develops well-formed maturity in you. You know, these words, I think, speak to the heart of what it means to live a life anxious for nothing.

You see, it's not a matter of being perfect or having everything lined up perfectly or everything always worked out perfectly. That creates less anxiety in more peace in us. You see church, I lived much of my youth and young adult life thinking that the goal of following Jesus was to get to this point where I didn't send much anymore. In fact, I'd be so much like Jesus that temptation wouldn't even be a thing for me. I'd be so good at it, in fact, that I wouldn't need hardly any grace. And, you know, people would notice that kind of life. You see, I never would have said that out loud, but practically that was the way that I lived. That was my goal. Or at least I thought that was supposed to be my goal. But I had this chronic nagging feeling of exhaustion and shame because I knew myself well enough to know. Might could hold on for a while, but I couldn't hold out forever. You see, I find myself jealous of new Christians or or folks who aren't Christians yet because they could make mistakes and sin and then find Jesus, and he'd show them lots of grace and love and forgiveness. But I knew better. He said I grew up in the church and I learned early on what was right and wrong and good and bad, so any time I made a mistake.

I knew better. I mean, can you hear the middle child and me coming out? Yeah, yeah, I knew better. And so with my inability to live a sinless life came this nagging and persistent shame. And I'd come across passages like Hebrew six, where it says it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift who have shared and the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, and who have fallen away to be brought back to repentance to their loss. They are crucifying the son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. Oh Lord, that was me. You see, I tasted the heavenly gift when I was a young man, but sende just kept crouching at my door. And too often I gave in. Then I made a mockery of Jesus. It was, though I was crucifying him all over again. I mean, there's just no hope for me. I mean, you want to talk about anxiety. Right, I would hear Jesus words in Matthew 11, 28 eight come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest, take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I'm gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest for your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. But, you know, friends, if I was honest, I would think, what are you talking about, Jesus? I feel the weight of my sin all the time.

How is the yolk of being a Christian easy and light? It feels cumbersome and restrictive and punitive, and sometimes just a set up for failure. I don't feel rest. I feel exhausted. I mean, should I be talking about this, a church? I mean, can I be real a second for just a millisecond? You see, I lived with this burden of anxiety, like I was constantly letting God down, and he was constantly disappointed in me and in my ability, my inability rather to keep myself out of trouble and to keep it all together. You see, my false self kept telling me that I needed something, whether it was approval or to be liked or respected or seen as competent, or someone even to tell me that mattered, that I had value. And when I didn't receive what I perceived I needed, I was devastated. And this anxiety would just overwhelm me. And then, as I told you a couple of weeks ago, I'd find a way out of feeling that way, which often meant turning to food. But you see church, though, your anxiety triggers and coping skills may be different from mine. We all have them. And they're all away are false self is trying to stay in control, but they're all based on this lie that we need something other than Jesus in our life to be OK.

Whether that's approval or respect or control or love or money or fame or power, whatever it is, it won't satisfy. And so Paul writes these words. Therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. You see, I think this is Paul's answer to the anxiety challenge offer ourselves to God. In light of his incredible mercy, don't conform to the pattern of this world, he says, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is his good, pleasing, perfect well. You see our part in this process is dying to self. The part that God plays, it's renewing our minds, transforming us one day, one hour, one moment at a time. One office conversation or one school cafeteria interaction. One family argument or neighborhood meeting. Or a church service project at a time. You see, if we're willing to give him the space and the time God promises to deal with our assumptions and our idols and the stories that we tell ourselves and our habits and our beliefs and our values and our dreams. And his promise is not just to reform them, it's to transform them. And so, as Steve Case points out in this book, that's been such an incredible resource for me, managing leadership anxiety.

He says this process of dying to self, it's lifelong but friends. It can also be frustrating. You see, just because you become aware of something in your life doesn't mean you fix the problem. You know, a couple of years ago, I could hear this soft, subtle noise in our house, especially when I was in the bathroom. It was almost like the sound of a toilet tank filling up again, but but much softer, more quiet. And so I went throughout the house checking all the bathrooms. None of the toilets were running, so I thought, Well, maybe I hear this noise sometimes when Caylee's outside watering the yard or her garden or her flowers. But that wasn't it, either, because it was nighttime and she wasn't watering. So what was it? I went down underneath the house so I could see if there was a leak and nothing as far as I could see. So what do I do? I knew something wasn't right, but just knowing that didn't solve the problem, I had to invite someone over who knew more about plumbing than I did. And so I did, and my friend helped helped me figure out the problem that there was a leak in a pipe at my house, but it wasn't under my house. It was actually right where the pipe entered the foundation. Now I'm really thankful for my friend helping me diagnose and find and fix that problem, something that I couldn't do for myself.

I needed an expert. You see, it wasn't enough for me to know I had a leak. I had to do something with the knowledge you see dying to self. Is this frustrating process? Because once you learn the places in your life where your false self likes to be in control, it can feel overwhelming as you start to see how much energy you expend defending and keeping that false self satisfied. I mean, it's especially true when we're anxious or we're worried. But not only that, you also start to see how pervasive your false self can be. So it turns out that my need for approval or to be liked, it didn't just show up for me at work. I found it present in my marriage when I visited my extended family at holidays when I was with friends. I mean, but just like Paul said, that reminder in Romans six, the power of sin can be broken even if we still struggle with it. Well, so too can the power of the false self. It can be reduced even if it still exists. That's one of the best ways to help overcome the false self is leaning into one of the great gifts that God has given to us, and that's US community. I think that's why Paul continues in Romans 12 verse three. This way for about the grace given me, I say to every one of you do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.

But rather, think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith that God has distributed to each of you for just as each of us has one body with many members and these members do not all have the same function. So in Christ, we though many form one body and each member belongs to all the others. Friends, I've learned one of the best ways to deal with that false self, with that anxiety that comes as a response to our false self trying to be in control. That false self that tries to tell us we need something we don't really need. The best way to lean into community, to find someone that you can talk to, who can pray for you and encourage you, and that's not always easy to do friends. It can often be painful, even caused us anxiety just thinking about it because our false self wants to tell us, you don't need to do that. You don't need to expose your secrets. You don't need to tell about your darker side, then, because if you do, people won't like you or they won't want to be friends with you or it tries to tell us to do this. It's going to be painful and it's going to hurt. It's going to be hard. But the truth is, living at the mercy of your false self, it's already painful and hard.

I think that's why Paul invites us to live in view of God's mercy, because in view of God's mercy, as we offer ourselves as living sacrifices in that process, God can and will transform our minds and our hearts. You see one of the most amazing gifts that got gifts to us to help us learn to offer ourselves as living sacrifices is each other. Just together, we form one body and we need each other, Paul says. You see, that's why I here at Broadway, one of our core values is building community because we believe life change happens best in community. Why? Because that's how God designed us. In fact, one of the best ways we live in a life anxious for nothing is by living it in community with others, loving and serving and giving and praying for and being prayed for and encouraging and being an encourager to one another. But that's not the only way I think Paul also gives us another way that we can live an anxious life anxious for nothing, and that's this it actually comes from his letter to the church in Philippi. It's the passage where I took the name for this series. Philippians Chapter four. Listen for how Paul invites us to recognize our anxiety. Name it, die to it. Lean into God's grace again from the message translation, he says. Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying. Pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.

Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness of everything coming together for good will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life? I love this translation here. Instead of focusing on our worries or our anxiety, we allow them to serve as grace, right, pointing us to the things we think we need that we don't really need to the places in our life where our false self has yet to die. Then those places become petitions that we offer up, praising God for the gift of not having to live in fear, not having to live in anxiety anymore because Jesus died on the cross to free us from the power of sin and death. And so we no longer have to live an anxious life. Instead, whenever I feel anxious, I allow it to be an invitation, an invitation to pray because the power of the gospel, it's available to me right then and there, not one day far from now, but right now in this moment. In this circumstance and this relationship in this crisis, there's never a moment when you're out of reach of the power of the gospel to remind you that Jesus died to set you free so you don't have to be afraid anymore. You don't have to be anxious anymore. You see, as we develop this rhythm of of grace and prayer, this sense that God's wholeness, his peace, his shalom begins to fill our hearts, begins to fill our minds and we begin to see how God is at work and every moment in every circumstance.

That his peace settles over us and it displaces the worry and the anxiety from the center of our lives. I mean, why would we want to live any other way? And yet, if we're honest, we do. But that's why God's mercies are new every morning. In fact, they're new this morning. It's so church. I invite you to take a moment right now to think about an area in your life. It may be in your work life or school. A relationship, a financial situation, maybe a health challenge you're facing. But think about an area of your life where anxiety has been showing up most often for you. And I invite you to offer that up as a petition to the father. I invite you to give that over to him right now. Invite you to TomKat. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I've allowed my false self to tempt me to believe I need something other than you in my life right now. And I realized I can't control this situation or this person or this circumstance or this challenge. All I can do is offer myself up to you as best I can. God, I'm going to go in and try to die to the need that I think I need or to the control that my false self wants me to grab.

And instead. I'm going to write you. Holy Spirit, to doing me what only you can do. God, I can't, but you can. And so today. I think I'll let you. Let's pray. Father, I do pray for your wisdom, for your grace, your peace to be real with us tonight, today. God, I pray. Now by the power of your spirit. You would remind us of the freedom that Christ won for us on the cross, that because he died. We no longer have to be afraid. We no longer have to live a life anxious and worried. Instead, father, we can allow those moments and those situations where we feel anxious to be invitations to prayer, invitations to community. And so God, would you help us to be that for one another now? This morning, father, I know there are many here who feel the weight and the burden. Shame and anxiety and fear. I worry. Oh, God. Would you draw them close to you? Would you remind them about following Jesus? It's not about being perfect. It was only one who is perfect instead. It's about offering ourselves up to you. Dying as best we can to ourselves, to those false needs, that false sense of control. And instead, opening ourselves up to allow your spirit to flow on us. So why would you give us courage this week to pursue you and in community? Would you help us get as a church? To be the kind of community open for anyone.

Who is struggling anyone? Who needs help? Anyone who has felt the burden and the weight of anxiety or fear? How would you help us to encourage and pray for one another? How would you help us as we move forward from the series into the rest of this year? To have the eyes to see in the ears, to hear those, those things in our life. Those anxieties, those worries that help us to name them. Help us to name that need we think we need, but we don't really need. For those times when we're tempted to want to grab control. And God help us die to it. Help us to give it over to you, knowing, trusting, believing you've set us free. Father, thank you for the gift of life that you give to us. God, I pray that you would. Draw us deeper into that life this week. And that father, again, we ask we cry out to you to do for us what only you can do. May your peace be at work in our hearts and our minds as you transform us, as you renew us, as you give us courage and strength to offer ourselves up to you. Oh God. Maybe we walk in peace this week and live life's anxious for nothing. I pray this in the power of Jesus. Amen. Amen, Church. Love you of looking forward to seeing you next week.