Life From God

Good morning. How about those Hoosiers?

Anybody else a little sleep deprived today? There's one of those games. Once you got into it, it's hard to walk away from it. So historic. That was fun to be a part of last night.

You know, I once had an English teacher explain prepositions in terms of a squirrel and a tree. She said that prepositions are the directional words that we use to describe the squirrel climbing tree, you know, up the tree or running around the tree, or stashing nuts in the tree or leaping from one tree to another. Now, it's been quite a while since I've taken an English class, but our backyard is home to a small army of these commando squirrels who love to assault our bird feeders. So we see scenes like this all the time. Squirrels running along our fence and scrambling up our gutters and dangling often upside down from their rear claws from our screens while they're scooping birdseed into their mouths.

And then they run like mad from our dogs who think that it would be fun to rip their heads off their bodies. So, lot of prepositions going on there. These are little words, but they're really important, right? I mean, it is far better to be in your car than to be under your car. So we've been using this book called with by Sky Giotani to prepare our hearts for Christmas by unpacking several of the distorted and incomplete ways that we sometimes think about God.

So in the last couple of weeks, we've talked, for example, about life under God, which is a posture that seeks to trade religious behavior and rule following for blessings and favors. This posture kind of envisions a moody God that we have to appease, so we focus on manipulating him rather than being in relationship with him. We talked last week about life over God, which is about trying to use principles from scripture to create this roadmap to success. We assume that if we just. If we lean really hard into this formulaic list of best practices, that we can somehow substitute that for truly knowing and being with God.

Now, the posture I want us to think about this morning is one that I'm going to call life from God. And we find our first biblical example of life from God type thinking right in the beginning in the Garden of Eden. You know, the Bible's first hint at Christmas is found in Genesis, chapter three, where God made this beautiful garden and he placed two humans there to manage it. A husband and wife who created in his own image for a relationship with him and with each other. So Genesis describes this moment when the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And because we often read that as a part of a larger narrative, it's easy for us to just skim right over that and move right on past it. But let's not do that this morning. Let's stop and listen to it one more time. The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden, the cool of the day. Did you catch that?

God walked where Adam and Eve were so closely that they heard him do it. Now, I don't know about your house, but at our house I can hear pretty clearly when somebody walks up or down our staircase. I can hear the click of our dog's paws on our vinyl floors. But can you imagine hearing a rustle of leaves as God himself joins you in the backyard? I mean, to Adam and Eve, God was not a distant spirit somewhere out there in space.

He was up close and personal. God was with them, which has always been God's desire to live with us. What could be more amazing, what could be more majestic than to share a home and a life with God? Well, unfortunately, Adam and Eve made a choice that took that life with God and turned it upside down. Disguised as a snake, Satan approached Eve and scoffed at God's warning that if she ate from the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, she would die.

The serpent insisted that God was lying, that in reality, eating from that tree would grant wisdom, just like God's. Satan insinuated that God was being petty and he was just trying to hold them back and keep them down. And Eve bought it. She ate, and then Adam did too. And immediately their eyes were opened, but not in the empowering way they had expected.

Instead, their knowledge of good and evil made them instantly and painfully aware of their guilt. Before this moment, the end of Genesis chapter two tells us they had been naked and they felt zero discomfort about that. But now they felt so deeply self conscious that they scrambled to cover themselves with leaves. And when they heard God walking, their instinct was to hide from him. God offered Adam and Eve a life with him, but they decided they wanted what God provided.

They wanted food. They wanted pleasure. They wanted a place to live without God himself. They wanted things from God more than they wanted to be with God. And that led them into sin and rebellion that fractured their relationship with God and ushered in mortality and death.

And yet, in that very same moment, right here in Genesis chapter three, God announced a plan to Restore what sin had broken. Right in the middle of chapter three, in verse 15, God predicted that there would be ongoing hostility between Satan and humanity, that the woman's offspring would be struck by the serpent, but then crush the serpent's head. All of which was a prophetic reference to Jesus, who would be born of a woman and who would suffer at the cross before crushing Satan through his resurrection. As soon as sin broke his world, God announced that Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, was coming to restore it. And yet to this day, one of our greatest barriers to life with God is our generation after generation repetition of Adam and Eve's big mistake, which is.

Which is desiring things from God more than we desire God himself. We find another example of life from God thinking in ancient Israel. Last Sunday, Craig reminded us how often in the years after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites just grumbled. They complained about danger, they griped about thirst, they moaned about hunger and. And each time God protected them and provided for them, they gladly consumed the blessing.

But then they quickly forgot about him. So before God finally allowed them to enter the promised land of Canaan, he gave them some very specific instructions. This is what God said. When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I'm giving you this day.

Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. See, Israel cried out to God when they were in need, but after he provided for them, they turned away from him again and again and again. That's really the overarching narrative of the entire Old Testament. They wanted God's gifts more than they wanted God himself. Then we also gained some insight into life from God thinking in Jesus parables in particular Luke chapter 15.

Many of you have seen out in our commons just you'll run right into it as you walk out the doors after the service. We have this giant number one that we placed out there last year. It's a reminder of God's heart and it's a reminder of our desire to be a church like we just sang about. For the one to reflect God's loving desire to seek and save lost people who are living without Him. That concept of the one comes from this series of stories in Luke chapter 15, the most famous of which is often called the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

But it's actually a story about two sons. You see, in that culture, it was a traditional thing that sons would inherit their father's wealth, but the oldest son always got a double share. But in Jesus story, the younger son came to his father and demanded his slice of the estate right then and there. In other words, he said, tired of waiting around for you to die, old man. Give me what's mine now.

What a jerk, right? It was a massively selfish and arrogant, disrespectful request. And shockingly, this may be the most shocking part of the story. The father granted the request. So this arrogant young man took his fortune and he went away.

He left home. He quickly blew all of it on wild, reckless living. And soon he. He found himself broke and hungry. And he decided he had no choice but to swallow his pride and go back home and beg his dad for a job, any job.

But before he could even get there, his father, who had been watching for him in the distance, ran to meet him. And rather than berate his son for all of his foolish choices, the father welcomed him home and he threw a huge party to celebrate his safe return. Now, this story illustrates God his compassionate and forgiving heart toward lost, sinful people. But it's easy to assume when we hear this story that the prodigals most in need of God's grace are always other people. And I think that's why Jesus included the older son in his story.

Because rather than celebrating his brother's return, the older son just felt jealous and bitter and resentful. He assumed that since he had been making better decisions all along, he actually deserved. He was entitled to the kind of attention that was at that moment, being stupidly wasted on his spoiled brat brother. These two sons were very different. The one was an impulsive and rebellious thrill seeker, and the other was a responsible, disciplined rule follower.

But they had this one big thing in common. They were both more interested in what they could get from their father than simply being with him. Now, they manifested it differently, but they were both consumers. And so are we. We live in a consumer culture.

Did you know that Here in the US we place almost 9 million Amazon orders every single day? This last week, about 17% of those came directly to our house. But we have our groceries and our meals delivered. We have streaming services on our phones that allow us to pull up exactly what we want to watch. Or exactly what we want to listen to.

So when we see God described in Isaiah, for example, as the creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to its people and life to those who walk on it, or where we hear God described in the book of James as the father of the heavenly lights, who gives every good and perfect gift, where we see Jesus describe God as a good father who wants to give good gifts to his children, it's easy to picture God as yet another purveyor of all the things we want. So we take the biblical truth, the foundational biblical truth that God is our provider, and then we twist it around our own self centered preferences. See, like life under God, like life over God, life from God. Thinking is just incomplete. It takes one reality about God and it magnifies it to the neglect of other important truths about Him.

The problem isn't that it's wrong for us to ask God for things. Scripture actually encourages us to do that. The problem is that we reduce our relationship with God to simply asking him for things. We become like a kid who only speaks to her parents when she asks for money, or that friend who only calls when he needs a favor. The most exaggerated form of this posture is sometimes called the prosperity Gospel or the health and wealth gospel, or the name it and claim it gospel.

And it substitutes more of a cosmic genie or a vending machine for a sovereign God. And in this way of thinking, faith, like everything else in our culture, simply becomes a commodity. Now consumerism is something we come by honestly because for many of us it's all we've ever known. But it hasn't always been like this. And in his book with Sky, Giotani takes us on a really simple overview of history that I found really fascinating.

Before the Industrial revolution, which began in the late 1700s, the there was just a lot less stuff. There were a lot fewer goods and services. But mass production technology enabled us suddenly to manufacture far more goods than the market actually needed. So advertising was invented to create demand for these products, to convince us that we will be happy, that we'll be successful, that we'll be admired if we buy certain things. And it's proven so effective that you and I on average are now exposed to, to somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every single day.

Insatiable consumption is now seen as essential to sustaining our economy. This was fascinating to me after the attack on Pearl harbor, which took place 84 years ago today. President Roosevelt called on Americans to reduce consumption of goods that would be needed for a war effort. But if we fast forward 60 years, we were told after the 911 attacks that if we quit shopping, that if we quit traveling, if we quit spending and consuming, we would be letting the terrorists win. Have you noticed that in recent years, our government's response to financial crisis has not been to encourage austerity measures where we try to buckle down and practice wiser money management.

They've actually deepened our national debt by just issuing stimulus checks and in hopes of kickstarting the economy with a huge spending blitz. See, for all of these reasons, Sky Giotani suggests that consumerism is more than an economic system, it is a belief system.

Now, meanwhile, in his letter that we call Colossians, the Apostle Paul had this to say to a group of believers and by extension, to us. Paul said, since then, you have been raised with Christ. Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature. Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. Paul called greed this constant desire to have more idolatry. What does that mean?

Well, Tim Keller defines idols as good things turned into ultimate things. Clothing and cars and homes and money are helpful things. They're good and necessary things. But when having them becomes the source of our identity, the source of our fulfillment, when the pursuit of more of them becomes our driving desire, we are worshiping counterfeit gods. Life from God is a narcissistic posture that places us at the center of the universe, where we imagine that everything else, including other people and even God himself, revolves around us.

And at a cultural level, this take on life reveals itself in so many different ways. See, often, rather than commit to a church community, we may attend events and programs at several different churches without serving or giving at any of them. If our marriage no longer feels right, we just end it and go looking for a new one. Some of us are chronically lonely because of fomo, this fear of missing out. And so we pass up legitimate opportunities for real connection with interested people because we don't want to be tied down if something or someone a little bit better happens to come along.

See, our consumption comes from a number of different places, but I think much of it stems from our desire to distract ourselves from fear and pain and yet both fear and pain are not only inevitable, they're sometimes necessary parts of life. It can be easy for us to recognize when we see someone else using drugs and alcohol as a tool to help them numb out and deal with their stress. But shopping and entertainment are also forms of self medication. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman points out that the word amusement, the root of that word, ah, muse, literally means to not think, to be distracted. And so we sometimes fill our lives and our calendars with stuff and with noise and with experiences to distract us from some hard things that we actually need to face and deal with.

And we can use religious activity in that same anesthetic way. Rather than walking with God through hard things, we might look instead for songs or books or concerts or podcasts or films to simply distract us. I mean, think for a second about the Christian songs or the Bible verses that you like best. Are those focused more on who God is or more on us? See, if we think God's primary job is to keep us comfortable, then when life gets hard, as Jesus said that, it certainly will, at times, we're gonna tend to reject God rather than rely on Him.

And yet, there are some really important lessons to be Learned from pain. Dr. Paul Brand spent much of his professional life in India treating patients who had leprosy. Now, leprosy is a disease that destroys nerve endings, and in the process of destroying nerve endings, it robs its victims of the ability to feel. And Dr. Brand's work taught him that pain is actually a gift.

Now, at face value, the idea of being unable to feel pain sounds incredible, doesn't it? A life without pain sounds like a dream. But without that blister to tell you that your hands need a break, without that jab to tell you that you've just reached into a thorn bush and you're bleeding, we can unknowingly do ourselves a lot of harm. So pain isn't always our enemy. Pain sometimes warns us about heart issues or strokes, a ruptured appendix, an ulcer.

I mean, if we never felt pain, would we ever seek medical care? Or would we just keep going and going and going and pushing ourselves until something catastrophic happens and we drop dead? See, pain not only warns us of danger and helps us stay alive, it actually has the power to deepen our hunger for a kind of beauty and justice and freedom that this world simply can't offer. CS Lewis wrote that if we find ourselves with the desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for Another world. And that realization can turn our hearts toward God.

But our natural human tendency is still often to look for heaven on earth. I mean, if we can just land the right job, just get a better salary, a nicer car, a bigger house, if we could just see a different number when we step on the scale, if we could just find that special someone, then surely, then surely then we'll be happy and at peace. And because God is a provider of good things for our enjoyment, God often grants us those very kinds of things. But he doesn't always. In Second Corinthians, chapter 12, Paul wrote about one of his greatest personal challenges.

And this is just a. It's such a convicting text to read, Paul said. In order to keep me from becoming conceited because of these amazing visions he'd been able to experience, he says, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. And we don't know exactly what Paul's thorn was, but it was clearly a physical thing that was painful and frustrating for him.

So much so that he begged God repeatedly to remove it. And yet God had other plans. This was God's response. He said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Paul said, therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest on me.

That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Rather than take away all of Paul's pain, God promised that he would work through it, that he would give him the strength to keep going, that he would sustain him through a life with God.

Jesus told a lot of stories, but one of the shortest stories he ever told goes like this. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again. And then in his joy, went and sold all he had and bought that field. The end two sentences wouldn't make a great bedtime story.

Your kids would still be awake at that point. But when this man found an unexpected treasure, he didn't see it as just one more thing to be added to the collection of everything else he had amassed. He saw it as something so valuable that it was worth selling everything else to acquire it. See, we want things from God, but our greatest treasure is life with God. Our greatest treasure is God himself, not just the blessings he gives.

Jesus knew that, and he Lived that the people of his day had been studying prophecy for centuries and they wanted a military messiah who would overthrow their enemies and put Israel back at the pinnacle of world power. But instead, Jesus was born as an infant to a poor, humble, blue collar couple. Jesus spent his time healing the sick and loving the outcasts. He preached love for our neighbors and love and forgiveness for our enemies. So the very people that Jesus came to save actually rejected him and they killed him.

And that was no surprise to him, because dying for our sins is exactly why Jesus came. But because he was fully human, because the Word became flesh and he wrapped himself in all of the frailty and the mortality that you and I experience as human, human beings on a daily basis. Jesus knew how painful and how scary crucifixion would be. So in his humanity, he asked God the Father for some other way. But even as he prayed that prayer, he coupled it with this pledge.

He said, yet not as I will, but as you will, Father. Your plan matters more than my comfort. And in that moment, Jesus fully surrendered himself to God and to his mission. The New Testament book of Hebrews describes this decision that Jesus made like this. It says, for the joy set before him, for the joy that he knew awaited him, Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Friends, the reason we celebrate Christmas is the reason we have hope is because Jesus refused to cling to a life from God mentality and he chose to do life with God all the way to the cross and beyond. And that reality brings to the forefront for me a couple of challenges, a couple of things I want to encourage all of us to wrestle with and to think about. One of those is this, could we make this Christmas about Jesus and not just stuff? I mean, it's a joy that we get as a church to provide Christmas gifts for a number of Operation Christmas families who might not be able to give anything to their kids otherwise. We've been celebrating that the last couple of weeks as a church.

Collectively, we've adopted 100 local families. There are 271 kids who are going to receive Christmas gifts this year because of your generosity. That's amazing. That's fantastic.

But culture wide Christmas often amounts to people who already have everything they need buying more things for other people who already have everything they need buying things just to buy things, buying things because it's expected, buying things because we feel obligated, which is expensive and time consuming and exhausting, and it often creates financial stress that is Actually the opposite of the peace that Jesus came here to give us. So while we still have some time intervening between now and the Christmas holiday, how could we simplify our approach? How could we scale back our gift giving? How could we focus more consciously on Jesus this season? I think one simple way to do that would be to simply spend time with Jesus.

I mean, this is a busy season, isn't it? We're shopping and we're wrapping and we're decorating and we're baking and we're planning get togethers with family and friends, and we're trying to wrap up assignments for work and school before the end of the year. We're trying to squeeze in medical appointments before December 31st. And for all those reasons, it is remarkably easy for us to go through the entirety of this season that, in theory, is supposed to be all about Jesus without actually giving Jesus much thought. Have you ever experienced that?

So could I encourage us to turn off the TV a little more often to put down the phone to open up your Bible, if you're not already in the habit of doing that? The Gospel of John would be an incredible place to start. But just to carve out some time to sit in silent reflection on God's goodness to us in Jesus.

It's a powerful thing to pull out your phone long enough to set a timer for five minutes or for 10 minutes and just resolve that in that span of time, you're just gonna be still. When was the last time you did that? Where you just sat to the point that the ticking of the battery operated clock on the wall becomes the loudest thing, or the beating of your heart becomes the thing that you notice most. Sometimes we just have to shut out the noise in order to give God the opportunity to speak with us. Our greatest treasure is God himself, not the blessings he gives.

And every time we gather together, we do what we're about to do right now, which is to remember that sacrifice that Jesus made for us by celebrating communion together. Along the front of the room and along the back walls, we have some tables where you'll find trays that are filled with double stacked plastic cups. That bottom cup contains a small wafer of bread. It's a symbol that represents the body of Jesus that was nailed to a cross for your sins and mine. And that top cup contains some grape juice, which is a symbol of the blood of Jesus that flowed on that cross as he suffered and died in our place.

I'm gonna lead us in prayer in just a moment. And then after we pray, we'll just invite you to move when your heart is ready to whichever one of those stations is closest to you. But as we do that, we're gonna do something a little bit different. Today, our worship team is actually gonna share a song with us. And this is a song that's not designed for us to sing along with.

It's designed for us to just sit and listen and. And reflect on. So I know for many of us, communion is a time where as we shuffle from our seats to one place or another, you know, we. We often greet one another, and that's a beautiful thing. I love being a part of a family that is affectionate like that.

But I want to encourage us this morning to make this a time of complete silence, a time of stillness, where we just allow the. The words of this song to wash over our minds and our hearts as we think about this God, who desires a life with us so much that he put on flesh, and he came here to make that possible. Would you pray with me, Father? God, we're so grateful for your goodness to us, For the humility that you manifested in putting on a human body and coming here to suffer and die in our place, to deal with the consequences of our sins so that we could have that barrier removed and be able to experience the life with you that you designed us and created us for. God.

Because this is a busy season, because we are busy people with lives that are full and stressful and often noisy, we ask that for these next few moments, God, you would help us to slow the pace and bring the volume level down and push to the back of our minds some of those things that are weighing on us right now and just soak in the wonder and the beauty of the reality that you want to be with us. God, we thank you for that, and we invite you into this time in Jesus name.