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]]>A pregnant runaway slave, alone in the desert with nowhere to go, is the person who gave God a name that nobody in Scripture had used before. Not a king. Not a prophet. Not anyone with standing. She called Him El Roi, which means the God who sees me.
Her name was Hagar, and if you have ever carried the quiet suspicion that you have slipped through the cracks, not hated or opposed, just overlooked, her story in Genesis 16 is worth your time. It shows something about God that is easy to miss if you assume He only pays attention to people who have their lives together.
The chapter opens with a plan that was destined to go badly. “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar. So she said to Abram, the Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave, and perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed. After he had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar and she conceived. When Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Sarai then turned on Abram: “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”Abram’s answer was to step aside entirely. “Your slave is in your hands. Do with her whatever you think best.” So Sarai mistreated Hagar, and Hagar fled.
Nobody should be surprised that this turned into drama. Look at who Hagar is in this arrangement. She is a slave with no voice in any of it. Nobody came to her and asked whether she would be willing to carry a child for a couple struggling to have kids. She was told what was going to happen to her body.
Then the emotions arrive. Hagar is carrying a baby she does not want to hand over, because it is her baby. Sarai’s insecurity about her own childlessness boils over, and she takes it out on Abram. Abram says he is only doing what he was told and the two of them can sort it out between themselves. So Sarai goes after the easiest target in the house, the woman whose dignity had been stripped from her long before any of this started.
Hagar ran. And nobody went looking for her.
Verse seven begins like this: “The angel of the Lord found Hagar.”
Sit with how unusual that is. She did not cry out for help. She did not pray a desperate prayer and then watch God show up. God pursued a runaway slave woman into the desert and found her before she ever asked.
Two notes are worth pausing on. First, when your Bible prints LORD in small capital letters, that is translating a Hebrew name that many people pronounce Yahweh, and others pronounce Jehovah. It is the personal, proper name of God. Second, there is a theological term called a Christophany, which scholars use for an appearance of Christ in the Old Testament, before Jesus was born on earth. Many people believe that when Scripture says the angel of the Lord, that was Christ Himself, and that Jesus was the one pursuing Hagar.
Whether or not this particular appearance was Jesus, the point being made is not in dispute. God moves in the direction of people who feel forgotten and overlooked.
Where He found her matters. Scripture says it was a spring in the desert, beside the road to Shur.
Hagar was walking away from a place of promise and a people of promise, because in that place she was unseen and mistreated. She was heading back to Egypt. And on that road, God found her next to a spring, next to a source of life.
It is tempting to assume God mostly shows up in the holy places. We walk into a church building, sit down, listen to a message, and expect God to meet us there. But across all of Scripture, God keeps showing up in ordinary places where life actually happens. Along the road. Near a spring. Near a well. While people are working and going about their days. That is where He met Hagar, and that is still His pattern.
God did more than notice her. He spoke to her, and He called her by name.
“Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
Then the angel of the Lord told her to return to her mistress and submit to her, and added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” He continued, “You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
Hagar probably could have done without that last sentence. Strong track record right up until the wild donkey line.
But do not miss what just happened. God pursued a runaway Egyptian slave woman, and when He found her, He did not scold her. He did not force her to do His bidding. He asked her a question, and then He listened to her. God listened to Hagar. And in listening, He handed her back the three things that had been taken from her: hope, purpose, and dignity.
What does El Roi mean? El Roi means the God who sees. It is the name Hagar gave to God in response to being found, and she is the one who coined it.
“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: You are the God who sees me, for she said, I have now seen the One who sees me. That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.”
A slave woman with no standing, no voice, and no advocate is the person who names God in that way. Not the patriarch. Not the matriarch. The one everyone else was willing to lose.
Here is what cannot be missed. The God who saw Hagar has been revealed to us in Jesus.
When Jesus showed up on earth, He did the same thing. He saw people who were unseen and overlooked, and the stories pile up. The woman at the well. Blind Bartimaeus. The disabled man beside the pool at Bethesda. The woman known only for her bleeding. He saw the pain in the eyes of the centurion whose servant was sick. He saw the lifeless body of Jairus’ twelve year old daughter, and He raised her to life. Children, widows, sinners, and the sick. Jesus saw them.
He tells us why Himself. In Luke 19:10, He says, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
That is the goodness at the center of this. God does not watch us from a distance. He has come to us, and He has come for us, exactly as we are. Romans 5:8 says that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. Let that sit for a moment.
On the cross, Jesus took onto Himself your sin, your shame, your rebellion, and your brokenness. He took on everything that separates us from God, and He paid for it, and it killed Him.
Then He rose from the dead. He rose so that you and I could receive new life, not a second chance at an old life, but a new and transformed life through Him.
Which means you do not have to move through your days wondering how God sees you, or whether God cares about you, or whether your story registers with Him at all. The cross is the proof. Hagar did not have this. She had a spring, a promise, and a name. On this side of the resurrection, we have God’s own demonstration of His love, and His declaration is the risen Jesus.
If you have been quietly assuming that you are the person nobody would come looking for, the God who sees me is not a comforting phrase invented for people in crisis. It is a name that a desperate woman gave God after He tracked her down in a desert and treated her like she mattered.
He says the same thing to you that He showed her. I love you. I care about you. I have come for you. The invitation is simply to receive it, and to be found by Him.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>Doubting God is not the beginning of the end of your faith. For a lot of people, it is where real faith actually starts. What collapses when you doubt God is usually not God Himself but the picture of God you have been carrying, and that picture may have needed to come down. Mine did, and losing it is the reason I still believe.
I know that from the inside. When I was in college, life was hard. Nothing seemed to be working out. I was frustrated, probably a little depressed, lonely, confused, and struggling financially and in just about every other way. It was a genuinely hard season, and I was wrestling with God over it. Why wasn’t God showing up in my life the way I thought He was supposed to?
So I got in my car and drove to the top of a hospital parking garage. I sat on the hood and had a conversation with God. Calling it a conversation is generous, because I said things to God that I would never repeat to you. I cursed God. I rejected God. I told Him that if He didn’t care about me, I didn’t care about Him. Then I got in my car and left.
That was the day I thought I rejected God. It was absolutely the day I rejected my understanding of God.
If we are honest with ourselves, we all have needs. Real, tangible, physical needs. And underneath those, there is a deeper need that every one of us carries.
Sitting on top of that parking garage, the question I was really asking was, “Who needs God anyway?” Maybe that is your question too. Or maybe you are asking it from the other direction: who does need God? Maybe someone you love is asking it.
Here is the answer this story keeps circling back to. The people who need God most are the people who don’t think they need Him at all.
If you are wrestling, questioning, doubting, confused, angry, hurt, or simply wondering whether this Jesus thing is for you in any way, shape, or form, you should know that you are welcome. No one belongs in that conversation more than you. And the clearest picture of what that looks like is a man in Acts who was absolutely certain he had God figured out.
Saul’s story really begins in Acts 8, where Stephen has just been stoned for following Jesus. Acts 8:1 tells us that “Saul approved of their killing him.” The text wants us to know Saul’s mindset from the very first line.
What follows is brutal. Acts 8:1-4 describes a great persecution breaking out against the church in Jerusalem, believers scattering throughout Judea and Samaria, godly men burying Stephen and mourning deeply for him, and Saul going house to house, dragging off both men and women and putting them in prison.
Before you write Saul off as a horrible human being, understand what was driving him. Saul was devout. He was a prominent leader within the Hebrew faith, and when he saw Jesus and the movement forming around Him, he saw a direct threat to everything he believed. He was not some faithless man persecuting people of faith. He was defending his faith, his understanding, and his picture of God, however misguided that defense turned out to be.
By Acts 9:1-2, Saul is still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He goes to the high priest and asks for letters to the synagogues in Damascus so that if he finds anyone there who belongs to the Way, whether men or women, he can take them as prisoners back to Jerusalem. He wanted official documentation, something like an honorary sheriff’s badge, to prove he was authorized to do this. People who followed Jesus were terrified of him.
Saul was on his way to carry out that plan when everything changed. Acts 9:3-5 records that as he neared Damascus, a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?” Saul asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The answer came back: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
Imagine how disorienting that would have been. Here is a man literally traveling to arrest followers of Jesus, and Jesus shows up.
Saul was struck blind. The men with him led him into Damascus, where he sat for days, not eating and not drinking. Meanwhile, God was at work somewhere else in the city. A devout follower of Jesus named Ananias received instructions to go find Saul. Ananias hesitated, and understandably so. He had heard about this man. He persecuted people exactly like him. God’s answer was essentially, “I will tell you everything you need to do. Just go.”
Ananias went. He laid hands on Saul, prayed over him, and shared Jesus and the Holy Spirit with him. Acts 9:18-22tells us that something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes and he could see again. He got up, was baptized, ate, and regained his strength. He spent several days with the disciples in Damascus and immediately began preaching in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. Everyone who heard him was astonished and asked whether this was the same man who had raised havoc in Jerusalem. They were right on all accounts, and yet Saul grew more and more powerful, baffling the people living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.
Most of us look at the Road to Damascus and say that is when it happened. To a point, we are right. To another point, we are completely wrong.
The transformation did not happen because Paul found a new religion. It did not happen because he found a new church, one with better worship music or a better preacher or positions that agreed with all of his political opinions. He did not trade one faith system for another. The transformation happened because Paul encountered Jesus. He met the living God, he met the resurrected Christ, and then he allowed Jesus to become his foundation.
What came next took years. Fifteen to twenty years later he is the author of the majority of the New Testament, writing letters to churches he helped plant, leading people, and discipling people.
Paul describes that stretch himself in Galatians 1:11-20. He writes that the gospel he preached is not of human origin, that he did not receive it from any man and was not taught it, but received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. He recalls his previous way of life, how intensely he persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it, how he was advancing in Judaism beyond many of his peers and was extremely zealous for the traditions of his fathers. Then, he says, God, who set him apart from his mother’s womb and called him by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in him so that he might preach Him among the Gentiles. His immediate response was not to consult any human being. He did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before him. He went into Arabia, later returned to Damascus, and only after three years went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas, who is Peter, staying with him fifteen days. He saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother, and he assures his readers before God that what he is writing is no lie.
Here is the point. The transformation in Paul’s life did not happen overnight. What happened on the road mattered, but it was not the whole story. The change came through years of being discipled, reading the Word of God, praying, experiencing Jesus, learning, and growing.
Yes. Doubting God is not a betrayal of faith, and Scripture does not treat it as one. Dare I say it, Paul deconstructed his faith.
You can call it deconstruction. You can call it doubt. You can call it asking questions. Call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, what Paul was doing was dismantling his previous view of God in order to build on the solid foundation of who Jesus actually is.
That is why doubting God is not automatically the end of anything. The picture of God that fell apart on top of that parking garage needed to fall apart. It was too small, too transactional, and too dependent on God performing the way I expected Him to. Losing it felt like losing everything. It was the beginning of finding Him.
If you are doubting God, or angry enough at Him to say so, start by telling Him the truth. Paul’s story and my own both suggest that God is not intimidated by an honest accusation, and He is not waiting for you to clean up your language before He shows up.
Then give it time. If you are expecting a single moment on a road somewhere to resolve everything, you may be looking for the wrong thing. Transformation came to Paul through years of Scripture, prayer, community, questions, and lived experience with Jesus. The moment mattered, but the years are where the foundation got laid.
And if you are convinced you don’t need God at all, that may be the most important sentence here. The people who need Him most are almost always the ones most certain they don’t.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>If you want to stop feeling like a fake Christian, the answer in Philippians 3 is not to perform better. It is to put the list down. The apostle Paul held the most impressive religious credentials of anyone in his world, and he eventually called all of it garbage. Here is why he let it go, and what he found waiting on the other side.
That is good news for anyone who has ever sat in a church service doing the math on their own spiritual performance. The pressure to project something you are not is not new, and it is not a sign that your faith is broken. Paul treats it as the most natural thing in the world, and then he offers a way out of it.
In the first two chapters of Philippians, Paul describes how Jesus created space for people to belong. He shows what that looked like, what Jesus modeled, and what He taught. Then Paul makes the turn: if you have bought into that way of living, you ought to create that same kind of space for one another. He closes chapter two with two examples of people who did exactly that.
Then comes the warning. Some people were masking. They presented themselves as part of the movement, as followers of Jesus who were creating room for others, but inwardly something else was happening. Paul does not soften it. In Philippians 3:2 he tells the church to “watch out for those dogs, those evildoers,” and he keeps going from there. His words, not ours.
The language is strong enough that it deserves some explanation. Paul is pointing at a specific group known as the Judaizers. These were Jewish converts to Christianity, or at least they said their faith was in Christ. What they were teaching was that anyone who turned to Christ from outside the Jewish world needed to do more than accept Him. They also had to take on the full set of Jewish laws and customs.
Most of the people Paul was preaching to were not Jewish. They had not grown up knowing anything about those laws or customs. Paul could not see why they would be asked to carry a weight that was never theirs to begin with, and he opposed the teaching strongly.
The Judaizers leaned hard into one requirement in particular. Faith in Christ alone was not enough, they said. You also needed to be circumcised.
Their reasoning went all the way back to Genesis. God made a covenant with Abraham, and circumcision was how the Israelites demonstrated that they were in on that covenant. It was the family’s way of saying they would follow these commands and these laws. So the Judaizers argued that anyone joining the family needed the same sign.
Think about what that actually asked of people. This was not raising a hand to be saved. This was not even stepping forward to be baptized. For an adult man, this was invasive surgery and a painful decision. Paul’s answer was no. He taught faith alone in Christ alone, saved by grace, and he said that anyone teaching otherwise was not helping people but mutilating them.
Then he reframes the whole thing. “For it is we who are the circumcision, who serve God by His Spirit,” he writes in Philippians 3:3, describing people who boast in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Because Jesus died and rose, there is a new covenant, and the seal of that covenant is the Holy Spirit. So why send people into surgery? Taking the first two chapters together, Paul’s point lands hard: when we demonstrate our commitment to the way of Jesus through the way we love one another, that is a far better representation of our faith than anything the Judaizers were selling.
Paul then tells us why this matters so much to him personally. If anyone wanted to compete on religious credentials, he had them all. Circumcised on the eighth day. Of the people of Israel. Of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. A Pharisee in regard to the law. Zealous enough to persecute the church. As for righteousness based on the law, “faultless.”
He knew what it was like to pretend that the outward things, the things he could project, were what it was really about. This was his story.
So pull your own mask back for a second and consider what you project. Maybe some of it is spiritual. I go to church every week. I take communion. I serve on the kids team. I read my Bible every morning. I pray with my kids at night, most nights. Paul’s response to that is almost playful. You have got a list? I have a list too, and mine is probably better than yours.
Then he says the thing that changes everything: “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ” (Philippians 3:7). When he met Jesus, the mask stopped making sense. So he gave it up. He surrendered it. He considered everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord, counting it all as garbage so that he might gain Christ and be found in Him. Not a righteousness of his own that came from the law, but the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. What he wanted was to know Christ, to know the power of His resurrection, and to share in His sufferings.
Paul was at the top of the food chain in the religious world. He was the picture of what devotion was supposed to look like. And at some point he looked around and asked what any of it was actually accomplishing.
So he gave it up. And when he gave up a righteousness built on his own projections, he did not end up with nothing. He found something so much better: a better way of living, a freer way of living, and an eternal kind of living.
Paul traded righteousness based on the law for three things he could not manufacture on his own. He found true identity in Christ. He found purpose in sharing the gospel with anyone who would listen. And he found true belonging alongside other believers.
That is the invitation here. If you are willing to take off the mask, if you are willing to let go of the things you have been holding onto for the sake of knowing Christ, you can experience the same three things. True identity. True purpose. True belonging.
Paul wanted this desperately for the Philippians because he had lived both sides of it. He knew the exhaustion of the projection and he knew the freedom on the other side.
If you want to stop feeling like a fake Christian, that feeling may be the most honest thing about your faith right now. It means the gap between what you present and what you actually have is finally bothering you. Paul’s answer was not to project harder. It was to let the whole list go, and to find identity, purpose, and belonging in Christ instead.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>Biblical community is friendship shaped by the gospel. It looks like people who show genuine concern for each other’s welfare, who look out for someone else’s interests instead of their own, and who serve Jesus alongside each other no matter what it costs. That is a much deeper bond than regular friendship, and it is far rarer than most of us realize.
In Philippians 2, Paul describes two men who lived this way. He is writing to a church he loves, calling them to shine like stars in a crooked and depraved generation, and then he does something practical. Instead of leaving the idea abstract, he points at two people and says, in effect, look at them. This is what it looks like.
The first example is Timothy. In verse 19, Paul writes, “I hope to send Timothy to you soon, and I also will be cheered when I receive news about you.”
It helps to remember that these are days long before texting. To hear someone’s news, you had to send a person with a letter, and then you waited a long time. That is the situation behind Paul’s words. He wants to be encouraged by news of this church so badly that he is willing to send his closest companion to get it.
Then comes the description. “I have no one else like him, who will show genuine concern for your welfare.” Imagine that on a resume. I have no one else like him. Why? Because he genuinely cares about you.
We live in a time where comfort and self preservation are the highest things we are trying to protect. I was laughing with my family when we lost power at our house. The biggest issue we faced was how we were going to recline the electric chair. First world problems. But that is honestly where we are. We are comfortable, and we look out for our own interests. That is normal.
And Paul says this guy is different. “Everyone looks out for their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ.” Not Timothy.
When Paul meets Timothy, Paul is the kind of man who goes from one town to another talking about Jesus. When communities of faith would form, he would strengthen them, then leave and plant another church. He hears about Timothy first. The young man’s reputation precedes him. Then Paul meets him and thinks, I have to work with you.
Timothy becomes like a son to him. Friendship is too shallow a word to describe their relationship.
Timothy goes through the whole journey with Paul of telling people about Jesus, and Paul’s journeys were dramatic. His obedience was costly. He got beaten up. He got thrown in jail. He got accused of things he did not do. So for Timothy, a kid, probably a teenager, to say I am with you was expensive. It was not an easy path.
Paul says it plainly in verse 22. “You know that Timothy has proved himself, because as a son with his father he has served with me in the work of the gospel.”
Sometimes the journey of obedience is costly, and it is so much sweeter in the company of others who have decided they are in it too. There is a kind of person who says, I am allowing my identity in Jesus to permeate every fiber of my being, and I will say yes to the Lord whatever it costs. Are you with me? If you have even one other human like that, if your small group, your community, your family, or your friendships become bonded around that, it goes far deeper than regular friendship. That is biblical community, defined by the gospel.
Then Paul says in verse 23, “I hope, therefore, to send him as soon as I see how things go with me. And I am confident in the Lord that I myself will come soon.” Sit with how deep that is. Paul is essentially saying, I love this kid, and I love you so much that I am willing to give up this companion, this son, in order to show you my love.
The second man Paul names is Epaphroditus. In verse 25, Paul writes, “I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, co-worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs.”
Timothy is like a son, and Paul can send him. But Epaphroditus he calls necessary.
Now imagine a first century Roman prison. You are on your own. If you got beaten on your way in, nobody is nursing your wounds. If you need food, if you need to be cared for at all, you are on your own. So for the Philippian church to send Epaphroditus to take care of Paul is deep ministry. Paul needed it, and this man came as an expression of care from his whole church.
Then he gets sick and almost dies on the journey to care for Paul. Paul sees the weight of it. He explains that Epaphroditus is longing to go home and is distressed because the church heard he was ill. He cannot send them a video saying he is fine. He has to come back physically. As Paul puts it in verse 27, “Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow.”
Paul’s life was hard, and I do not think he complained much. He was about Jesus no matter what it cost. But he looks at this situation and says, I am so glad he did not die coming to take care of me. That would have been really hard. Sorrow upon sorrow.
Paul knew what costly brotherhood looked like from the inside. I will come and take care of you. It might kill me, but I am coming. I do not know whether Epaphroditus would have gone if he had known how costly it would be. But reading Paul’s description of him, I think he would have. I think he had already made a predetermined decision to serve the Lord with his whole life, no matter what it cost him.
This is exactly why helping people take next steps with God matters so much. It is worth pausing to name your next step and make a real commitment to it, because the moment you start taking it, it gets costly, and you begin thinking you might not want to do this anymore.
So you take your next step, and you tell your people, so they can help hold you accountable.
I used to be in youth ministry, and there was a young man who gave me a hard time constantly. He was just a punk. Then he met Jesus and got baptized, and I happened to be preaching the day he got baptized, so I gave him a hard time right back. It was payback. But underneath the joke was something real. Here was someone saying publicly, my life belongs to the Lord. So if you see him around and he is doing dumb things, give him a hard time, because that is what accountability looks like.
It works the same way for me. If I decide this is how I am going to love my husband or my kids, and I tell the group of women I pray with, and then a month later I am not acting that way, they have every right to call me out. We are in this together. That is biblical community.
Timothy and Epaphroditus give us something to aim at. Consider what they embodied and what you want to be remembered for.
How can you show genuine concern for someone? How can you look out for someone else’s interests in a way that is countercultural, in a way that does not even make sense to the people watching? How can you serve Jesus alongside another person? How is God calling you to sacrifice and to speak about Jesus in your own world in ways that may be costly?
Maybe He has already put a Paul in your life, someone radical who is willing to stand up in the school yard and talk about Jesus. And maybe your role is companion. I am here with you. We are doing this together.
These two men are a powerful picture of what Paul was inviting all of us into. Not comfortable friendship, but the kind of community that shines like stars in a crooked and depraved generation.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>If you want to know how to be humble, the answer is not more effort. Humility is not a habit you install by writing the word on a sticky note and staring at it every morning. In Philippians 2, Paul points to something underneath the behavior: humility grows in people who know who they are and who they belong to.
I know the sticky note approach does not work, mostly because I have tried it.
Paul was writing to a church he loved, and he opened the second chapter of his letter with a word that carries a lot of weight. “Therefore.” I learned in Bible college many years ago that therefore is a connector word. It means because of everything I just said. Because of everything Paul had just told the Philippians about conducting their lives in a manner worthy of the gospel, so that people far from God could be drawn near to Him, because of all that, here is what comes next.
Paul begins with four conditional statements. “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from His love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.” He continues, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” (Philippians 2:1-4).
Read those conditions slowly. If you have encouragement from being united with Christ, if you have comfort from His love, if you have fellowship with the Spirit, if you have experienced tenderness and compassion, then you will be united in spirit. Then you will be humble. Then you will value other people as better than yourself.
Here is the whole of it in one sentence. If you have been changed by the sacrifice and the love of Jesus, your life will look like one that is laid down.
I will say that again, because I do not think it lands the first time. If you have been changed by the love of Jesus, then your life will look like one that is laid down.
Let us be honest. The person Paul is describing does not look anything like our culture. We are not encouraged to lay anything down. We are encouraged to puff up, to show up, to be tough, to take control.
I recently came across an ad for an online course platform, the kind where professors from major institutions record trainings on becoming the leader you want to be. A professor from Yale appeared in the ad and asked, do you want to be a person who gets power? You do not get power by sitting back. You get power by seizing it.
That is a mindset, and mindsets disciple us into a way of being. It is completely opposite from what Paul says it means to follow Christ. To live the way Paul describes is to live against the grain of nearly everything else forming us.
I have heard it said that you cannot be something you have not seen. Paul seems to understand that, because in the next verses he stops describing humility and starts showing it.
“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage; rather, He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:5-11).
Watch the direction of that passage. Jesus is in very nature God, and He lowers Himself to become nothing. Lower still, He takes on the nature of a servant. Lower still, He is made in human likeness. Lower still, He becomes obedient unto death. Lowest of all, death on a cross, the most excruciating and humiliating death that existed. Christ humbled Himself to that point for you.
That is the picture we have been given to see, and it is the picture we are now called to model, so that other people can receive the same gift we have received. That is the why. That is the reason we reflect what Jesus has done.
No. You cannot manufacture humility by concentrating on it. Thirty minutes a morning of thinking about being humble does not produce a humble person, because humility is a fruit, not a technique.
Paul’s hope was that this would move through us rather than sit in one place. It would move from being a knowledge we hold in our minds, to a feeling we experience in our hearts, to actions we carry out with our hands. Head, then heart, then hands.
You may be thinking, I am not Jesus. I am not either. But when we are united with Christ, and that is exactly where Paul started the chapter, we have been given power through the Holy Spirit to engage in relationships with one another in this way. Humility is the thing that fuels our belonging with each other, and we are able to follow in the humility of Jesus because His Spirit is at work in us.
A couple of days ago I was in the drive-through line at Wendy’s. I was driving, my husband was in the passenger seat, and my two kids, ages five and eight, were in the back. The line was long, so we had time to talk. My five year old announced that he could not wait to be married one day. He really wanted to be a husband, he said, because when he was a husband he would get to drive all the time.
I would like you to remember who was driving the car at that moment.
My husband does a great job of operating motorized vehicles. It is one of the top hundred things I like to watch him do. And in that moment he answered our son beautifully. He said, well, buddy, I really like being in the driver’s seat. But being in the driver’s seat is not what makes me a man. Your mom is completely capable of driving the car on her own, and I feel just as much a man sitting in the passenger seat with her as I do when I am driving.
In that moment he modeled humility for our son. Just because he can does not mean he will.
I will be honest, he is a better driver than me by far. The number of times I have tried to back up a trailer with that man in the car and broken out in a sweat, knowing he could do it better, is not small. But just because he can does not mean he will.
So how do you actually become humble? Look at Jesus again. Jesus was humble because He knew who He was, and He knew who He belonged to. Throughout His public ministry we see Him departing again and again to a quiet place to be with the Father. His identity was rooted in belonging to the Father before anything else.
I see the same thing in my husband. He wakes up at 4:30 every morning to work out and spend time with the Lord. His identity is rooted in who he knows he is before God. That is what makes him able to say, without any threat to himself, that his wife driving the car does not bother him one bit. Not permission granted from above. Partnership.
That is where humility comes from, and it is why trying harder never works. You cannot value others above yourself while you are still using them to prove something about yourself. Security has to come first, and security comes from knowing whose you are.
So the question underneath all of this is simple, and it is worth sitting with today. Do you know who you are? Do you know who you belong to?
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You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>A sense of belonging does not come from standing in the right room. It comes from being known by people who are committed to the same thing you are. That is why someone can sit in a crowded building and still feel like an outsider, and why two people separated by hundreds of miles can still belong to each other completely.
If you have been trying to figure out how to find a sense of belonging that actually holds, the New Testament letter to the Philippians is a surprising place to start. It was written by a man in chains to a group of friends he could not reach, and it opens with some of the warmest language in the entire Bible. Right from the first few verses, belonging turns out to be central to the gospel itself.
Belonging means being known and counted as one of the group. It shows up in three layers, and the gospel touches all three.
There is belonging to a place, the sense that you can walk into a space and be welcomed and safe there. There is belonging to a community, the sense that you are part of a people and that you belong with one another. And there is belonging to God’s family, which is the deepest layer of the three. It is part of why God invites all of us to address Him as our Father in heaven. It is also why Christians, in language that can sound a little awkward at first, refer to one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Every one of those phrases is communicating the same thing: you belong here.
That kind of belonging sits at the center of the good news of Jesus Christ.
Paul begins his letter to the church at Philippi by putting on a name tag. Philippians 1:1 reads, “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus.”
If you know his story, Paul’s given name was not Paul. It was Saul. Timothy was his apprentice, and the two of them are writing together. Notice the label Paul attaches to himself: servants of Christ Jesus. That is his identity before he says anything else.
Then he labels his audience. “To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and the deacons. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
And then the affection starts pouring out. “I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
Can you already sense how connected Paul feels to these people? Every time he thinks of them, he wants to pray for them, and every time he prays for them he is filled with joy.
A little context helps here. Paul had planted this church roughly a decade before he wrote this letter. He got to know people, he raised up overseers and deacons, and then he moved on to the next town to plant more churches.
He is writing back now because he keeps hearing reports as he travels. The people he raised up are still sharing the gospel. Whatever happened while he was with them did not end when he left. They kept going, and they kept bringing others in.
So he gives them a new label: partners in the gospel. Not a church he founded. Not people who once heard him preach. Partners. That label brings him joy, and it also brings him confidence, because the work God began through him is now continuing through them.
Before going further, it helps to be clear about what this gospel is that they are partners in. One simple way to picture it uses three circles.
The first circle represents creation the way God intended it. It is whole. It is made in His love. There is harmony and there is peace. This is the Garden of Eden, the world as God designed it to be.
That is not the world we experience. Something happened. God’s good and perfect and whole creation rejected its design. Human beings, made in God’s image and in His likeness, chose to rebel against God’s plan. The Bible calls that rebellion sin, and sin leads to brokenness.
This second circle is the world we know. We all sense that something feels off between us and God. We all sense that something is off in the world and something is off in us. Anytime you feel that, you are feeling the brokenness. The hard part is that we all contribute to it. As Scripture puts it in Romans 3:23, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Because we feel it, we all want out of it. We want back to wholeness, so we make attempts. Some chase pleasure. Some chase comfort. Some chase approval. Some chase the accumulation of things or a steady supply of distractions. Whatever it takes to escape the brokenness and get back to whole.
The problem is that most of those attempts, if not all of them, only lead to more brokenness. They leave us feeling further from God, further from other people, and further from ourselves.
God sees this, and God longs for us to be whole, because that is how He made us. So He made a way, and Jesus is the way.
God sent His Son Jesus to live in that broken world. Jesus existed inside the brokenness without contributing to it. He lived and did not sin. He lived His life in perfect alignment with the way of God, and even so, He faced the ultimate consequence of our broken world. He died, and He died a humiliating death on a cross.
But because He lived without sin, and because He willingly took the consequences of a broken world, God restored Him to life and raised Him from the dead.
What Jesus taught is that if we acknowledge what God has done, if we acknowledge our own part in bringing brokenness into the world and turn from it, and if we put our trust in His death and resurrection, He will restore us too. Our relationship with God can be made whole again. That wholeness then flows outward into being restored with each other and restored to ourselves. And when we trust in Jesus, God sends us back into the brokenness to lead others to put their trust in Him.
That is the gospel. That is what Paul meant when he told the Philippians they had been partners with him in it. When he hears the stories coming out of Philippi, he is overjoyed, because his friends are experiencing wholeness again and leading other people into it.
That shared work is what produces the sentence he writes next. “It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.”
Catch the detail buried in that line about chains. Paul is writing from prison. He is physically cut off from these people and not even able to reach them. He is in chains because he was preaching the gospel, and from that cell he is writing to his friends telling them to keep preaching it.
Which means proximity is not what holds this together. Connection is. Relationship is. Paul has no access to the room, and the belonging is still intact.
And who would not want to be connected to someone who writes like that? I have you in my heart. We share in God’s grace with each other. I long for you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
That sentiment is the output of belonging. It is what comes out the other side of the risk, and there is real risk in it. Letting yourself be known by a group of people can feel like anxiety before it feels like anything else. But on the other side of being known is being loved, and being part of something bigger than yourself alongside people who are in it with you. There is a deep sense of bonding and connection and relationship when we share in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
If you have been searching for how to find a sense of belonging, the pattern in Philippians points somewhere specific. It starts with being known rather than merely being present. It grows through shared purpose rather than shared square footage. And it rests on a foundation that no distance, no prison cell, and no season of life can take apart, because you belong first to God’s family.
You belong here. Not because you have earned a spot, but because the God who made you whole has invited you in and given you people to walk with. That invitation is open, and the next step is simply to let yourself be known.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>There is a difference between what you hunger for and what you want to hunger for. When Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6), He was naming a hunger most of us have not learned to feel yet. That difference shows up in your food, and it shows up in your faith.
Years ago, a friend and I went to lunch together. We were both pastors, both trying to get healthier, both going to the gym. I was trying to lose a few pounds and do some body recomposition. He was trying to lose a lot more. We got together to commiserate about ministry and to talk about the journey we were both on.
The server brought out our meals. In front of me she set grilled chicken with some kind of sauce, mashed potatoes, and broccoli. Then I looked up and saw what she set in front of him. Have you ever looked at someone else’s food and gotten physically sick? On his plate was a pile of deep fried restaurant made potato chips, and next to it, a hamburger. I have nothing against a hamburger, but let me describe this one. It was a double, two quarter pound patties, with bacon, grilled onions, and peanut butter. It gets worse. The entire thing had been dipped in batter and deep fried, so it was essentially a donut encapsulating a hamburger. When he took a bite, grease ran down his chin and he had to lean over the plate. I had nine and one already dialed, because I knew the next one was coming.
Here was a man who had just told me he wanted to be healthier, who was exercising and trying to eat better, and he ordered a heart attack on a plate. Something did not line up.
But something does not line up in most of us, and that is exactly what Jesus is getting at.
The world will tell you a million different things about what the good life is. Jesus told us early in the Gospel of Matthew.
After Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, He goes into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights and is tempted by the devil. Then He begins to preach, moving through towns and villages and people groups, proclaiming the good news. In Matthew 4:17, He says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.”
That proclamation is the foundation of everything Jesus does. Yes, He healed the lame, gave sight to the blind, cured the sick, and raised Lazarus from the dead. He walked on water, turned water into wine, fed 5,000 people with almost nothing, and calmed a storm with power over the weather. He did all of that. But that is not why He came. Jesus came to call you and me into repentance, because He was ushering in the kingdom of heaven, and every miracle pointed back to that purpose.
Matthew 4 closes with Jesus gathering His disciples, and then we step into the most famous sermon the world has ever heard, the Sermon on the Mount, spanning Matthew 5-7. Some of Jesus’ best known teaching sits in these three chapters. What deserves our attention is how He started.
Jesus did not open with an introduction. He did not give His background or His education. He did not make announcements about what was coming later. He did not warm up the crowd with a funny story. He began with blessings, and we call them the Beatitudes. What He was doing was showing people what the good life actually is.
Here is what matters about the Beatitudes. This is not Jesus scanning a crowd and saying, “There happen to be some meek people out here today, and good news, you all are blessed.” That is not what is happening.
Jesus is looking at everyone and telling them what it means to follow after Him. It is not simply “blessed are the meek.” It is blessed are those who choose meekness. Blessed are those who follow Me in a way that produces a meek life. Every one of these blessings is an invitation into a way of living, and Jesus is describing how any of us can live the good life.
Then He arrives at verse six, where He says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled, or satisfied, depending on your translation.
Start with the word hunger, because all of us have felt it. If you have ever practiced fasting, you know. If you have simply gone without a meal, your stomach starts to growl and churn and you feel it.
To hunger is to be unsatisfied. That is what hunger means. It is knowing something is missing. When we are hungry for food, we recognize a gap, so we go looking for something that will close it.
So when Jesus blesses those who hunger and thirst, He is acknowledging something real. Blessed are those who are unsatisfied with this life. Blessed are those who know something is missing. This is the same ground He was standing on in Matthew 4:17 when He said to repent because the kingdom of heaven has drawn near. Blessed are those who long for that, because there is a kingdom Jesus is ushering in that is greater and more powerful than anything in this world. Blessed are those who see it, who hunger for what He is bringing, and who are unsatisfied with the world as it currently is.
We have to be honest that hunger is not one uniform thing.
At this very moment there are children in this world who cannot remember their last meal and do not know when the next one is coming, people living with real, dangerous, life threatening starvation. And on the other end there is the hunger of my twelve year old, who just had a snack, has dinner coming in twenty minutes, and is standing in the kitchen announcing that she is starving to death. Not all hunger is the same.
Neither are the things we hunger for. Some of us hunger for power, influence, sex, money, pleasure, and approval. Those cravings are not equal either, and Jesus is not blessing all of them indiscriminately.
He is identifying something very specific. There is a difference between hungering for something healthy and hungering for a deep fried double bacon cheeseburger, and Jesus names the difference by naming the object: righteousness.
Blessed are those who are unsatisfied with the level of righteousness in their life. Blessed are those who hunger for more. Blessed are those who hunger to be more like Jesus, who hunger to be more holy, who know they are broken and in need of redemption. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
That question is not rhetorical, and it is not about what you say you want.
When I sat down with my friend that day, everything he told me was true. He wanted to get healthy. He wanted to exercise. He wanted to eat better. But at the end of the day, what he actually hungered for was something else entirely, and the plate in front of him told the truth his words could not.
What we hunger for and what we want to hunger for are sometimes very different things. That gap is worth sitting with rather than rushing past, because Jesus is not asking you to perform an appetite you do not have. He is calling you to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be genuinely unsatisfied with the level of righteousness in this world and in your own life, and He attaches a promise to it. Those who hunger this way will be filled.
There is never a moment you approach God and He is unwilling to transform you. There is never a moment you enter His presence and He does not want to draw you closer. So the honest prayer is not that you would pretend the hunger is already there. It is that He would whisper into your soul until you can tell the difference between what you hunger for and what you want to hunger for.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>When Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” in Matthew 5:5, He was not blessing weakness. The meek are not the timid, the fearful, or the easily pushed around. In the language Jesus used, meekness means strength that has been surrendered. And He promised that this kind of person would one day inherit everything.
If you have ever read that line and pictured someone quiet and walked over, you are not alone. It is one of the most misunderstood promises Jesus ever made. Understanding what He actually meant changes how you see strength, power, and what it means to wait on God.
No. Meekness is not the absence of strength. It is strength under control.
The Bible comes to us from two primary languages. The Old Testament was originally written in ancient Hebrew, and the New Testament in Greek. The Greek word translated as “meek” in Matthew’s Gospel describes someone mild mannered, with a gentle disposition. That fits our usual picture of meekness. But the same word was also used to describe a wild horse that had been tamed. That horse still has all of its power and all of its strength, but it has been surrendered to its trainer.
So meekness is not always about a lack of strength. There is a broader meaning underneath it: strength that is surrendered. Sometimes that strength is physical. Sometimes it is our influence or reputation. Sometimes it is our education, our ability to control a situation, to win an argument, or to bend things in our own favor. In every one of those areas, the meek are the ones who say, “I could take control here, but I am going to choose restraint.” It is strength surrendered.
One of the clearest pictures of this comes from the life of David.
When David was a young boy, he was anointed to become the next king of Israel. God had placed a calling on his life and was preparing him for real authority. Later, David defeated Goliath in battle, so he clearly had courage and strength of his own. But he was not the king yet. Saul was still on the throne.
When Saul began hearing all the praise being given to David, he threatened to take David’s life. David could have confronted Saul directly and seized the throne. Instead, he withdrew to the wilderness and waited for the Lord’s timing. While David was hiding in a cave one day, Saul entered that same cave, not knowing David was there. Suddenly David was handed the perfect opportunity to take everything that had been promised to him. His friends urged him on, telling him this was his shot, that God had delivered Saul into his hands. And what did David do? He refused to take the throne of Israel by force.
That was his demonstration of meekness. It was strength surrendered to God’s timing.
There is a second layer to meekness in the Old Testament. Another word translated as meek is sometimes rendered humble, and sometimes afflicted. It describes people who are powerless, oppressed, overlooked, unimpressive, or poor. These are people who are easily taken advantage of, easily placed under someone else’s authority, without the resources or social standing to change their circumstances. They are considered meek not because they choose to hand over their strength, but because they have so little strength to begin with, and what little they have is often taken from them.
That part matters, because of who Jesus was speaking to. He was sitting on the side of a mountain, surrounded by a crowd of people who were poor. They felt powerless. They felt oppressed and unable to change their situation. And to them Jesus said, blessed are the ones who surrender whatever strength they have to God.
Who is most willing to surrender their strength to God? It is the ones with a humble disposition and a gentle spirit. The stronger, more impressive, and more self-important a person feels, the harder it is to surrender anything to anyone, even to God. But the humbler and gentler and more low key a person is, the more willing they are to let go. Jesus says that is who the good life belongs to.
Jesus told the meek they had a surprise coming: “they will inherit the earth.”
While the proud and the powerful seize and conquer and take the land, the meek know that a day is coming. When the kingdom of heaven arrives, all the land that has been taken by the powerful will be returned to God as its rightful owner. On that day He will redistribute it and give it to the meek as their inheritance.
In that culture, as in ours, a land inheritance was a big deal. It meant a transfer of wealth, which matters deeply if you are someone who feels like you have been left out. But it was not only about wealth. A land inheritance also meant dominion. The one who received it got to decide what happened on that land. Jesus was telling the meek that those who have taken and conquered will hold their spoils no longer, and the meek will become the rulers of the land when the kingdom of heaven comes.
When Jesus said the meek will inherit the earth, He was directly quoting Psalm 37. Beginning in verse seven it reads, “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath. Do not fret, it leads only to evil. For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.” The passage goes on to promise that “the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity.”
This was the promise to the people of Israel hundreds of years before Jesus ever arrived. The problem was that they did not wait for the Lord. They fretted, and they fretted often. And so God allowed their oppressors to take the land from them.
By the time Jesus delivered this message, He was literally sitting on a piece of land that had once been given as an inheritance and passed down from generation to generation, until an oppressor took it. Over the years it had been bought and sold and taken and sold again. That was simply the way things were. The people Jesus spoke to knew only one pattern: the powerful come and take, and the meek lose. Many of them assumed that when the Messiah finally came, He would gather an army and take back the land by force.
Then Jesus arrived as the Messiah, the rescuer of Israel, and in His revolutionary sermon He reminded them how Israel would actually obtain the land. Not by force, but through those who are still and who wait patiently for the Lord.
Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the ones who hold real strength and still choose to surrender it to God. Blessed are the ones who feel powerless and overlooked, who trust that God has not forgotten them. According to Jesus, the good life does not belong to those who grab and conquer. It belongs to those who wait on the Lord.
That is not a call to passivity, and it is not weakness. It is the deep confidence that God is a better keeper of your future than your own grasping ever could be. A day is coming when the kingdom of heaven arrives, and on that day the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity. Until then, the invitation is the same one given to Israel long ago: be still, surrender your strength to God, and wait patiently for Him.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>Ask most people to finish the sentence “Blessed is the one who,” and the answers come quickly: blessed is the one who is wealthy, healthy, successful, or secure. Almost no one finishes it the way Jesus does. When He opens the most famous sermon He ever preached, the very first quality He calls blessed is the one nobody would choose. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).
So what does “poor in spirit” actually mean, and why would Jesus put it at the top of His list for the good life? To be poor in spirit is to be consciously aware that you are empty of life, that you lack a certain vitality, and that you feel powerless to change it. It is the last state most of us would call a blessing. Yet according to Jesus, it is the doorway to the kingdom of heaven.
We understand these words on their own. To be poor is to lack something, or to have nothing at all. More than that, it means being aware that you have a lack and feeling powerless to change your situation. That is what makes poverty poverty: not only the absence of what you need, but the sense that you cannot fix it on your own.
Then there is spirit, a word that can carry many meanings. It can point to a ghost, a breath, or a wind. Here Jesus is describing something else, the invisible energy that animates a body, the life force we all recognize in ourselves even though we cannot see it. So to be poor in spirit is to have a conscious awareness that you lack this kind of life energy. Jesus is describing people who feel empty of life, drained of vitality.
He is not mainly talking about people who are poor in a financial or material sense, though the two often go together. He is talking about people who feel empty of the very energy of life, who know it, and who feel they can do nothing about it. And these, He says, are the blessed ones.
When you first read this, it is fair to wonder whether Jesus is playing some kind of trick, setting us up for a lesson we do not see coming. To understand what He means, it helps to know who was listening.
The crowds drawn to His teaching were not the polished and self-sufficient. They were fishermen, farmers, traders, and merchants. There were beggars in the crowd. There were sex workers in the crowd. These were people who already saw themselves as poor in spirit. Jesus had been announcing that the kingdom of heaven was breaking in through Him, and then He turned to this ragtag group and told them it was breaking in through them, too. They simply could not see it yet.
That is the brilliance of what Jesus is doing. He takes people who have written themselves off and hands them a new lens, the perspective of the kingdom of heaven. From that vantage point, He tells them, you are the blessed ones. If we want to understand what it means that the poor in spirit are blessed, we have to put that same lens on ourselves and begin to see our lives, and the world around us, the way Jesus sees them.
This was not a one-off statement for Jesus. He reinforced it throughout His ministry. Later He told a parable about two men who went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, a respected religious leader, and the other a tax collector, who in that culture was seen as a special kind of sinner, the very opposite of religious.
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, “God, I thank You that I am not like other people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven. He beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said it was this man, the tax collector, who went home justified before God, “for all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 18:10-14).
Which of those two men came to the temple poor in spirit? Jesus is showing us that there are two ways to view our situation in the world. We can see ourselves as full, or we can see ourselves as empty. And the ones who know they are empty, powerless, and in need are the privileged ones, because they are the ones able to receive what is coming to them.
Picture two cups, one full and one empty. Which one can receive something poured into it? The answer is obvious. Now think of God as the source of life, the abundant life He created and constantly pours out. He gives life, and He never stops giving it, pouring Himself out for all.
Only one of those two cups can receive what God is pouring. The other is already full. This does not mean that someone whose life is full by the world’s standards, or full of self-sufficiency, cannot receive the kingdom of heaven. It simply means that such a life has to be poured out first to make room for what God wants to give.
Those who are poor in spirit come already empty. That is why Jesus calls it a blessing. The empty have no struggle here. The poorer you are in spirit, the easier it is to receive what is coming to you, and the more freely you are able to pour out your own life, or even be willing to.
The kingdom of heaven runs on a logic that turns our assumptions upside down. We spend our lives trying to fill our cups, and Jesus blesses the ones who come empty. We chase self-sufficiency, and He says the good life belongs to those who know they cannot do it on their own.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The good life belongs to those who are, or who choose to become, poor in spirit, because they are the ones able to receive the kingdom of heaven that is coming to them. If you feel empty today, drained of life and unsure you can change it, you may be closer to that blessing than you think. The invitation is not to fill yourself up, but to come with an empty cup and let God pour.
If you want to sit with this longer, Jesus offers eight of these blessings in a row at the start of the Sermon on the Mount. Reading Matthew 5:3-10 slowly, and even committing it to memory, is one of the simplest ways to begin seeing your own life through the lens of the kingdom.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
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]]>You have probably tried to fix yourself. Most of us have. We work to scrub off the pride, the resentment, the anxiety, the habits we swore we would finally quit, and for a while it seems to hold. Then the stain shows up again, usually a little deeper than before.
Near the end of the book of Revelation, John hears Jesus describe two kinds of people using a single, surprising image: their clothing. Revelation 22:12-14 records Jesus saying, “Look, I am coming soon… Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may go through the gates into the city.” All through the passage there is this idea that what we wear matters. The kind of robe we have on actually matters.
Behind that image sits the question every one of us has asked at some level. How do we get in? Who actually gets to walk through the gates of the city that never closes? And if the honest answer is that I cannot clean myself up, then what hope is left? That is exactly the question Jesus answers.
John has spent the whole book showing us two kingdoms, and Jesus makes it clear that each kingdom has its own uniform. The difference between being inside the gates and outside them comes down to what you are wearing. Revelation 22:14-15 draws the line plainly: “Blessed are those who wash their robes… Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”
The uniform of fallen Babylon looks like a life covered in idolatry, pride, greed, emptiness, control, gluttony, lust, anxiety, and anger. It is everything this world keeps pushing onto us. The uniform of those who enter is different. It is a robe that has been washed clean, cleansed of the brokenness of this world. That is the only wardrobe allowed through the gates.
Here is the danger with the labels the world hands us. Wear them long enough and they stop being labels. They become identifiers. They become identity. Some of us have worn the same robe for years. Pride stopped being something we did and became who we are. Self-sufficiency stopped being a habit and started calling itself wisdom. Idolatry stopped feeling like idolatry and simply became the way we live our lives.
The longer we wear the robe, the more it looks like us. And you can wash, and you can scrub, the way I once tried to scrub ink out of my wife’s clothes, and still not get the stain out. If anything, the harder some of us work at it, the more ingrained the stain becomes in the fabric.
Before going any further, it is worth being honest about something. Many of us are trying to wear both robes at once. We walk into church, or pray before a meal, or pray with our kids, and it looks like we have the white robe on. Then the week starts, and at work or with certain friends we slip back into the other one.
That may be the most dangerous place of all. When we try to wear both, we are not only lying to the world about which robe we have on. We are lying to ourselves.
The short answer is no. You cannot make yourself clean. That is hard to hear, especially for anyone who has spent years trying. But John has been building toward this moment the entire book, and when the question finally arrives, “How do I go from this robe to that one?”, Jesus gives an answer that runs in three simple parts.
Some of us have tried everything in our power to stop being identified by these things, and it has not worked. The first thing to let go of is the idea that you can do it yourself, because you cannot. I still remember the day I actually gave my life to Jesus. I knelt at the rail of the church I grew up in, and honestly I do not know how I got there. I think the Holy Spirit dragged me up. All I could muster was, “God, I can’t do this on my own, I need You.” It was the first time I felt the Holy Spirit enter my life, and the first time I was able to put on a white robe. For some of us, the reason the robe has never changed is that we have never let go of the idea that we can change it ourselves.
The next thing we try is a quiet compromise. We think, I do not have to get all the way clean, but surely I need to get some of the stains out first. Jesus will never accept me this dirty. But that gets it backward. Jesus calls us to come exactly as we are, because we cannot wash the robe anyway. So we bring it, stains and all, to the only One who can.
Here is the paradox at the center of everything. The one thing that washes the stain out of your robe is the blood of the Lamb. You would never normally reach for blood to clean something. Yet His blood is the only thing that removes the stain of this world from your life. Every other method fails. The only thing strong enough to cleanse you is the sacrificial blood of Jesus.
There is a scene earlier in Revelation that makes sense of all this. In Revelation 5, John sees a sealed scroll that no one is worthy to open. Revelation 5:4-5 says, “I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside. Then one of the elders said to me, do not weep. See the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.”
John turns to see this conquering Lion. What he sees instead is “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne.” The One we call the Lion is victorious, not because He roars, but because He offered Himself up as a sacrificial Lamb. That is how you are saved. Not by your effort, but by His blood.
It is why, when Revelation reaches its final battle (Revelation 19:13-14), Jesus rides out in a robe already dipped in blood, His own sacrificial blood, while His entire army, the church, you and me, stands behind Him in clean white robes. The robes are white because of what He did, not because of anything we managed to scrub off.
Here is the secret of the book of Revelation. It was never really about the world. It was always about you. John did not write it to satisfy our curiosity about the world’s future. He wrote it so that you would follow Jesus more closely, so that you would wash your robe in the blood of the Lamb, so that you would walk through the gates.
It is easy to read Revelation as a book about everything out there, all the events and enemies outside of us. But from the first page it has been an invitation to you. And it comes down to one honest question. Which robe are you wearing? You cannot fix yourself. The good news is that you do not have to. You only have to come as you are to the One whose blood makes filthy robes white.
We always welcome new friends to worship with us. Find a location that’s close to you!
You can learn more about our beliefs and visit our video library to explore more topics like this one. You can also check out our events page to find out what fun new things we’re doing this season.
The post Why You Can’t Fix Yourself (And What Actually Can) appeared first on 2|42 Community Church.
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