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]]>You can know a great deal about God without actually knowing Him. That is the quiet danger sitting underneath one of the most familiar conversations in the Bible, and it is worth slowing down for, because knowing about God is the easier of the two and it looks close enough to the real thing to fool almost anyone.
Growing up in the 90s, my two favorite baseball players were Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas. I still have a big baseball card book at home filled with cards and posters of both of them. Back in 1994 I could have told you a lot about those two guys, and I had never met either of them in my life. This was before the internet was in every home, so everything I knew came off the back of those baseball cards or out of whatever was printed in Sports Illustrated for Kids.
That is the whole point. We can know quite a bit about someone without actually knowing them.
One of the biggest mistakes we can make in faith is mistaking knowing about God for actually knowing Him.
We can know all the Bible stories. We can memorize the chapter and verse where each one is found. We can show up to church, go to Bible study, and attend Christian conferences. Those things are good, and you will learn things about God at every one of them. But we can know a lot about God and still miss knowing Him, and still miss the sort of life He has called us to.
Scripture gives us a story about a man who knew a lot about God. If this were the first century and we were looking for the expert on God, we would have been pointed toward Nicodemus or someone like him. He knew a lot. And yet at some point in his faith journey, he seems to have suspected that there was more to faith than having all the answers. So one night, Nicodemus went looking for Jesus.
John 3 begins like this: “Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus, who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.” The first thing we learn is that he was a Pharisee, which means he belonged to a sect of Judaism devoted to understanding God’s laws and commands and committed to living them out precisely. Then we find out he was not just a Pharisee but a leader among them, appointed to the Jewish ruling council also known as the Sanhedrin. Today we might call him a religious expert or a religious influencer. His whole life was devoted to shaping people around faith.
Verse two says, “He came to Jesus at night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with Him.'”
We are not told why he came at night. Maybe he wanted privacy. Maybe he was worried about what the other religious leaders would think if they saw him talking with Jesus. Maybe it was the only time that worked for both of them. What we do know is that despite everything he knew about God, despite his position and his authority, he had been watching Jesus and noticed something different. Something about the way He talked. Something about the way He treated people. Nicodemus was intrigued, and he wanted to understand what it was.
Jesus answered a question Nicodemus had not asked. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
Nicodemus responded with the logical question: “How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Jesus went further. “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
If I had been standing there, I would have wondered why He put it so strangely. But there is a reason He used the language of birth. Birth is something every one of us simply received. None of us did anything to earn our way into the world. Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God works the same way. You cannot manufacture it. You receive it.
Jesus knew that Nicodemus did not need more information. This was a smart man, a learned man, a man who taught this material for a living. What Nicodemus needed was a different lens through which to view everything he already knew.
So Jesus told him he had to be born again. He was saying that the thing Nicodemus saw in Him could not be reached through a more meticulous breaking down of the text. There is an aspect of this that has to be received from God.
You can change your behavior without having a changed heart or a changed mind. You can study the Scriptures and know everything in them without ever surrendering to the God who gave them to us. You can become more religious without ever becoming more like Jesus.
What Nicodemus needed, and what you and I need today, is not more knowledge but new life. Life that can only come through the Spirit. Just as our first life was given to us by our parents, this new life, this eternal life, is given to us by God. What we cannot achieve through any amount of hard work, God can accomplish through His Spirit.
Understandably, Nicodemus was baffled. His response was, “How can this be?”
Jesus answered, “You are Israel’s teacher, and do you not understand these things?” That can sound like a jab, but keep reading. He goes on to say that of course Nicodemus does not understand, because a person can only testify to what he has seen, and Nicodemus has never seen the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus has. And then He explains how Nicodemus could experience it, by pointing forward to the cross through a story reaching back into Israel’s history.
In Numbers 21, the Israelites in the wilderness were dying from snakebites and cried out to God for help. God told Moses to lift up a snake, and anyone who looked at it would live. They simply had to trust that. In John 3:14, Jesus says that story was pointing forward to something better: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in Him.”
Our problem today is not snakebites in the wilderness. Our problem is worse. Our problem is sin. We are all guilty of it, and none of us can do anything to escape its consequences. When Jesus says the Son of Man must be lifted up, He is saying that what we cannot accomplish on our own, He came to do for us. Just as the Israelites had to trust that what God provided was the thing, strange as it looked, Jesus asks us to put our trust in Him and receive new life.
Nicodemus had spent his entire life trying to unlock the mystery of the kingdom of God through more study. What he had missed along the way was a relationship with the One who could give him this new and eternal kind of life.
The apostle John famously summarizes the whole interaction in John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”
More than anything, Jesus wanted Nicodemus to know, and He wants you and me to know, that God so loved this world. This broken and mixed up and sinful world, full of broken and mixed up and sinful people like me and like you. He loves you so much that He gave His Son, so that whoever believes in Him can receive the kingdom of God, can receive new life in the Spirit, can receive eternal life.
Maybe you grew up hearing it called everlasting life. Whatever you call it, it is not something you achieve by learning more. It is something you receive.
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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]]>Success rarely kills your faith in one dramatic moment. It happens in a sequence that feels reasonable at every step, until the God you once needed has quietly become optional. That slide sits underneath a short conversation in Mark 10, where a man who had everything people wanted ran to Jesus with a question he could not answer on his own.
If we were honest with ourselves, there is probably something in your life that you hold onto so tightly you would at least be tempted to go back in for it. We all have those things. We go to great lengths to hold onto them because in some way, shape, or form they are a sign of our success.
We have all kinds of things that resemble success for us. It is the money, the car we drive, the house we have, the job we have, the education we achieved, the lake house. Maybe for you it is not even that. Maybe it is having a car that is paid off, or being able to say that you are good and actually mean it.
Here is what is easy to miss: by most of those measurements, most of us are actually successful. We believe we are successful. And still the scorecard keeps running.
Years ago my family moved to plant a church, and I remember standing in our dining room looking out the window of the house we got to live in. By every measurement, we were successful too. But I was watching all these people come home from work. They would park their nice cars in their big garages, get out, and greet their families. I remember thinking, someday I will have it together like these people do. Someday I will have it figured out.
You have been there. You have looked at people your own age and thought that they have it all figured out, that they have all the answers and all the success. We carry a mental scorecard where we grade ourselves against other people and against every other measure of success around us, and from that scorecard we decide how we are doing.
So we strive for it.
A Harvard study a few years back took a group of millionaires and asked them the same question: on a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you, how content are you with what you have? The answer came back universal, across the board. It did not matter whether they had one million dollars or one hundred million dollars. In order to be satisfied, they said, they needed two to three times more than what they already had.
Studies have shown the same thing is true for you and me. We look at people with massive wealth and think that if we just had what they had, we would finally be content. The truth is they are not content either, because there is always something else we are chasing after.
Yes, and it rarely happens all at once. It happens in a sequence that feels reasonable at every step.
Here is what happens when success starts showing up in our lives. The first thing we say is, I have got this. I have got life figured out. Once we reach that point, the next step is, I do not need other people. I can handle this on my own.And the step after that is, I do not need God. I am successful. I have things figured out.
So let me pose a question. What if success is actually one of the greatest threats to your faith? I am not saying success is bad. I am asking what happens if success turns out to be one of the greatest threats to your walk with Jesus.
The story picks up in Mark 10:17. “As Jesus started on His way, a man ran up to Him and fell on his knees before Him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?'”
It is worth pausing on the running.
When we first moved to our church about five years ago, my youngest daughter was around seven years old. Our family is rooted in the community where we live, and we decided early that she was not going to follow me around on Sundays. She would have her own community of faith. So on the mornings I preached at that campus, I would go out onto the field between services to greet people while my wife picked her up from kids ministry. Keep in mind I had not seen her all morning, because I left before she got out of bed. She would walk out, look all the way across the field, see her dad, yell “Daddy,” and run the whole way with her arms wide open. I would squat down and give her a big hug.
It was sweet and it was awesome, and I miss it, because she is twelve now and it does not happen anymore. But imagine my nineteen year old doing it. Or imagine a grown adult, someone respected and dignified, sprinting across an open field in slow motion to throw their arms around a friend. You would think something was wrong with both of them.
In Jesus’ day it was an even bigger deal. Dignified adults did not run like that. And here this man runs to Jesus, calls Him good teacher, falls on his knees, and kneels before Him. There is a desperation in him.
Matthew’s account tells us this man was young. Luke’s identifies him as a ruler. We are about to discover that he is also wealthy. That is where we get the rich young ruler. But he is also desperate, willing to look undignified in the eyes of his culture just to approach the good teacher and ask a question.
Keep in mind, this is the guy who had it all figured out. He is dignified. He is respected. He is a ruler. People looked at him and thought, if anyone has made it, this guy has made it. He is the kind of man someone would gaze at through a dining room window and think, someday I will have my life figured out like him.
And he runs to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Here is the reality. An inheritance is not earned. It is given through relationship.
His question is his confession, because it tells you everything you need to know about this man. He thought that if there was just one more thing he could do, one more box he could check, then he could get eternal life. What is it I have to do?
Sometimes successful people think this way. What is the next thing I need to accomplish? What is the next task, the next goal? What do I need to do, Jesus, so that I can inherit eternal life?
You can have a full resume. Your bank account can be full, your calendar can be full, and you can still be empty inside. That emptiness is not proof that you failed at success. More often it is proof that success was never built to carry what you asked it to carry.
Success quietly kills your faith by making God optional, and the only way back is the way this man took. The man in Mark 10 had the scorecard everyone else wanted, and he still ran. He still knelt. He still asked. Whatever else that moment shows us, it shows a successful man admitting that what he already had could not get him what he actually wanted, and taking that admission straight to Jesus.
If you recognize yourself in him, you are not far off. You are close enough to run.
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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]]>Learning how to admit you’re wrong is harder than it sounds, because most of us cannot see ourselves clearly enough to know we are wrong in the first place. We cast ourselves as the hero of the story, or sometimes as the victim of it, but almost never as the person doing the damage. There is a moment in David’s life that exposes this tendency in all of us, and it begins with a stranger telling him a story.
David is so convinced he is going to cover up what he has done that he is sitting with it alone when a man named Nathan appears and starts a conversation with him. Nathan begins to tell a story. In the story there is a rich man in the city and a poor man in the city. The rich man has a visitor coming into town. The rich man has everything, while all the poor man has is a single ewe lamb, one lamb that was like a daughter to him, like a child. He took care of that lamb. It was precious to him, the one thing he valued more than anything else.
But rather than giving one of his own lambs to share in a meal with his guest, the rich man goes to the poor man and takes the one thing the poor man has.
As Nathan tells the story, David gets angry. He gets outraged. He starts to yell, saying this man should be put to death for what he has done, that he has taken something that did not belong to him, that he should not still be alive. And then comes the line in 2 Samuel 12:7: “Then Nathan said to David, ‘You are the man.'”
David is so far entangled in sin, so deep into mistake after mistake and compromise after compromise, that he cannot even see himself in the story about himself.
Nathan was telling David a story about David’s life. He was holding up a mirror for David to look into, so David could reflect on the man he had become and on the things he had been doing.
This is the opportunity David has in that moment. He has the chance to get real, to come before God, and to repent. But he has to actually look into the mirror and understand that he is the man in the story. He is the one who had it all and chose to take something that was not his.
And he does. He looks into that mirror, and he chooses to repent. Nathan then helps him walk that journey of repentance.
If I am being honest, when I read this story of David and look at this moment in his life, I think this moment in Scripture is an opportunity for us to do the same thing. It is a chance to hold Scripture up to our own lives and allow it to be a mirror, to let it ask us who we are in this story and what we are doing. What are the things we are doing wrong that we need to be called out about?
So the question is this. Are you going to let Scripture be a mirror for your life, something you can look into and reflect on? Am I the person I want to be remembered as? Am I being and becoming the man of God, or the woman of God, that I want to be?
Here is the reality. In a story like this one, it is really easy to look at Scripture and decide, well, I am Bathsheba, or I am Uriah. They seemingly did nothing wrong. They were taken advantage of. They were hurt. So it is easy to read a story like this and think, I have been hurt, so clearly I am Uriah, clearly I am Bathsheba.
Maybe that is true for what you are walking through right now. Maybe you have been hurt, and maybe you do relate to those people in the story.
But here is what we have to be careful about. For every moment that we are Uriah or Bathsheba, there are also moments in our lives where we find ourselves being just like David. What I know to be true about my own life is that no matter how many moments I feel like I am a man after God, doing good, making strides to look more and more like Jesus every day, I also find moments where I have to be real with myself and admit that I have fallen short. That I am the sinner. That I am the one doing the hurting.
What you cannot do is justify yourself by saying, well, I am not David, because I did not do anything that bad, and I did not cover it up that much.
The reality is that we all find ourselves being the David in the story at some point. Just because what you have done to hurt someone else can be justified, or called smaller than what David did, you have still hurt people. You are still a sinner. You are still someone in need of saving.
How do I know this? I know it because Scripture says it. Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” For every moment that we want to be the hero or the victim in a story, for every moment we want to be the person who has never done anything wrong, we have to also come to the realization that you and I are broken, and that you and I are sinners. Just because my sins do not look like someone else’s sins does not make me better, greater, or any less in need of a Savior.
That is the question worth asking, and the answer is the sinner. In case that is still not landing, let me be clear. I am the sinner. You are the sinner.
Each and every one of us was born into a broken world, a world where we see evil on full display and where we see the hurt people carry on full display. Even when we are not one of the people who caused a particular person’s pain, we still cause pain for others, because we are broken. For every moment that we find ourselves pursuing Jesus and choosing to make the right decisions, we also find ourselves in moments of selfishness, in moments of pride, in moments of anger, and in moments of bitterness.
So we have to come to the conclusion and the realization that we are all in need of God.
Learning how to admit you’re wrong starts the same way it started for David, with a willingness to look into the mirror and recognize yourself in a story you would rather believe is about someone else. David had every reason to stay outraged at the man in Nathan’s story and every reason to keep covering his own tracks. Instead he looked, he saw himself, and he repented.
That same mirror is still available. The question is whether you are willing to stand in front of it long enough to see what is actually there, and whether you will do what David did when he finally saw it.
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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]]>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?
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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]]>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.
The post What Jesus Said About Wanting the Wrong Things appeared first on 2|42 Community Church.
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