Good morning. This morning's scripture comes from Hebrews, chapter 10, verses 19 through 25. It's a call to perseverance and faith. Therefore brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, open for us through the curtain, that is his body.
And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart, and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled and cleansed us, from a guilty conscience, and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold on swervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised us faithful. And let us consider how we may spar one another on, toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together a summer in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another. And all the more as you see the day approaching.
And the word is true and can be trusted, praise be to God. I got some pictures here. Oh, and look at that. Here's a picture of Joe when he was a baby.
You get it? Yeah, oh baby. You are a cute baby, Joe, dirt. That's why we were so crazy when we lost him.
I mean, he's here. Now he's going. Where you going? Oh, oh, oh.
Where you going? There you go. Well, where did you go? I was at the canyon.
Yeah, you know what? It was right by the garbage can where you left me. Is that where you were? I'll be dead.
The one place we didn't look. I knew you looked for me. I told everybody you would. And was there every time when you would look at the moon and was hoping maybe I was looking at it too?
Oh, I want you to know that I'm continuing this clown, sir, but they can't ever get a shot of these. Do you see these clown figurines? Whenever I used to get sad, I'd just look at a clown. And I just can't help it.
I just can't stop grinning. They're available for purchase. We're starting this clown.com kind of thing. Yeah.
I don't mean interrupt your clown pitch there, but how exactly do you not go right back to the place where you saw me? Hey, how exactly is a rainbow made? How exactly does a sunset? How exactly is a positive track where you're going to play with work?
It just does. It just does. I'm not talking about positive track. I'm talking about me.
It just does. I've been thinking about that clip all week long, because it makes me think about the things that we take for granted in life. What do we take for granted? Now, there's little things.
Sometimes there's serious things. But the more and more, I think that we take relationships for granted in life. When you're a kid, sometimes making friends is easy. Sometimes when you're a kid making friends, it's hard or difficult.
It was an adult. That's something that doesn't necessarily get easier either. No relationships or something that we take for granted. We might want them and we might feel like we need them, or we deserve them, and that sort of thing.
But when we take relationships for granted, a lot of times, we feel like it's just going to fall flat. Sometimes for some people, that seems to come naturally. For other people, it just doesn't work. It just does.
It doesn't happen when we're trying to find the community that we need. Living in isolation, it's not healthy either. And what's interesting is it's it's fairly modern thing. This idea of being the strong individual in your own, that's not something that really has been part of humanity.
It's really what's really wild is when you get into what biologists call complexity theory, they realize that there's no such thing as the biological self. Our bodies on their own, they don't have some atomic level of individual being. The primary idea of our neurological system is actually a relational one, and our brain system will be stunted if it's not relationally stimulated. Our brain sends out electrical waves.
It needs another brain to interact with and another electrical waves to hit each other into change. Our bodies are literally looking for another living human to be around. To know ourselves, we have to be known. And that's what we're going to talk about this week.
In this month, we have to know ourselves. We have to be known. And today, we're going to talk about how this whole thing is created and craft to the basis of why we might be like this, but also to understand that relationships are not just this thing that we need, this ancillary benefit to life, but that we were created to be in relationship because God himself is a community, that God himself is a relationship. This is fundamental to our identity of what it means to be human.
Over the last 2,000 years, a predominant amount of Christians they've held to the doctrine of the Trinity. And if you're hoping, OK, great chat. It's about to explain it. Extremely complicated concept in 20 minutes in a very thoughtful and brief way.
That's not going to happen. People that are much smarter than I am would tell you that the church is held to this doctrine is the best way for us to explain the unexplainable. We're going to talk about that unexplainable today. And why was it mean to be comfortable and unexplainable?
But the idea of the Trinity of God manifested as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There's a few ways that people look at it now in the 21st century. So the first one is this, is that people just don't believe this. There's still subsets of Christianity that do not believe in and not hold of this as a primary doctrine.
There's a second group of people who say we believe this, but we don't get it. And we really don't think about it. It's like the Positrack on the rear end of a Plymouth. It's just there.
The third way is I want us to think about it from this perspective's morning as this, is that we get this and we live into it. That's where I want us to sit for just the next 20 minutes. Because in scripture, what we find is the doctrine of the Trinity, it informs about how God relates to us and how we relate to Him more than anything else and how in Jesus Christ and His life and His death and His resurrection, we see how our relationship to God as Father, Son, and Spirit really is the promise of Jesus. So God is Father, Son, and Spirit.
How do we think about this? I think the quickest way for us this morning really is just this, is that Jesus gives us access to the entirety of who God is. It's a passage that Pam read for us earlier. Jesus gives us access to the Father.
Because of Jesus, we get access to the Spirit. And you might be saying, Kachad, it sounds a little more complicated than I'm buying in for. Like, OK, we're talking about complexity theory and there's funny charts and that kind of stuff. Does this matter that much?
And I told you earlier, to know ourselves, we have to be known. Let me ask you a simple question that all of us can answer. Would you rather eat barbecue? Watch a TV show about barbecue or eat barbecue?
No, I like to talk about barbecue. That's an easy way to get me into a conversation. It's kind of fun. I like to find a new TV show about barbecue, especially when I'm not seen before, especially when one that talks about Texas barbecue.
I get really excited to watch that. But there's nothing like eating barbecue. Friends, for us to experience the best life, we need to stop talking. We need to stop watching.
We need to start eating. Our Hebrews passives at Pam Redford's. I want to read just a couple of those verses again. For us to think about this now when we realize this really is a conversation about how we get access to God.
So Hebrews just 19 through 22. Therefore brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way open for us through the curtain that is his body. And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with a full assurance that our faith brings, having our heart sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. We see this is about access.
How are we coming to God? How are we interacting with God? How are we knowing God and thereby knowing ourselves? We see why we need Jesus for this access.
And for many of us, I think that we begin thinking in this fragmented way and in kind of living in this fragmented life because of our understanding of sin. We've talked about this a lot at Foundry. We did a whole series a year ago on understanding sin and what it's biblically because remember, this is about access. You've also heard me say that the how and the what tells us the why many times.
When we live with this understanding that sin is simply something bad, what it ends up making us do is like, okay, God's created a list of his least favorite things and we just shouldn't do what's on his least favorite things. That's gonna leave us with a flawed view of who God is. And it was like watching a barbecue show and they say, to make a great brisket, you pull out your crock pot. Like it just doesn't work that way.
And we live in this okay, sin is bad things and bad things are just the things that God doesn't like. Then we live in a false world where everything is simply God's reaction to our sin. It makes us live in a place where we say, it's okay, the Father made the world, got that. Then we sinned and he got really mad at us, okay, got that.
So Jesus came, so God would not be mad at us, okay, got that. And then they sent the Holy Spirit to us so we will behave so God won't get mad at us anymore. This sounds kind of silly, right? But let's think about it, how often do we live in that world?
How often do we sit with that as our framework for understanding who God is and how God made us to be? Instead, what we realize is when this is about an access conversation, it's a, you know, Jesus comes to us because God is so absolutely multi-faceted that we can only begin to think about explaining it as the perfect relationship manifested as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And that God has come to us consistently as a redeemer. God has come to us consistently as a creator.
That God has come in consistently to us as a sustainer. And he's doing all of these things all of the time, simultaneously, always active. Like at the rear road, he's hopped up on a family-sized bag of M&M's. Like he's just doing all the things all the time.
And this means that we can begin then understanding our relationship to him and not deal with sin is just some, okay, it's like not God's favorite thing. I got regret telling some of our middle schoolers that my least favorite song in the world is any version of Wagon Wheel, which means now all of them will play it on their phone and cram their phone in my ear and follow me around. It's not like God's least favorite thing. We stay away from it.
Okay, as soon as not Wagon Wheel, I think he's saying it's Wagon Wheel, but instead it's us realizing this a broken relationship that God immediately began mending with all of his being. Jesus coming to us was not a reaction to something we did. Jesus coming to us was an essential part of his character and who he is. I'm gonna ask you this, you're in a fake relationship.
It's one-sided or you're essentially a commodity. Like your only value you have to that person is something that you can do. No one enjoys one-sided relationships, do they? This terrible is realizing that we might be in a one-sided relationship is, do you also know the feeling of like, okay, when you get to my rest, oh my goodness, I just made a one-sided relationship with somebody.
It goes both ways. So when we realize that's happened to us and then when we realize we've done that to somebody else. You know, how does our relationship with God work? We can't live in the Joe Dirt, it just does.
Framework, it's not a good answer for us. Instead, we begin to realize that we are uniquely discovering who we are to Christ and we are uniquely discovering who we are through Christ. It's like those relationships we have that are really, really good and we know they're really, really good because every time we finish having a conversation or being around that person, we feel like we're a better person. That we're happier.
We might be more content, we might feel more like ourselves. You know, sometimes those relationships happen, like we still have to have rough conversations and all that kind of stuff happens, and we know that person makes me a better person. Does that sound like what we want in relationships? And what does it mean if we realize that that's Jesus' intention with us?
Like, hey, I don't want this to be one side. I want this to be two-sided. And I want you to be a better person because of who we already are. We read this verse last week.
And we're gonna read again, but Philippians 3-8 talks about this so well when it says this, yes, everything is worthless when compared to the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord. For his sake, I've discarded everything else counting as garbage so I could gain Christ. You have to know ourselves. We have to be known.
We willfully step into that two-sided relationship with Jesus because we know that Jesus gives us access to the Father. Jesus gives us access to the Spirit. And we will be enabled for all of the things in the way that we always were because of that relationship. That means we have to answer a couple of questions.
If you think about a couple of things, I think that's how we kind of pull this into our world now. And so we're about to just do that. You can find these questions also on the back deck and on the home sheet right there. You can find it.
You can pull your phone out and go to myfounday.life and find those to explore that a little bit more this week. But two things this morning for us to talk about. And the first one is this. How can we challenge the temptation to only practice our faith in private?
We really have to ask ourselves, what's our current motivation for our relationship to Jesus? Is it just cultural? It's just, okay, I'm gonna go to church because that's what I do. I live in the South, that sort of thing.
My parents always went to church, so I go to church. I'm not going to church, I need my kid to go to church. They don't turn out crazy like Joe Dirt. Or is it truly personal?
Do we have a personal relationship? It's a two-sided relationship where we're discovering more about ourself with Jesus Christ. It's also on the lines of do we look at Jesus as just simply how he offers us a tool? Or do we realize that Jesus is our entire toolbox?
And I think sometimes for me also what I've learned is that I have to remind myself, am I filtering every single thing through Jesus? Or am I just taking Jesus and filtering it through everything I deal with in life? Is this my foundation? Or is this my Wednesday?
What does it mean for this relationship to not be private? Because when we realize we get down to the bottom of a private relationship with Jesus, it's just a one-sided relationship with Jesus. We're using him. We're not getting access to everything he wants to do for us.
You know the world and how it attempts to fix things sometimes, they tell us that we need to focus, and we to fill ourselves with ourselves with our own power, our own mind, our own being, the whole you can do hard things. What Jesus tells us is if we want to find ourselves, we will lose ourselves. Not empty ourselves completely, if everything that's Buddhism, that's not Jesus. But instead to empty ourselves to fill up new spaces with what Jesus has for us.
And it's possible to think that we're acting Christian and never actually to allow Jesus to be inside of us. We're recreating new spaces in our heart for Jesus to come. The second thing is morning is this, how am I lying Jesus to explain me? Or am I trying to explain myself through Jesus?
Do we pick and choose the things that we might kind of bring Jesus into just to justify our actions or our thoughts? Or are we in a relationship with Jesus? We're regularly coming up against things and like that we know we need to change. Because these things that Jesus is making us aware of, the things that are leading to the broken relationships in our life and the places of brokenness that we might have with him, the places of brokenness we might have with others, but then also the places of brokenness that we might have within ourselves.
And where is Jesus asking us to change things? I think that's a great just indicator for the way that we're engaging with him. If he never asked you to change anything, I want to ask you, are you actually paying attention to him? And next week we're going to talk about how the church is a spiritual community.
Now, the church needs it other, but we will not be able to even get to that point if we don't consciously and intentionally live with the truth, that God himself is the perfect community, but he made us to desire that level of relationships and community. On the night that Jesus gave himself up for us, the disciples were kind of freaking out a little bit, hey, where are you going? We need you around here. And he goes into the first time that the people ever took communion and he says, this is about presence, this is about how it's offered to you.
This is about you realizing that my actions here on this earth now make you belong into this great, big, huge story that I have been telling and doing and fixing and creating and all of the wonderful things since the beginning of time and I will be doing them until the end of time. So come into my presence, come be drawn into my love and come begin to see things as I see things. I see things.