Alright, good morning. I have to say that when they asked me to come reach scripture day I got so excited because I felt like I was getting finally called down like on the price is right that I forgot my Bible So he would fall along with me. We're gonna be reading Matthew 16 24 or 3 28 Then Jesus said his disciples if any of you wants to be my follower You must give up your own way take up your cross and follow me if you try to hang on to your life You will lose it But if you give up your life for my sake you will save it And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? If anything were if anything worth more than your soul for the son of man will come with his angels in the glory of his father And would judge all people according to their deeds and I tell you the truth So I'm standing here right now will not die before they see the son of man coming to his kingdom This is the true and trusted word of God.
Thanks be to God Crisis right. I like that Brian I did tell when Madeline would say when Madeline was asking him, you know, be it Brian kind of a back and forth banter with every time He gets asked to do something at church. He said chat. It's always the awkward Bible verses I made sure to Madeline that hey, we're sending him one that's not awkward this time.
Thank you Brian Um, does anybody get obsessed with things? See anybody else have to obsess the personality Mary told me I have to obsess the personality when we first I absolutely do Then here's several examples as of why um when I was in college I think we were dating at the time there they opened up this new restaurant in Rustin called fatties It was a chicken wing restaurant chicken wings and meat pies and I ate there so much I became obsessed with it Meredith I had to stop me. She said hey you smell like garlic and Frank's red hot all of the time now I became obsessed with it I worked at a closed-circuit television station in college for a while too and one night We were all bored and we decided to watch the documentary super size You'll remember that but the guy who ate McDonald's for 30 days and almost died Well, the entire staff we all became obsessed with McDonald's and ate it was that the backwards thing happened? We all ate McDonald's away too much just like right for marathon about to get married I'm eating like three-quarter pounders a day and the whole staff like just got obsessed with McDonald's and it finally died when we got a Really bad batch of milkshakes one night and like we did not want McDonald's anymore after that last summer I became obsessed like every time my brain like we start going kind of dead I got obsessed with a particular performance of the 80s classic rosana by toto and I would play it very loudly and Madeline liked it With me and Jack did not like it whatsoever at all and so like last summer was the summer of rosana I get obsessed with things if you might remember a few years ago We took an entire year and we said that we were only going to look at gospel passages on Sunday morning and that year We're doing that and that was kind of that was a growing edge for me I don't kind of naturally default to those and so when I decided that year was I'm just gonna try to read No Matthew Mark Luke and John just as much as I can to immerse myself in that world I'm gonna be teaching on it for a solid year and I became obsessed with this thing I just kept seeing throughout Matthew Mark Luke and John and I went into a little bit of research one day and I found out that like the Number one teaching of Jesus only teaching of Jesus that goes across all four gospels It's his teaching of lose yourself and find yourself for a few if you die to yourself You know this is some variation of this and I've talked about this several times.
I'm gonna go okay. Yeah, you're obsessed with this We agree with you 100% But I've been thinking about just more and more and more and a couple of years ago And I realize like this just keeps showing up and up and up and it's the most important thing that Jesus taught about It's a thing that we have a record of him teaching about more than anything else We have to respond to it, right? Only problem with dying to ourselves doesn't sound very fun. Does it?
It's the kind of thing that we don't know like how that how that looks How does it work and I think that it's so easy for us to look at this key teaching of Jesus and to be kind of confused and get to the Point where we just don't know what to do with it And then we can't respond to the thing that apparently he talked about more than anything else We're about six or seven months ago I'm kind of still think about this reading across these passages still and I begin realizing you know What if we just switch it to the positive? Was it mean for us to look at this teaching of Jesus and begin just make that mind shift? Okay, how do we think about this in terms of positive? You know if we hear lose yourself, you're gonna naturally get negative, right?
Does anybody else kind of follow that train of thought? But what does it mean for us to just kind of start thinking about positive? How would this outlook? How would this action potentially change every single thing for us?
How can it make our life better? But how's also maybe allow us to grow closer to Jesus and that's what I want us to talk about in this morning I want us to to think about where our own personal negativity might come from and then I want us to look at four different people all throughout the Bible And their own stories of losing themselves and how they found themselves and how they found change afterwards in it And I think that for us to get into this idea This is this personal and this internal battle that we might have with stepping into a life that is the way It's always been designed for us to work I think we have to think first about the moment where you know brokenness really entered into all the Humanities life but also in a personal way how is this brokenness affecting me? You know it helps us to understand who we are it helps us to understand how we got to the place where each one of us is Sitting this morning in our own emotions and Genesis 3 7 another noise passage I'm just kind of fascinated with right now since this at that moment This is an admin Eve they ate the fruit and then all of a sudden stuff started happening We find this at the moment their eyes were open and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves You know we talked about sin and what it means for us to think beyond that just being a moral issue earlier this year We had a whole series three weeks on sin those are linked on the digital home sheet if you go to that my family Life if you want to think more about that, but um sin is an unhealthy reaction You know David Kelsey he calls sin an improper response to God It's a personal thing It's the way that we see him and the way we choose to do something or we choose to not do something in that verse They eyes were open and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness the Hebrew language is beautiful. It's artistic It's poetry.
It's not the kind of rigorous one two three four that we're used to in English But no test when the eyes become involved what it is. It's about suspicion That Adam and Eve representing all of us at this moment. They became self-aware and they became self-conscious Now think about how do you make decisions when you're self-conscious about things? And we spent more spent an entire month over the summer in the book of songs songs talking about just that metaphor of nakedness and how This talks about exposure just an awareness of guilt that happens You know we need to realize that you know we have all been walking around with these emotions aren't our life We've been we've been metaphysically naked for a long time We deal with all the stuff that comes out So if we go back to that earlier question how do we look at this key teaching of Jesus How do it means to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves and not see it as something negative?
But to think about it is positive You know when we think about it's negative we hear that verse and all we think about is self-sacrifice No self-sacrifice is not something like we wake up in the morning get a bit excited to think about self-sacrifice today Like that doesn't that doesn't sound very funny when we live in the negative We are only going to see deficiency in our life. We have this teaching of Jesus just stay in the negative We're gonna be focused on deficiency. You know when we think about positivity in our life We begin to see increase We know that God desires for us to be happy God desires for us to be full And so if we begin to look at this teaching in terms of positivity in terms of fact that Jesus is saying this because he wants To be happy he wants us to be fulfilled He wants us to have the life that he has wanted us to have since day one We're gonna begin to understand how that happens through this action of losing ourselves So how does this teaching move us beyond the realm of guilt? But into a full participation with life full participation that leads to emotional healing a full participation that leads to spiritual healing That's we're gonna do some more so four stories four people in the Bible Moses Nebuchadnezzar you said that three times fast Nebuchadnezzar Paul and then Jesus himself You know Moses we come to the story in his life You know right there that whole burning bush moment exits chapter four and this is what we read Moses pleaded with the Lord Oh Lord I'm not very good with words I never have been and I am not now even though you have spoken to me I get tongue tied and my words get tangled in the Lord asked Moses who makes a person's mouth Who decides whether people speak or do not speak here?
Do not hear see or do not see is it not I the Lord now go I will be with you as you speak and I will instruct you in what to say But Moses again, please hold please send anyone else And the Lord became angry with Moses. All right. He said what about your brother Aaron the Levi I know he speaks well and he would be delighted to see you talk to him and put the words in his mouth I'll be with both of you as you speak and I want struck both you both in what to do And Aaron will be your spokesperson to the people he will be your mouthpiece and you will stand in place of God for him Telling him what to say and take your shepherd staff with you and and use it for him the miraculous signs I have shown you know Moses had to lose himself by overcoming his fear You know what are the basic limitations that we have in our lives personally that we allow to have a gigantic effect I think anyone who knows any of us well could probably quickly point them out to us What is the little things about our life that we have allowed to become much bigger than they can be that we have allowed to stop us It's the first thing you imagine God comes to you and says hey I'm going to do all of this super super cool stuff through you and all you to do is talk And Moses like yeah, I can't do that Lindsey's back there shaking your head No, let's you have a deal and staff that she doesn't have to talk in front of people Yeah, I'm a god comes up like he says God comes me his Chad I'm going to I want you to do all of this amazing awesome things I've ever wanted you to do but only thing is you can't eat catfish ever again. No, God I mean catfish like I need you to say no, that's not the table You know what tiny little things we have in our life that have a gigantic effect You know in the story between Moses and God we see just a handful of truths come through really really quick You know when God's solution is already inside of us.
I can talk about that for hours God solutions already inside of us The second thing is you know, sometimes God's solution involves other people Well, we have to do this inside of community with others We have to have other people in our lives that see these things that show these things that talk about these things We have to have other people in order to grow and sometimes we have to have other people's help But the third thing that we see in this story is that God's solution sometimes they're outside of our imagination I imagine most like what you're gonna teach me how to talk God and teach me to not stutter or pronounce things correctly and God's No, but really your brother Aaron do it And I'm gonna give you this big staff that turns into snakes and all sorts of other cool stuff You know God solutions are outside of our mind and what that looks like they're outside, but they're already close I can't do this with someone else. I can you know, what excuses we go through inside the store We see God coming to Moses and saying you know, I won't do this for you But I'm going to do this through you the way he does this it honors us it honors who we are still But we also see inside of this that God's character desires our growth. That's part of who he is Moses had to learn to lose his deep fears in order to find himself our second story Nebuchadnezzar Nebuchadnezzar Was the king of Babylon a couple quick things about Nebuchadnezzar for the story because you kind of have to have him to understand it a Babylon had been an ancient old kingdom It kind of shrunken was not that important anymore and Nebuchadnezzar comes in and as a young man begins this massive military quest and overthrows The Assyrian Empire which is like the ruling order of the day and then begins to expand and expand and expand and expand He ultimately comes and takes over Jerusalem And we find this at the end of the story Jeremiah He takes the Israelite king out and he takes all the king's sons out and he makes it He right there in front of you the city is Jerusalem is burning You have the king's sons right there Nebuchadnezzar kills all of the king's sons in front of him and then pops his eyes out So the last thing he sees is this he then carts off everyone who's worth anything in Jerusalem brings him to Babylon He'll just sort of Daniel Shabbat Meshach and Abinago We find that's we we come into this story because of Daniel's faithfulness to God over time Nebuchadnezzar begins believing in God You know he goes from like killing the king's sons and popping the king's eyes out to being to be following God He still is a little bit too big for his britches And God comes and says listen if you don't take care of this something really bad is going to happen to you We pick up the story in Daniel chapter 4 today So 28 to 32 12 months later He was taking a little walk on the flat roof of the royal palace in Babylon You've ever heard of that seven wonders of ancient world in the hanging gardens of Babylon That's where he's walking as he looked at across the city He said look at this great city of Babylon by my own mighty power I have built this beautiful city as my royal residents to display my majestic splendor And while these words were still in his mouth a voice called down from heaven Oh King Nebuchadnezzar this message is for you. You are no longer ruler of this society You'll be driven from human society You will live in the field with the wild animals you will eat grass like a cow Seven periods of time will pass while you live this way until you earn the most high rules over the kingdoms in the world And gives them to anyone he chooses So after so we find that the Nebuchadnezzar like literally goes mad and has to live in the private palace gardens Like it's like a wild person is a wild animal for a season of time until his mind begin to turn around He realized that God is in charge.
Are you glad God? I never make sure you go feral Like there's there's really cool like I just google like a Nebuchadnezzar animal And there's all sorts like crazy old like woodcuts and stuff and back and they do it's a great way to burn some time if you need to this afternoon But Nebuchadnezzar had to lose himself by admitting to his pride Nebuchadnezzar he kept saying you know God can rule on heaven, but I'm going to rule on earth now That is something I think many of us can identify with it's all right for God to do God stuff up there But when I'm here in my domain, I'm the king I'm in charge Nebuchadnezzar wanted to be more than human so God made him a less than human And we see in the story that you know and Nebuchadnezzar story coming to term with his own pride It means that he finally was able to come to term with himself He realized that his life is not his own first the second thing There's someone out there that is bigger than me and the third thing is that he learned Oh, no, well, they're the ones who direct this Nebuchadnezzar had to lose himself in order to find himself fast forward a thousand years now the apostle Paul is writing in second Corinthians to a church That he started this is somewhat a familiar passage was kind of jump straight into second Corinthians 12 5 3 10 This is what it says But I won't do it because I don't want anyone to give me credit beyond what they can see in my life or here in my message Even though I've received such wonderful revelations from God so to keep me from becoming proud I was given a thorn in my flesh a messenger from Satan to torment me and keep me from becoming proud three different times I beg for the Lord to take it away and each time he said my grace is all you need my power works best in weakness So now I'm glad to boast about my weaknesses so the power of Christ can work through me Paul had to learn to yield in order to find himself now. We read the story like the first thing I'll have to go to what's that thorn in the flesh what's that thorn in the flesh? Yeah, we could get lost right here just by focusing and fascinating on that I mean there's so much conjecture about this That's not the issue But what we find is this is the only time this phrase is used in the Bible is an agricultural term is normally used to talk about Happen to bring someone back down to earth It's something that causes frustration and trouble that leads to personal revelation Now this what Paul's talking about this is about no our discipleship.
This is about our sanctification We get to see Paul's process here, you know with both Moses and both Nebuchadnezzar We weren't about this on the front end of things. We're seeing with Paul story now We're seeing this on the back end of things. We're seeing how Paul has already grown through this all things that Paul has done I mean after effect it has created and released in his own life We can think about this way now What does that one thing that you we will have in our life that we will always be mastering? There's a part of our person as a part of who we are that we know that we just have to make sure we pay attention to What is the thing that's inside of our character that needs the biggest transformation of Jesus?
Paul did this tough work by yielding himself over my my strength is found inside of weakness He gave this over to God and now he's talking about it in a very healthy and a very inspiring way His own yielding to these things allowed him to come to terms with his own metaphorical nakedness and to move all through this in a way That leads to fuller life So what spaces do we have of honesty and thoughtfulness about ourselves that we might need to apply? And what are the things that we realize that I really need to give this over in order to find more to find more to grow through it? You know what journey do we have in life that will not be possible until we become open about it? Paul had to lose himself in order to find himself our final story today is Jesus in the garden This story is just heavy when we begin to think about it in these terms Matthew 26 30 60 46 And Jesus went with him with the olive road called get semi he said sit here while I'll go over there to pray He took Peter in Zebidees two sons James and John he became anguished and distressed He told them my soul is crushed with grief to the point of death stay here and keep watch with me Then he went a little further and bowed his face the grandpa and pray my father if it's possible let this cup of suffering be taken away from me Yeah, I want your will to be done and not mine Then he returned to disciples found him asleep He said to Peter could you not even watch one hour keep watching for a so you will not give an Intimitation for the spirit is willing but the body is weak And Jesus left him a second time and prayed my father if this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it Your will be done and he returned to them and again He found him sleeping for they couldn't keep their eyes open So he went to pray a third time saying the same things again Then he came to the disciples and said go ahead and sleep have your rest But look the time has come the son of man has betrayed into the hands of sinners.
Let's be going my betrayer is here Jesus had to submit and be willing to lose himself. I Think this story right here is the most human thing we find in the Bible Jesus is fully God and fully man. He went to the depths in this moment You know we see you might see fear and worry in the beginning this passage if you ever thought about Jesus being scared You're not about Jesus being worried about Jesus being anxious over something. I mean I can hear it Can you in verse 41 he comes and he tells Peter know the spirit is willing with the flesh is weak and I read this story And all the times it shows up in Matthew Mark looking John's week and that phrase wait kept I realize like have you ever you ever told somebody something that you think they need to hear but you really need to hear It yourself so you have to tell it to them and work for you to actually think about it I think that's what's going on.
I really really think that you know Jesus like hey the spirit is willing with the flesh is weak to Peter But he's also been telling self the spirit is willing with the flesh is weak Like he's right there He has to do this and the thing that just throws me in this story so much is what it actually happens when things get super super rough If you've got stuff that you are carrying that is not your fault It's heavy if you're carrying trauma If you're carrying these massive loads that just seem to not be able to go away I think this is the story because Jesus literally the son of God is telling God either you take this away from me or you make me strong enough He's going back to him and back to him three times either take this away from me or make me strong enough We see that third time so y'all just going ahead and rest it's happening And this moment I can almost imagine Jesus kind of being like okay, you didn't take this from me So I am now going to step into this with your strength This is Jesus's lose yourself moment Happened the biggest moment of learning to trust and submit that just ever has happened in the face of the earth Andrew Murray in his book the Masters in Dwelling has a chapter It's called dead to Christ and it's all about us going alongside of Jesus in this journey from the garden It's just it's just fantastic I've got a digital link to that in a home sheet this week if you want to read that and just just kind of go through reflection on what this might mean We've gone through these four stories So we said we're gonna keep this in the positive remember so how do we bring this into the positive? How do we learn to what do people in the Bible did this even Jesus had to do this now? How do we do this now? A couple of things just as we jump into it to I encourage you to think about this week There's a couple ways that we've already tried to resource you through that number one if you don't normally I keep saying home sheet home sheet home sheet But if you don't normally use that resource There's about 15 of those printed off in the back copy or you can go online at my family that life You can grab that and it's some focus ways to think about this practically throughout the week What we really have is just two questions And what these come from in a lot of ways are the ways that I have been ingesting this and thinking about this over the last Eight to twelve months is what does this look like the first the first thing is this now?
What are the things that keep happening in our life? Now have you ever come up against the same disappointment over and over or like the same situation begins to happen? I remember at a friend of mine when I was a kid their dad would always say you know First mistakes and mistakes are honest and the second time you make that mistake. It's a bad habit The third time that mistake is made you need to figure out what you need to change You know when we find these things happening kind of routinely in our life coming to them We begin to rest.
I've got to start tackling this and one of the things I've learned this so much in the last few years I'm I refer to it as my party trick But mostly on those couple years ago went to doctor thinking I had bad ass mother found out I was in stage four heart failure Got to have an all-inclusive seven-day vacation ICU at st. Francis Learned a lot of myself during that and stayed at home for a month just thinking about things and it was It was one of the most deeply formative spiritual times in my life and I began seeing some things about myself like what what was I doing? To make these sorts of things happen to live with the level of stress that I was living with with the worry and that sort of things and so Between a lot of spiritual direction between professional counseling between a lot of really honest conversations with my trusted friends and trusted family You know a lot a lot a lot of just focused prayer and awareness Through begin to journal a lot about this and begin to see slow growth to be and I realize okay I understand my reactions now and I realize that the reactions I lead with my step into a room sometimes No the reactions I bring into situations midway through and sometimes the ways that I react afterwards like that's leading me to kind of Some routine places of life. That's just not healthy for me at all You know through this Jesus began to allow me to just reframe the way and this is really where it was as I began to have to rethink my relationship With other people in other words humility and pride get coming a bunch of thankfully not like Nebuchadnezzar stuff There's never like look at my vast domain under my control But just learning like what does it mean to be alongside of other people truly and just step through that and through that and that has been just an Amazing life-giving thing that's still going on right now And what are the places of frustrations you have that you have some responsibility for I think Jesus That's one of the ways that we can lose ourselves We're willing to work on the things that we know that we're doing the second thing is this You know what are the unhealthy things that we hold ourselves?
So I think we kind of go into Paul this idea of the thorn in the flesh that he talks about but at what point in time Will we allow Jesus to come into the places that we deeply protect? Now what are those parts of our personality that we defend? That we want if we waste a button that anybody touches it we just turn into a very different person You know what are the ways that we what are the places we go to during times of stress and anxiousness? You know do we begin to go deal with substance abuse?
We turn into other unhealthy forms of coping You know what alternate ways of life do we still want to keep a foot in and try to follow Jesus? It's like Jesus. You're always there for me, but things get really really bad I'm just gonna do this for a couple of days and just we'll come back after that David Kelsey he said this and I love this so much We are most ourselves when we orient ourselves We are most who we are and who we were made to be When we orient ourselves in our context in ways that are appropriate responses to the particular way God has already Creatively revealed himself to us You know this is literally about when God comes to meet us in the very space of where we are with everything that we are holding on in our Situation and he offers us a way through this and when we are able to say yes to that way through We are the most ourselves that we will ever be That our unhealthy coping practices are a way that we lose ourselves that takes us completely away from who we are made to be But when we respond to the ways that God is uniquely calling to us that we become the most We will ever be There's two there's two losing's right there one's an absolute losing and one's an absolute getting Lose yourself and you will find yourself So what have you been carrying that you need to let go? No letting go doesn't mean giving up or giving in But allowing Jesus to come in and to do that tough work that tough work to pry our fingers off of those places that we are trying to control That we think will falsely save us and we find ourselves fully When we let Jesus show us our true selves Let's pray father.
We are in this space We need you and God you know some of us might be here with like super super heavy stuff God where this work might seem just monumental God others or we've got some stuff we're worried about some stuff where we know we need to work on We're struggling. We just don't know what to do sometimes we just need someone to tell us hey You need to do this Others of us might have been in a stable steady way with you for years But just wanting more a fuller sense of yourself a fuller sense of your presence But God it is who you are where you come into who we are right now in the very moments in the very ways that we need to see and Hear and experience you and you come right into that spot God the only thing that's asked for us is to be open and to be expected and what we want to be right there with you It's your enemy pray. Amen. Let's stand together