back to it. I remember a few weeks ago on the bumper, I convinced Jack and John Steel to go camping with him. It was freezing. It was cold.
Hold on yards. It was fun. Jack's still arguing that it was fun or not. John liked it.
I love it. I think about it more and more. My favorite thing when I was a kid was when I got to spend the night with other people. Anybody else like light trips?
A lot? A trip? A road trip? A marathon?
You can always tell with a mark of a good friend is when you can spend a lot of time in a car with him or on a stressful plane trip. We decided to go to Charleston, South Carolina and take two days to drive there. On the second day, we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere in rural North Alabama and we were bored and listened to every seedy I had in my vehicle like 40,000 times already. We had to find something new to entertain ourselves with.
I decided to take a risk. I know this could have been bad for my 36-hour old marriage at the time. I decided to buy a copy of Jerry Clower's greatest hits at a truck stop and see what Meredith might think. She had never heard of Jerry Clower before but luckily she did not mind Jerry Clower.
She had a couple more hours in the trip. When you are with someone in close proximity, it tells you a lot about how strong that relationship is. When you cannot get out of the vehicle with that person, it tells you a lot about how good your relationship is. When you have to, has anybody ever had a horribly miserable travel experience?
You know a lot about what you think about that person. Abiding with God is about the space that we inhabit with him. That is what we want to talk about today. A couple weeks back, we started the series, we were still online only at that moment.
I took the time to talk about what does it mean to abide with Jesus at a personal level and how abiding really is an intentional and intentional action that we take to dwell in the presence of God. We understand that our abiding is going to produce fruit and that God works inside of us to make sure this is possible. Last week, I decided to take a little bit of a sidebar. I'm going to talk about that some this week.
Last week, I talked about mature Christianannity and use Philippians text for that. We talked about how Christian maturity exists inside of this reimagined vision of time. About how God allows us through our abiding with him to be future focused. Today I want to wrap up.
I want to talk about abiding. I want to talk about the space that we inhabit with God and how he influences us through abiding. This is the bottom line part. Is that abiding isn't accidental.
Before we jump in really deep, I feel like there's actually a couple of false beliefs that we sometimes have that we need to get out of the way in order for us to have this conversation first. These are things that we might not realize our mind unintentionally goes to when we talk about this passage and we see some things in this. The first one is this. We have the false belief that God had to come here.
Think about the beginning of every lifetime Christmas movie where somebody's parents get sick and they have to move on to take care of them. I think sometimes we feel as God's presence here with us on this earth is because we did something wrong here to come here to fix us. That means we're immediately going to start off with a negative view of how we are in a relationship with God. So simply not the case.
The beginning desire of God, the creating desire of God and who he is, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was his deep desire to share a relationship with us. He wanted for us to know the fullness of who he was from the very beginning. Dune Skotus was a Catholic teacher in the 15th century and Skotus even said that even if the fall had not happened that Jesus still would have found a way to come to this earth so we could experience the fullness of grace because that's who he is. God did not have to come down here because we were sick.
God chose from the very beginning to be in a relationship with us. It's why he created us. The second thing is kind of a false belief just to kind of kick out of the way for what we get going on. Is this in verse 5?
God says, you know, without me you can do nothing and sometimes we hear that and we read that as, you know, without me you can't do anything. We focus on the end of that phrase instead of realizing what Jesus is saying is I am inviting you into the complete fullness of every single thing who I am and inside of that you have open access to all that I am. It's not vengeance or a source of anger of this whole power thing but it's our source of power. It's like Kryptonite.
I'm not that big of a Superman fan but I know how Kryptonite works. Remember if Superman gets close to Kryptonite he's immediately going to lose his power and all of his abilities? The presence of God is the opposite of that. The closer we draw into the presence of God the more access we have to who he is to who he made us to be in a way that he wants to offer himself to us.
So two kind of quick false beliefs to kick out of the way before we can really jump into this. What I want to talk about is that space that we inhabit because the space is in our relationship to space is they matter to us. They matter to God. They also matter to us.
And the last few weeks I've been working on this. What I've been thinking about is the idea of special relationships. It's our relationship to our space. How we live in it, how we move in it, how we relate to it.
Just the whole nine yards. When what relationships do we have of space? Think about it. No, you have people that you may or may not live with.
You have people that you work with. You have places that you inhabit. You have things that you need to do. You have things that you need to be at.
If we think about our special relationship with God, that means we ask questions about how we are with him, how he is with us and how things are going on around us. It makes us ask questions. How do we as followers of Jesus live in a broken secular world but also in a redeemed kingdom of God? One of the figures that just looms tremendously over my childhood is storm and norm and source call.
I mean, I learned from K. Reynolds this week and that was the last four star general we've had in the United States. I didn't know. Five.
I'm sorry, K. What was the little phrase we learned? Yeah, be my little thing. That's it.
So he's the last five star general. But this is the thing I remember. I grew up in Alexandria, England, Air Force Base, all of my buddies and Boy Scouts, dads and moms were deployed over to the Persian Gulf. They were all over eight, ten pilots.
But I think about this. There's a picture of storm and norm and I'm going to move. Do you all see the bottom right now? Do you all see his arms?
What do you notice? There's two watches. This is what Storm and Norman did. He was in Saudi Arabia commanding our forces there.
We also had a communication with Washington. So what he did was on his left arm, he had a watch that was in Saudi time. On his right arm, he had a watch that was set on Eastern time in Washington, D.C. time.
So every single place he was, he had the ability to think into function in two different places at the same time. You know, as Christians, those are the things that we have to do. We have to live in this broken world that is overrun with sin and affects us. We also live with the vision of the kingdom that Jesus has invited us into.
You know, Norman had Storm and Norman had special awareness. He was aware of what affecting him. He was aware of his situation, of his immediate physical space in Saudi Arabia. But he was also aware of what actually was in control and what was the larger point of what he was doing without watch that was sitting there in Washington, D.C.
time. So it makes us think about this. What sort of special relationship do we have with God? You know, special awareness is knowing where is our body in relationship to other objects or people.
You know, to have good, this is just kind of, it's a medical term. Is anybody ever encountered this in, inside of medicine or therapy, that sort of thing? That's really where it's strongest at, is it talks about the way that we're able to almost change in shape and shift with what's going on around us. And when our special awareness is somehow, it's just, it's, what's the right way?
When we struggle with it, we're going to struggle to interpret and move best in spaces around us. When I worked at Louisiana Tech Wesley Foundation, we had a lot of blind students. And we had to make sure that all of our spaces would accommodate their, their site issues. And we had to think about where we had couches, where we had pool tables, all these sorts of things.
I'll tell you right now from experience that if you had a misplaced foosball table with this, it could be disastrous. So what happens when our own awareness of where we are with God or where God is to us is messed up? So this isn't a new thing. And John 15 starts talking about abiding with me and I will abide with you.
This isn't a new thing that Jesus is trying to introduce, but this isn't his last words to his disciples. But this is actually one of the oldest things in scripture, one of the oldest things that we find going on. In Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, we see that there is a relationship of creation and equity. God is moving about in the garden with his people.
In the book of Exodus and Leviticus, we find that God's presence is visible to his people while they're sitting there in the desert wandering around for a generation. And during the day, he is there in a pillar of smoke and at night he's there in a pillar of fire. And this rests immediately outside the tabernacle, which is where they believed he was. And God ordered their whole camp to be set up with the tabernacle in the middle.
And everyone was in a circle around the tabernacle and they could look to the middle and they could see that God was there with him and I did this pillar of smoke, a pillar of fire. It was time for them to move. The presence of God would literally be moving and they're following him. In the book of Deuteronomy, so when that generation had died out and they were about the new generation but to step into the promised land, there's a couple of things that are repeated so much in Deuteronomy.
And this is kind of a last teaching of Moses. And if we pull them out, we wouldn't have that much of a book at all. Fort Wells says this. Remember the Lord rescued you from the iron smelting furnaces of Egypt in order to make you his very own people in his special possession.
And that is what you are today. That God told them that he draws them into himself and that he defines who they are. Now God's presence is who they are. It's what makes them what they are.
It's their biggest gift. And he is their treasure. Hundreds of years later, Solomon, in the coronation of the temple, the second chronicles tells us the presence of God, the manifest presence of God, was so thick. It was a cloud of smoke that it was so thick inside the temple that the priest could not enter into it to do their job.
God was there with his people. Hundreds of years after this, and it's a sad story, but Ezekiel, who was a priest, when the Babylonians came in and they overthrew Jerusalem, they pulled all these people out and we heard of Daniel and Shatak and Abednego, like Ezekiel was a contemporary with them. He's there in Babylon in captivity and has this vision to where he sees the presence of God leave the temple and leave Jerusalem. And if you've been around Foundry for any length of time, you'll be familiar with John 1 and 14.
The word became flesh and made his home among us. And we had seen his glory. The glory of the Father is one only one reason. In the coming of Jesus Christ, not only has the presence of God come back to the world, but is no longer bound to a particular space that is given to the whole world and is offered to all of us.
Now, when we've kind of laid out who we are as a church with our vision and our mission and our values, one of those things we call them the four Jesus assumptions that Jesus is here. Jesus is doing things. Jesus invites us to do those things with him and our greatest fulfillment in life will be found as we participate alongside Jesus in his mission. So you see, this abiding presence of God has been with us all along and it's part of the core of who he is that abiding isn't an accident.
So we come to this place that hopefully by now we can kind of make another assumption together this morning, right? We would realize that God has an eternal and a constant reality of place. He is always here with us, right? I mean, I can get to that point.
So this one, can you? If that's the case, that makes us ask these questions. You know, how do we change what we do? Now, when we begin to reframe this idea, does it make any sort of a difference?
You know, what does it allow us maybe to diagnose that's going on wrong in our life or something we're going to have here unsatisfied with in our life? You know, that relationship of space, that special awareness, it's about how we relate to a fixed point. You know, abiding in Jesus is not simply locating a point in time in our life where he was there, but it's instead us realizing and being willing to live and function. So he is always here with us and we let that overlap.
We say two things that sound almost the same that the more and more I'm realizing are very, very different is the way that we make a shift of God living in our world or us living in God's world. Do you all see that subtle difference there? You know, when we want God to live in our world, we're still trying to control things. We're trying to drive things.
We're bringing in our own situation and our own circumstances and we're trying to get God, we're trying to define God inside of that. But when we begin making that shift and know I'm living here in God's world, that creates an entirely different scenario. No matter what we say, we say, we say, we're about faithfulness and the power of faithfulness and what that means to us. You know, it's a lot easier to deal with the stuff that life throws at you when you're able to realize and recognize all the places he's been before when you're living there in God's world.
So how do we know this is happening? How do we know we're living in this way? How do we know that this is affecting us positively? In the very last verse in what Marge read earlier, today it shows us this.
I'm here from you throw up that last scripture slide verse 11. So I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. I've said these things so that my joy is in you and that your joy may be complete. That joy means to be glad.
It means to be filled positive. It means to have a hope and a security. It means exactly what we think it means. Joy is here when your abiding presence of God is fully here.
It's a huge indicator. So let me ask you this question. Do you have joy right now? I'll be honest with you.
I really don't. Something I've been learning about a lot lately. Something I've been learning about when I try to just squeeze and conform things into my own idea of reality. This is my idea of reality.
This is my idea of space. It's my idea of what should be in control and what should be in charge. And sometimes when every single thing is there lined up, it doesn't still make any sense because I'm trying to self-create joy. In the middle of what it can honestly be described as one of the most un-joyful times of my life.
What's highly ironic is I'm also right now in the middle of one of the most spiritually deep times in my life. And through the words of a good friend who I was talking with last week, what I realized is maybe the reason that spirituality is so strong is that God is trying to urge me to realize, hey, you're still trying to live in your world and you're not coming and living in my world. That we allow that overlap to happen. Joy is going to be present.
In many ways, what we see is joy is a barometric pressure reading of us willfully being in the presence of God and being satisfied inside of that. So do you have joy? If you do, take some time to think about, man, what am I doing? What is happening in my life to see those things?
And if you don't have it right now, realize this should be calling me to go into investigation. Jesus said, I will give you my joy. Your joy will be complete. So a couple of things, just two things to talk about and what we've done.
Is this, you know, what are we willing to be hard in life? And we're going to last week, talk about a low investment, high return. How are we going to be easy? Now, what are you willing to be hard in your life right now?
What are you okay with sacrificing to get this? What are you willing to stand up for? You know, years ago in church, we have these kinds of conversations. We say, you know, there's a difference between a secular culture and a Christian culture.
And now, I mean, if you've been around, you've heard me talk about this, you've heard Jack talk about this. This is not a new conversation. You realize that one of the things that we realize in 2021, we have to be differentiated between his cultural Christianity and actual biblical Christianity. And we're ways that we've kind of distorted this enough to where it's not leading us to the presence of God.
And we're able to sacrifice and reflect and hone in on what actually is the thing God's been asking us to do. What do we understand up for? You know, what do we need to know? We need to stretch to be able to do and to stretch into embodying these things, because we know this is the way of Jesus.
It's not necessarily the way of Chad, or wherever you are, how we can call to stretch into that way of Jesus. Another question I've been thinking about is this, what are, what am I willing to give up so much that I have to have the abiding presence of Jesus to carry me while I'm in that sacrificial moment? Now, what are we willing to be hard in order for us to abide with Jesus? Abiding it is in an accident.
It's something we stretch ourselves into, something that's future focused. I said earlier today, and I was going to talk a little bit about last week, last week's whole message on Christian maturity started off as a bullet point right here. And I got to the point where I realized, no, we really need to talk about this a lot more. What is Jesus calling us into in the future?
That we're going to have to be a sacrificial people to see and to experience and to understand. The last thing I want to do is just talk about the space that we are in right now. Not this building, we've talked about this building for years. I'm very thankful for this building, but I want to talk about the space of worship that we are in.
It's been a year ahead of it, almost 12 months. I realized a lot of anniversaries in my own life are coming up pretty soon. I know a few days ago, it was celebrated a year ago, a few days ago, it was Ash Wednesday. I called a friend of mine who I knew on the internet from New Orleans to come and lead us in worship in Ash Wednesday service.
I met at work with Madeline for the first time that day. I looked, Meredith keeps this five-year journal where she writes down what she does every day for five years. I think it was like two Sundays after Ash Wednesday before Meredith and I left when it was the Holy Land for three weeks. It was while we were in the Holy Land that the entire world crashed and crazy stuff started happening.
And we got out on the second to last flight out of Israel before they locked the borders down. The governor shut down things while we were on the bus ride between New Orleans and Alexandria to come home. It's been a year, hasn't it? You know, 30% of church folks aren't in church anymore right now.
And there's nothing to do with them like being mad or like not believing in things anymore. They're just not coming anymore. You know, it takes 21 days to develop a new habit. We've had 365 days almost of new habits.
I saw someone yesterday on Twitter last night and said, I have, I just want you to say, I know how long it takes to finish Netflix now. I've watched the whole thing. You know, our habits have changed dramatically, haven't they? Nothing's changed though, in many ways, except presence.
We've become de-aclimated to the gathered body towards the corporate reality of the presence of God. You know, worship is necessary because worship is a corporate activity. You know, worship is one that matters because right now, you know what me and you and all of us together are doing, we are mutually abiding in the presence of Jesus right now. That's why it matters.
It's why it's powerful. And your worship is subversive because worship goes against the ways of this world and leads us into the ways of Jesus. It's sometimes counter intuitive when our world says, hurry, hurry, hurry. Worship says linger here for a moment.
Worship isn't an activity, but it's a manifestation of the kingdom of God. You know, corporate worship is a constant construction practice. It's something that has always been working on and never finishes. It's where worship is where we can stand against opposing forces together as we seek the presence of God.
You know, last Wednesday night, we had worship in prayer. We've been started doing these things for several months and we jump back into it last month. We got back to it this past week. We did it in the St.
Andrew's Chapel, which is a fantastic space for smaller sizes of worship. And I think the phrase I used when I called Madeline afterwards was, I said, Madeline, I think we kicked the door in. I don't know if you've been in those times and those spaces, but those are turning into just precious times of worship where serious things are getting done that don't lead you anywhere, but into the presence of God as a people. It's abiding.
That's all it does, it abides and abiding is one of those powerful things in the world. And so what I want to do today is I want to finish up with a quote from Eugene Peterson about worship and about abiding. Next week, we're going to talk about what does it mean to belong to a church. I'm excited about that conversation for us having that together, but I just want to close with what Peterson says about worship and about abiding about what happens.
This is what he says. There's simply no place where these things can be done as well as in worship. If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we're going to miss a lot. For our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture, limited by our ignorance distorted by unnoticed prejudices.
In worship, we are part of the large congregation. We're all the writers of scripture's address us. We're hymn writers and songwriters use music to express truths to not only touch us in our heads, but in our hearts. We're the preacher who's just lived through six days of doubt, hurt, faith and blessing with the worshipers speaking the truth of scripture and the language of the congregation's own present experience.
We're worshiping together in the language of our own present experience. We want to hear what God says and what he says to us. Worship is a place where our attention is centered on these personal and corporate and decisive words of God. Biting is not accidental.
And friends abiding is worth fighting for. Let's pray. Father, in these moments, we sit here with each other, God. We may be hearing from you, we may be feeling things, Lord.
We might be sitting here wondering what this whole stuff actually sounds like. We might be thinking about our joy, trying to do some self-diagnosis. But Lord, what we are here for and the beauty of who you are and every single thing, because you're big enough, is we're here to engage with your presence, God. And that you have, because you are the most powerful thing on earth, the ability to meet and to speak with every single one of us right now, right where we are simultaneously.
God, we don't have to wait in line because you're talking to the person that's three chairs down from us. God, what we do is we open ourselves up to your experience. We open ourselves up to your presence, God. We open ourselves up to every single thing you have for us and you've promised us.
God, we aren't going to be satisfied with you dwelling in our space, God. We want to be dwelling in your space. God abiding is that mutual thing that happens between both parties. God, we want to define the world around us not by what we can see, but by what you can see and by who you are.
So Lord, we are here to be with you. It's your name, pray, amen. So over the next couple of weeks, I told you I'm going to talk next week about what does it mean to belong to church. We're going to try to highlight a lot of amazing, fun things that we have going on at Foundry right now.