Do you have a reputation for anything? You know, reputations are funny. We're not gonna talk about bad reputations this morning. We could do that, we're not gonna do that.
I'm sure I have a reputation for certain things around places everybody. But look at the funny reputations that you have. The things that you're known for. I mean, a reputation is something that typically describes you in a very interesting and unique way.
A lot of times there's great stories behind reputations. Like one of the things I love that makes my life very easy is, you know, I'm gonna get tagged in something Bigfoot related on Facebook like five times a day. Because people know I like Bigfoot, so I don't have to spend time looking for stuff like this. It's just gonna fall into my lap or onto my phone, literally.
But also another reputation for something that only comes up in the fall. And it's always humorous for everybody else. It's kind of aggravating for me. But I've done it so much, I have a reputation for it.
One of my favorite things about the season changing is it gets a little cold. And besides me having a body type made for cold weather, cold weather means it's duck season. I love duck hunting. But I have a reputation from, I'm the guy who always falls in the water.
And there's a reason I fall in the water all the time because I went and bought a few years ago, I paired like the Simmons' brand waders. You know what I'm talking about? They're good waders, affordable, I mean, hold on yards. But my problem with Simmons' brand waders is they buy them by the shoe size.
And they assume that your body is a certain shape and size according to the shoe size. A couple of things you need to know. My ideal pant is a 40 inch waist of a 27 inch inseam. And I wear a size 14 boot.
So my waders really and truly the bottom, like the top of it, would come up to like above my eyes. Like I have like a foot and a half of extra material on the legs of my waders. And I've always kind of, I mean, I'm not necessarily the nimble big guy, but I can get around some places you might not assume I could. Well, a few years ago, where I developed this reputation, I was on a duck hunt with some friends, there's people in the building here in here for this day, it's notorious because we were hunting a flooded field as the last day of duck season.
And we were picking up all the decoys and everything. And the person, if you don't know, like duck hunting works, one of the places you hunt isn't a field that's been flooded. And it might be a couple of inches deep, it might be kind of deep, it might be really deep. And sometimes this field has been dis, it's been plowed.
And when it's been plowed, that means it's kind of mud underneath, it's not been dis, it's pretty stable and solid. You don't know until you get out there. Remember, my waders too long for me. If I get my feet stuck in the mud, I'm gonna step out of a boot in my wader.
And then in my attempt to get my foot back into it, I'm gonna get my other foot out of the wader. And next thing you know, here I am, standing with my sock feet in where my knees of my wader are, and I have a foot and a half of wader behind me, and the boot's still stuck in the mud, and then I fall into the water. But here's a picture, this is the third time I fell in the water that day. I think there was like six total, it got the point I said, Chad, just sit on the side by side, we'll pick up all the decoys.
Don't worry, I have a reputation for falling in the water, and reputations are funny things. Because it's, you give your friends something to laugh about, but it's also kind of like, I know I'm gonna fall in the water. I'm gonna make decisions on what I'm gonna do to come duck season based off of the likelihood of how many times I'm going to fall in the water, because I know what's going to happen. The reputation is completely true.
And this morning what we're talking about is just that idea of stability. What does it mean for us to live our lives, knowing that we can't exactly see what's in front of us, but what does it mean for us to know that we have sure footing, no matter where we go, no matter where we walk, so you can't stand firm on unknown ground. It's one of the scary things about life. This morning we're gonna read in the book of Ephesians about the way Paul was talking to these folks, he loved very much about what it means to stand firm on unknown ground.
So Ephesians chapter three, you can follow along on the screens behind me or you can use your Bible, you can find it on your phone in various places, but let's read the words of God this morning that we have. So when I think of this, I fall to my knees and I pray to the Father. The creator of everything in heaven and earth, I pray from his glorious unlimited resources, he will empower you with inner strength through his spirit. In Christ we'll make his home and your hearts as you trust in him, your roots will grow down into God's love and keep you strong.
And may you have the power to understand as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, how deep his love is. May you experience with all the fullness of life and the power that comes from God. Now glory to God who is able through his mighty power at work within us to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever, amen.
So Ephesians, it's an interesting book because there's a church that Paul had a deep relationship with. See Paul's ministry lasted for probably around 30, 35 years. And what he pretty much did was he would take these trips. He took three of their Bibles, might call them a missionary journey.
And that's just kind of confusing language to us now, but what Paul would take is he'd take these loops through the world that he knew and would teach people about Jesus and would establish communities of Jesus in these places. When he first started doing this yet, they weren't even calling these people Christians. They were calling them followers of the way. And Ephesus was the very last church that Paul started.
He spent three years there at the very end of his third, missionary journey's third loop that he made. Everyone kind of got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. And on his way home, this last loop, he came to this town called Ephesus. It was an important town.
It was a wealthy town. It was a town that had like Olympic type games outside of it. Paul, his trade was that he made tents in like pavilions, like the first century version of the easy up. So put your college logo inside of it.
And so he met and he has some people that they worked with. And so it's kind of it's MO. By this point, Tom, he had honed in the way that he reached people most effectively. He would make his tents in the morning and in the evening.
And in the afternoon, when it was hot after dinner, it's like a siesta. Everybody would typically kind of go home and like lay low for a couple of hours. And that's when Paul would rent this lecture hall and he would teach in this church in Ephesus. But he had built up and up and up.
And after three years, Paul felt that it was time to leave. It's the very last thing he did though. And this church in Ephesus was very well known. It was very strong.
Later on in time, the Gospel of John was written from Ephesus by John Luke, wrote the Gospel of Luke. In Ephesus, he was on a Paul's traveling part. He also wrote Acts while he was in Ephesus. So much of the early church found its strength in Ephesus.
This was almost like the center point of everything. But Paul had this weird gut feeling. And he felt compelled, if you read the book of Acts and you see when this happens, it's almost weird because it's like a switch got flipped. And Paul felt the need to go back to Jerusalem quickly and with purpose.
And the more I look at this, the more I read, the more I look at what scholars and people say about this. It's kind of odd. He felt compelled to go and to leave what was possibly the best ministry he'd ever been able to start. He was always the equal of stayed for the rest of his life.
But we see Paul going back to Jerusalem where he kind of always got into trouble. Like the Jerusalem church really wasn't a fan of Paul's ministry to Gentiles to non-Jewish people. But also every time Paul goes to Jerusalem, he almost gets arrested. And the more and more we read this, the more and more, I try to figure out what's going on.
I read other people that are a lot smarter than me thinking about it. What a lot of them felt was that Paul was going to Jerusalem to get arrested on purpose. Because he was a Roman citizen and he knew if anything happened, it was outside of the boundaries of the law, he could appeal to Caesar. And he could pretty much run a line that would put him right in front of the most powerful man in the known world.
And we see that Paul's ministry is very strategic. We also see towards the end of Paul's ministry, he had the ability to have influence with non-Christian and non-Jewish civic leaders. So I think Paul's like, I'm going to go get myself arrested. And I'm either going to be executed or I'm going to get to meet Caesar and tell him about Jesus.
I'm willing to take that gamble. So Paul leaves this church in Ephesus. And he goes to Jerusalem and he gets arrested. And they end up starting to beat him.
And he's like, hold on. I mean, his whole line. I kid the long game that he was planning completely works out. And he ends up in Rome, in jail.
And he's writing letters to these people that matter to him. And this letter in Ephesus is one of those letters. It's from that context. I told you this big old story, because it's about the emotions that the church and Ephesus had at this moment.
You see Paul talking about it specifically right now. It's the basic premise of the letter to Ephesians. It's like, your world is in discord. And it's in chaos.
And it's unstable. But that's OK. We read it in chapter 1, verse 9 and 10, that God is reconciling all things to himself through Christ Jesus. So Paul's telling him, yeah, it's crazy.
I'm not going to tell you it's not crazy. But you can relax because it might seem unstable. It might seem chaotic. Everything might seem to be in complete and total disarray.
But God is reconciling all things himself through his son, Jesus Christ. And every one of us, that unstable ground happens when we realize that we can't control things. Things a little bit too chaotic for us. The life's unstable, that we don't know what's going on.
The Ephesians are communicating to Paul, hey, we can't do this without you. Like, yeah, you've left us the best of your second string. Like the JVs here. But we need you.
We cannot do this without you. And so Paul's assuming a few things when he's telling this church in Ephesians that he deeply loves. That he started that are some of his closest friends. He's saying, I want to assure you that God wants to invite your whole self into his entire being and give you every single thing that comes with them.
Paul's saying, that's how I'm coping with this right now. Because I haven't invited God's entire being into my being. And he's giving me every single thing he has. That's how I'm OK with all this.
And that's how I want you to be OK with this. Because they're freaking out right now. Very beginning what we read. He says, now I pray to you.
When I think of all this, I thought of my days and I pray to the Father. That's how Paul's reacting to this. That's also how Paul is reacting to the fear that his friends have that they're communicating with him. See, God provides stability when there seems to be nothing left.
But the stability he provides is completely different from the stability that we try to create. See, God gives us grounding opportunities. We just have to realize it's a completely different ground than we're used to standing on. So four ways this morning, almost to think about this.
Four ways about what it means to stand an unstable ground. Because we can't stand firm on it. And we don't know it. But four steps.
The first firm step is simply just going into the presence of God. It's not just worship. I mean, it's not just the half the service we've been singing. But this is the idea of us consistently inviting the presence of God in our lives and us consistently engaging with the presence of God in our lives.
See, the presence of God's a grounding opportunity, because the presence of God is both completely truthful and it's completely timeless. There are anchor points in the book of Hebrews we read that this hope is an anchor to our souls. The presence of God tells us to honest to goodness 100% complete truth. Sometimes don't you want someone to tell you the truth?
When things seem unstable? You realize the truth might not be what you want to hear at the moment. You actually want to see what is going on in this version right now? The presence of God is completely truthful.
The presence of God is also completely timeless. Because when we enter into the situations where things seem unstable, we get into our heads, we begin to our hearts, and we begin thinking that this will just be mine now 100% reality until time ends. Have you been there before? I've been there before.
We think this will never end. God's presence is timeless. It operates within time. It operates outside of time.
It operates before time. And after time, it's completely timeless. We spent so much talking about that this summer when we went through revelation. God's presence of God's grounding activity, because it's completely truthful and it's completely timeless.
He Christ is making his home in our hearts. He's making your life his habitation. Think about that. There's so many times when we feel like things are going out crazy.
God can just take me out of this. We want him to remove us from the situation. But that's not providing us as a firm foothold. It's not providing stable ground, is it?
That's just removing us from having what's unstable underneath us. It doesn't actually fix anything. But Jesus' presence, He comes and makes us home in our hearts. To me, that's much more powerful than me going to a place where I don't make sense.
It's Him coming completely to us. The presence of God isn't grounding because it pulls us away and out, but the presence of God is grounding because we allow Jesus to do the work through us as we find new footing. It's stability in our world because He has come to us. We can't stand firm on unknown ground.
The second firm step we find is our roots grow into Jesus. In verse 16, we read, He has unlimited resources for us. If He can't run out. Think of it.
What would you like to have unlimited in your life? Peanut M&Ms, Pilot G2s and the 0.05 millimeter. Is anybody else picky about what pen they use? I got one right now.
Don't take it. I'll ask for it back. What would you like to have unlimited in your life? Jesus has unlimited resources that are exactly what we need.
He can't run out. And this isn't resources that we feel will simply make our unstable situations bearable. But the resources to anchor us as we allow him to be our stability. For our roots grow down deep into Him, to let ourselves grow into Jesus is He's creating a foundation.
That's exactly what we need. He's already provided it. It's our trust and our faithfulness that anchors us to what Jesus has provided. The third firm step is simply having the power to understand.
This is where I think many of us get hitched up. We kind of lose it right here. Because this is bigger than us asking for specific things. This is instead us realizing that Jesus has completely different things for us.
In verse 19, he says, I'm a prayer that makes you complete. So we can begin to understand the fullness of God. Sometimes we have a kind of a different perspective of what full means. Maybe we think something is full, but there's a lot more space that can actually be there.
How many are like dank and trail? Barbecue. It's dank and dank and because you're going to smell like it when you leave. Give a beer like this.
You can kind of stay with you all day long. So my favorite thing about dank and trail is not the barbecue. It's the banana pudding. Dank and trail, banana pudding.
Who knows about it? A couple years ago, I was with some friends of mine. I was with Sean Hornsby. Sean spoke a few weeks ago here at Foundry.
I was with Alan Johnson. I somehow lost a better guy and caught in a bunch for all three of us. The thing about a barbecue plate at a barbecue restaurant is you get two meat plate and you get your sides with it. And most barbecue joints, you can also allow your dessert to be counted as a side.
Well, that's kind of a problem at dank and trail, because all their sides are so good. So you want your two sides and you want your dessert. And so we're sitting there in line, and we all have our sides and I was like, I'm getting banana pudding. All three are just getting a banana pudding.
And the banana pudding is like $2.49 for a serving. It's a single scoop. So three guys worth of banana pudding and $7.50. And it's three little scoops of banana pudding.
But you can get a quart of any side for $5.50. So let me tell y'all, that's a lot more than the $7.50 worth of banana pudding you get if you order the single serving of banana pudding. And so I'm excited. The other two guys are excited.
I'm having this exchange with the checkout lady that you can tell how excited I am about this. I remember I'm like, ma'am, is it possible for me to get a quarter banana pudding for $5.50? I can't even, you might be a little bit more than that, but it's not as much as three servings of banana pudding. It's just, oh, baby, I can take care of that for you.
I was like, thank you so much. Y'all, let me tell you, so this, like, quart styrofoam cup of banana pudding. You remember this day? Yeah.
Yeah. Vouching. You can trust me. Y'all, this, like, y'all know, y'all know, y'all know what they're kind of coming and talking about, right?
They're 32 ounce styrofoam container. Y'all, this thing, like, went from like a kind of shallow V to like a, like an inverted hour glass. It was pregnant, 360 degrees around. This, this, this quarter banana pudding was so full, it looks like me and a pair of duck waiters.
Like a boot an ball about to pop. And y'all, it was just like, we, we didn't know there's such a thing as that full. So we proceed to dole it all out and we take our knife out and we cut the, into three so we can get into it at the spoon and there's no banana pudding left. So now, every good day can trail.
I always get a quarter banana pudding, but she's never packed that much in there before. Our idea of full was not the idea of full. The person who had the capabilities to fill that quarter up for us. We have the power to understand is because we realize that Jesus' definition of full is completely beyond our definition of full.
And he wants to pack that cup until it pops. And as we let our roots go down deep into him, what we find out is that 32 ounce cup turns into a 34 ounce cup and a 36 ounce cup and a 38 on the, you get my drift. It's consistently expanding while God is consistently filling it up to capacity. The third firm step is having the power to understand what God wants for us.
The vastness of Christ love, how deep, how wide and how high this love is for us. The fourth firm step is experiencing the love of Christ. Jesus wants us to experience a full measure. And that can't happen by our definition of what we need in life.
This means our idea of stable really isn't that stable. It's just simply not stable enough for what might happen. We all had the stories about when we found that out the hard way. Our own attempts of stability simply aren't big enough.
But Jesus is big enough. You can't stand firm on unknown ground, but you can stand firm on unknown ground. My brother-in-law knows about my reputation of falling into the water when I'm duck hunting. And he owns a big huge field that he floods and gets ditched every year, and I'm going to fall into it.
But he put a road out to one of the blinds for me. I actually fight for it side by side to make life. He's like, I think he did it for me. But there's like a six foot run out to the best blind in the middle of that field.
Then everywhere around it's two feet deep. But it's like a half inch deep right there. It's like any of the Jones in the last crusade. And you know it's there.
Nobody else can see it. Because that's the thing about unstable ground. We get a reputation. Because other people only see our reactions.
They don't see our fears. They don't see our anxieties. They don't see what we struggle with. They don't see what we might be good at.
The only thing they see is our reaction. They cannot see why we have the trust in the faithfulness of stable ground. Because we know that it's underneath that right there. Because we're not scared to walk out.
Because we know what we can expect. And Jesus is laying a path ahead of us that is stable. The prophet Isaiah said that God is coming, that making a highway of holiness where he is stretching out the curvy roads, where he is laying the mountains flat, where he is filling the valleys up to bring us back into the presence of our God. He wants to give us stable ground.
See if we can only stand firm on unknown ground, we begin to realize it's known ground. It isn't defined by our life and what we know about God, but how we are experiencing God. It often ends up with us finding a new definition of what's stable, that's instead of a life that we try to control. It's a life that we now allow to reign with a peace of God.
And the peace of God's a completely different kind of stability. Because it's one that completely recognizes that things might get a little crazy sometimes. And that's all right. And for us to move into that place for us, that we kind of, I say that a lot this last few weeks, that I feel like the beginning of school really is January.
It really is the beginning of the new year. As we move forward this year, I'll see what I'm going to do. I made a decision. I'm going to stop trying to manipulate and to schedule and to plan and to order every single moment in an attempt to have controlled stability.
What I'm going to do is realize that the stability that I need for myself, and I would hope that this would make sense. You have to hope that you would see this is what you might need for yourself to, the people that I love, for the people that all this work with, that we live with, the people that we influence, the people that we run into at the grocery store that we've never seen before, that we would live a life that stable because it's the peace of God. And not our attempts to control. Let's pray together.
Jesus, each of us has those moments, those things that we would love for you to control. But God, us is asking you to control something, is us just still participating in a world that is not big enough for you. So God, we pray for your peace, for your peace to overwhelm us. Jeez, we pray for you to reign in our hearts this year.
God, for you to be in the fold of every fabric of our being. Or for us each just to take one step, one place, one area of our lives that we are going to invite your peace to reign in, where we know that you have laid out past ahead of us. This up to us to simply take the right steps. God, we pray for you to show us where there's still waters are.
For us to see what the true stability you offer us is. God, for us to see that you want what's best for us, and you've offered us what's best for us. Thank you for loving us above all and above anything else. Let's do it for you.