Embracing God’s Light in a Confusing World

Summary:

Navigating life is full of challenges amidst uncertainty and confusion. Trust in God’s guidance and rely on God's wisdom rather than our own understanding. Shift our focus from the chaos around us to the steadfast love and light of God, finding hope, clarity, and strength in His unwavering presence. Join us as we delve into what it truly means to live by faith and let God’s light illuminate our path.

Transcript:

Well, good morning everyone. 

My name is Jonathan. I get to be a pastor here at Journey, and I just want to begin this morning by saying thank you and welcome to you all. We are so glad that we have the opportunity to gather each week for the purposes of being able to worship together, to inspire one another, to spur one another on, and it's not something that we take for granted. You being here today, we know that there are lots of other things that you could be doing. There are some enticing Father's Day brunch options out there, some freebies that you can find. And for you being here, it is something that we are so grateful for and want to say to each and every one of you. Welcome, and we are so glad that you are here. I want to invite you this morning to pray with me as we turn to the sermon today. Father God, you who know us by name, the type of weeks that we have had, if we have been on top of the world or if it feels like that the weight of the world is on top of us. So regardless of where we are today, regardless of where we have been, 

We know that yesterday does not define our lives. Tomorrow does not define our lives. We define our lives by your grace. So impart it to us today. Jesus, show us your kingdom and we join in today with the ancient prayer come Holy Spirit Earth. Amen. 

Happy Father's Day to all of you out there who are dads, who are men, who bless others with your wisdom, with your presence, with your giftedness. And Father's Day for me is kind of an up and down day. I am very thankful for my grandfather who has probably been the most constant father figure in my life. He has been there for me in every situation that I can remember. My dad and I, we kind of have an up and down relationship, which is probably why Father's Day for me is up and down. And then I have been also blessed with a stepdad who has been there for me most of my life continues to be there for me and so grateful for him. And then of course, I have children of my own and worry each day whether or not I'm being the type of father that they need me to be. 

And sometimes that weighs heavily upon us all. But regardless of where we are in relationship with our father, we all have the presence of not only our heavenly Father, but also great men in this congregation that we are so blessed to have and there are such gifts and treasures to us. So we want to just simply say today, happy Father's Day and for all of the men who are here, and ladies, if you want to be patient, you can probably grab some too afterwards. But we have of course, dad's root Beer. It's everybody's favorite root beer on Father's Day and some moon pies. And our hope is that at some point during today, you'll be able to maybe sit a little still and whether you're a father or not, just have a few moments to watch the wind blow by, enjoy some fellowship and friendship and family ship. 

I don't think that's a word, but enjoying just community with one another and indulging in some goodies. Moon pies are calorie free on Father's Day, so feel free to enjoy that when you stop and think about it. The world that we live in is oftentimes so heavy. There's so much pressure that each of us face to live up to certain standards, to achieve all of the things, to have all of the things for perfection, which we know is a myth, and we need moments in our lives where we can just pause from all of that, just simply enjoy, learn to enjoy the ride that is life. So I hope that we get to experience that today. What Jeremy read earlier from two Corinthians chapter five, there's an interesting phrase in there which I want to point to our attention. Paul writes this, we live by faith and not by sight. 

As Paul is speaking these words or writing these words, he is writing to a church community, the church of Corinth, similarly to our church community. If Paul was here today, he might utter these words from the stage or he might send us an email. He probably wouldn't hand write a letter, but who knows how he would advise us. But he is addressing a church as they are seeking out to live lives, obedient to the kingdom of God, seeking to be the people that God is calling them to be seeking to live in. The truth that Jesus presented, seeking to be responsive to the Holy Spirit, seeking to love God and their neighbors as themselves and as they are doing everything within their ability and relying on the Holy Spirit to live faithful, obedient lives to the kingdom of heaven. Paul is encouraging them to see that God is calling them to be focused on that which is eternal. 

So he instructs them live by faith and not by sight. So here at Journey we have been seeking to invite the Holy Spirit to give us a fresh outpouring of the kingdom of God in our lives and in our church, we have been seeking to be as obedient as we possibly can individually and collectively as the church to what God is calling us to. And so this passage, the whole passage, but this particular verse, lived by faith and not by sight is very pertinent to us. But what exactly is Paul getting at here? What does it mean to live by faith and not by sight? Well, we got to back up a few verses in order to understand exactly what Paul is talking about here. If we go back to two Corinthians chapter four, beginning in verse four, here is what we read the God of this age. 

Now notice that's a lowercase g. Paul is talking about what he and other places would call the patterns of brokenness. There is a way about the world that leads us into situations and circumstances that keep us from being obedient to who God is calling us to be. Paul here is saying that that is the God of this age, and he says that the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers. Now Paul, another place in another place says, don't add to the word of God. So I will not do that. However, I would like to invite us to consider that God has also blinded the minds of some believers as well, not capital G God, but the God of this age has blinded the minds of both unbelievers and believers. What has he blinded them to? Well, they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ who is the image of God. 

He continues for we preach for what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as the Lord and ourselves as your servants. For Jesus's sake, for God who said, let light shine out of the darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. So the God of this age, the lowercase God of this age, the patterns of brokenness, the strategy that the God of this age uses is confusion. Now, it is dangerous when we are reading the scriptures to consider that the ancient texts were written and can just be received in the modern context without a little bit of interpretation. Sometimes when we do that, we can get ourselves into dangerous places. However, when Paul talks about the God of this age since the beginning, there has been a God of this age that cloaks himself in confusion and has been manipulating and deceiving people to allow patterns of brokenness to move them away from peace and joy and love and wholeness with oneself and with God. 

So we have to understand this in order that we can be able to see and identify the patterns that lead us to brokenness as followers of Jesus. We proclaim that Jesus is the way, right? That's what the scriptures say. It is what we say. However, there are plenty of other ways that people can live. Jesus is the way to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is the way to God, but there are all sorts of other ways that people can follow. That's why we say here at Journey that everyone, no matter what they claim about themselves, no matter who they are, everyone is following someone or something. 

And what we should all do, no matter who it is that we are following, is examine our lives and discover whether or not what we are following has the ability to deliver on what has been promised in the age of confusion, which is every age that has ever been, there are lots of confusing things that go on both inside and outside of the church that will allow the patterns of brokenness to infiltrate our lives if we are not careful. We think sometimes that the age that we are living in is unique. I hear this a lot. I'm not making any sort of predictions. I had a professor in college, one of my theology professors, he said that predicting the end of times has a 0% success rate so far. Anyone who has made any sort of prognostication about the end of times has been wrong. 

I have all of my life heard that Jesus is coming back and he's probably going to come back tomorrow. Now, the thing that we have in common with all other ages is that every generation who has been since Jesus has been on this earth, has thought that they would see Jesus come back. We are not unique in that way. However, we do have unique circumstances. We do have unique things that are pulling for our lives that other generations have had to deal with. But there has always been a spirit of confusion that has confused people away from the ways of God. In the beginning of the Bible, we read of a couple Adam and Eve who are living in the garden and they are deceived into what God has told them not to do. And from that point on, that story has been passed along from generation to generation to generation to generation. 

It is one of the oldest stories that has been played out on repeat. But all the while in the midst of the confusion, what has also been passed from generation to generation to generation is the God of light. The God of light does not deal in confusion. God deals in light, meaning that the light of God has shined into the darkness and illuminates for us the way to the kingdom of heaven. And what Paul writes here is that the light of the knowledge of God's glory that is displayed in the face of Jesus when we are obedience to his ways will shine through our lives. And two Corinthians four, verse 13, Paul writes this, it is written, I believe therefore I have spoken since we have listen to this one, the same what spirit of what? Spirit of faith. Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. All of this is for your benefit so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. Therefore, we do not lose heart though outwardly, we are wasting away yet inwardly, we are being renewed day by day, you and I today we have the light of Jesus, the light of Christ, the same spirit of faith that that raised Jesus from the dead is resurrecting our lives. 

The same spirit of faith. That's why we have been praying here a journey for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit because we believe that God is up to something special here and we believe that God is shining the light into the darkness. And what results from that is that the good news is proclaimed that freedom is found for the prisoner. That recovery of sight is found for the blind, that the oppressed are set free and that the year of the Lord's favor is proclaimed. And what our eyes tell us might be different, but this freedom found in Jesus is the most true and non confused story that there is as a church in East Dallas. It has been our prayer that we will see the kingdom of heaven flourish in East Dallas and for East Dallas that people literally would be set free from addictions, that people would know that God loves them and cares for them and seize them and knows them by name. That people who are facing hopeless situations that hope would be restored to them, that people whose lives are filled with frustration and anxiousness and fear and bitterness would be set free from all of that 

And that those things would be replaced by the peace of Jesus and that becomes reality when the church lives by faith and not by sight, not trying our best, not doing our best, not raising the most money, not having the best effort or the biggest building or whatever other types of measurements that we might subscribe to. But heaven is revealed on earth when we live by faith, fixing our eyes not on what is seen but what is unseen. How many of us know that our eyes can deceive us? Oftentimes when we look at something, when we see something, we see what we want to see happens to all of us or we see what we are being confused to see our eyes can deceive us, and when circumstances get tight, when we get in a bad way or a bad situation, when we look around and we say, why can't I have this or why can't I do that? Our eyes can fail us. Our eyes can tell us things like we deserve that or we need that or we have to have it or we can't live without it. This, by the way, can happen to us as individuals, but also this can happen collectively as the church that we get split off on wrong roads, that we start doing things where we're treating people not as Jesus told us to, but with judgment and bitterness and envy and anger and all of the things that Jesus has told us to guard ourselves against. We can begin to employ those things because of the confusion that is in the world 

Happens communally just as much as it does individually. But there is an antidote. And that antidote is, as we have said, living by faith and not by sight. When you live by faith, your eyes are fixed on what is eternal. A proper way for us to examine whether we are living by faith and not by sight is for us to examine whether or not we are living by impulse or is there pause in your life? God grant us pause between impulse and action when life gets frantic, when there's very little margin, when we are constantly going, when we are stretched thin, when we're having to have all of the things all of the time and be all the things all the time, who in that way has time to pause? God has given us a rhythm to go about life and it's not stuffing it full and stretching it thin. It's not living by impulse. Rather, it's a calculated pace where we create margin in order to be present with Jesus, to be shaped by Jesus, to do what Jesus did and to be present to those that are around us and the world in which we live. 

When I was in college, I took some interesting classes. If you study spirituality in the church, you can find some very interesting characters out there. Just like anything, there's people who are kind of on the middle of the road and then there are people who are living a little bit farther out there. And by the way, what I have found is that those who are living a little farther out there are necessary. They're necessary for me, necessary for the church. They encourage those of us who like things safe and neat to maybe get a little bit outside of our box, but I remember reading, I don't remember what it was, but it was a monk from an old order and he instructed people to go out and talk to the trees to find out about God. He would literally instruct them to go out there and ask the tree to reveal God to them. 

And as I read about that, I thought this guy was a little off his rocker, right? Fun fact, when I was working construction, I worked with an arborist who anytime I would call him, he would show up, ask him a question about the tree, and he would say, well, did you ask the tree first? No, that's why we pay you just to talk to the tree. But as I have thought about that over and over again about why would someone suggest that you could have a conversation with a tree? Well, it's not that far from what the scriptures say, right? Does that creation cries out the glory of God. This world is such a magnificent and wondrous and mysterious place and sometimes we live so disconnected from it that we don't even have time to stop and look at much less spend time basking in the glory that is this world and understanding how it cries out the glory of God. 

But God has given us a pace, a rhythm to live by that is calculated, that creates margin to do just that. A place where work and creating and doing are supplemented with times of being still and waiting a place, a pace where we are able to let go of all of the pursuits that occupy the majority of our time and our energy and our efforts and be present and enjoy the world around us. This pace has a name. It's called Sabbath. Sabbath isn't about adhering to a law or a command. It's about living at a pace that provides for us rest and enables us to live by faith. One of the problems in our modern world, one of the ways in which we have been confused is because we, most of us live without any sort of Sabbath moments in lives. And if you know anything about the Bible, Sabbath is in the top 10 of things that you should keep right? But yet oftentimes in our modern world, we don't have time for it, but if we are serious about living by faith and not by sight, then we have to trust that Jesus knows what he was talking about, that God knows more about the world than we know or that we could ever know or that we could ever convince ourselves that we know. 

So Jesus told this really interesting parable in Mark four, and I'll invite you to turn there as we wrap things up this morning. It's a parable that is kind of confusing. It's one that as I have studied it this week, at first I wasn't quite sure what exactly Jesus was getting at and because it's a little confusing and maybe because it challenges our fantasies of control, it's one that we often overlook, but it's very pertinent for us today. Here it is, mark chapter four, verse 26. Jesus is a teaching and a series of parables and he says this, this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. That might sound familiar, but then Jesus says this night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how all by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come. Did you hear that? Whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts all by itself, 

It produces the grain because of the soil. 

We are tempted in our lives and our modern world to believe that if we aren't out there making things happen, then things don't happen. Most of us, we don't have time for pause because we actually either think or feel pressure that we can't stop. Sometimes we might even think that if we stopped, if we pause, if we took time to rest, that the world itself might stop rotating on its axis. But what Jesus is getting at here, what he's teaching us is that whether we sleep or we get up, it is the soil that produces the grain. Now, Jesus is obviously not promoting laziness. He's not approaching a take whatever happens life and approach to life and don't do things to help things along or to encourage things or to create things. That's not what he's saying, but he is inviting us to remember that there is much more unfolding around us than what meets the eye. 

He's inviting us to see that while we play a role, while people play a role, it is the soil that ripens the grain and whether the man got up or stayed in bed, the wheat did its thing, and when it's ready though, when it's ready, the man puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come. This is what it means by living by faith and not by sight that we might see. We might not see with our eyes what exactly is going on. We might think that we are the ones that make everything turn, but regardless of how much control or lack of control we have that God is working and that things are happening around us, we might find ourselves in the midst of a drought. 

We might find ourselves in a situation where everything that we touch turns to gold, but in the midst of it all, God is working and the kingdom is and hand following this teaching of Jesus. The disciples get in a boat and they head out of town and while they're on the sea, there comes a storm and the wind is blowing and the waves are threatening to overtake the boat and the disciples become afraid. They feel like that they are about to drown. And what Mark tells us is that Jesus is in the boat, but he's in the back of the boat and he's asleep unbothered by all that is going on around him. And so they stir around and they wake Jesus up and they're, they're think, Jesus, we're about to drown. What are you doing? Sleeping in the back of the boat? And Jesus gets up, and I don't know how exactly it happened, but I imagine he just sort of looks around and says, waves wind calm down however it occurs. The story tells us that the waves and the wind listened to the commands of Jesus and went completely calm, and then Jesus turned to his disciples and he says this, 

Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith? 

You see what Jesus is inviting them to? Is it saying that no matter what your eyes are telling you, no matter what's going on around you, the winds could be raging, the seas could be overtaking your vessel, but at the end of the day, Jesus is with you and regardless of what you face, you will be able to endure. Not because you are so great or because you have everything figured out or because you are able, but because Jesus is here, their response, there's a response of the disciples to this, is that they were terrified and they questioned, who is this man that the wind and the waves obey him? Who is this man that the wind and the waves obey him? This man of course is Jesus and he is inviting us to trust that the same, remember spirit of faith that raised him from the dead is raising us as well, 

Is raising you and I today, as we have talked about the stories that are passed along from generation to generation, one of the things that is very important for us here at Journey is that we are connected not just in our body, but as a family of God with the people of God, but also with the generations who have come before us, and that the things that we do today that the generations would come after us would be able to say, wow, look at the faith that those people had. That's what we are invited to experience together today as we come around the table. Jesus, on the night he was betrayed. In the middle of a meal, he paused, picked up a piece of bread, he gave thanks for it. He broke it. He passed it around to all of his friends at the table and he said, this body broken for you. Whenever you eat this, remember me following the consumption of the bread, he picked up a cup of wine. He passed it around and he said, this cup represents the, represents my blood whenever you drink this, do it and remembrance of me. 

He was inviting them to remember Jesus. All of the experiences that they had with him from the moments when they were in the boat and the waves were overtaking them, and he got up and said, peace be still to the teachings, to the commissions that he gave them. All of that is what they are instructed to remember as they eat this meal, and it's what we are called to remember today as well, that Jesus is here, that Jesus is with us, and that Jesus is trustworthy, that Jesus is able. A couple of instructions for us over here to my left is a table with, there will be a couple of people there with one holding a plate with bread, the other holding a chalice of juice. You can receive communion by picking up a piece of bread, dipping it into the juice, and receiving communion that way. Over here to my right is the prepackaged wafer and juice. If that is more appropriate for you, however you respond in this moment, may we respond in faith, trusting that Jesus is who Jesus claims to be and that Jesus will do what Jesus said he would do. 

Come today and feast on the fair of the kingdom of God.