11.11.2024
Reflect on Jesus’ teachings for peace and unity amid life’s pace and societal divides.
Sermon Series:
Summary:
The concept of surrendering to Christ involves denying personal desires, ambitions, and self-centered attitudes. Following Jesus requires a daily commitment to taking up one’s cross, symbolizing a life of self-denial and sacrifice. The broad path of worldly pursuits contrasts sharply with the narrow path of Christian discipleship, which, though challenging, leads to a life filled with love, peace, and grace.
Transcript:
What if I told you that a life of expanding love, unending joy, increasing peace, deepening grace and fulfilling contentment is available to you and it's all for a low price. A few monthly installments of $0 and 0 cents. Even better, could you even put a price tag on that?
When I was in high school, I had some family that we connected with only sporadically. We lived in different states. We only got together a couple of times maybe as I was a kid and going into my high school years, but they were aunts and uncles and cousins who I loved to be around when I had the opportunity to. It was just few and far between. And I remember one time our families gathered in the great town of Branson, Missouri. Anybody ever been to Branson? A wonderful place if you like, riding Go-karts and watching shows. We were in Branson for a couple of days and I think we went to Silver Dollar City and did some of the attractions there. But the highlight of the trip, at least for me was when we spent a couple of nights at Table Rock Lake. My uncle who was there with us was one of my favorite people in the world.
He was one of those that I always looked up to and was just simply amazed with. He seemed to be a very tough guy, a very strong guy, had a lot of abilities, could seemingly do anything. One of those where as a little boy, I looked up to him and just sort of thought that he was Superman or something like that. And while we were at Table Rock Lake, he decided to rent a pontoon boat and he became the coolest captain in the world driving us around the lake and exploring and just enjoying that we would park and jump off in the middle of the lake and swim for a while, had just the most fun time. At one point he noticed that there over near the shore was a concentration of boats that had parked and docked and people were getting out. And so we went over to see what was happening and what the people were stopping for was that there was a cliff that overlooked the lake and you could go out and jump off of the cliff into the lake.
So you would have to park the boat, get into the water, swim to the shore, wait up onto the beach, climb up to the mountains and jump off. And as I was sitting there watching these people listening to the sounds, it sounded and looked like the most fun time a person could possibly have. But inside I was terrified. Have you ever been in a situation like that where you're looking around and you're thinking, wow, that would be really cool, but inside there's a voice inside of you saying, don't do this, don't do it. But as any high school aged boy would, I said no to the fear and acted like I was pumped about it and had no reservations. And so I jumped out of the boat with my family, swam up to the shore, waited up to the beach, climbed the trail, and stood in line to wait to jump off of this cliff.
And everybody who was going before me just seemed to have so much fun. My little cousin who was like five or six years old, jumped off and he yelled and screamed on the way down and people were cheering for him. And my uncle went off and my other cousin went off, and unfortunately it became my turn to jump. And so I was standing on the edge sort of like this. That was the edge there. I was kind of peering down and what looked like maybe 10 or so feet from the water level might as well had been from the top of the Empire State Building at this point. And I was simply gripped with fear. People were cheering for me to jump. I had all of the buzz around just the fun and excitement and energy, but I could not move. I was paralyzed there in that moment, unable to go forward.
And I stood there long enough to where the people behind me began to get a little agitated and they were like, you got to either go or get out of the way. And they were claiming my family kept chanting for me to go. And ultimately I decided to take the walk of shame. And I turned around and I walked back down the trail and I waited out into the water from the beach and I swam back to the boat. And my was very gracious to me. My very cool uncle was very encouraging. He didn't shun me. He let me back in the boat and we went on our day. But I remembered that feeling of defeat and how I let my fear get the best of me in that moment.
So what is a story of a high school boy on a cliff at Table Rock Lake? Have anything to do with the Sermon on the Mount and what Jesus taught to us? Well, Jesus's vision in the Sermon on the Mount is a lofty one. These are some of the highlights. He talked about forgiveness for those who have wronged us, fighting against materialism and greed, seeking a trust that replaces anxiety being trustworthy and honest, blessing those who persecute us, maintaining sexual integrity, loving our enemies. If there is anyone sitting there today looking over this list thinking, oh yeah, I've got this. The test has been aced, I would caution us to really kind of take a step back and see these things that Jesus is calling us to because they certainly are not easy. And Jesus concludes his sermon by stating that those who will walk down this path, those who will trust me in these areas and live according to the way that I am teaching you and leading you, and eventually going to send the holy spirits to move you towards those who will do that are on a narrow way. And in contrast, most people are on a broad path and the destination there ultimately is destruction, but in the meantime is filled with fear, anxiety, judgment, and discontent. As we are working through this foundational teaching of Jesus last week, we said that this teaching in Matthew five, six and seven is probably the most important and comprehensive set of teachings, particularly when it comes to us following the way of Jesus. This is the scale which the fruit of the spirit of our lives is measured.
And as we are journeying down this path, there are oftentimes a torrent of voices that are clamoring for our attention, joy and fear, excitement and nervousness, courage and distress. All of these feelings and emotions and dispositions are going on in our lives a lot of times at the same time. And we are left trying to decide, do I trust Jesus fully or do I turn away? And in both simple and complex ways, we stand running through all the scenarios and thinking through and responding to the Holy Spirit wondering if I let this thing go or if I open myself up to that, can I trust Jesus and what it costs me? Now, I might say, well, wait a second, Jonathan, before you told us that story of cliff diving, you said that it's free, right? You said it costs four monthly installments of $0. What do you mean what does it cost? Well, why this is not something that money can buy, the cost is definitely high. So what is that cost? Well, in Jesus's words, it is to deny yourself whether we find ourselves today standing at the crossroads of the broad and the narrow or we're some way down one of those directions,
Many of us at times in our lives will find ourselves in a situation where we have to sort of pause and get our bearings and decide which direction are we going to continue. And for those of us who choose the way of Jesus and who submits to the cost of denying yourself, you understand that that is a significant task that requires a daily routine to continually offer yourself to Jesus. Because what we know is that our egos will not go quietly into the night. Last week we read a quote from an author named Brendan Manning, and I wanted to read it to us again because I think it helps capture the description of what it is like to walk down this narrow way. And here is the word picture that he painted for us. He said, littered along the shoulders of the highway of holiness.
And then we put in there the narrow way. In order for our purposes, it says, we'll lie the skeletons of our egos, the corpses of our fantasies of control and shards of self-righteousness, self-indulgence, spirituality, and our selfish ambition. One of the reasons why I enjoy Brennan Manning's writings is because it becomes for me sort of a word picture. And the picture that I get in my mind when I read this scripture comes from, or this quote is it comes from the movie Lion King when Simba and knowledge journey out into the elephant graveyard and there's just bones laying to the side. And that's sort of the picture of the narrow way that Jesus is calling us to walk, that there will be littered along the shoulders. These different bones of self-control, these bones of self-denial, these bones of selfish ambition. And what we will find is that if we are willing to in both small and large ways, allow the spirit to shape us in the areas that Jesus covered on the Sermon on the Mount, to deny ourselves our urges, what comes natural to us on the other side of that denial is that life of expanding love and unending joy and increasing peace and deepening grace and fulfilling contentment.
The question though, which we brought up last week is ultimately the question, how important is it to you to seek to pattern your life after Jesus? How important is it In the passage that we read earlier from John, you say, well, Jonathan, the Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew, and I am aware of that, but I wanted to read the passage in John because this helps us understand that this theme of denying ourselves is not just a one-off thing for Jesus. It is something that we find throughout the New Testament. And in John, the way in which he talked about it was comparing our self-denial to a kernel of wheat. Now, I am not a farmer. I actually don't even, I try not to eat a lot of bread, so I don't know much about wheat period. But apparently according to Jesus, and maybe those of you who are gardeners could verify, this kernel of wheat has to die before it will sprout new seeds.
So Jesus is talking about this in relation to our lives, and I want to read part of what we read earlier, but I want to read it today from the message because I think it helps us capture what Jesus is saying here. So he talks about the seed having to die, and then he says this in the same way Anyone who holds onto life just as it is, destroys that life. But if you let it go reckless in your love, you will have it forever real and eternal dying and letting it go and reckless in love that is according to Jesus what produces life real and eternal. It doesn't take rocket scientists for us to know that Jesus here is defying conventional wisdom. We are taught to play it safe. We are taught that A plus B equals C. We are taught that if you do well in school, if you go to college, if you work hard, then you will live the happy life in our society.
Everything has to be calculated and weighed and measured before making an investment. And we have to determine what is going to be the return of our investment before we make it. And if it doesn't pan out, then we aren't going to go through with it. But what Jesus is saying is the opposite of that. He's saying, you have to let go of all of that and follow me. And a very real sense, that type of formulaic approach when we are talking about following Jesus won't get us very far down the narrow road. Last week we talked about a couple of hurdles that we might face if we're choosing to follow this narrow way. One of them was the hurdle of the term narrow. In our day and age, the term narrow has a lot of negative connotation to it. We think about maybe closed-minded or closed off or holier than thou or whatever we might put to it. Then we talked about the hurdle of having sometimes having to go against the masses, that sometimes the masses will lead us astray.
The narrow way doesn't sound very 21st century for us, but if we can get past these hurdles, what we will find is not a closed off, confined and constrained existence, but a life and a love that is expanding and increasing without end. What we will find is there is nothing narrow about the narrow way other than of course illustrating that few will find it. Our cultural lenses will tell us that anything goes that we decide our own fates. You are the master of your castle. We live in an egocentric reality. Broadly speaking, even Christians tend to exist with themselves at the center for many followers of Jesus. The temptation is that Jesus becomes a servant to their ego rather than patterning their lives after the self emptying way of Jesus. Whether it's the status that we want to achieve in life or eternal bliss, we are often tempted in our day and age towards a self-centered spirituality. I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more narrow in the negative sense of the word way to live than with myself at the center of it all as best I could find this week, Jesus 26 times referred to this denial of self in his teachings throughout Matthew, mark, Luke, and John,
Deny yourself, Jesus said very frequently, die to yourself and follow me. This is not news to anyone, but when something dies, that thing typically is dead. Death is a reality that many of us tend to shy away from. It's not something that we want to think about. We don't talk about it a lot in our culture. It's something that for many of us, we spend money and invest in research trying to figure out how we can put it off as long as possible. But if you know the story of Jesus, what is true for the kingdom of God is that death is not anywhere near the end. Death is merely the soil and which resurrection blooms. That would've been a great spot for an amen. So we're going to rewind it and we're going to say it one more time. Death is merely the soil in which resurrection blooms. Amen. Amen. There we go. On the narrow road, we find that dying to self opens us up to the kingdom of heaven, which is not some far off or disembodied future, but a reality that you and I are invited to live in right here, right now.
This past week, like many of you, many of our neighbors, we spent time gearing up for a new school year to start
Look up. And all of a sudden summer's over and school has begun. Time flies by so fast. If you have been a parent, you know that as a parent, much of your energy, your money, your time goes into giving yourself a way for your children. That's kind of the purpose of being a parent, is that you deny yourself and invest in your children. It isn't easy to give your self away for your children, but in that there is a life and a level of love that you could never know otherwise. And this is not only true of relationships with parents and children. This is true in any type of relationship in which you are giving yourself away to another, whether that be familial relationships or marriage or friendships. However that looks like to give yourself a way for and to another is one of the most beautiful and loving gifts that can be given.
It's also the way in which we find the most full life for ourselves. And it also is the way in which we enter onto the narrow path. It's by giving yourself away. But we all know that that is not for the faint of heart. It is not an easy task to give yourself to some one else. In a conversation about this act, Richard Rohr wrote this, the realization that someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own afterwards, after we die to self, we know in a different way, although we have to keep relearning this truth over and over again. That's the point of daily prayer, but it demands a major dying of our own small self, our ego. Maybe that's why so few go there. So if the entrance to the narrow way is to die to one's self and few are able to muster up the courage to journey in that direction, then what the opposite way or the broad path or the more popular path, and how do we know which path that we are on? Well, the broad path is the opposite of dying to oneself and is instead the promotion of self cue our culture.
Promoting yourself might appear as if it leads to the life that you always wanted and it might get you things that are alluring or compelling to you, but it is also the root of spiritual brokenness, and that's not my opinion. That's what Jesus taught, where dying to self leads to love and peace and grace and contentment promoting oneself leads to the brokenness of moralism being success oriented only and individualism. So quick look at those moralism is the idea for both Christians and non-Christians alike that if I am a good enough person, then good things will come my way or that I deserve good things. If I'm nice and smile, if I hold the door for at least one person or if I think the right way about things and I try to keep as upbeat of an attitude as I possibly can, and if I do enough good things to outweigh the bad, then I'm good to go.
But there's brokenness in this, as we said, and the brokenness is that while this type of thinking might shape our behavior, it neglects our hearts. And Jesus taught us that heart formation is much more significant than behavior modification. In fact, the way that he said it was, it's not what is on the outside that defiles a person. It's what is inside. And that has to be rooted out. And no matter how well you perform or behave, you can never root that out through behavior modification or moralism. Heart formation leads to freedom. Moralism will enslave us and lead us to judge our neighbors. That by the way, as we said is true for both Christians and non-Christians. Then we have being success oriented. Now, there's nothing wrong with success, but when that's our only focus, when we are constantly being led by the motivation of more and bigger and we are in danger of being on the broad path, being completely success oriented, is the idea that if I work hard enough and I do enough good in the world and with whatever I'm doing, then I can have it all and I will experience happiness through the acquisition of all the more and the bigger and the better.
But the brokenness in this is while that might give us nice things, it promotes our ego to the center. And then everything that we have in life exists to feed and fuel our ego. Ego does not know what it means to be content. And the last one is individualism. Individualism is being centered on me, me, myself and I, the idea you do you. But life and faith with me at the center is the definition of selfish selfishness leads to isolation from our neighbors, both those in close proximity and those far away.
And the brokenness that is in individualism is that I might begin to think that I am at the center, but a life or a faith that is lived to please me is full of dull, shallow self-centered mt. So those are the differences of the way that Jesus has called us to on the narrow way and the broad path. Of course, there's many more that we don't have time to discuss today, but over the next several months, what we are going to be looking at is a deep dive into what Jesus taught about these things. My guess is for each of us, no matter if we have been following Jesus since we were young and that was a few days ago, or if following Jesus is something that is pretty new to us. Each of us, if we hang in for the next several months, we'll find ourselves listening to Jesus's teaching and it will fit perfectly fine with our lives.
It'll align totally with the way that we see ourselves and understand ourselves. And I'm not talking about what we put on for everybody else but in our heart. It will align with our vision and values and how we live. And then there will also be some topics which are very difficult for us that confront our understanding of ourselves or our neighbors or that challenge the way in which we live. But no matter where we find ourselves in these conversations, my prayer for each of us is that we would have a steadfast trust in Jesus and understand that Jesus is trustworthy and if he calls us to something, no matter what it costs, it is worth it. And as we will find ourselves on the edge of the cliff over the next few months, peering off the side wondering if it's okay to jump or if we're going to walk back the other direction.
My hope is that in response to the Holy Spirit, we will say yes. When I was in high school, another thing that they had was the DARE program. It was a program designed to keep kids off of drugs, and the tagline for that program was just say no. Well, while that might help us in drug education, I want to flip that around and I want to encourage us to this when it comes to following Jesus. Now, I'm not saying when it comes to taking my word, I'm not saying when it comes to what a preacher on TV might say or some theologian might say. I'm talking about when it comes to following Jesus.
My hope for all of us is that we will just say yes no matter what it costs, no matter what it causes us to feel inside or in our minds. No matter what popular culture or popular wisdom might say about it, when it comes to following the way of Jesus, just say yes. Because whether you can see it or not, whether you can find a pastor that will preach it or not, or find a book in which you can read it or not, or a podcast in which you can listen to it or not. Wherever Jesus is leading you will be a place where you find yourself expanding beyond anywhere that you could have ever been on your own or utilizing somebody else's collective wisdom. So just say, yes, Jesus, by the power of your Holy Spirit, we pray that you would give us the strength, the courage, the discipline to say yes. God, as we move deeper into this sermon, there will no doubt be some heavy thoughts, some heavy hearts, some heavy maybe actions that come from what you are teaching us. And God, as difficult as the road might be, EI pray that you would give us the perseverance to move forward following you, trusting that what you say you will do. We ask these things today, Jesus, in your name and for your sake, amen.
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