Political “favors” usually work in a tit-for-tat type of motion where you scratch the weird spot on the left side of another person’s back and he/she scratches your itchy spot. That’s not Biblical, that’s business. If you don’t already know, “favor” is something that is bestowed upon you just because. Most times, it doesn’t even need a reason. This is Biblical “favor” anyways. Romans 5:6-8 says, “6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus didn’t have to die for us to save us from ourselves; but because he favored us, he did. This is the ultimate favor, but you already knew that. You know that we don’t deserve favor and received it, so it makes it harder for us to ask God for anymore favors. At least that what I hear sometimes. We’re afraid to ask. We’re afraid to take from somebody giving us a favor. It is God’s favor and He wants to give it, yet we sit favorless because we have some messed up thought in our head that tells us that “favor” is a bad thing and that we would owe somebody something later. We already owe God our lives and being; why not also take some of His favor too? This is the argument I am going to make over the next month.

• 2/5 – Finding the Favorable – yes, I’m a systems guy and you know it because I’m going lay out the Bible map on finding the favorable moment and time.
• 2/12 – Finding Favor in Brokenness – Being broken may be the exact thing we need to see where favor comes to live in our lives.
• 2/19 – Finding Favor as a Foreigner – Sometimes being a foreigner puts us at a disadvantage, God’s favor says, this is where even more mercy and grace is bestowed.
• 2/26 – Finding Favor in Sorrow – Yes, there is favor in being sad and depressed.

Lets start this morning with finding the favorable—because all of us are favorable when we realize it.

13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. 16 Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, “I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, 17 and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.”’ 18 And they will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.’ 19 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. 20So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go. 21And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty, 22 but each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and any woman who lives in her house, for silver and gold jewelry, and for clothing. You shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians.” – Exodus 3:13-22

Here’s the first thing: God is observing your life. We read this in verse 16. God sees your afflictions. You may feel alone. You may feel like there is no favor in your life. But the mere fact that God is watching you and observing the beatings you are taking mentally, physically and emotionally makes you favorable. Just think about it. If you were not favored, there would be no reason for God to watch you in your struggle. He’s not watching your life to be entertained; He is watching you and feeling your pain. You’re not one of them subway car shows, absolutely not. He is watching you because you interest Him.

The reason God watches your life and observes your life is so that He can bestow upon you favor. Let me define favor then as an action. Favor is an opportunity to change your life. People don’t get that about favor. When you have God’s favor, He is offering you an opportunity to change the circumstances that hold you prisoner. He is giving you a promise declaring that when you accept His favor that the game changes. Look at verse 17, it says “I promise to bring you up out of the affliction.” This is the beauty of favor—it can’t be manufactured. Favor is something God does for you because you can’t do it for yourself. I know it’s counterintuitive, but we have been taught by the American social system that we make our own favor when we hustle and bustle; there is a myth that says we can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and take matters into our own hands. That is a lie—there is always somebody or something granting us favor to allow for an opportunity to walk through the doors of change. Therefore, true favor is a seeking a good thing and getting a God thing. If we don’t want change or something different to happen, then we won’t get it. Absolutely not. The Israelites have been crying for a change to their socio-economic predicament for 400 years! That’s four generations! If they weren’t seeking a change (the good thing) there would be no way God would make a God thing for them.

I want to share with you now the crazy thing about favor. Favor comes with heavy opposition. When you become favored by God, there will be principalities standing between you and getting God’s thing. The powers that be, don’t want change, they want you to get “good” things, but if you receive a “God” thing, it would upset power and turn everything on its head. That is not what Satan wants, it is not what people want. They want you to be minimized so that they can get the glory, so that they can take advantage of their circumstances. By God favoring you, it takes away from their ability to capitalize on that. Opposition allows God to make good things into God things.

I want you to underline verse 21—“And I will give this people favor.” I want you to say it with me now. “I want to give this people favor.” God wants to give you favor, but you have to ask God for His favor. Favor must be asked for so that it can be bestowed.

Now I want you to circle this phrase in verse 21—“you shall not go empty.” Just having an opportunity is not enough when God is bestowing upon us, His favor. It absolutely isn’t. He wants us to have, not only an opportunity, but He also wants us to have a chance to maximize on that opportunity. Do you know why God gave the Israelites gold and silver from the Egyptians? It’s because gold and silver can be used to barter. God gives us favor, but also gives us tools to use that favor! Does that sound unfair? Absolutely it does and it is unfair, but to the favorable, it is an awesome gift that we should receive with humility and thanksgiving. Honestly, I am a recipient of God’s most awesome favor. I’m not bragging, but I want to share this with you. When I got the chance to change my life like 12 years ago by going to Notre Dame, it was by God’s favor. I had good opportunities at other colleges I could have gone to, but it was God’s opportunity that was at Notre Dame that made me go that way. The former CEO at Chase Bank gave me money to go to school. He not only paid for my college degree, he gave me allowance money so that I wouldn’t be struggling to make it. There was a lot of opposition when I went to college too! I want to say also that this favor wasn’t possible at all without God bestowing upon this CEO a feeling that he should have favor on me.

I want to keep reading, Exodus 33.

12 Moses said to the LORD, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” 14 And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” 17 And the LORD said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” – Exodus 33:12-17

Here’s what we learn in verse 13—Favor comes from personally knowing the one who bestows it. This is so important. This can apply politically, economically, and theologically. You can only get favor if you know where the favor is coming from. Likewise, you can’t get favor if the person bestowing it doesn’t know who you are. Moses asks God, “show me your ways.” This sentence sounds like a tautology, but it actually isn’t. The favor Moses talks about in the first part of the sentence is “grace.” When we receive “favor” we are receiving “grace.” Not some plain ‘ole grace, but unwarranted grace. You did nothing to deserve this. Then when we get to know the bestower of this “grace” personally, we get “favor” in the form of “blessing” or opportunity. I had to through that in there so you get a grasp of what’s going on—that is, we receive favor despite what we do. You see, favor is about who we are to the bestower of that favor.

Verse 15, “if your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.” If you live your life and don’t feel God moving and shaking, your life doesn’t have the favor of God. It’s as simple as that. You may have gotten God’s favor when you walked through an opportunity to change your life, but if God ain’t there, then there is no actual favor—it’s luck and that runs out quick. The favor of God is in His presence that is with you.

When God’s presence is with you, you become marked with distinction. You become an “it” person. If we look at verse 16, we see what it means to have God’s presence with us. A favored person’s life is distinct from other people. When the Israelites began to move out of Sinai and into the promise land, the indigenous people knew that there was something distinctive about them—the Israelites were set apart for something. This is because the presence of God went out with a bunch of slaves to conquer fortified city-states. We talk about favor today because we live like we don’t have any favor, when all we have is the presence of God, distinctively marking us apart from the rest of the world to change something and do something that we were never able to do. We just never took hold of that. I haven’t said this in a while, but this is what this church we’re working on building is about. We want to be marked distinctively to do something for community, for society that is just not possible with our own power. I want you to live it and reflect upon it this week. Answer those reflection questions. Let’s pray.

But what happens when you have this unstoppable mindset and then you meet a partner who empowers you and you empower them to achieve something God put into your hearts to do? Well, that’s today, you become an unstoppable idiot. Except, some of us don’t becoming idiots for the vision we have. We don’t become fools for the passion burning in our hearts. We don’t become unstoppable in the circumstances we face. The reason we don’t do any of these things is because there are some underlying misrepresentations we believe in that cause us to stop pursuing God’s dream for us and instead of being an idiot, we live idiotically.

Here’s the first lie we are told when we find it difficult to pursue our calling: you are not ready. Let me tell you something, you’re never ready and there never will be a time when you are ever ready. I don’t care how many letters you have after your last name. God doesn’t call the prepared, but He prepares the called. So let me explain how God works because He is an extremely efficient God. Here’s how it goes—God doesn’t expect you to be perfect before you can step into the vision he placed in your heart. When God called you to Him, that moment you accepted Jesus as your savior because it became clear that you were depraved and unable to fix yourself on your own, He then started to prepare you for something. God did not call you to Him, into salvation, when you were ready for it; He called you to be saved and prepares you for something more.

I want to define the word, “idiot” for you before I continue because I know some of you are now thinking that I’m off my rocker and just being inappropriate and giving sermons titles that are senselessly controversial for the sake of controversy. The word, idiot is a noun meaning: private person, layman, person lacking skill or expertise. The disciples of Jesus in the first century fit this definition. Let’s look at Mark 1.

16 Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. – Mark 1:16-18

Jesus found these guys while he was walking down a beach! There was nothing special about them! Jesus then says to these fishermen, who had spent their entire lives fishing, to suddenly change careers, where the only type of talk they had to do was trade fish for money, and become rhetoricians and/or politicos. I want you to notice something here in the text that we take for granted. Look at verse 18. It says, “…immediately they left their nets and followed him.” I want you to underline or circle that verse. Listen, you can get God to call your name a hundred times and guess what, if you don’t leave what you’re doing behind to follow Him to where He wants to take you, you ain’t going. And you can’t ever be prepared to what God has for you, if you never leave it behind and go! I know, it’s a trust issue, it’s a commitment issue. It’s hard for you. I know, trust me, I know, I have both those issues where I distrust and I can’t commit—I mean it’s apparent by the vast quantities of people I keep around me that I don’t even know. And have you ever tried to pin me down to give you an answer, the work you have to put in, to get a simple yes or a no?

I want you to realize something about yourself. You’re an idiot. There’s nothing special about you despite what your momma says. Listen, growing up, I thought I was such a good hockey player because I was big, I was fast, and I can hit really hard—both the puck and other people. But then my parents came to one of my games early in high school and said to me, “Jonathan, you suck at hockey!” And I said, “what do you mean, I made the city all star team, this is why you came to the game.” My dad said to me, “Son, I don’t think you understand the game, you spent more time in the penalty box than you did on the ice, you don’t want to play hockey, you just want to hit people and that’s the only reason you made it this far, quit now while you’re ahead.” Yes, I was an idiot! But here’s the difference. You can be an idiot wherever you or I go, but there’s something undeniable about idiots who spend time with Jesus. Let’s look at Acts 4.

So let me try to fill you in on what’s happening. Peter and John were going to temple and there was a beggar that was annoying them. So instead of giving the beggar money, they prayed and told the beggar to get up and walk, and the dude got up and started jumping up and down and virtually started doing the dougie down Jerusalem Temple. So Peter and John were arrested and sent to sensitivity court, I mean, they were sent down to the Sanhedrin, that’s the religious oligarchy that rules Israel.

13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus. 14 But seeing the man who was healed standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. 15 But when they had commanded them to leave the council, they conferred with one another, 16 saying, “What shall we do with these men? For that a notable sign has been performed through them is evident to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it. 17 But in order that it may spread no further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.” 18 So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, 20 for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” 21 And when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding no way to punish them, because of the people, for all were praising God for what had happened. 22 For the man on whom this sign of healing was performed was more than forty years old. – Acts 4:13-22

When an idiot is called by God and lives in the love of Jesus, there is something recognizably different about them (13). No, they don’t stop being idiots, but something is changed. It’s like there is a fire in their eyes, something on their faces that cannot be described, but experienced. I know you’ve seen this before. These seemingly dumb and untrained people start doing things that they have no training in doing. Not only that, they are actually good at what they are doing and nobody can really explain it and nobody is going to deny it as luck either (17, 22).

This is the part that always amazed me about idiots who are called by God. An idiot who has been with Jesus, gives their whole lives to God’s calling. Do you see the move that Peter and John make in part because of their idiocy? If it were me, I’d be trying to bow out of there because these attorneys have the power to crucify you. I don’t know whether it was bravery, stupidity or a mixture of both, but they could have definitely given a noncommittal answer and walk out of that room. Don’t look at me with those judgmental eyes; you know you’d do the same thing. Listen to what they said in verse 19 and 20: “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” They didn’t care what other people were going to do to them. It didn’t matter what the price was. It didn’t matter the circumstances that they faced. They knew that despite what they are trained to do, and the skills they don’t have, that they were going to be unstoppable because an unstoppable God was guiding their steps. My question to you is whether you have this same faith. Do you have this same confidence? You and I both know that at some point, God used you to do something life altering and you were not qualified to do it. You never had the training for it and yet, you did it and somehow, it was amazing.

We’re always going to have naysayers, but it would behoove us to listen to them. When it comes down to it, these idiots were unstoppable because they didn’t listen to people—they listened to what the voice of God said to their hearts and minds that they could do and what they were created to do. They went out and then did it! My friends are constantly worried about me because every time they blink, I’m quietly taking on another impossible, shipwrecked project. I was on the phone with a friend, trying to figure out the math for a project work and he basically told me, “Jon, can you just go to sleep and forget this project even existed?” So I asked why? And he says, “well, because honestly, you were set up for failure, there’s nothing here that would suggest you come out of this in one piece.”

33 When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. 34 But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while.35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, 40 and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. 41 Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. 42 And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus. – Acts 5:33-42

Just in case you don’t know who Gamaliel is, he is the Apostle Paul’s teacher. If you don’t know where I’m going with this, then just imagine how prepared Paul was when Jesus called him on the road to Damascus and told him to change the course of his life by becoming a missionary as opposed to a synagogue leader. When we are ready to give our whole lives for the vision and mission God has put us on, He will take us on a journey, whether we’re ready or not, and most likely we won’t ever be ready, and if it is God’s plan, the journey we travel will not fail. That is a guarantee and this is the first place we step toward as we begin a new series next week called, “Found Favor.” Let’s watch this video.

Let’s pray. 14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen. – Ephesians 3:14-21

This afternoon, we’re going to look at the Bible and learn how to hit the sweet spot on this because without the “right” partnerships being forged into unstoppable partnerships, it becomes difficult for us to get to a place we will spend in February that is in the land of “favor.” I say this because we are largely skeptical of the idea of favor because we hear it so much and then we don’t see anything come of it, that I think we need to radically reexamine the notion of favor because there is a favor upon your life when you work with God, we just have to be able to harness it and accept it for what it is. Let me try to press this upon you because I think I should have defined what a partner is before I got into this whole deal. But a partner is a person who shares and is associated with you in some type of action or endeavor. Therefore, in our life journey, our partners become invaluable because they are actually sharing in our lives. That means a partner shares in all the good and all the bad that comes with living life. That also means that the partner gets credit for your successes and also that means that they can curb your successes if they don’t hold up their end of the sharing. So, why do we partner up? Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 9.

19 For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. – 1 Corinthians 9:19-23

I want you to underline this phrase, “I am free from all.” This means that alone, we are unstoppable. You can live your life as a hermit and be unstoppable by yourself; BUT the vision you have for your life should never be that small! Paul says, I make myself “a servant to all, that I might win more of them.” First blank, “We forge partnerships so others can receive the blessings of God with us.” Our life vision and goal and purpose must always be bigger than just ourselves and must extend further than our noses. If it doesn’t, you can just check out mentally right now and pick trash out of the garbage can because that’s where you need to be. God did not create you to be a bottomfeeder worried just for your lonesome. The reason Paul partnered up with people was so that his partners could realize their true purpose and live their lives in gospel oriented fruitfulness—that is to have God touch every part of their lives in a radical way. This is what we all want in our lives. We want to see life more than what it is, we want to live life in a place where we only dreamed of where it can be.
That brings me to a place where we may find ourselves: in a bad partnership. You can apply this to your love life, your business life, your social life, wherever you want to apply this because it’s universal. I’m not going to get into the Bible passages for each in the interest of time but I will tell you that if you’re doing your quiet time reading from the plan we developed, you are probably reading or have read the full gambit of bad partnerships through the early days of Israelite history so this should just be a refresher for you.
Signs of a Bad Partnership
• No equal exchange (Power Imbalance) – this is where one party does more than the other party, that is, where one person in a relationship controls too much or vice versa, where one person in the relationship takes too much. There should be an equal exchange, playback, a give and take. I want to caveat here that this is a holistic look at a partnership because there will obviously be some unequal exchanges in some areas, especially areas of weakness and strengths. (Jacob and Laban, where Jacob worked for 7 years and got the wife he didn’t want. Or you can look at Jacob and Esau, where Esau got a bowl of soup and some bread for his birthright).
• No Accountability – sometimes this would be like being friends with a used car salesman. I love this the most, when you’re in a partnership and the other person is totally not interested and loves to flake out or disappear and fails to take accountability for their actions. I was in a relationship once with a girl where every time there was a hard decision to make or if something in my life was difficult, she would disappear. I mean she would be up in my face every time her life got hard, but when my life got too hard, she’d be gone like the wind.
• Distrust – no trust, this is all the same. You can’t be in a partnership with people you don’t trust. A lot of us sit here in a place where we are in partnerships with people we totally distrust. I don’t know why. My problem is that I lack tact, or I don’t care enough to have tact, so I tell people, I don’t trust you, which automatically makes me distrusted but we get into partnerships with these people and it’s going to be bad. One example, Bernie Madoff?
• No shared vision – If you’re not going in the same direction or if only one of you have a direction, or if you and this other person have such stark ideological differences, then the likelihood is that you’re in a bad partnership because you’ll constantly be undermining each other.

But then, the problem becomes, because most of us are engaged in this type of partnership, well, breaking up. I know most of you hate this part and I enjoy it a little too much. Breaking up a Bad Partnership: 37Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark.38 But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. 39 And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. – Acts 15:37-39a

Did you see what happened here? They separated. Circle that. If you are in a bad partnership, you must separate. This doesn’t apply if you’re married, unless you’re beating him and he’s beating you, then, not only do you separate, you call the police. When the signs of a bad partnership arise you separate you. Paul and Barnabas are not the only ones to separate this way. Even Jesus says to his disciples, if they are in a bad partnership with a town they are preaching, they need to turn around and leave, but they have to shake the dust off their sandals as they leave because bad partnerships are doomed.

I want to press upon you then, the characteristics of who would make a good partner, since you know what makes a bad partnership, you have to know what has the potential for an unstoppable partnership:
• Purity – Genesis 39 – Joseph vs Potiphar’s Wife
• Wisdom – 2 Kings 22 – Josiah goes neither to the left, nor the right and stays the course
• Responsibility – Ruth 4
• Honesty – Job 31:5-6 “If I have walked with falsehood and my foot has hastened to deceit; 6 (Let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity!)
• Courage – 2 Corinthians 11 – sufferings as an apostle
• Forgiving – Acts 9 – Annaias forgiving Paul
• Compassion – Mark 10:17-31 – Jesus and the young ruler

Just because somebody embodies these godly characteristics doesn’t mean that the person or people are the right partners for you. Not by any means. You can be in partnerships with all these people types of people and still be miserably unhappy. It just means they have the right characteristics to mesh well with what you should be embodying as the other half of a partnership. The “Right” partner takes time to find and usually is the very thing you need at the very moment. But even this is subject to change depending on the season of life you are entering. This I find particularly funny and ironic because I’m coming to an end of seminary and everybody is clamoring about how I don’t have a wife yet and because I’m not dating and all that nonsense and so people tell me they’ve been praying for my “partner.” I don’t know how serious they are about that, but at the end of the day, they just want me to settle. And so I keep telling people, I will stop being a maniac, when I find the “right” person. I’ll be honest with you, there is no such thing. The right person is what you make of it, that embody the characteristics I just told you plus being the person that doesn’t display the characteristics of the bad partnerships from the previous slide.

You all know what I’m going to say right now. The “right” partnership begins with Jesus. Let’s just be honest here, if the other person doesn’t believe in his or her own depravity and Jesus as the way to salvation from that depravity, you will have a hard time seeing eye to eye with that person on a lot of other things. Trust me. And FYI, missionary dating doesn’t work. The “RIGHT” Partner is godly and available in your circumstances.

How are unstoppable partnerships forged?

1 Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, now that Ehud was dead. 2 So the LORD sold them into the hands of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. Sisera, the commander of his army, was based in Harosheth Haggoyim. 3 Because he had nine hundred chariots fitted with iron and had cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, they cried to the LORD for help.
6 She sent for Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali and said to him, “The LORD, the God of Israel, commands you: ‘Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them up to Mount Tabor. 7 I will lead Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands.’”
8 Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.”
9 “Certainly I will go with you,” said Deborah. “But because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the LORD will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.” So Deborah went with Barak to Kedesh. – Judges 4:1-3, 6-9.

In the heat of your life, you will find somebody or you will have to choose somebody and say, “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.”

This passage is probably most commonly used in conjunction with these oft heard and more lame idioms: “slow and steady wins the race” or “it’s the journey that counts” or “mind or matter” and then there’s my favorite, “let’s not be hypocrites.” I won’t go there with you today. But let’s get one thing clear. The Apostle Paul didn’t want to fall off the bandwagon. He wanted discipline, not for the sake of discipline, but because he recognized something greater awaiting him if he persevered. He didn’t care about the journey. Nor did he care about what others would think of him. He cared about the prize. He didn’t want to be disqualified from it!

This brings me to what we all strive for in life: to receive something better or to become someone better. Shoot, why not, Jesus did die for us so we can have better! So despite what Calvinist preachers tell us, we work hard in making ourselves better to be ready for a prize. We study harder because our tiger moms want us to become doctors. We diet harder so that the shirt that is two sizes too small fits more snugly. We work longer hours to get ahead. We party harder because there isn’t enough time to socialize with our hard schedules. We even fall in love harder. All of that is great and fine, but it’s a lonely road and a difficult path at best, if not absolutely treacherous!

So if you don’t know, I’ve been on a 2012 mission to decaffienate myself, in hopes of making myself better. But its not going as well as I anticipated. In fact, it got so bad at one point that when my accountability partner in this (who graciously gave up coffee to walk encouragingly with me on this journey) asked how I was coping given my long days, I sent an obnoxious tirade about the oppression I am enduring for only being allowed 240mg of caffeine any given day. However the story doesn’t end there because I got a response:

…so as a grown-up who is of age and (relatively) sound mind to make his own decision, you have two solutions to choose from:

1. Try to be a little less miserable, and actually be happy that you’re working toward a goal that YOU want.

2. Quit the project. this was, is, and always will be an option, but I don’t recommend it because it will show you in a very, very, very psychologically unsteady, emotionally hopeless, socially unattractive, capricious and stubborn light.

If you are like me and on day 19 of the new year, debating whether it is even worth the fight to continue in your new found path, I want you to tell yourself, “it is worth the prize!” Perhaps you are the person who has been debating whether you can continue on with school because you hate 99% of the people there, well, I want you to tell yourself, “there’s still the 1%!” Maybe you are contemplating to cheat so you can get ahead in life because everyone is moving past you– don’t disqualify yourself from the real prize!

I managed to stay on the bandwagon another day and I can bet, as long as I don’t give up and my accountability partner is there to kick me in the shin every now and then, I will become better suited for the prize I always dreamed of. Quit should not enter your mind, because the prize is too good to give up on. Whatever it is that you have set yourself to do make yourself better, don’t do it alone if you’re feeling tempted to quit. Find somebody to journey with you. In fact, the more, the better. Jesus is already on your side and wants you to become radically changed for the better, the only thing stopping you is that nagging feeling of whether the hard road is even worth it. I tell you that it is and it won’t disappoint.

The cupbearer and the baker were in jail for reasons they couldn’t even conceive– it was the predicament life threw them in. Now while they were in prison, and they both had dreams that couldn’t be explained given their current situation. If it were me, I might have brushed it off as bad prison food, but they knew that there was something more to it than that.

No, this is not a post about the magical fortune telling abilities of your subconscious on the alternative reality you always wanted to live in. Nor is it a post rationalizing your all too realistic “Inception” experience that has it’s roots in the supreme pizza and chicken wings you ate at 1AM. Don’t get me wrong, God can speak to you through your dreams, but a lot of times, we confuse God to be equivalent to the bad can of tuna we ate that gave our dreams a psychedelic trip. Don’t let this post minimize how God speaks to you, but instead, let this post open you up to the possibility of our deepest desires and longings of our heart to be in direction opposition to where God wants you to be.

We all have notions about ourselves and we all have idealizations of who we are, but unfortunately this is never quite enough understand where and what that means in the long run, nor does it ever give us the efficacy to act in the present. Then what we experience as a result of this is stagnation, imprisonment, and what Dante called purgatory, where nothing happens except an infinite loop taking us on a Merry-Go-Round ride, up and down to nowhere.

This is mostly self-inflicted and the petrifying nature of being “stuck” somewhere we don’t want to be makes us irrational and hopeless. So what do we do? We go and buy new shoes or we go and buy a car or we go on vacation or start binge drinking or snorting coke. Maybe you’re not that extreme, but perhaps you start looking for a new relationship, maybe with a somebody from the opposite sex that has similar characteristics as one of your parents, a savior that will spring you from prison.

If you are that person right now, who is sitting down reading this entry and wondering why you are in a prison; ask yourself, “have I consulted God?” I bet you haven’t. In fact, you probably tried every diversion except to ask the very God who seemingly is complicit in your imprisonment. Your dreams and your current situation in life may be confounding you and burning holes in your stomach ulcers could never cause on their own; however senseless that may seem, it could be a sign for you to open yourself to a new interpretation of what your heart desires.

Interpretations of your life belong to God, so tell Him your dreams and He will interpret them for you. The prison you are finding yourself in where your dreams and inaction are killing you may be just the place you need to be in for you to realize that you have one option that you can rely on. One option you have to revolutionize how you see your predicament. If Jesus saves us from a certain eternity in oblivion, how hard is it then to have our deepest longings and desires interpreted a new way, a fresh way by the only God that loved us enough to call us to Him?

On the day that you stood aloof,
on the day that strangers carried off his wealth
and foreigners entered his gates
and cast lots for Jerusalem,
you were like one of them. – Obadiah 1:11

We learn here that if we do nothing, we might have as well been the person committing the atrocity. That’s right, talking about something to raise awareness is nothing. Minding your own business is guilt. The notion of minding your own business and “not judging” is a laughable farce created to help people sleep at night. It’s a devilish tool employed to to be satisfied with the world to blindly sleep through a lifetime without asking why or what could be done. To this notion Obadiah writes in verse 3, “The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rock, in your lofty dwelling, who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’” We are no different than anybody else. In fact, one of my mentors used to say this to me all the time when I’d get filled up with an arrogance of indifference, “we’re just one paycheck away from being on the other side.”

Now, this goes further than just doing nothing about an injustice. You can say that by doing nothing to help somebody struggling through life is as unjust as doing nothing about an injustice. How could you watch somebody struggle and not help? I am not talking about watching a baby struggling to walk here, I am getting at watching over and over a person, a friend, a family member struggle to get on his or her feet and through no fault of his/her own. Yet we refuse to get dirty ourselves. We believe for some reason we are too good and cannot be bothered by somebody else’s struggles, I mean we have our own struggles to deal with!

At the end of the day, we will be called to answer upon our actions and our in-actions because an inaction is the act of not acting. Just as we celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr today, I want to encourage all of us, from the greatest to the least of us, the importance of doing something. Don’t sit by idly watching because it’s not your business or because you’re too busy or to weak. God could have easily have done nothing, but He did something and that saved us. You too can be an instrument in the work of salvation that Jesus offers the world. Stop Doing Nothing.

I met somebody the other day and the person who introduced me to this person introduces me as, “This is Jonathan Kwon, he’s my pastor.” And this person, not the one making the introduction says to me at the end of the conversation, “wow, you’re really a Southern Baptist pastor? But you’re so socially liberal?” I try to be cool, because I didn’t want this person to know that I am a registered, card carrying Republican and said, “The true conservatives are the most liberal.” Which probably made no sense to that person; however, I am essentially saying this to all of you. If you believe the Bible, like I believe the Bible, that is fundamentally, that is, it says what it means and means what it says depending on the type of literature you’re reading, then you’re going to be theologically conservative and therefore socially liberal. This is what it means to be Christian—it means that we enjoy a relationship with God, if we want, at the expense of God, and He wants us to call Him all the time and He wants us to introduce people who have nobody to call on, to Him. This will, in turn, change the status quo of the world and the people in the spheres of your lives, one by one, by one and become an unstoppable, never ending movement. This is what the church envisions for not only me, but each and every one of you.

With that being said, I want to introduce how we will get at this practically over the next three weeks. I encourage all of you to be here to take notes because you can’t even get this at Harvard Business School. Today, I want to reframe your mindsets—because, I’m going to be honest and make some of you mad, you’re weak minded… It’s okay, that’s a forgivable offense, just ask anybody who knows me—I’m weak minded too. I can’t say no to a good party. There are no megaminds here. But we can have an unstoppable mindset if we so choose.

Next week, we’re going to talk about how to form partnerships that are unstoppable. The reason why most people fail, even if they have unstoppable mindsets, is because they don’t have partners to live that mindset out with. I think I have 4 points next week. Woohoo. Right, stop cheering.

Then finally, the last week of January, what it means to be an unstoppable idiot, yes, it was inspired by the Green Day song, “American Idiot.” I think I don’t need to say much more than that.

The unstoppable mindset exists in two fractions of life—the personal and the communal. We have to have a mindset in both areas to really have a full view of our lives because we live both personal lives (within our neurosis) and in community (where everybody talks behind our back in regards to our short comings). You see, having a vision is great in your mind and on paper, but it’s kind of useless without an action. But in order to act, we usually have to find our one thing that gives us the impetus to act. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you have to listen to the last two podcasts on the website. Please.

So now, let’s say we have both those things, a vision for your life and more importantly the impetus to act on that vision, that’s great; however life isn’t that simple, nor is it that easy—so we get slammed by a roadblock. I call my roadblock seminary. You may call it something else. What happens when get slammed by a roadblock—that’s right, we stop and then do nothing and then stagnate, then we become fat and then we get lazy and then we die—we die unhappy, and we die longing that there would be more to life, we die cursing God about the opportunities that you didn’t get. Yeah, that’s how it usually goes. You don’t need to lie to me. I’ve been there and done that. The only way to keep going in life when you hit a roadblock is if we become unstoppable and it begins with our mindsets. Let’s go to Mark 8.

34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” – Mark 8:34-38

I know there’s no space for this in your notes, but I want you to write this down: DON’T LIVE IN THE CLOSET! This is what Jesus says here in Mark 8:34-38. That’s my translation anyways. If anybody starts getting technical about what your cross is and what the gospel means, tell that person, Jesus wants us to live what we say we believe. That’s not in the notes either, but write it down anyways. To become unstoppable personally we must be willing to lose our lives. That’s the first blank. Are you willing to lose your life? When we chose to become Christian, we essentially chose to give up whatever menial ambitions we had for life for a life greater than the one we thought we could live. And you know what the biggest problem in our mindset is when it comes to this decisions—we’re so ashamed of it, that we’d rather not live the way we say we believe.

I’m not talking about sinning here because everyone sins and we all don’t represent God in the best way all the time, and that’s totally okay, we need to be realistic about that instead of trying to hide it. We need to fess up to our shortcomings and call ourselves out and say, “my bad, I’m sorry” and actually start working towards fixing it, rather than hiding the mental venereal disease or sinful burden. Sorry, you had to hear it like that. But we need to be honest. But what I’m talking about is the fact that in our minds we are so weak that we can’t Tebow without turning red in the face. Yes, that’s the sad part. We don’t want to offend anybody because we try to get closer to God, so we don’t. What a joke. What a weakness and this is how Mark says we lose our souls that we can’t ever get back. Now, then comes communal mindsets. Let’s go to Acts.

42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. – Acts 2:42-47

To become an unstoppable community we must devote ourselves to teaching, fellowship and praying for one another. We have to be a mindset, as individuals living in a community that embraces what the Bible says. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m hoping that you’re here so that you can listen to what the Bible says because I don’t teach new material ever, it’s always the same material—the B-I-B-L-E and I hope you go and talk trash about me and how I did the Bible a disservice today and then send me harsh, critical emails about how I can do better teaching the Bible so I can hang it up in my office and stare at it. But also, I know this is going to kill you all, but fellowship, we talked a little about this last week, can we get to know people well and grow with them instead of living on the shallow end? I know I don’t do this well, and this causes me to have a weak communal mindset and the reason I don’t do this well is because I have enough crazy people in my life that I want to harm, every time they want to meet with me, but you all need more of that in your life. Yes, I really said that. But we should be having fellowship with each other that we are comfortable enough to say something like that as long as nobody disappears. Just kidding. But do you see what’s happening here in the Book of Acts? Yes, the disciples are teaching the Bible, having fellowship and praying for one another and it was beginning to change the fabric of everybody’s lives. If you don’t know or you don’t remember, this is not like the United States of America where the only people persecuted were the Native Americans who were here first. This was 1st century Rome where, you were persecuted if you didn’t worship the Emperor.

To have a mindset that is unstoppable personally and communally, we need to understand three things about our mindset towards other people. First, our mindset must “welcome everyone.” So when I say that, I don’t mean “everyone” as is your stalker or somebody who is trying to kill you or abuse you. You don’t welcome them, and if they welcome themselves tell me, we’ll get some guys to put on some black leather gloves and handle it—and I forget, most of you didn’t watch the OJ trial on TV like I did. Anyways. When I say “welcome everyone” we must have a mindset not predisposed on judging by the cover. In psychology, there is notion of “first impressions,” you may have heard of it. Haha. But basically what we do, and this is a mindset thing, is we take “thin slices” of experience and then composite our own reality based on those “thin slices” and almost instantaneously formulate a judgment on somebody or something and thus close most people out of our lives. I do this all the time and so do you. If you didn’t go to this church and I met you on the street, I would have judged you and given you the “please drop dead” or “get out of my way” look and as unwelcoming as that is, we do it all the time. We are stopped by this non-welcoming of everybody when we do this.

I read the story of how Bill and Hillary Clinton first met; they locked eyes across Yale’s law library, until Hillary broke the silent flirtation and marched straight over to Bill. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me, and I’m going to keep staring back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham. What’s your name?” Bill couldn’t remember his own name. Now if that had been the end of the story, wow, that would have changed the course of history. Let’s read what it says in Revelation, almost the last verse of the Bible, chapter 22.

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. – Revelation 22:17

If somebody wants to be a part of your life, you should welcome them because, while they have nothing to offer you, as you are already saved because of the blood of Jesus, that person may be offered a brand new life because of your influence, because your mindset was welcoming. You know what it feels like not to be welcomed, why would you stop yourself from welcoming everyone else? I want you to circle the word, “bride” and next to it, write the word, “me.” I say “come.” Remember, I want to make this note—don’t welcome people who you know are trying to hurt you! I know you girls have a penchant for doing this. I’m going to call it out straight, you all are nice girls and you are attracted to bad boys because you think you’re going to fix that fool. Guess what, it ain’t happening like that, if you have a bad boy that needs to be fixed, you bring him to church, I’ll have somebody fix him for you. Oh, do you see on the bottom right hand corner of your notes, there are questions, that’s for your reflection. I know I do fly overs and have little practical applications, so I’m telling you to write up your own after I give you an outline of how to do it. See I’m incorporating your surveys.

Second, Have the mindset to Meet the Need. Let’s read 1st Corinthians 12.

21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, 25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. – 1 Corinthians 12:21-26

I want you to underline in verse 25, but that the members may have the same care for one another. You all have some type of vision, which probably, if I’m not mistaken, is in line with your talents, abilities and skills. If you’re still sitting here thinking you’re going to be a mathematician when you can’t do mental math, let’s find a new career path. When we welcome people into our lives and have the mindset to welcome people, they will, if they have in their mindsets to welcome others into their lives, the ability to fulfill the needs of those they welcomed and vice verse, those people fulfill your own needs. I know it sounds un-American and altogether communist. But this is the mindset of an unstoppable person. An unstoppable person is unstoppable because his or her community fills in for his or her shortcomings. America says do it on your own and that’s wrong. God never intended it that way. When we meet the needs of others, no matter how crazy it may seem, you will have your needs met. At the end of the day, when we have the mindset to meet a need, we have the openness to receive that same care from another. You can’t expect somebody to give you respect or fulfill your needs if you don’t fulfill theirs at the same level. This is a mindset thing. Some of us just want to take and take and take. So we have some takers, they just take and they want to be served. They want to complain how it doesn’t meet standards. They want to moan about how unpresentable it is—what about you stop complaining about it and do something about it. Most of the complaints I get about me, is how about how I failed to “meet some need” that they would have met if they were me and I usually say something like this, “then go do it and stop wasting your time with me.”

If you see something you can do, because it is in your scope to do it, then do it. Then watch how that frees up somebody to do something in a weird chain reaction to free something up for you, in your life. I know it sounds like a karma principle, but it’s not. It’s Biblical. It’s a mindset. You have to understand, you are indispensable. You can circle that word in verse 22. Write this down, I know there’s no space for it in your notes, but find a place for it, “I may be weak, but I am an indispensible tool being used by God.” Believe it, because it’s true.

Number three, Be willing to welcome change. We are so easily stopped because we refuse to change. If we refuse to change, we will be left in the Stone Age and then we will die in a fabulous extinction. I made my career on change and my ability to change and have been unstoppable. I’ve seen a lot of careers end because they were unwilling to change and I simply took their job from them. It’s like when you see somebody in the 21st century refuse to use a computer. Yes, there are still people out there who refuse to operate computers. When we are unwilling to welcome change, we stop ourselves. I can compare this to a relationship if the job thing is still too abstract for some of you—if you are in a relationship and unwilling to change your behavior, like taking showers in the morning and brushing your teeth, then your relationship will not last long. Or if you refuse to change the pattern of your life, you will stop growing in that life, your life will stop. When I say pattern of your life, I am talking about your mentality. 1 Samuel 10.

6 Then the Spirit of the LORD will rush upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man. 7 Now when these signs meet you, do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you…. 9 When he turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart. – 1 Samuel 10:6-7, 9

The prophet Samuel was anointing Saul, the first king of Israel, and he essentially says, things are changing for you, “go and do what you gotta do regarding this change.” I want you to underline that in your notes: “do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you….” If you don’t know what’s happening, it’s that Saul is going from commoner to royalty, he is essentially becoming the head priest of Israel. When we change, God gives us another heart, or a new heart. We all know that when God is with us because our mindsets are of change, we become unstoppable. If we want to see the vision God planted in our hearts come to fruition we have to start by having an unstoppable mindset. Let’s pray.

Let me set this up. Issac’s father, Abraham had just passed away and he was living life when there was a famine that caused him to get up and move. He settled in one land with his family and was driven out the people there. So again he emigrated to another land and this is where our Bible passage picks up and begins to parallel our life path.

Sometimes it feels like when we found something we could really settle on, somebody is already there and laid claim on it. This would be like finding the love of your life only to realize he/she is already with somebody else. Or more practically, taking our business and moving into a location or industry that is already claimed by somebody else. We can call situations and circumstances like that “Esek.” Unlike most of us, Issac, pauses momentarily and moves on with his life. How many people are stuck at a place like this but stand in disbelief somebody has already claimed the space? I know endless amounts of people that stare at something already claimed. We need to get up and move on.

The second stop is a place where you find confrontation. Don’t be mistaken, not all confrontation is bad. Don’t avoid it. But there are things that are not worth confrontation. Issac probably could have fought here and won. He chooses not to. Here, the word doesn’t simply mean to confront something, it means finding yourself in hostility and therefore having to confront an already bad situation. In our struggle to find ourselves or to find our callings, we sometimes enter into hostile situations and accept it as a matter of fact. It’s like selecting a major in college that you hate. You took the spite math pre-requesites and you stick in something you don’t even want to do because you took two pre-requesites. That’s lame!

Then there’s the third place, “Rehoboth” — the open space, your niche in the world. If you look at Issac, he searched and wandered until he found a place large enough to accommodate him and his family and also, this is the key, where there would be enough room for future growth. We, being such limited individuals, sometimes have the tendency to look only at the here and now and sure it’s great to find an open space for here and now, but it is unsustainable, there is nowhere to grow. We all need to find a place in career, relationships, and in faith where it fits here and now, but also provides a future to grow into.

If you have been seeking this place and haven’t found it, don’t worry, you just need to keep looking. If you keep digging holes in the ground and can’t seem to find water, it’s time to dig somewhere else. Don’t be distracted by other people and their wells, there’s no reason for you to dig into their niche. There’s an open space for you, God promises it, it’s your job to go dig to find it.

That may mean for some of us, we linger on marrying the girl you know you you should marry. Maybe, however, some of us are lingering on with somebody we shouldn’t even be with because there is nothing added in the empty relationship. For others it means lingering at a job which is no more than a bullseye for a deadend, unsatisfying career. Perhaps some of us linger on simply the ideas of a good body and eat three Big Macs only a few days after the resolution and new years. I’ve even experienced the lingering effects of being unable to cut down substance abuse (I start shaking at the mere thought of it).

But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. And as they brought them out, one said, “Escape for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley. Escape to the hills, lest you be swept away.” – Genesis 19:16-17

The Bible says Sodom and Gomorrah was going to be destroyed but Lot and his family would be given a chance to leave with anybody who was willing to go with them. The angels told Lot to go and escape otherwise he too would be destroyed, yet he, like most of us, lingered.

When we linger, we set ourselves up for death. We know beforehand that a certain situation will not end well, it’s written plainly, our friends make it clear, our families are indignant about it, and when we pray, our gut knots up; yet we still linger! Look at the warning the angels give to Lot– “Escape for your life!”

The good news is that even when we do linger the grace of God is still upon us and He usually grabs us and pulls us out, but not without any pain (Lot lost his wife and lived in a cave after this). Jesus, our savior does the same thing. He grabs us, as we linger in sin, and doesn’t allow us to be swept away. It is evident in the death and resurrection. We are not swept away. We probably do have some casualties though. We probably have the emotional and mental scars of lingering, if not the physical remnants of our inaction. We may be suffering right now because of our lingering. You probably told yourself that it was unfair, but it was your decision in the first place.

Today, I challenge you– stop lingering! There is nothing for you in the linger.

So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” – Genesis 18:12-14

Sarah laughed because she was 90 years old. She couldn’t take seriously the idea that at half past dead, she could have the opportunity to be a mother. It didn’t matter God was the one who said something so outrageous. Here was an opportunity to take hold of an amazing promise and rather than jump on it, Sarah laughed it off like a bad joke. Some of us have the tendency to do the same thing. We find ourselves in positions of tremendous blessing and rather than humbly accept it, we scoff it away.

It is obvious we don’t fit the bill. It is clear we missed our prime. It is certain life is radically different when we cease the promised vision God gives us; but really, what is stopping us from ceasing the chance when we finally do get the opportunity?

For some, this conjecture may simply be wishful thinking because you are cursing God for not giving you opportunity because you would otherwise be all over it, and I challenge you to see what Sarah failed to see– hope. Isn’t this the reason why some of us still cannot swallow the idea of Jesus as saving our wretched souls– because we believe we’re hopeless? Yet, Jesus did die for us and we can choose to accept that or laugh at the very idea of being able to receive salvation.

If you reach into your souls and hope once again to seize your calling from God, I promise you that there is nothing too hard for Him. He will make it happen because there is nothing too hard for Him. You just need to trust Him to deliver you when opportunity passes by. Now is the time to dream deeper, aim higher and move more intentionally toward the one thing you were called to do. It is not too late and your fate doesn’t have to end with unfulfilled dreams and a set of unanswered callings. Keep believing, keep hoping and remain faithful. You will see the fruits of that promise you take hold of sooner than you think.

The reason i bring this is up is because all of us, despite what we may argue want to be treated like adults and we get offended when we don’t get treated like adults, and we don’t realize that we don’t act like adults. Likewise, we all want God to provide some amazing breakthrough in the form of career advancement, money and relationships but want God to provide those things to us when we’re not ready. Then we have the audacity to say life isn’t fair. But it is fair!

Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. – 1st Corinthians 3:1-2

Ultimately we get what we act like and so I always advocate the “fake it till you make it” way of living, but I want to temper how this works in our hearts because we can fake it all we want, but we’ll never make it. If we are praying to God right now or have been praying for an amazing breakthrough in the form of a career, ask yourself, did you really live up to the expectations of the one you have now? If you are asking God for more responsibility at church, as a leader, ask yourself, “have you really done justice and think you deserve more?” If you are looking for a long lasting adult relationship, ask yourself, “do you act enough like an adult to reciprocate?”

I think if we really examined ourselves and looked at our hearts, we would find that we stagnate and find difficulties accepting areas of our lives where we act most like infants. We would probably see the same childish things messing us up now that messed us up before and we’d probably continue to complain about stagnation, not realizing that we’re the ones causing ourselves to stagnate. We’d probably like to blame our infantile behavior on somebody or something else, but really, it’s us. At the end of the day, God only gives us what we are ready for and if you’re asking God to treat you like an adult with adult responsibilities and adult gifts, you need to be ready for it. So I challenge you, what are you ready for?

The four steps to having a vision, because visioning is a process and this process keeps growing into bigger and crazier things, starts with the Spirit’s prompting, that is a direction your life is taking you, the path God has you walking. Then you find yourselves amidst certain uncertainty, this is where I said a lot of stop visioning because we’re afraid of taking the next step. It is a crossroads where beginning to star the groundwork on that vision is the biggest gamble of our lives and we stop. Then, the next phase of our visioning is the predictable resistance we face in opposition to the dreams God gives us. Sometimes this is our own egos! If there is no resistance, then you know whatever you’re planning to do is too small and not vision worthy. People will try to convince you that the trouble just isn’t worth it. The funny thing is, sometimes, people will try to convince you that there isn’t enough trouble for it to be worth it. I told somebody this week, I want to quit government because doing news cover ups is too much trouble and the person tells me, “well, I think you might hate yourself for not having the kind of stress in your life just simply being a pastor.” Finally, however, the last stage of a vision from God is a sense of uncommon clarity. It is the moment where, in our lives, we can say to ourselves, “I consider my life worth nothing, if only I can… [fill in the blank].”

So I want to move into what my personal vision is, since all of you have shared in part or in whole what your visions and dreams and goals were. If you haven’t done so already or want to revise them, I have copies in the back that you can fill out and drop off. I consider my life worth nothing, if only I can,… lead a sleeping community into states of radical wakefulness through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This will be done by:

–Quitting the dependent cycle of substance abuse (mostly caffeine addictions)

–Cultivating meaningful relationships with mutually beneficial partners (yeah, I have trust issues and I’m working them out and I believe I am with a few people…)

–Launching a visible community beacon in the form of a community of faith and Development Corporation (you think that little thing over thanksgiving was all? That’s just the beginning, just an appetizer to get your tongue wet)

–Declining great opportunities for God’s opportunities (I believe I started saying “no” to a lot of great opportunities and I will continue to do so because I’m believing God has an impossible opportunity ahead of me)

–Developing and adhering to financial planning stratagems (Ron Paul calls it Austrian Economics, I call it, 10-10-80, Give, Save, Spend)

–Spending more intentional time in prayer (index cards, I began writing prayer requests on index cards that I put in the breast pocket of my jacket. You need prayer, write it on this card and drop it in the offering box)

This church will reach those who do not know Christ and bring them to an authentic relationship with Him by:

–prayerful dependence on God (we don’t pray enough corporately or intentionally, let’s start invoking God’s name and see what a little intentional communication with God can do for our lives)

–creating momentous worship experiences (somebody wrote on their surveys, “better atmosphere,” but didn’t write how, whoever it was, tell me what that means or do something about it because obviously that comment implies my lack of style)

–Living missionally in the community at large (I know I suck at this, but I come to church every Sunday morning to sit at starbucks to talk with people here, so I can get to know them, I buy their coffee, just so I can have an opportunity to speak, I know I’m horrible)

–building meaningful relationships (Most of us don’t have meaningful relationships with other people in this room that aren’t related to you, I know it’s my fault because I don’t do mixers and fun activities and I’m too busy to accommodate, but you all need to do that on your own and feel free not to invite me)

–Leverage assets to assist those in need in our communities (we waste very little money at this church and our sole fundraiser was a two week facebook wall post that said, “we need $1200 to feed a lot of people” and we exceeded expectations, yeah, we need to keep leveraging that social capital)

All of this at Redemption is for one vision, for the one thing, to reach those who don’t know Christ and bring them into an authentic relationship with Him. So I ask you this morning, this second week in 2012, what is your one thing? I don’t care what you thought your one thing was when you were growing up dreaming to become an astronaut, or what your one thing was in college before you got them “D”s in chemistry when you thought you were going to be a doctor. I want you to forget the former things, don’t dwell there. This one thing, I want you to know and have is a new thing, as in the words of the Prophet Isaiah. What is that one thing?

I want to give you four areas of life where there can be “one thing” that will make you what God created you to be.

First, One thing you must always know is that God is for you. Then my enemies will turn back in the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me. In God, whose word I praise, in the LORD, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? Psalm 56:9-10. Simply put, God is always with you despite of you.

Somebody I knew a long time ago, called me out of the blue earlier this week. I don’t know what it was, but I got a lot of bad news this week. But anyway this person, I haven’t spoke with them in a few years, I thought they’d be married with kids by now, says, “I heard from so and so that you’re a pastor now, do you have time to talk with me?” Long story short, this person is 29 years old and was diagnosed with cancer and is now cancelling their lives to come home and get treated. The person says to me, “every time I go to church and try to get my life right, God makes it wrong, if I die, and I will burn in hell because I hate God now.” I wanted to tell that person so bad, that this is an opportunity to pursue God more tightly and wholeheartedly, but that is one thing God is going to have to do.

Check this out, I’m going to be really honest this morning. For some of us, there is an addiction or a tendency that is keeping us from going further with God; it is probably the one thing that is stopping us from fully pursuing your faith. You want me to be more specific because I can be and I know I’ll be spot on because I’ve been there and done that and I’m still there at other places, but you know what I’m talking about. That one thing that you do that nobody knows about. That one thing you do that you think you’re covering up, but your life reeks of it. That one thing you don’t want to give up because it drives you. But you know and I know, when you pursue that one thing, it comes and goes and you’re still left unfulfilled and as my friend puts it, “I can see that it makes you depressed.” And if that’s you, I want you to believe right now, with all of your heart that the Holy Spirit will give you the power to overcome this one thing right now that’s in the way.

Second. What is the one thing you desire from God above all else? My question here is simply, what is the one thing you lack? The one thing the Holy Spirit is showing you that you lack and do you have the courage to obey the voice of God? Check out our passage from Mark again—Jesus specifically told him what he lacked and he didn’t want to obey. If you ask people, they say the one thing I lack in my life is companionship. Somebody to share my life with. Some of us may be lacking faith. Some of us, compassion. Some of us a passion. Some of us may lack nothing and therefore we need to lack to see what we do lack. Let’s go to Mark 10:17-22.

¹⁷ And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ¹⁸ And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. ¹⁹ You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” ²⁰ And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” ²¹ And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” ²² Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Some of us are looking at our relationships and saying, “you know what, it’s not where God wants it to be.” If there is one thing you desire from God, it is so that you can change your heart and heal those relationships. People have told me, “Jonathan, you don’t live on an island man; you don’t need to battle life on your own.” And I’ll be honest with you, in the past, for a long time, I just iced my heart and walked away from those people because they tried to hold me accountable. I drifted away from people I love, from people who needed to speak into my life because I saw them as parasites to my wonderful sin that messes me up. The one thing I’ve been asking God to do is to change my heart, asking God to bring people into my life who are brave enough to say “What are you thinking you idiot! Are you dumb or just crazy? I am going to kick you over the head if…” The wonderful thing is God has started to bring people into my life that is just that brave enough.

You see if you look at this story we just read out of the Bible, we realize the person asking the question had a vision for his life—that was a chance at eternal life. He wanted to be in the presence of God, to be completely fulfilled in every way possible. There was just “one thing.”  This “one thing” drove his life and at the same time kept him from what he wanted all along. At the end of the day, he knew only God can do for him the “one thing” he needed to do.

Third, What is something we need to let go of? Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? – Isaiah 43:18-19

Some of us still, we’ve been telling ourselves for a long time that we’re going to slow down. “I’m going to slow down one day…. Yeah, one day…. And have you realized, you’re looking back at your life and feeling like you’re missing out and this may be your one thing. God help me enjoy you in my life. The reason we don’t slow down is because we failed at something or we’re holding on to something from the past and we’re internalizing it. We got shipwrecked and we see the shore but would rather hang onto the piece of lumber and drift away from where we’re supposed to be. Maybe somebody hurt you so you hurt others; maybe you compromised, so you just push in every direction except the right one. Maybe you broke a promise and you’re hoping nobody notices.

Lastly, what is one promise you can claim? Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. – 2 Corinthians 12:8-9. Paul claimed his weakness as God’s strength. Everytime Paul had a victory for God and set up a church, he got stoned or thrown out or shipwrecked. It’s like you go one step in the game of life and he took two and a half steps back. Here is what God is promising you some of you and you need to claim it right now and it will sustain you like food sustains your body. It will carry you when you are too weak. We are building a life beyond our own on our weaknesses, because it is in our weaknesses that God’s power and strength are perfect. Claim it because we need it. Claim your weakness!

If you ask these questions in 2012, you will be able to see and say, “That’s it, that’s the one thing I am here for in this life.” I want to ask today and then spend some time in prayer, to think and reflect about this: it is a new day and God is doing a new thing. What is the one thing that will allow you to become all that God wants you to be?

For some of us, it may be relationships, for others, it may be family, careers and finances. I mean still others of us, we will ask God for faith or courage and boldness because we lack it. The point here being that we have “one thing” we need to ask of God in 2012 to start our year.

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. – Romans 5:6

Here’s one promise that you should hold and know, and this is “one thing” that should matter– God is for you! There are no “if”s or “but”s, this is the “one thing” you can be sure of. At the right time, when we were most utterly helpless, Jesus intervened to give us life.

I understand if this is hard to believe because when we are at a place of utter helplessness it seems like God is not there and if He is, He just doesn’t care. I can’t tell you to be spiritual and feel His care, but I can tell you that you have brothers and sisters who can be there with you to remind you of this if you let them. You will not be disappointed when you ask God to do the “one thing” you need Him to do because only He can do it. That is the “one thing” that matters.

Now we all know that we weren’t the first God believing individual to have gotten drunk, pass out from drinking too much, or strip down to his/her birthday suit in a drunken stupor. If you haven’t done any of the above, God bless your soul. If you have, “haha! Join the shameful club of ‘can’t hold my liquor.’” But my point this morning isn’t to lambaste you for your indiscretions because everybody makes mistakes, and I’m probably the biggest idiot of them all so you’re in good company– mine. I want to instead point out two courses of action that can take place in a situation where a mistake has been made. The first is to publicize it and make it a mockery. If a person fell on his or her face because they were show boating, then it’s totally okay to mock them for making the mistake of falling, otherwise, it’s wrong! In this scene, Ham, the youngest son, sees Noah’s mistake and then goes to spread the word of his father’s mistake. In essence, Ham demeans the person making the mistake and follies them. We know this happens all the time because there is always that one jerk face who can’t keep their camera phones in their damn pockets and loves to post things on facebook and on youtube with your name tagged for all the public to see. You know who you are. People make mistakes, and so will you (wagging fingers to the person taking video). This is obviously the wrong route to pursuit, in fact, it would be ignorant for us to hastily pursue this course of action.

On the flip side, we have Shem and Japheth, Noah’s older sons, whom cautiously and carefully try to cover up for the mistake of their father. I’m not, by any means saying, “see no evil, hear no evil.” I am saying that a person must be treated with some dignity and respect despite of his/her transgression. I know here, people will get at me and send me all types of emails about Joe Paterno, Catholic priests and child molesters and etc, etc, but my point here and the Bible’s point here is not for an institutional, mafioso style cover up masked by lies and trap doors. The key point here is that the two older sons of Noah came to help the situation and cover their father from the embarrassment of his mistake.

When was the last time any of us did that for a friend? When was the last time we had a friend we could call on to do that for us? In the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes that God, seeing our miserable mistakes and despite of it, decides to cover up those mistakes through the blood of His Son Jesus. 2,000 years later, we can’t even begin to imitate that type of love, a love that covers up for a naked person. We stand here, naked ourselves and proud of our nakedness. It’s time we start covering up the nakedness of the people around us and make ways to mend their mistakes together. This is a part of our calling in 2012. Can we live up to it?

He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. – Romans 4:19-21

Paul writes to the Romans who are losing hope in a Messiah liberating their pain and their sadness. Using Abraham as a man who utterly had no hope; all signs pointing to the fact that his life work would terminate with unfulfilled promises by the God who called him out of his homeland; illustrates to us that hope has nothing to do with the situation we are in and everything to do with the place we put it. Therefore, when Abraham looked at his own body, or the fact that him and his wife had been trying for a better part of the century to have a child, he saw no reason to have any hope except to whom made the promise to him in the first place.

Some of us may be looking at our lives and questioning the very idea of having any more hope for this new year, mostly because everything you once were has now been stripped away– no money, but lots of debt, no family, but mouths to feed, academic degrees, but no job, no grace, but lots of sin, whatever the case may be, don’t lose hope just because your situation points to an inevitable hopelessness. God is faithful to the vision and call He placed on your life and each of us have a vision and call in this life. It doesn’t matter whether you failed to live up to that call, it doesn’t matter whether you tripped up and made some mistakes– it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that when we place our faith in Jesus’ redemptive work, it is the reason for any and all hope despite having no reason to hope. 2012 is the year you redeem that hope and live hopefully in the hopeless world.

For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you— that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. – Romans 1:11-12

The Apostle Paul writes how he longed to meet with the Christians in Rome– people whom he never met so that he could add to their lives the story of his own life. What we fail to realize in our busyness is the importance of slowing down and to take time to meet and encourage one another. People, when they meet with each other, becomes intervening factors that can change and alter the course of each other’s lives. By meeting, your troubles can be averted with the input of another. By meeting, you can set a lost person on the right path and have their personal disasters avoided.

One of the resolutions I made this year was to meet regularly with people to feed their faith because as I meet with people, my faith will be fed by the stories and their journeys through life. I had to make this resolution because I was missing people just like you in my faith life. God was missing you in and you were missing God in your life so He intervenes through Jesus to connect our lives to His own. He could have simply continued on residing in eternity without you. But there is an intentionality for Him to add to your faith life. It would behoove us, therefore, not to add to the faith of others. Let’s make this our resolution this year, that we don’t neglect each others’ faith lives.

In 2012 I want to change your mentality. I want you to be inconvenienced. I want you to have wrinkles in your plans. I want you to be bothered. I want you to live beyond yourself because that is what God calls us to do.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. – 2 Corinthians 5:14-15

In a very messed up way, our belief system transformed into “Your Best Life Now” and unfortunately, it was never about YOUR best life. Even people who psychoanalyze your head that preach a message of “selfcare”, that is to take care of yourself to take care of others or you will die unhappy and prematurely got it all wrong. The only way to fulfillment is to kill yourself entirely to yourself to go beyond yourself for the sake of Jesus. That means sacrifice beyond sacrifice is required of us. That means our dreams effectively end for a purpose in life beyond our wildest imaginations.

When we live beyond ourselves as opposed to living for ourselves, there is an opportunity inserted into our lives by God that radically alters everything and it is this radical move that brought us to Christ in the first place. It is this radical move that compels us to Him. It is this radical move that gives us good news. In 2012, stop living for yourself and choose to live beyond it. Christ has a radical plan for your future and it requires you to be selfless.

The apostle Paul writes about this very thing to the Galatians. The Christians there were comparing the size of their feats and trying to do bigger and better than one another. The Christians were trying to prove themselves and their intrinsic value as human beings by the number and size of their religious actions. But Paul intervenes and simply says, what are your intentions with the things you do? A lot of us will go about “doing” a lot of things in the name of Jesus but the intentions held behind the scenes in doing it may be worthless. More important than what we are doing in faith, we must come to terms with why we are doing things in faith. Why did we choose a particular career path? Why do we choose to be in a relationship with a certain person? Why do study the things we we study? Why do we believe in Jesus? Asking “what” to any of these questions end the conversation quickly and is meaningless.

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. – Galatians 5:6

A few days ago, I was forced to rethink the idea of sacrifice and what that means in relationships, especially because I advocate the idea of “love” being an “action” as opposed to a “feeling.” This is to say that an individual does not “fall in and out of love,” he or she chooses rather, to love. And love by any definition (my logical definition anyways) is to sacrifice one’s self for the sake of the one they so choose. With this being said, and with us being in a period of reflection as Christians, we need to account for what comes next. This isn’t one of my tangents, there is a reason for defining love in the context of actions.

If the greatest commandment is to “love God with all your heart and strength and love your neighbor a yourself”, then we need to take two specific actions with anything and everything we do, don’t we? First, to love God we must sacrifice our egos to God. Our “worship” must be for us to die for His will. We must give up (sacrifice) everything we want for what God wants. This is sacrifice is our intention. Don’t be fooled, God doesn’t want a bunch of people wearing diapers playing harps! God wants people who will go out and boldly change the world as He sees it. Again to sacrifice yourself for God, to “love” Him, we intend to glorify Him. He wants to use you for His greater purposes, but He won’t, until you truly love Him, that is, when you sacrifice yourself for Him.

Secondly, for our faith to be worked out in love means we have to be self sacrificing to everybody. We need to stop thinking about injustice against me and start thinking how you can cover injustice against somebody else despite the position it puts you in. Don’t give yourself excuses of violence to self as a psychological excuse for not executing sacrifice. Jesus violently subjected himself to the ultimate violence against self, yet he was motivated in “love.” It was God’s intention to do something radical for us. Our faith is directly correlated to how much we are willing to lose. To be a Christian then means we are risking it all out of love (sacrifice) to God and for people in our lives, no matter how strange they are.

In 2012, stop thinking about “what” you will do and think rather about “why” you will do. Is the “how” and “why” under the pretense of “love”? With that in mind, try envisioning a new year without empty milestones that mean little.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths. – Proverbs 3:5-6

Several years ago, before I decided to get on the road toward becoming a pastor and giving up the beginnings of a promising career in whatever it was that I was doing, I suffered the loss of my father. He suddenly became sick and quickly afterward passed away after a battle with cancer. To tell you I was not de aster would make me sound like a bastard child, but in that moment when my brother called to tell me the news, my understanding of the situation was tainted by the feeling of disparity. I cursed God that night in my prayers, I won’t lie. However, in those earnest, heartfelt prayers and cries God straightened out my path– my goals needed to change, my vision had to be altered and the only way that was possible was the way God ordained it.

I don’t know what 2011 brought for you, but I do know, you can’t completely wrap your head around it without God. If you are assessing your year and trying to determine your future you need to acknowledge His influence in your life. You need to come to terms with the fact that you were never in charge and your best laid plans are futile and crooked. It’s funny when we envision our futures with the limitations of our own understanding, we can’t see past our noses and think we have any real say over where life takes us. Pray and reflect where you can trust God more– in relationships? Career? Faith? Ask God for directions to where He wants you to Go, and He will give it.

Special Thanks goes to the following people for making all of this possible:
Sarah Choi – Adlibs
Sarah Kim – Set Design
Grace Pak – Set Design
Joy Pak – Vocals
Danny Yoo – Vocals and Instrumentals
Michelle Yoo – Writer
Sharon Yoo – Adlibs

What I described wasn’t even the depressing part of this season after Christmas right before New Years. The depressing part is the fact that we look back and reflect and make assessments and create action plans and goal charts knowing fully well the exercise was futile in your heart. We don’t believe any of it deep down inside and we like to have them posted on our cubicles but any achievement is marginal at best and that is the sadness. You’re not alone, I do it every year. This year, we need a new way.

Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, – Philippians 3:13

The Apostle is writing about life change in this passage. More specifically, he is writing about life after believing in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. For Paul, the Christian slayer, he knows looking back on his previous life condemns him to an eternity of hell without God. He was the New Testament Cain– murdering people who were doing good things. So he says, “I’m giving up everything in my past for a new life in Jesus and since it is a brand new life given to me, I must look forward to it.” Life as we know it isn’t a continuation of our past failures and bad habits once we accept Christ as Lord of our lives, absolutely not. Life becomes something we strive towards, a new opportunity, a new mentality, a new hope. We can do this because we are saved and constantly being saved, transformed time and time again becoming everything we never imagined was possible with out pasts.

If you’re with us on weekends for one of our services, fill out the 2012 vision and goal matrix and complete the questionnaire with these things in mind. If you are not around on the weekends or don’t go to church entirely, this is a great opportunity to jump in and connect like a brand new person doing a brand new thing. You’re always welcome here. We’d love to pray with you and walk with you on this brand new life journey.

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me. – Psalm 51:10

As we get closer and closer to Christmas and finding more and more aggravating the busyness of life and the holidays, we need to wake up every morning and ask God, before doing anything, “Create in me a clean heart.” Doing so is imperative. The festive, holly, jolly Christmas is supposed to embody a right spirit, a godly spirit, a contrite spirit that covers the embarrassment, the sadness, the loneliness, the pain, the hardship, and wipe them from our lives as bygones that no longer affect who we are and what we have to become.

Having the right heart gives us the right to sing praise and worship God the way He wants. The right heart gives us freedom to be who we know we were created to be. The right heart is the only way we can offer ourselves in sacrifice for something greater than we ever imagined. I know it’s hard to have the right heart in your toil right now, but remember, God will create one for you, when you are ready to ask and receive it. Christmas teaches us that you are worth saving. Christmas tells us we have something redeemable within us, set aside for greater things. We just need the right heart to and right spirit to start our journey.

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.

Well I woke up to that song this morning playing on the radio and had this thought: if you guys are kings why are you going to follow a star to see another king. And why would you provide, after all that traveling gifts to a king born in a manger– the equivalent of a feeding troth? Shoot, I sometimes don’t even say hi to the janitor in my building when I’m feeling tired. These guys traveled an expansive distance– because they’re from the orient– and find themselves revering a little peasant girl and her construction worker fiance. What in the world is going through their minds? If I were one these three kings and traveled months and months and months to see the coming king, I would have been angry like you couldn’t imagine if I found was a smelly barn yard and a little baby wrapped in some hay. Where is the palace? Where are the royal viziers? Where are the servants? soldiers? The other worshipers? We would have all been very angry at the sight of a supposedly future king who was supposed to come and revolutionize the world if we found him in an animal troth after following a star far away from home.

The kings dreamed and longed to find themselves before a life altering event. They walked away on camels, over mountains and under valleys with their caravans only to find out that the nation that birthed the new king didn’t even care. We often think about the distance, sacrifices and obstacles that we overcome in life and find ourselves in circumstances of life altering plausibility and find ourselves disgusted and even ashamed we traveled so far for what appears to be so little. Just think about it: how often do we ignore the ordinary things in life because it comes wrapped in just that– the ordinary? When was the last time you found yourself being open to a life altering circumstance in the middle of just another day? In the Book of Matthew, we are told about how the seemingly ordinary and lowly of things comes to radically redefine everything we never possibly imagined. This goes for your relationships, your careers, your families, and every other corner of the mind and body that keeps you up at night wondering what comes next.

Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. – Matthew 25:13

In our highly narcissistic and prideful society, we become accustomed to certain levels of expectations and what we do is disregard things and people that don’t meet those expectations not knowing that this exact thing, situation or person can be the life altering circumstance God had always planned for us. Jesus came to this earth under the cover of poverty and turned the world upside down. I bet this Christmas, when we open our eyes to what God is doing and where He is going, under the cover of the ordinary something extraordinary awaits you. We get wrapped up way too easily at having, not having, being served and bigger and brighter, but when we focus on all these things, we lose out on why we make the journey of our lives and overcome the very obstacles we surmount. We may feel like three kings, but don’t forget even they humbled themselves enough to worship and witness God in the insignificantly ordinary. Your journey and hardships this year bring you to the place God wants you to be, go and witness it and worship God for it.

What is a paradoxical purpose? It is when God does something so vehemently disagreeable to society that only He can be credited for it. What is vehemently disagreeable to society? It is anything paradoxical to the patterns and systems of power holding together the status quo of culture and manmade structures of society.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. – 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

If you’re life is looking and feeling a little foolish or a lot crazy, then know you’re not going through it because God doesn’t care, because He doesn’t love you, nor because bad luck or curses condemn you to it. You are in the middle of becoming God’s paradoxical purpose for the lives of others in your sphere of life. You are low and despised, weakened and foolish for the sake of bringing glory to God. When you think about Christmas or at least the first Christmas, remember where Jesus was born– a little hick town, in the back of a barn. Remember who first got to witness the birth– a bunch of people from the hills. Remember who Jesus chose to be his disciples– a bunch of misfits, failures, and traitors. You are chosen, not because of your good looks, your brains or your political savvy; but because of who you are in Christ. I know we can all get swept up in Christmas and this year may feel bleaker than the last few, but your current circumstance is not without potential. It is not without purpose. It may feel paradoxical to you at the moment, but God uses the very things that don’t make any sense to become the sense the world needs at the very moment. I am not offering you unrealistic hope; however I am trying to show you that perhaps you need to reframe your lenses. Life was, is and never will be about you and what you can prove nor what you can do. Life, as we know it, has, is and always will be how the craziness of who you are and where you are takes you to a place where only God can be. Five days until Christmas, it is time to stop thinking about us and start thinking about where God is in the midst of all of us. His presence is here and Jesus dwells amongst us right now.

To fully understand what’s going on today, I have to recap a little bit of last week and just the general trend of what’s going on here within our community in a theological and personal way. The resultant reflection led to a sermon last week entitled “153 Fish: Redemption that Transforms Nature.” I made several conclusions last week and they need to be held at the back of your minds in order for you to understand where I feel God is leading us going into 2012, because 2012 is going to be a big year for a lot of us and I want us to rush into the next year like a charging bull. We have 153 fish to catch, one net and daybreak is coming. 2012 is our daybreak, this net that we have, our vision, our mission, our activities, our actions, is about to impact every single person, group, man, woman, and child. It’s going to be exciting but some of us, most of us, lack this vision, the concern and/or belief that is held here and thus there was a disconnect between my leadership and your following. Immediately, you will see three changes here in my leadership which will rub a lot of you the wrong way.

I’m telling you all this again or you’re hearing it for the first time because to be going into 2012 like a charging bull requires us to be at the same page. I don’t want anybody here telling me that they don’t understand or ask me why we’re doing some of the “radical” things that we’re doing. Everything we’re doing is to fulfill the mission and vision we have and held when we started a new community. We don’t need another church; we don’t need to do another church service. What we need in the 21^st century is a movement that shakes and pushes the boundaries of a culture dead to itself. The only questions I want to be bothered with is: “how can we push the boundaries further?” and “what more can we do with the little we have?” and lastly, “where can we get more bang for our buck?” Here’s what we’re doing January 8, let’s take a look.

The message is entitled today: “Redemption: an Implication of Incarnation.” This will be my one and only Christmas Sermon and the sermon I usually save for the last Sunday of the year to recap the year all wrapped into one so you’re in for a treat! I want to start with a definition. The definition is for the word, “incarnation.” The reason is because we all know what the word means because we all, to a certain degree speak the informal slang of Christianese, but unfortunately, none of us actually think of the implications of the word, “incarnation,” and perhaps if we did, we would look at ourselves a little differently, we would view time, differently, we would view people differently and we would look at what we’re doing here differently. Incarnation is where God became fully man and existed as fully as God in the form of Jesus, the Christ. Yes, this is why we celebrate Christmas. This is why we come to church on Sundays. This is why, when we look up in the mirror every morning we don’t have to feel disgusted at our ugliness. Without the incarnation, humans could not be saved from their sin through penal substitutionary atonement. If you don’t know what that means, it means, because we are guilty of sin, we deserved to die outside the presence of God and be condemned to pay for our injustice, but we don’t have to because there was a substation that was made in our place where Jesus took our place in paying the price with his own life. It is actually unfair and disproportionately and inherently violent to fulfill the thirst of justice and not a moment should go by without us reflecting on our lives understanding that we actually live within a gift, not matter how messed up and hard our pathetic lives are. Lastly, without the incarnation, there is no resurrection from the dead. I know this is important to a lot of you, but if Jesus didn’t become fully human, in the flesh, we’d just literally be skin and bones and then fertilizer. Now we have hope of having life that is radically unlike our own in that we will be surprised by what it actually looks like.

With that being said I need to start taking you on an emotional roller coaster. If I could write anything on a Christmas card and not be sent to sensitivity training for it, I would write this: As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” - Romans 3:10-12. I know some of you are thinking that this isn’t you, but you’re the exact type of person this was written for. You, no matter, how “good” you are, are not that good. Let me tell you where that comes from, it’s from Psalm 14 and it starts, “the fool says in his heart there is no God.” That means, when we have vision, when we call ourselves into action, when we live our lives, we live like there are no consequences for our actions, vision or for our lives. The reason we live this way is because we don’t feel the gravity under which we were created. This gravity is where we would recognize the true value of the things we do, but we do not weigh those things because we either don’t have the foresight to do so or because we’re truly at that place where we don’t care. Either of those two make us unrighteous. When the world was created there was only one rule—do whatever you want except don’t eat from this tree. We couldn’t help ourselves; we had to eat from the tree. Don’t act like you wouldn’t have, of course you would have ate from the tree, not because you don’t believe God, but because you want to test the limits to where you can take the action, because you don’t believe God will punish you for your stupidity, because it’s the way He made you, right? Yeah, guess what, your actions condemn you to death.

On the flip side of this coin, you say to yourself, there are too many rules to follow, why bother? There was one rule and we broke it. Then God gave us 10 more and we couldn’t even keep those. Ten rules and we break them all. Do you realize if all people kept those 10 laws we’d be living in utopia—a perfect land? You think it’s bad luck that things go bad for you in your life? You think that there is no reason for things to become worthless once you obtain them? You think that your self-motivated doing things to “feel good” is actually good? Hell no, it’s not good. We’re not looking for God, we’re looking for a genie. It’s why we get frustrated by other people. It’s why we hate it when we lose control of our plans. It’s why we get nervous and have anxiety. It’s why we lazily accept things as they are and close our eyes to evil. Let me tell you how this works in real life because I think maybe I’ve been speaking a little esoterically. This isn’t about becoming perfect. This isn’t about walking away from church today saying to yourself, well let me just dropping F-bombs left and right. It’s not about you trying to fix your life because you’re broken. It’s not about growing up in the wrong environment, that is, your imperfection isn’t your parents fault for coddling you all your life. It’s not about not lying. It’s not about making some commitment not to gossip or slander other people. And let’s face it, you can’t comply with any of it, you can cloak it in religion, but that’s nothing! Shoot, a lot of things we do and this is what the text is saying, is done out of religion to somehow mask what we really truly are. I noticed this from some professional Christians, they’ll say something like this: “Oh we need to pray for Jimmy over there. I told him that he shouldn’t marry her because I heard she was a gossiper and he’s just making the biggest mistake of his life. He asked me what I thought of her and he didn’t listen. We need to pray for him.” The great thing is that in the stories we tell, we’re always awesome, like we’re the hero or something but there’s no compassion, there’s no love there. I’ll tell you that you didn’t bless the guy who cut into your lane in Christmas traffic. You didn’t say, “God bless than lady who can’t drive, I hope she doesn’t kill anybody and I hope she gets the perfect gift for her children. Let them have a merry Christmas.” Come on, you know that’s not what you do.

If you accept that this is you and you should, you will realize that it’s not a matter of what you do, it’s a matter of what you are. You have issues because you are! Therefore, we don’t lie because we’re liars! We don’t take other people’s things, because we’re a thief. Merry Christmas! How’s that? I’m not trying to give you guilt, I just want to point it out, it’s who you are. Let’s go to John 1 because now I want to reframe the world for you so that you can see 2012 the way you should see it.

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. – John 1:1-3. I want to reframe creation for you because if you don’t get this part, you don’t understand the gravity of our life purpose in the first place. You are here because God created you. You have a specific purpose. If you haven’t found your purpose, you are a problem. If you’re not looking for your purpose, because a lot of you are incredibly young, then you are unrighteous and you’re worthless. It says it in Romans 3. We just read it. Jesus who is the “Word” was there in the beginning with God, the Father framing you, putting you in your circumstance for His purpose. There was an original intent for your life and some of us fail and some of us will never find it and we won’t find it because we won’t want to find it and we don’t care to find it.

⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. – John 1:4-5. When we sinned or when we live in sin. It’s impossible to live outside of sin because that’s just how we’re wired, but when we live unbiased and unaffected by it, then we live in darkness. Yeah, we become blind to what we are supposed to do, how we’re supposed to do, and why we’re supposed to do. Jesus gave us a sense of being; he offers us a sense of being. Every step of the way, Jesus provides people with a sense of being. We have no sense of being because we’d rather sit around in the dark and look at shadowy figures rather than actually see what they look like in the light. I bet the people we associate with, the things we do, and the goals we have look a lot different when we can scrutinize them under the weight of eternity, in the presence of the glory of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1:14. This is what Christmas is really about. It’s about us, remembering that God came to be with us, who live in “darkness” to subvert the darkness that we live in. See, God is not some distant being. He is not uncaring. He wants us to find ourselves but he realized we would never be able to do so without being amongst us to show us and to provide for us and to cover up for us. When we understand that, it reframes our religiousness because some of us are plain religious and it doesn’t do anything for you. All it does is put an unnecessary hassle between waking up on Sunday and watching football or going to brunch. When we see God’s glory in Jesus, we have the ability to see our redemption at work. We become liberated to be what we were originally designed to be. We have the capacity to reach what God made apart for us. If you go back and read Psalm 14, you will realize how God used a peasant in a hick town to bear Jesus. It’s actually a little ridiculous that a man, whose trade was to build furniture, radically revolutionized the world. If you heard or saw the initial wire up of the children’s church Christmas play, you will clearly see the ridiculousness at which God’s grace and truth become mobilized in our society. The savior of the world being born out of wedlock in the back of a barn, witnessed by some crazy shepherds in the hill country, visited by three pagan kings and anointed savior.

I want to leave you with some questions to mull over through new years because when we come back from our break, we’re going to be searching for the “One Thing.”

• At the bottom of your heart, what is holding you back from seeing yourself as a sent person?

• In what ways has God integrated you into society and what practical steps can you take to live as a person sent on a mission?

• Who has God placed in your sphere of influence to whom you can affect life change?

Lets pray.

Failure is never permanent and losing never spells the end. As little comfort as that brings, I need to pop your bubble even further: we can only have victory through delivery. You may see few to little in terms of options. You may be facing your staunchest opposition ever. In fact, you may be battered, tattered and broken, but that does not preclude you from victory. And that is because your victory is and always will be delivered to you by the strong hand of God. I know it’s hard to believe that when life hit you so hard and you are literally on your last legs, but this is not the end for you because you still have time left on the clock and a God who is alive and active in this world that whispers gently into your ear, “Believe.”

Jesus, the one and only son of God gives us victory over death, the Bible says. But guess how it starts? It starts with a baby being born and an unlikely delivery in the back of a barn. If you believe in this delivery, the reason we celebrate this time of year, you must also believe there will be victory in your life. You have a little more than a week left, remind yourself everyday that there will undoubtedly be victory as you anticipate God’s wonderful delivery.

We who feel isolated right now are probably isolated because we choose to be, but we don’t have to be. Yes, this is the sad state of our lives. Nobody really knows the sorrows you hold and relive every heart wrenching moment but you never wanted anybody to know. It probably feels as if God, our friends and family abandoned us and left us like pieces of trash amidst total ruin. Ultimately, we don’t reach out because they don’t reach back. More than that, we don’t reach out because we don’t want to be judged. We hide our ruin so as not to alienate anybody else. We mask our ruin because everyone goes through life with equally difficult circumstances. We dull the pain by not thinking about it.

A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. – Proverbs 18:24

The writer of this proverb recognized two things: first, we all need to make friends, and I mean good friends, friends whose loyalty are thicker than the blood uniting you with your siblings; and secondly, everybody will face a period in their lives where the only certainty is uncertainty and where the landscape of your life is in complete shambles, a desolate ruin. True friends are often forged amidst ruins, loyalty is witnessed in times of despair. I will not justify your “ruin” as an opportunity from God to gain true friends; however, I will point out that your “ruin,” whatever that may be, is a great opportunity to forge new friendships that you never imagined. Ruin, puts us all in very interesting fraternities. If you expect to live happily ever after, wake up, that’s not life! Ruin may mean very different circumstances to various people so let me give you the JKwon definition: ruin is anything that alters your life paradigm to becoming uncomfortable and/or unbearable. I know for many of you all that means is that you can’t watch basketball until Christmas, but for others that means loss of work, bankruptcy, divorce, death of loved ones, academic failures, break ups, and 99 other problems.

You will undoubtedly face ruin. Ruin hurts, I know. It gives you anxiety, makes you shake uncontrollably, keeps you awake at night, unproductive in the day, and places you in a quiet isolation. Today, know you do not go alone. You have a friend here. More than that, you have a companion whose presence is always with you. You just need to cry out and be heard in your voiceless fear, in the lightless darkness, against the fiery foe. You may be amidst total ruin, but you are not condemned eternally to it. I am with you and God is with you and we will walk together out from against the wall. That’s really all the assurance you’ll ever need. You may be in ruin, but you will never be alone.

I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. – Revelation 2:3-5

This passage actually begins with Jesus saying, “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance…” God understands what comes next is this: you can’t bear people who are holding you back and making your works, your toil and your patience wear thin! Tell me, this isn’t the reason you left your first love! Of course it’s true. The good thing is that even though you may have left your first love behind, the passion you pursued that first love doesn’t have to be left behind. I hope and pray that you haven’t given up yet and that even if you’re hanging in by threads like I am, you will remember what that passion and pursuit feels like. Life’s opportunities are like trains, and once they stop, you can either jump on or stay off. But regardless, it’s going to leave the station and it may not come back. The question you may be wrestling with is “What if the train doesn’t come back? My answer to that question, and the answer Jesus has for you is, “You could live with it, because what you are doing has meaning to people.” Your life, just like your first love was never about you, it was about other people. Remember that is the reason any of us have any opportunities in life.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:9

I say have all the unconfident notions fly in your head all you want. Take that depression and let it run rampant. Harbor that anxiety which is seen in your nail biting, thumb sucking, leg shaking, cigarette smoking and angry discoursing within you, let the world see it. You ain’t hiding anything from anybody. But in doing all those things, because it is human nature to attempt to kill ourselves with unnecessary mind games played with our own selves, remember this command from God as you wake up every morning to fight the greatest battle you will ever fight– “Be strong and courageous!”

You may never shake notions of inadequacy even with my confidence, you may breakdown and cry. You may go to your weak proclivities and bad habits, I know I do, but understand that the reason we even have confidence is because “the LORD our God is with us wherever we go.” So if you wake up this morning fearing the hell you are about to face in life– be strong. If you wake up trying to make an impossible decision– be courageous! If you are about to go down a brand new road and do something totally unfamiliar– God is with us.

This is why God became flesh, to be with, Jesus is after all, Immanuel, the God who is with us. Therefore God is for us and God is all the confidence we need. Be unconfident of nothing!

We then call God’s work stupid and then audaciously we think we’re smarter than God so we disengage entirely in a selfish, anxiety filled moment of haste and irrationality. Trust me, I’m a pastor, I give up on more futile causes in a single day than most do in an entire lifetime. It’s okay to admit it too, because I’m guilty; not that I’m proud of it, but why bother trying to hide it. In this frame of mind, the Apostle Paul writes, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (v20)”  The answer is yes. This Christmas season, even though the holiday shoppers drive you crazy as you drive home from church because some people deserve to have their licenses revoked, as we await the birth date of our savior, we need to come back to a place of humility and wisdom where we realize that our futility is actually the best thing that can happen to us. In a contradiction of absurdities, we know that it was by the lowly birth of a God in a barn house that change the course of history as we would have known it.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. – 1 Corinthians 1:25

Our futility, for all those lost hours and wasted efforts, are the strongest weapons in God’s arsenal. I’m not saying every lost cause and every hopeless situation should be given a thought about God’s opportunity, but I am saying that we should not get frustrated by the futility of the little to no change all our energies are creating. After all, we are all descendants of a “stiff necked people.” You will see that our intentions for God’s work, if they are ordained by God, and all the heartbreaking futility it cost you, will turn out to be stronger than anything you would have ever imagined your futility becoming. That is the hope of Christmas, that is the good news of life. That is why you should love futility, like I love futility. We are called to it, so that we can see that as God’s weakest’s links even our lives will overturn the impossible.

This week and next week I have for you some important things you need to take a grip on in life that way in the coming year, you can focus on what matters. What that really means is that I intend to make your comfortable little bubbles of lackluster thought and brain power focused on menial things of life into a battle field of deconstruction that becomes violent with a new thought. I entitled today’s message, the “Transformative Nature of Redemption” and the reason I named the sermon that is because we’re not being transformed into redeemed beings. I’m not talking about sinning, I’m talking about mindsets. Our mindsets are just too small picture and I’m going to be honest, really stupid. It’s so stupid sometimes, that it’s even starting to annoy me. I mean, how annoyed do you think I would have had to be in order to contemplating jumping ship and leaving for sunshine and greener pastures in a different state? I’m sorry, you gave me two weeks to think about this, and now I have a lot to say.

Suppose we think of God as someone who prowls the streets and disturbs the peace of what we call American Christianity because that is our God, what would we do? Suppose God pitches His tent among the homeless, so that God has no place on which to lay his head, would you still worship Him? Suppose God is not the domesticated house genie of Sunday sermons, would we still stand living unchanged? Suppose God is to be found hidden in a subversive corner of a revolution, not as the stabilizer of the status quo, would you risk everything? Suppose God’s call on our lives is to interrupt, disrupt, confound, contradict and confront the established human order, the all too human way and sway of doing business, a la the world, would we answer? Suppose God’s power over human beings is found in the place besides people in their powerlessness, would you be humble enough to receive Him? This is the true God, the one that created the universe and put us in our places, the God that can do without religion if religion only means sacrifice and ritual. This is the God of justice that redeems by calling us closer, drawing nearer, soliciting us as a beggar with outstretched hands.

Redemption is the voice of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God, is the call that calls to us without causality, power, or prestige, calling upon us what’s best in us. In redemption is a transformative nature that needs to be unleashed. I want to enlighten you all to the cycle of this transformative nature so it can be unleashed in your lives because God calls us in the world that really exists into His kingdom that calls for something different altogether from the world in power. Let’s open up our Bibles to John 21:1-14.

¹After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way.²Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. ³Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

I want you to write this down: How many times does Jesus have to prove himself to us? Then I want you write this underneath: Why do I keep going back to the same old thing after He gives me a new option?! Verse 1 says that Jesus had to come “again” to the disciples; it was actually the third time in a single week where God had to visit his disciples to set them straight and prove that he was still alive. I don’t know about you, but if a dead guy was up and walking the first time, I would listen. But then again, I’m the type of guy who wrote on Tuesday’s Quiet Time: But God isn’t fair, in my point of view anyways, because I’m just middling in idle in middle class America and in particular, the armpit of New York known otherwise as New Jersey. That may seem pretty sweet to you, but what if you watched your dad die at the prime of his life at 49, became burdened with his problems, taken on a sickly mother and the responsibilities of an entire household, starting with grandparents to uncles and aunts, and even nieces and nephews you never even knew existed? The unfairness of God is pretty evident because it equalizes me into an existence beneath my abilities and skills. I know, this sounds like it comes from an egotistical maniac where the only thing bigger than his ego is his mirror in the bathroom. Don’t even pretend you never thought God wasn’t unfair to you because we all know you felt it, breathed it and venomously exuded it. You don’t think the disciples were saying the same thing the first two times. I know why they went back to what they were doing; it was because they didn’t think their redemption was fair. They felt it was unfair that because of their freedom in redemption they were called to something higher. So they went fishing. I call this being at the “drawing board” and that’s just a nice way of me saying, “dumb idiots!” I would use other words, but that’s not appropriate for church and you could probably guess which four letters I would use to describe this. The dumb part is not that they went back to doing the same old thing, it was that in doing the same old thing, there was nothing to be gained from it. Verse 3 says, “but they caught nothing all night.”

⁴Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵ Jesus said to them, ”Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶ He said to them, ”Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the quantity of fish.

I want you to write next to these verses: Divine Intervention requires us to do something new. All innovation requires we do something new. As far as the disciples are concerned at this point, they were taking advice from a stranger. They were willing to do something different in their lives, despite the fact that these guys were professional fishermen and been doing this for years. Yet they wouldn’t have tried anything new if they didn’t realize that there was nothing to be gained in the way they were doing things. I don’t know about you, but isn’t this the problem with a lot of us, not only do we keep doing what we were doing, we realize that the way we were doing it doesn’t work and yet when somebody yells out to you and gives you a suggestion, what do we do? We curse them out and then keep doing the stupid thing we were doing anyways and then you just prove evolution wrong because it’s obvious people don’t evolve by your lack of innovation. You see according to Isaiah 40:29, because I know nobody reads the blog or the Bible, “He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless.” When we feel most weak and powerless– God wants to give you strength and power. And the weaker, the more powerless, you feel, the more God wants to fill you with His own strength and power. Yet, despite having this offer, a lot of us would rather burn.

⁷That disciple whom Jesus loved therefore said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea. ⁸The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off.

Let’s look at verse 7. Who puts their clothes on to go swimming? That’s right, nobody puts their clothes on to go swimming—it’s dumb. So here’s what’s actually going on. Peter, even though he should be excited for the record haul, isn’t excited about that. He was mostly naked, which is an embarrassment for most people, but particularly so for those people who are about to meet their maker. But you see, Peter has two motives: the first is to cover himself and the second is to get to Jesus as soon as possible. A lot of people, when we are redeemed, we are not transformed. We come naked and we remain naked and when I mean naked, I don’t mean literally, I mean figuratively naked. That is to say that we come with the whole world seeing every single mistake, every single error, every single regret, every single scar and we live life that way. But Jesus covers us up from that. Peter covers himself and jumps into the water and swims the length of a football field, excited that he can be with the transformer.

⁹When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place, with fish laid out on it, and bread. ¹⁰Jesus said to them, ”Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn.

I would start giving you conspiracy theories on this, but I won’t because you people already crazy enough without anymore conspiracy theories. You can take this one of two ways, but at the end of day, the meaning is the same and single in notion. That when we are redeemed and transformed and seeking God that leads to unprecedented results. This is what I want to focus on here and the next set of verses. All that other stuff we talked about in the beginning leads to this moment when God provides not a selfish motivated outcome and result for your life, but an unprecedented outcome by which you, in your transformation experience the fullness of life that God calls us to live.

Jerome, a church doctor who lived in 400 AD, said the 153 fish were the entirety of all the known fish species at the time John wrote this gospel. It is now known that there were 157 known fish species. I want to say that perhaps somebody miscounted, like a bunch of non educated fishermen, but whatever. It’s close enough right. So if you interpret the 153 fish being caught by fishers of men and not losing a single one to a torn net, one could say that the influence and significance of the disciples’ lives and calling are going to impact every single person on every single nation. If this were to be extended to us, in the 21^st century, this has unprecedented significance in that the redemption we have through Jesus transforms us so that the world we know it would be impacted in a dramatic way.

If you think that’s too much of an easy fit for you to believe, we can go about this mathematically through what we call Gematria, that is where numbers represent letters and so the numbers 1-5-3 as  J. A. Emerton, perceiving the weaknesses of the traditional explanations of 153, sought a solution along this path. He observed that Ezek 47, and especially v 10, could have been in the mind of the author of John 21: the stream of living water from the temple is to bring life to the Dead Sea, which will be full of fish; fishermen will stand along the shore and they will spread their nets from En-gedi to En-eglaim. “En” is the Hebrew for “spring”; gedi provides the total 17, eglaim 153. These two numbers are mathematically related. Emerton suggested that the number of fish may thus represent the places where, according to prophecy, fishermen are to stand and spread their nets in the time of messianic fulfillment. But at the end of the day, same result for us—if our lives are not transformed through the act of redemption by Jesus, then we will never see these types of results that we are called to.

I want to conclude here, a few months ago, for some of you, I washed your feet and said, as your leader, I will serve you, that is to humble myself lower than what I know I am, not in some symbolic ceremony, but to show you that what I do is to help you realize and recognize that your lives are going to be forever transformed when you start walking with me. Not because I’m God or anything, but because the redemption that Jesus has given requires me to change your status quo, to be that transformation that liberates within you a world shaking new reality.

¹²Jesus said to them, ”Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. ¹³Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. ¹⁴ This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

Jesus did the same for his people and continues to do the same for us; he says, “come have breakfast” and gives us “bread with some fish.”  153 fish can be caught in your life. Let’s pray.

In this passage God is declared to be a “tower of refuge” and as far as imagery, similes and metaphors go, it’s beautiful that God is called the “tower of refuge” but what exactly does that mean tangibly for our lives? Really, what good is a “tower of refuge” if we can’t access it, see where it is or even get there? I mean, protection and safety are only available when we’re in the cover of protection and safety. Let’s be quite frank about this matter, when was the last time you sought after this “tower of refuge” that is God and actually got refuge? You could probably rattle off an enormous list of being left to die without refuge faster than you can read this blog post. The last time you found holes in your pocket and less than lint in your name, there was no refuge. The last time you were roiling in trouble outside of your control, you found no protection. The last time you were under the gun, brimming with pressure in the flow of blood through your tear ducts, there was no shelter. What about the person who tanked your career or stole your girl, where was the protection then?

When Isaiah calls God, the “tower of refuge,” he was referring to the presence of God pervading through all aspects of life. A lot of us believe in a God who allows us to dilly-dattle through life, like a bad parents allows their child to run loose on a busy Manhattan street. But that isn’t the case. That really means God, although He is present, loves you enough to allow you to choose and pretend He’s not there. He allows you to go in seven different directions and fall into a hole. He allows things to hurt you, people to attack you, and for you to make decisions because that’s what His love is like. God is actively involved in those aspects of life. If you don’t believe me, have you noticed how “things” happen that sort of push you in the right direction or when tragedy strikes, “things” awaken you to a new reality? Don’t misinterpret those “things,” its surely the movement of God whether they hurt or harm, it is purposeful. In this passage, God is responsible for incredible destruction and it is because of it, Isaiah knows that God is the “tower of refuge” as nothing is outside of God’s control and presence.

The easiest thing we can do is just say “God is my ‘tower of refuge’” and then live our lives in a tortoise shell, never attempting to go beyond what is safe. I know a lot of people advocate this type of living. Yet if we were designed to live this way, God did not have to be described as a “tower of refuge.” If you fear reaching out beyond where you are in life because you would never be able to find refuge, think about where God’s presence is and remember that it is His presence that is our “tower of refuge.” But today, knowing that God’s presence is our “tower of refuge” I want to encourage you to reach out towards doing the impossible and say, “this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.” And if you’re ever feeling poor, distressed, battered and abused, all you need to do is call upon the name of the LORD because it is a “tower of refuge.” At the end of the day the choice is yours: will you live without the need of a tower of refuge? or will you live outrageously knowing the tower of refuge is near?

This might be too extreme for some of us, and the world’s ambivalence toward us may not exactly be characterized by this type of violence but this is the sad reality for some people. They are alienated into victimization and life becomes meaningless, and so death is the most economic option. You may not have ever considered taking your own life, but I bet there were days you wished you could hide instead of facing the cruel world. Perhaps you deal with the loneliness and victimization differently; you pick losers to date so you can feel needed and loved; you may be irrationally clingy; or drinking yourself into a stupor every other weekend. The list doesn’t end there, that’s where it all starts.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. – 1 Peter 2:10

I wish I was quicker on my feet in the haze of dawn, but I don’t think I would have had anything better to say even if my mind was sharp. What do you say to a person who asks, “Pastor Jon, can I go die now?” The only thing you can say, in a militant way is, “No!” There is something to be said in situations like this, where the world around crumbles and you feel alone, if not naked and cold also. Any of us, who feel shunned, are hated, are bullied and abused must be told, “I (we) am here with you and I (we) am (are) for you. You may have been neglected, been kicked to the curb, ostracized and abandoned, but now you are no longer alone.

The Apostle Peter writes that life may take us away from our homes, the people who love us and into no man’s land; but that doesn’t mean you are alone. He says, you have been set apart for something better than an early exit into the next life. You have been delivered for a purpose yet unseen. You have a lot to offer and much more to do. You are being called, “God’s people” and that is why you never are alone.

Everybody may have abandoned you, in fact they may have even trampled your cold, motionless body as you yearned for help and a lending hand, but you must now get up and I (we) will pick you off the ground in Jesus name. You are worth it and believe you are redeemed. God promises you will never be alone again. You will never again go about life alone.

Let’s be real, we hardly blow up over the big things, it’s the small things that make us sweat and break our metaphorical backs into fits unbecoming of ladies and gentlemen. It’s okay to call me petty and feeble. Go ahead and judge me because I sweat the small stuff when I am directing my wrath at innocent bystanders unknowingly crossing my path.

but for Cain and his offering He [God] had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? – Genesis 4:5-6

When Cain killed his brother Abel, do you think he was sweating the small stuff and misdirecting his anger? Of course he was. Abel and Cain were brothers and they weren’t even fighting a civil war on the ethics of sacrifices. Sure, there are hints of jealousy and Cain’s own shortcomings, but it was God who rejected Cain and it was Cain who got worked up over God giving him a second chance, so these little things added up into a murderous plot to kill his own brother!

Well, the question now becomes, what do we do with our anger issues stemming from what seems like insignificant transgressions and unimportant life matters? We know it’s impossible never to get mad. It is also impossible to not allow the small stuff pile slowly and steadily into our lives so that the lint won’t create a fire. We probably cannot accept the Vulcan way of rational disinterest either, mostly because it’s unhuman. We’re not robots or emotionless drones and are constantly moved by the influx of emotions that carry us and impact us daily. In the end, we know the small stuff shouldn’t make us sweat, but it constantly does and the way it affects our lives and the lives immediately around us is undeniable.

I propose focusing that anger, the one off, small stuff type of anger, into positive sacrifice is really the only way we can manage our anger. This doesn’t mean that we will never be angry, but it does mean that we will be able to use our anger for something other than destruction. God tells Cain in verse 6 of the chapter to “do what’s right and rule over the sin (in this case, the sin is his anger).” While this begs a lot of questions to what exactly it means to be “right,” we may be better off in understanding that we just need to do everything we possible can and let the rest of it hang out there regardless of what happens. Then when there are small things that we start to sweat, we have the full confidence to know we have already done what is “right.” Further, the annoyances that come in the forms of people can roll off our consciences because the small stuff was dealt with. Essentially, focusing the anger that builds up from the stresses of the “small stuff” into positive sacrifice allows us to see the worthiness of our offerings in the eyes of God. The small stuff which leads to destruction is turned into the building blocks of construction. This is the fabric which develops character. Don’t sweat the small stuff, use it to build a sacrifice worthy of your call.

But God isn’t fair, in my point of view anyways, because I’m just middling in idle in middle class America and in particular, the armpit of New York known otherwise as New Jersey. That may seem pretty sweet to you, but what if you watched your dad die at the prime of his life at 49, became burdened with his problems, taken on a sickly mother and the responsibilities of an entire household, starting with grandparents to uncles and aunts, and even nieces and nephews you never even knew existed? The unfairness of God is pretty evident because it equalizes me into an existence beneath my abilities and skills. I know, this sounds like it comes from an egotistical maniac where the only thing bigger than his ego is his mirror in the bathroom. Don’t even pretend you never thought God wasn’t unfair to you because we all know you felt it, breathed it and venomously exuded it.

In Psalm 73:2-5 we read about the unfairness of God and it’s hard to disagree with what Asaph writes:

² But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
³ For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.  ⁴ They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong.
⁵ They are free from common human burdens;
they are not plagued by human ills.

You may even be at the same place as when he writes, “Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments” (vv 13-14).  So, if God is not fair, why should we even bother trying to live blamelessly? Why not just do whatever we want, when we want and how we want? Why do we have to be fair and accommodating? Why do we have to take a hit on our liberties when nobody else does? Why are the wicked and people beneath us living the “blessed life” while we struggle and toil?

I wish I can give you a clean answer, but I really can’t explain why life is unfair from our perspective and I won’t offer some lame theodicy as a consolation prize to the question. What I can offer you is that perhaps the “unfairness” is intentional. It is for the very purpose of equalizing your life along the lines of other people, who are beneath you, and undesirable in comparison. Maybe the injustice you have been through in your life is for the specific purposes of knowing what it feels like. Perhaps, there is something greater for you to learn through it that you are too blind to see or haven’t been awakened to it yet. I bet, if you’re reading this, you were made stronger for it. You may have cried and teared for a bit in frustration, but it probably gave you more resolve to stick to what you believe is right. There maybe something that needs to be redeemed in our lives or the sphere of our lives that requires it. It may feel senseless and unjust as you walk through it, but there definitely is a divinely ordained mission within it.

The Apostle Paul, writing to a community of unfairly treated Christians in the first century wrote, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). Immediately preceding this verse, which already implies God is responsible for the injustice and unfairness in our lives, is an outlook on life that warrants fuller perspective when we live through hell on earth as we strive to live godly– Jesus died unfairly for our sins so that we, when we live and die to injustice and unfairness in our lives can experience something greater in love than we would have without it. This is why life is unfair, we just need to spend time finding the redeeming qualities of it.

I can give you countless examples of this but I think you get the picture, we have a real problem with people who slow us down or get in our way. At the end of the day, nearly everyone who isn’t you will get in your way and slow you down, that’s just reality. So what can we truly do about this? My past disposition was to either fire them or leave them behind, but that seems to be like a cold alternative and anti-humanistic approach most aren’t willing to take. It is also incredibly sinful to love others like garbage.

Now imagine if you had to lead 2 million people who slow you down? Moses was tasked to lead 2 million “stiff necked people” into the promised land by God. These people were seriously such a hamper to progress that God, at times wanted to give up on these fools. What should have taken perhaps a month of trekking clear across oriental trade routes led to 40 years of putzing around in the barren Sinai wilderness, only to die and have another set of people complete the project, you want to talk about delays and hampering? How about a 365% or a lifetime of hampering and toil with people that simply slowed down and hindered?

And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped. And he said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.” – Exodus 34:8-9

Moses, however didn’t give up on this bunch, he moved slowly forward, inching closer and waited ever more patiently. He prayed more and worshipped God more ferociously. Moses wasn’t used to this type of hampering, he used to lead an army of Egypt (at least the Charlton Heston version did), he lead this bunch, managed these fools and taught them because he was placed there intentionally by God, regardless of his preference.

In end, as leaders, managers, teachers and people of God, we have to remember that we are exactly where we are, with exactly the frustrating bunch of people, and our hot tempers for the greater glory of God. It is counterintuitive, but it puts us in a posture of humility and wisdom. I mean, God has been waiting for us to get our acts together our entire lives, what’s a few more hours and days we’ll never get back in light of the miracles God performs as His presence allows us to be His inheritance? Let’s thank God for the frustrations so that we can worship and be humbled before His favor in our lives.

If you don’t feel that way yet or don’t know where I’m coming from, then read what the Prophet Isaiah says, “Even youths will become weak and tired, and young men will fall in exhaustion.”(Isaiah 40:30). It will happen, sorry. It might not be the holidays that burn you out, living life in an increasingly demanding world may be burning you out. In fact you may be starting to smolder and can’t wait for Christmas to come fast enough so you can go hide in your room for a few days until you can face the world again. You guys in school know what I’m talking about, it’s finals time and you’re still riding that D+. I know you people who haven’t seen the sunny side of a vacation all year feel my pain because your stale office is looking a little like hell. But this is life and we grit our teeth contemplating surrender and giving ourselves up to our demons and exhaustions because there is no hope, well not much you can see anyways.

Don’t think God doesn’t see your struggles because He does. God sees your turmoil whether or not you shared it in your silence. In fact, He placed you in that moment and in your travail. He didn’t do it to torture you, no, that’s not His intention, despite your disposition to think that way. God does this so that you can experience His power, grace and mercy more deeply. The hope we have as advent begins is that, He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless. (Isaiah 40:29). I want you to keep this in mind this holiday season. When we feel most weak and powerless– God wants to give you strength and power. And the weaker, the more powerless, you feel, the more God wants to fill you with His own strength and power. Yet, despite having this offer, a lot of us would rather burn. Don’t wait until you burst into an amazing set of flames. Accept God’s offer and be empowered by an almighty God who loves you and will not let your burn. He never grows weak or weary and He can be the source of your power and strength right now and forever. Say goodbye to burning out.

Every time you fail or when your project goes to hell, however you want to put it, you say to yourself, “never again, I just wasted my time on a lost cause…” But that doesn’t seem to stop you from taking on another failure of a human project. At the end of the day we are either burned out from these failed of people or you are still disillusioned and one month after you were nearly maimed by your charity, you’re back at it, only to think to yourself, “what a wasted effort, I could probably have cured cancer if I didn’t have to spend time fixing this idiot.” I mean, honestly the chances of a non failed human project is like 1 in 100 and that’s only if you’re so lucky. Don’t let me leave you with a bad taste in your mouth if you never realized it, by all means, keep your ideological worldviews and try to live by unrealistic socialist values, it’s commendable.But we all know the truth, that at the end of the day, on most days, we feel like our efforts were wasted and could have been better served elsewhere. You know Jesus probably felt that way about his closest disciples, so don’t feel that bad. This morning, I want to take a look at he Apostle Paul’s statement on this issue because it gives us a new frame of reference if we are in a place of humble abdication.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. – 1 Corinthians 15:58

In this passage, Paul is talking about the frustrations in life experienced by all, if they dared to live outside of themselves or within any realm of the world un-sheltered and unfiltered, and how it feels so hopeless most of the time. He says whatever happens, failures, sin, trouble, mistakes, nonsense and in the words of Forrest Gump, “Shit,” we must remember that nothing is worthless when done with the heart of God. This may sound like a minor consolation prize, like getting a trophy for coming in last place, but the real truth behind this thinking is that we take on these failures of human projects, not because of some deep and false sense of responsibility, but because God chooses the greatest failures to help. God does this knowing fully well that He will never receive in return anything but curses. God ventures into the lives of failures because He loves the failures. So we in turn are not wasting our efforts on lost causes, we are mimicking the God who laboriously pursues the broken.

If you are sitting in a place ready to give up and close yourself into a clam shell and call it quits, think about it again. If you are hesitant in overextending yourself in the name of God to pick somebody up and carry them on your shoulders, stop hesitating. If you are thinking your efforts have been wasted on people in the past, then understand you wasted nothing. The power of God was given to us in victory over death by Jesus– be steadfast, be immovable and work aboundingly in the name of our LORD.

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. – Romans 5:5

The Apostle Paul says there is no shame in having hope (wishful thinking) and the fact that you have hope and ideals for a present and future do no harm. Wishful thinking, and I don’t mean wishful thinking as in having delusions of becoming a princess out of a Disney movie because that’s not wishful, it’s hopeless and fantastic, is really about going through life and seeing the goal despite facing the odds and challenges. I know for a fact how difficult it is to be hopeful after enduring so much in life, but those enduring moments are exactly the moments when we need to be the most hopeful.

I don’t tell you to have hope blindly or randomly so you can feel good about your failures and shortcomings. I tell you to have hope knowing and understanding fully that despite all your shortcomings and failures God is pouring Himself into your hearts and minds to be the catalyst of hope through your difficulties. If we didn’t need any hope in our lives, there wouldn’t have been a need for God to sacrifice His Son in a humiliating set of events– naked and displayed along the side of a busy highway like billboard advertising. It’s time to change the way we think and have more wishful thinking, to be hopeful of a future poured out into you directly by God through His Spirit. This is the only hope we need to fight the impossible fight. It’s time to be a little more wishful in your thinking.

Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” – Nehemiah 8:10

I started thinking about this because Nehemiah, who would make Jimmy Hoffa look like a a strawberry cupcake, says to all the Israelites gathered around him who have just had their worlds crushed and are feeling very weak and particularly tired from contemplating their failures, “the joy of the LORD is your strength.”It is great and all that God’s joy is our strength, but what exactly is God’s “joy?” That is, what makes God joyful and how does that empower us from the inside out? The reason we’re answering this question in the first place is because the phrase is so ambiguous and you run the risk of walking away not knowing what it means for your life practically this holiday season. In Zephaniah 3:17, we read that when God is in your midst, or rather, when you are in His presence, God shouts for joy. It makes Him glad and He takes great delight in you as you come into His presence searching for Him when you have no strength, when you feel like dropping dead, when you are tired. If this is not convincing enough for you to seek God when you have no strength left on your own. Or rather, if you are one of those Christians who lament people like me for giving this type of advice, I want you to check out Luke 15:10 where Jesus says, “In the same way, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.” I can actually continue on rattling off scripture references that will all say the same thing. God is joyful when people come to meet Him and when they find Him, because God answers those who call on Him, He gives you an inexplicable inner strength to carry you through.

With a refreshed inner strength powered by a never ending source of God’s joy, as you continually to seek His presence, you are being sent “on  your way” Nehemiah says, to do something greater than all your inner strength combined. That is the inexplicable inner strength God gives you to look back on  your year and look forward to the next year this holiday season. Seek God’s presence and find yourself powered by the “joy of God” to accomplish greater things and godly things.