Me Too I Worry About What Might Happen Next… ·...

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Transcript March 19/20, 2016

Me Too | I Worry About What Might Happen Next Aaron Brockett | Philippians 4:4-9; Hebrews 4:14-16; Psalm 56:3

Well, how is everyone? Good. Good. It’s good to see all of you. It’s good to see IU fans and UK fans getting along. No? No? Hey at least maybe you can reach out to our Purdue brothers and sisters and comfort them in their affliction. All I’m saying is first round to Ark. It’s good to see you. If this is your first time to be with us, welcome to First Christian Church of Trash Talk. It’s our gift that we are very good at this time of the year. I want to welcome anybody who may be tuning in online. I want to welcome our North campus as well. I’m glad to have you here. I want to remind you that next weekend we will have our Easter Weekend services. So here are our service times for next weekend. This Friday on March 25 at 6:00 is going to be our communion service here at Northwest. It is centered on the cross and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. So it’s going to be a real meaningful service on Friday. Then on Saturday our services are going to be at 4 and 6, here at Northwest. And then next Sunday, both here at Northwest and at the North campus, we are going to have an 8:00, a 10:00, and a 12:00. And I’m out of breath just going through that. That’s coming up next weekend. I want to encourage you to invite friends and family to come with you and if you’d like some help in that you can go to this resource right here: tpcc.org/easterdigital and there is a digital invite you can use on social media or you can text or email out to friends and family. I think we’ve got some paper invites as well in the lobby. I’m really looking forward to being here with you next weekend. If you’ve got a Bible, go ahead and get to Philippians 4. Or maybe you’ve got a device with a Bible on it. We’re going to be studying through a few of the verses in chapter 4 here in just a few minutes after I kind of set this up. Let me just go ahead and ask God to meet us in this time and this space in the next few minutes together. Father we come to You right now and we thank You. Just like the song said, “Here is our heart. Here is our mind. Would You speak what is true?” And sometimes what is true is hard to hear. And sometimes what is true is a real challenge, it is convicting. Sometimes what is true is a comfort. So God wherever we are in all of that I pray You would meet us in this space, in this time, in the next few moments. That we would hear a word from You that we really need to hear. I know I need to hear from You today. So God I just ask that You would do that in these next few moments together as we look at your Word. May that just resound in our hearts and our minds. And we ask this in Jesus’ Name. Amen. Today we are beginning a new series of messages I am really looking forward to, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. It’s called Me Too. And I think that two of the most powerful words in the English language are the words me too because from the time I was a little kid I can remember thinking

Me Too | I Worry About What Might Happen Next March 19/20, 2016

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

to myself, and maybe you can relate to this as well, just wondering if other people felt the way that I did or wondering if other people struggled with some of the things that I struggled with. And oftentimes I wasn’t brave enough or courageous enough to actually communicate with others what it was I was experiencing or what it was I was feeling, so I would just kind of keep it to myself. I was always afraid that if I did let anybody know what I was going through, somehow they would look at me as if I were strange, or weird, or erratic, or whatever and they wouldn’t be able to relate. Maybe they would even use that against me. But there’s something that’s really powerful about sharing with somebody else whatever it is you may be fearful of, or struggling with, or experiencing and having them look at you with empathy, with no judgment, and with no condemnation. Just very sincerely look you in the eye and say, “Yeah, me too. I know exactly what it is you are going through. I know what it is that you are struggling with. Come on. Let’s go through this, let’s face this, and let’s walk through this together.” I think it might be important for me to make this distinction. I’m not talking about people who every time you mention something you are struggling with in your life, they hijack or redirect the conversation upon themselves. We all know those people, right? The me monster. We all have me monsters in our life. Anytime you share something they are like, “Oh yes,” and then they hijack the conversation. And if you are sitting here going, “I don’t have a me monster in my life,” guess what? That’s for free. Just take that with you. You see, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people with whom we can take the mask off, we can take the makeup off, we can put down the front, we don’t have to wear that bravado, and we can just be who we are in front of them. And actually people you can get vulnerable enough with to where you can hand them the figurative bullet, so to speak, and if they want it they could turn and use it against you. I’m talking about that kind of naked openness, that type of transparency where you’re giving other people access to your life. And instead of judgment or condemnation, they give you empathy, “I know exactly what you are experiencing.” There’s something transformative about that and there’s something very rare about that. I think the reason why those two words me too are so powerful to each one of us is that two of the most common sin traps that we have a tendency to fall into are the traps of isolation and comparison. And I think this is true for both men and women. If I were to guess, though, I think I would say maybe isolation is the trap more men fall into. Statistics just say that grown men don’t even have one good friend. Not one guy where they could say, “This is me and I’m struggling with this.” We have a tendency to isolate ourselves. While both are true for both men and women, I think maybe ladies fall into the comparison trap more than men. You just begin to compare your lives with others, and you feel like maybe you’re all alone in this and you are the only one who is feeling this way or wrestling with this. The enemy can get you in either one of these things and he can begin to distort your understanding of who you are as a person and as a child of God. You see, prior to Genesis 3, neither one of these things



existed. Isolation and comparison, they did not exist within our relationships with each other and in our relationship with God. In Genesis 3 something devastating happened, there was an introduction of these things brought about by distrust in God. So what happened in Genesis 3 wasn’t that there was a piece of fruit that was so irresistible to Adam and Eve that they just couldn’t help themselves. When I was a little kid, that’s what I thought it was. I was like, “Man, they couldn’t have exercised a little bit of self control? What was it about that apple that was so irresistible?” It had nothing to do with a piece of fruit. It had everything to do with, “I don’t trust God’s best for me. I don’t trust God’s intentions for me therefore I’m going to take matters into my own hands.” And when that happened there were a few things that broke that day. And one of the most significant things that broke was that our connection, our relationship with God was fractured because in the absence of trust there really is no relationship. The second thing that happened was the image of God within us, what I would call your soul, your spirit, more than just your body, this is your self-‐esteem, your sense of self worth, the view that you have of yourself—that image of God got shattered within us. And ever since then we’ve been scrambling and trying to put that back together again. Then our relationships with other human beings got separated and broken and isolation and comparison got introduced to us. So ever since then we’ve been trying to rebuild some level of trust in our human relationships. This is why there is tension between the genders, tension between different ethnicities, and tension between people of other cultures. And we’ve been trying to regain this lost image of God that’s been shattered within us. So we go to therapy. And there is such a thing as the social sciences and self-‐help books because we are all trying to regain this sense of self-‐esteem and self worth that we lost in Genesis 3. What we have a tendency to do is isolate and compare. And if you just read through the Bible you would see that most of the biggest mistakes came when people got a distorted view of self, whether they began to think too highly of themselves or too lowly of themselves, and they began to isolate themselves from others, or they began to compare themselves to others. Oftentimes those two things are connected. So you could go to Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s two boys. Cain had this perspective that he wasn’t good enough and there wasn’t anything he could give to God that would please God. He began to isolate himself and to compare himself with his brother Abel. He spiraled down to this place where he tragically took the life of his own brother. And I’m just guessing that there wasn’t anybody he could actually be real with and say, “You know what? I’m experiencing these things.” Because I bet you Abel would have looked back at him and said, “Yeah, me too. I know what it is you are talking about.” In the Old Testament we’ve got this guy named King Saul who was a great leader in his own right. And he brought this young guy named David up and he was actually David’s biggest fan. He gave David his start. But it wasn’t long before David began to outpace Saul, and the people started to sing songs about David. They were like, “Yeah, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands.”



And all of the sudden this jealousy happened and Saul’s own sense of self worth began to get distorted and he began to pursue David. It literally drove Saul to insanity, where he dabbled in the occult and eventually took his own life. And I’m just guessing there wasn’t anybody in Saul’s life that he could actually be real with and say, “Yeah, I’m struggling with this.” “Me too.” And I would venture to say there is a fair amount of isolation and comparison represented in this room. You see the thing is that today we’ve never been more connected as a society through the use of electronic devices and social media. Ironically, it is that very thing that enhances the isolation that we feel and the comparisons we make to other people. I think oftentimes it just adds to it. This is not an anti-‐social media message. But oftentimes when we are on social media we are by ourselves and we’re getting snippets of other peoples’ lives that we compare ourselves to. And we just never measure up. So we think to ourselves, “Nobody understands what I’m going through. Nobody feels the way that I do. Nobody else seems to be as big of a screw up as I am. Everybody else seems to have this all together.” Men have a tendency to compare their lives to other men. So we look at other guys and we say, “Man, he’s so successful, and he’s got this six figure job, and he’s got that killer boat in the driveway. Everybody seems to respect him. He’s well into his 40’s but he still has a 32 inch waist. Man I hate that guy. I bet he has no problems, or issues, or insecurities.” So men do what men do so well when we are intimidated by other men, we just make fun of them behind their backs. That’s just what we do, ladies. That’s our way of coping. Ladies, maybe you’ve got your own issues where you look at somebody else, some other lady that you’ve kind of put on a pedestal. And you are like, “Man, she never seems stressed out. And her kids are so well mannered and polite (in public), and her sense of style is so amazing. I don’t see how she juggles it all while staying so beautiful, and bubbly, and perfect. I just want to throw up.” So, ladies, maybe you like her picture on Instagram, but secretly you may despise her. Secretly you are like, “I wish that I could be her.” Or, “Man, if I had her life, and her opportunities, and her figure, and her abilities then life would be better. I don’t feel like I am measuring up and I never will. And I’m all alone in this.” That is a lie you need to stop believing because it’s the shattered image of God within us and we are desperately trying to reassemble it. Now here’s what you’re not going to hear in the next few weeks together as we are walking through this series. You’re not going to hear this: You are good enough, you are smart enough, and man, dog-‐gone-‐it people love you. That’s not what you are going to hear. You’re not going to hear something like this: You just need to be true to yourself. I know that sounds really good and we hear that a lot in our culture, but that’s just a dressed up form of humanism. I’m not talking about self-‐hatred. I’m saying that kind of thinking goes the opposite direction and you’re actually trying to look deep within yourself. What you are trying to do when you say things like that is, “I am trying to reassemble the shattered image of God within me on my own terms,” and it’s not enough and it never will be.



You see, what you’re not going to hear is the words from the great theologian Katy Perry, “Baby you’re a firework. Come on, man, show them what you’re worth. Make them go oh, oh, oh as you shoot across the sky, y, y, y.” I don’t know where my wife is sitting right now, but I’m pretty confident she is rolling her eyes. I’m such an idiot, but that was fun. I’m not against positive thinking. I’m not against self-‐help. I’m not against Katy Perry, she’s very talented. All I’m saying is God has something way better. Hey you might write this down. You might take a picture of the screen here: The way God sees you in Christ is way better than you could ever see yourself through positive thinking and personal empowerment. You see this is what it means to be a Christian. It doesn’t mean you’re perfect, it doesn’t mean you’re not. It doesn’t mean you’ve got it all together, it doesn’t mean you don’t. It doesn’t mean you don’t need anybody, you do. But God said, “Listen, I’ve done the work.” Hide your very life, your very identity in Christ. You see, Jesus doesn’t just want to save you from your sins so you can be a nice religious person until the day you die and then you get to go to heaven. Jesus wants to give you your sense of worth. He wants to rebuild what’s been broken between you and your heavenly Father. He wants to reassemble that shattered image of God within you and give you a sense of self worth that can sustain whatever life throws at you. He wants to mend our earthly relationships. And only He can do that in Jesus Christ. I love what the author of Hebrews says in Hebrew 4:14-‐16. He says, “So then, since we have a great High Priest,” that’s what Jesus is, “who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for He faced all of the same testings we do, yet He did not sin.” That’s why we can have confidence in Him. “So let us come,” what’s that word right there? “Boldly,” man I love that word. “So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive His mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” Translation: God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ so He could look at you and me and say, “Me Too.” We serve a God who says, “I understand your weaknesses. I know what it’s like to struggle. I understand your temptations.” Because He wrapped Himself in human flesh and exposed Himself to everything you and I experience in this imperfect life. But we can have confidence in Him because He overcame it all. He did it perfectly. He did it without sin. He didn’t have to become like one of us, but He did. Yet, He’s utterly different from us. To identify with us, and to save us, and to give us confidence so that we can approach His throne of grace—and if you are anything like me you need to do it all the time—boldly, with confidence. This is not disrespectfully or brazenly but this is. “Because of who I am in Jesus Christ, I’ve got access to this throne of God’s grace on a regular basis.” I love that. I’ve got four kids and it would not surprise me if after the service is over and I am on my way back to my office that… If I were to go around the corner it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find one of them, maybe a couple of them, sitting in my chair at my desk with their feet up on my desk eating that bowl of candy I thought I had hidden from them and playing computer games. It just wouldn’t surprise me at all.



And I would walk in and they wouldn’t get nervous, they wouldn’t get anxious and say, “Oh father. We are sorry father.” No, they wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t want them to. Because they’re my kids, they’ve got access to my throne. Other people don’t call it a throne, I call it a throne. Because they’re my kids, they’ve got access. Now if I were to walk back there after the service and I saw one of you sitting at my desk with your feet up on my desk, eating my candy, and playing computer games I would call security. I love you, but we don’t have that kind of relationship. You don’t have that kind of access. Here we’ve got this passage where it says to each one of us in Christ, “You can boldly approach the throne of God’s grace.” Why? Because we’re His kids. So when you’ve got this self-‐hatred, or this low self-‐esteem, or this feeling of isolation or comparison what do you think that does to the heart of your Father who looks at you and says, “I want to give you your sense of worth? Actually when I look at you, you are the most treasured thing in the entire universe.” That’s the essence of what it means to put your trust in Jesus. It doesn’t mean to act religious, it doesn’t mean to act holier than you are, it doesn’t mean to pretend or to put on a mask or to fake it. It just simply means, “In my imperfect self I come to God and He gives me worth in Jesus Christ. Because of that I can walk with confidence as who I am in Him.” It all started with God being willing to wrap Himself in human flesh and look at you and me and say, “Yeah, Me too.” Now where this can become so damaging to others, as Christ followers—and I’m talking about post-‐conversion—is when we begin to forget what we’ve been saved from. One of the biggest ways we can mess up the hope that Jesus wants to give to other people we interact with is when we somehow give them the impression that we no longer struggle with a particular issue, that we can’t relate to whatever it is they are going through, that somehow we are above it all and we never struggle anymore. And we say, “Man, absolutely you are welcome here. You need to dress differently, and get yourself cleaned up, and you need to act differently then you can some in here.” One of the most helpful, authentic, most truthful things we can say when hearing the struggles of other people is to look at them with no condemnation, with a great amount of empathy, and say, “Me too, but let me introduce you to Jesus because Jesus knows what you are going through. And He actually came and He overcame it so that we could find our identity in Him. Let me introduce you to Jesus and maybe you can find the same mercy, and grace, and forgiveness, and hope that can transform you just like it transformed me.” You see what causes worry in our lives is really a kind of uncertainty about the future. When it comes to me too issues, I knew the first thing I wanted to talk about together was, “I worry about the future. I worry about what will happen next. I worry about my life,” and all of us could say, “Yeah, me too.” This last week I was googling the top ten things Americans worry about most, and there wasn’t anything on that list that surprised me at all: The instability of the economy. Are we safe from the next terrorist attack? Is our government getting too big? Who’s going to be the next president? And tension between ethnicities and violence in our city.



Pretty much what the nightly news is every night is a running through of what we are already worried about. Let me report and make you worry about it even more. We’re all worried about what might happen next in our lives. What causes worry and anxiety is we’re uncertain about what is around the corner. Here’s the thing. The one thing you and I never worry about is what happened yesterday. Now we might feel sad about what happened yesterday. We might be resentful about what happened yesterday. But we don’t worry about it, because worry is a present and a future problem over things that we can or cannot control. But what it does is it robs us of what God may be trying to communicate to us in the present. So in the remainder of our time together I want to talk about what we do with worry and anxiety in our lives. All of us feel worried about something. What I want to do is I want to read these phrases. At the very end of them I just want all of us out loud, together, to say, “Me too,” both here at Northwest and at North. Sometimes I worry about my job … Me too Sometimes I worry about personal finances … Me too Sometimes I worry about losing the people I love … Me too Sometimes I worry about where our country/world is headed … Me too Sometimes I worry about the escalating violence in our city … Me too Sometimes I worry about who the next President will be and where our country is headed … Me too Sometimes I worry about what might happen next … Me too This particular weekend is known as Palm Sunday. And what Palm Sunday is, whether you know what it is or whether you don’t, is that Jesus was descending down the Mount of Olives into the City of Jerusalem knowing what was going to happen to Him next. Jesus was coming into the City of Jerusalem knowing that He was going to be arrested and that He was going to be crucified. He’s riding in on a donkey as was prophesied by this guy named Zechariah in Zechariah 9. As Jesus is riding into Jerusalem the people were lining the road, and they were laying down these palm branches in front of Him as He is riding in, kind of treating Jesus as if He is royalty, treating Jesus as if He were their King, as if this is ultimately what’s going to happen the next moment. You see, I might be worried about what might happen tomorrow or what might happen next but Jesus knew what was going to happen next. Jesus knew that these very people who actually wanted Him to be their King at this particular moment, in less than a week they would be yelling out to have Him crucified. Jesus knew He was going to be arrested. It wasn’t if, it was just simply when. He knew He was going to be put on trial unfairly. He knew the soldiers were going to put a bag on His head and punch Him in the face, making fun of Him and saying, “Hey if You know everything, why don’t You just tell us who hit You.”



And yet He faced all of that uncertainty with absolute certainty, boldness, and conviction. He didn’t have to, but He did. And He didn’t face all of that just to forgive us for our sins so that we could go to heaven one day. It includes that, certainly, but Jesus did that knowing that by His actions, by giving up His life on a cross, and being buried in a tomb, and by defeating death on our behalf He was reconciling our relationship with our Heavenly Father. He was reassembling that shattered image of God that is within us, and He was giving us an opportunity to actually have our earthly relationships redeemed. You see, Jesus was giving us confidence in this particular moment to face an uncertain future with the same certainty He had in that moment. When I think about dealing with discouragement, worry, or anxiety, which I think we all deal with in waves and in seasons, my go-‐to book in the Bible is the Book of Philippians. And I would encourage you to read through it this week. You can probably do it three, four, five times. It’s only four short chapters. Paul is writing this letter to this church in Philippi that was experiencing a lot of worry, or anxiety, or discouragement in their lives. And Paul writes to them to lift their spirits and to encourage them. But he doesn’t say, “Just stop worrying,” because that wouldn’t be very helpful. What he does is he redirects their worry and gets them to focus upon who they are in Jesus Christ. So he starts off in verse 4 and he says, “Always be full of joy in the Lord.” And we talked about that last week. There is a difference between temporary happiness and long range joy. Happiness is based upon your circumstances, but joy isn’t. And he says, “Always be full of joy in the Lord,” or “Remember what Jesus has done for you, remember who He is.” “I say it again—rejoice! Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember,” and that word remember is really key here, “the Lord is coming soon.” So what Paul is doing here is he is really trying to help us with our perspective in life, because there’s no such thing as a problem free life. I would even say there’s no such thing as a worry free life. He is just simply saying, “When you worry, when you are filled with anxiety, when you are concerned,” he points us to that word remember. He is like, “Remember what the Lord has done.” Now it would be one thing for us to just kind of like read through this and be like, “Wow, Paul must have just been in circumstances where he never worried.” That’s not the case. We’ll see that here in just a minute. Paul is drawing our attention back to the person of Jesus. He is saying, “Oftentimes, when we find ourselves in a spot that’s causing us anxiety, what we really want is for God to deliver us out of it. But maybe that’s not the best thing for us. Maybe God wants to keep us in it for a reason.” I remember when I was in college and I was going through a particular season that was kind of rough. I don’t even know what it was I was struggling with, I just know I was kind of confused, and I was worried, and I was thinking about my future and all of that. I remember being in the car on my way to campus to go to class one morning and I was praying on the way to campus. I was probably 19 or 20 years old and I prayed a prayer in that moment that I had never prayed in my entire life up until that point. I just simply said, “God, would You please, through this season and through this experience, would You please give me wisdom?” I’d never prayed that in my entire life. And honestly I felt a little bit prideful about the fact that I prayed asking God for wisdom. I thought, “That’s actually a pretty impressive



prayer. Way to go.” I got done and I was like, “I just asked God for wisdom, that’s a new milestone for me.” Do any of you want to guess how the next several weeks and months went? It got worse. It was like, “God, where are You in the midst of this? I asked for wisdom.” He said, “Yeah, I’m giving it to you.” Oftentimes what we want is for God to deliver us out of something. And there are times and places for God to do that. But most often God will use some kind of pain to clarify our purpose and purify our motives. C.S. Lewis would say, “Pain is the megaphone of God.” Oftentimes I’m not even listening to God until I’m in pain. And it provides for us a clear sense of direction. Write this down and remember this: When everything within me says to escape God whispers for me to endure. God says, “Hang in there.” I have a tendency to see things up close and short sighted. God has a tendency to see things through a long distance lens. What enables you and me to endure is when we know what’s coming. That’s why Paul writes in this passage. He says, “Remember the Lord is coming.” This is why the resurrection of Jesus, what we are going to focus on and talk about next weekend, is so powerful. It’s Jesus saying, “Look, I’ve already overcome everything this life could throw at you, including death, so what else is there to worry about?” And in those moments when we are tempted to give in to our worries and fears about tomorrow, it’s an opportunity every time to grasp the full weight of God’s promise to us in Jesus. This is why the Bible describes the resurrection as the “first fruits” of God’s promises to you. It’s a good faith deposit. Listen, Jesus has already walked out of a grave. And in those moments when we can be like, “God, where are You? Why don’t You deliver me out of this? I’ve asked for wisdom, I’ve asked for guidance, and yet it still seems like I’m in this.” God is saying to us, “Hold on to who you are in Christ and simply endure.” God is not slow, He is patient. In 2 Peter 3:9, I love this, it says, “The Lord isn’t really being slow about His promise, as some people think. No, He is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent.” It’s this idea that you and I are a work in progress and God is saying, “Listen, this is an opportunity, a moment for you to grow deeper in your trust of Me.” And as painful as it may be, when I look back to the seasons of my life where I grew in wisdom, and I look back at the seasons of my life where I grew spiritually—when I grew in wisdom and I grew in maturity it was almost always because of some sort of resistance. I was face-‐to-‐face with some sort of worry or anxiety about my future. Paul is simply saying, “It’s temporary and there is something better coming.” I love how Teresa of Avila says this. She says, “The first moment in the arms of Jesus, the first moment of heaven, is going to make a thousand years of misery on earth look like one night in a bad hotel.” You see, in moments that are really scary enough to worry about, ask God what it is He wants to reveal to you, and shape within you, and form within you. Which leads us to verse 6, the heart of the passage



and Paul gets right at it. He says, “Don’t worry about anything;” that’s an imperative. That’s a command. He is like, “Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank Him for all He has done.” Now it’s really important to understand that Paul was not writing this on a beach somewhere with one of those little umbrella drinks. That would just be condescending. Where’s Paul writing this from? From a jail cell. Paul is writing this after he’s been criticized, and arrested, and he’s worked himself to the bone. This is what he’s gotten. You could arguably even say Paul had more to worry about than they had to worry about, and yet he is saying, “Don’t worry about anything.” But then he is giving us a great exchange. He is saying, “When you are tempted to worry,” he is like, “just pray about it.” Then he gives us this great description of prayer that is really, really simple. He says, “Tell God what you need, and then thank Him for all that He’s done.” What is worry at the end of the day? Worry is dwelling on a potential problem, or maybe it’s a real problem in our lives that we have very little control over. So we kind of marinade in that, we dwell on it. Initial worry is not a problem. It’s what we do with the second thought, or the third thought, or the fourth thought that counts. We could say this: Prayer is worry that’s been redirected. It’s just a concern in our lives. That’s why he says, “Tell God what you need and thank Him for all that He’s done.” Paul is making this connection between the two. In other words, have any of you ever wondered, “How do I enhance my prayer life?” You’ve got it right here. Because very few of us I think have a problem with our worry life. There’ve been times in my life where I’m like, “I really wish that I’d spend more time in disciplined prayer, but every time I pray it feels like I get distracted, or I fall asleep, or I drift off.” I’ve never been like, “I wish I could enhance my worry life but every time I worry I get distracted,” I … We don’t do that. But he is saying worry and prayer are kind of like cousins, two sides of the same coin. And it’s actually where that thought travels. So if it terminates on you and you are like, “I think I’ve got this,” it’s worry. If you redirect it toward God and you say, “God, you’ve got this,” it’s called prayer. Jesus would say it so clearly in Luke 12. He would say, “Can all of your worries really do any good anyway? Can all of your worries even add a single moment to your life?” He would even build upon that in Matthew 6. He would say, “So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and He will give you everything you need. So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” And ultimately what dominates our thoughts is arguably the most important thing about us. It shows us what we are putting our hope in. It shows us, ultimately, what we worship and it shows us what the most important thing to us is. So can I just give you a really simple challenge today? And if this is the only thing you take from the message, it will be enough. Next time you are tempted to worry, the next time you are tempted to have anxiety over anything would you just stop whatever you’re doing and would you just redirect it toward



God. It might be the weakest prayer you’ve ever prayed, but it’s still better than letting it dwell in your spirit. Whenever you’re worried about the election, instead of reposting that thing on Facebook, stop and just redirect it to God in prayer. It will be more productive. It will actually cleanse out your heart and your spirit and you will be like, “God, I’m just going to walk with You through this.” Paul goes on in verse 7 and he says, “Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” I love that. He is like, “You may not be able to understand it; the peace of God will exceed your understanding.” I love this little word here, guard. It’s going to guard your hearts and minds. Why? Because our thoughts, they have a tendency just to run wild, don’t they? Trying to keep your thoughts disciplined is like herding a bunch of cats. They just run all over the place. And he is like, “You’ve got to discipline them.” Here’s the thing you might write down: Peace isn’t a formula, but a Person. Peace isn’t a formula that you follow and it’s not just the things that you know. I think all of us know that you shouldn’t worry, that you shouldn’t have anxiety, but we still do. Peace is found in a person and that’s what Jesus is offering. When Lindsay and I were dating her family invited me to go to the lake with them one weekend. They frequented the lake all of the time so everybody in her family knew how to water ski. I didn’t go to the lake that often when I was growing up, so I didn’t know how to water ski. And so I was a little bit insecure about it. I kind of told her that. I was like, “I don’t know. I’ve never water skied before.” She shared that with her dad. And so he said to me, “Why don’t we go out the day before and I’ll teach you how to water ski. Either he was being very nice or he saw this as an opportunity to get me alone to kill me. So we go out in the boat together. And actually I love my father-‐in-‐law. We have a great relationship, actually going back to this and just going through the whole talk. If any of you have ever learned to water ski as an adult you know what I’m talking about because it is one of the most counter-‐intuitive things you can ever do. Basically, you jump into a large body of water all by yourself and get on the water skis in the water all by yourself which, by the way, is going to be incredibly difficult to do. He said, “While you maintain your balance, hold onto the rope and then I’m going to try to get the slack out of the rope. And you are going to kind of be crouched in like this fetal position. Keep your knees bent and your arms straight. Give me the wave and then I’m going to hit the gas. “You are going to feel this incredible amount of pressure from all the water on your chest. You might even go into the water a bit and you might drown. So you need to stay there. And everything within you is going to want to stand up too soon, because you are going to want to get your head above the water.” I said, “Isn’t that a good thing?” He is like, “But you need to stay in the crouched position for just a few seconds longer until you get up enough speed. And when I yell out to you, then you can stand up and get on top of the water.” Yeah,



easy enough—it took me all day long. I drank so much of that lake water it was pathetic. Every time I could hear what he was telling me, but what I felt was different. And every time I chose to go by what I felt, not by what I was hearing from him. That’s what worry is. Worry is I’ve got this. I know it feels counter-‐intuitive. Where are you putting your trust? Are you taking matters into your own hands? Paul ends the passage in verse 8. He says, “And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” This is a form of re-‐direction. Verse 9, “Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.” In other words, “I may not feel this is true, but in those moments I’ve got to know that this is true because Jesus is the game changer.” Jesus is the reason why we can have confidence in whatever it is when we are worrying about—about what is next. And the reason why is because whatever it is you are worrying about, Jesus has already leapfrogged over that. He’s defeated death on your behalf. What else is there to be worried about? In fact Jesus would say in John 16, “You’re going to have trouble in this world. It’s going to cause you worry, and anxiety, and fear. But be encouraged, I have overcome the world. So find your identity in Me.” Some of you are in a really, really dark place where you are tempted to worry. I just want to encourage you with the simple thought that you might be closer to God than you think. God is close to the broken hearted. God is close to the vulnerable. That’s the reason why the most frequently used words of God in the Bible are fear not, and He wouldn’t say it so often if we wouldn’t have so many opportunities to give in to fear. Remember this: God does some of His best work in the dark. And when you are in a dark spot, God is closer to you than you might think. I wrote this down in my notes when I was studying this last week. This might help someone: In the dark with God is far better than fabricating your own pseudo light. When I get in a dark spot I panic. And I’m trying to get out of it, trying to find a side door. And God says in that moment, “Can you find your rest in me?” Psalm 56:3 says it so well. It says, “But when I am afraid, I will put my trust in You.” Every single week we are facing circumstances where we could actually say that with complete confidence. You say, “I’m afraid.” Me too. I’m afraid every week. There are circumstances that are coming in on me whether it’s at the national level, and I don’t have any control over that, or whether it’s in my personal life, “But God, I will put my trust in You.” And I want to give you an opportunity, maybe for the very first time, to simply pray that very simple prayer. Say, “God I don’t know everything I think I should know about the Bible and I certainly don’t have my act together.” I just want you to know you are in good company with a whole bunch of people here who are not perfect. And that’s the reason why we are in such need of a Savior in Jesus Christ.



You can find a place here, no judgment, no condemnation just a group of people saying, “Me too. Let me introduce you to this guy named Jesus who has changed everything about me.” You can have confidence to face everything you are facing. The team is going to come out and we are going to sing this great song with a great title. It’s called Cornerstone. And it’s just simply a time for us to reflect and say, “What is it I am building my life upon? What cornerstone am I facing and can it endure anything my life will throw at me? And then we’re going to take communion together and we’re going to keep singing. So let me pray for us right now. Father we thank You for a teaching that I know that feels so counter-‐intuitive to so many of us. I know that there are people here today who are facing an issue that seems so big, and they’re in a really dark spot and they can’t see a foot in front of them. I pray that they would see this as an opportunity to not dwell, or to not give in to the anxieties and the fears they are experiencing, but as an opportunity to fully rest in You. They’re going to have to do it in faith, because there is really no other way. I pray that for all of us, as we look at the world we live in and we look at the circumstances and all these things we just can’t control. May we come to You and may we just rest in our identity in Jesus Christ, knowing that we can boldly approach Your throne of grace because of what He has done on a cross for us. So help us to see that worry is actually a gift in disguise, that we can redirect that to You and know that You’re going to help us grow in wisdom, that You’re going to help us grow in our faith and our understanding of who You are in our lives. But help us in that, God, because we don’t have the strength. So we ask this right now in Jesus’ name as we invite You into this place. And the church says, “Amen.”

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Me Too I Worry About What Might Happen Next… ·...

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