Template Oct 8, 2006 Messy Spirituality Series 2
Felt Need: What is God’s plan for my life, why is this so difficult to figure out?
Desired Results: Persons would hear the Good News of God’s grace and know that they are loved and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Message: God’s plan for Spiritual Misfits
Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-3 CEVA Large Crowd of Witnesses
1Such a large crowd of witnesses is all around us! So we must get rid of everything that slows us down, especially the sin that just won’t let go. And we must be determined to run the race that is ahead of us. 2We must keep our eyes on Jesus, who leads us and makes our faith complete. He endured the shame of being nailed to a cross, because he knew that later on he would be glad he did. Now he is seated at the right side [a] of God’s throne! 3So keep your mind on Jesus, who put up with many insults from sinners. Then you won’t get discouraged and give up.
Synopsis:
1. Why is it so difficult to follow Jesus?
A. Pretending to be more spiritual than we are.
B. Selfishness, Sin
C. godly incompetence
No one does holy living very well. Spirituality is the humiliating recognition that I don’t know how to pray well. I don’t understand God’s word or know how to navigate it properly, and I don’t know how to competently live out my commitment to Christ. Messy spirituality affirms our spiritual clumsiness.
2. Desperation meets Jesus.
A. Incompetence, story of Eric
. It is a myth that we have to fix ourselves to meet God. Pet shop story
B. God wants to meet us where we are, as we are.
3. We follow Jesus by:
A. Being honest about who we are.
B. Being Vulnerable.
C. Being Compassionate like Christ.
Lord of the Dance story
Metaphor:
Music:
Graphic Image:
Messy Spirituality 2
Land of the Misfits
Hebrews 12:1-3
Such a large crowd of witnesses is all around us! So we must get rid of everything that slows us down, especially the sin that just won’t let go. And we must be determined to run the race that is ahead of us. 2We must keep our eyes on Jesus, who leads us and makes our faith complete. He endured the shame of being nailed to a cross, because he knew that later on he would be glad he did. Now he is seated at the right side [a] of God’s throne! 3So keep your mind on Jesus, who put up with many insults from sinners. Then you won’t get discouraged and give up.
You hear the phrase, “just follow Jesus”, it is catchy, it is simple, but why is it so difficult?
That is what we will deal with this morning. It is difficult to follow Jesus because we often are pretending to be more spiritual than we are. This takes energy that goes no where. When we pretend to be spiritual we act like God is in control, when we know in our heart of hearts that He isn’t. When we pretend we put up the front that everything is ok, the family is ok, the finances are fine, my health couldn’t be better, praise God.
Pretending creates fake relationships built on fake foundations that we are in better shape than we want to admit. It is no wonder in our world, that depression has taken such a major part of our energy.
Secondly Sin and Selfishness get in our way of “ just follow Jesus.”
The whole idea that we aren’t quite what we represent here in worship sounds funny, but when we stop and think for a moment, who hasn’t dealt with loss,
fear of losing a job,
a marriage that isn’t quite living up to expectations,
habits that get between me and God,
financial issues that hound us,
Sin that ties us down
Selfishness that affects our priorities:
and the list goes on.
Do you see what I am saying? That when someone says, “Just follow Jesus” it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The last point to the difficulty of “just follow Jesus” is our fear of godly incompetence.
This strikes at the heart of the problem for many of us. We just don’t think we are competent enough to follow Jesus. We know we are incomplete, unfinished beings who are trying to get it all together and if God could only wait until we get our act together we might be more worthy to follow him...
My friends, No one does holy very well. Spirituality is the humiliating recognition that I don’t know how to pray well. I don’ t understand God’s word or know how to navigate it properly, and I don’t know how to competently live out my commitment to Christ. Messy Spirituality affirms our spiritual clumsiness.
Welcome to the land of spiritual misfits!!!
Often is our desperation that allows us to meet and follow Jesus. Mike Yaconneli talks about Eric. “I’ll never forget the day Eric, a recovering alcoholic, stood up in our church during announcements. Eric’s lifelong battle with alcohol had been mostly unsuccessful. He had been in and our of jail, and his drinking was taking its toll on his marriage. ‘I need prayer’, he said
‘my wife has given me an ultimatum- drinking or her. She’s asked me to decide today, and I just wanted to tell you all that I have decided......’
A long awkward pause ensued and every person in the church was on the edge of their seat with their face turned toward him, encouraging him, pleading with him to make the right decision. You could have heard a pin drop. Finally, he stumbled on, tears in his eyes. ‘I’ve decided to choose my wife!.’
Applause and cheering broke out. No one said it, but you could hear it, Good answer, good answer. Eric was not afraid to tell the truth; he was not afraid to reveal to all of us how difficult it was to give up alcohol, even for his wife.
Eric is a spiritual man. Troubled? Yes. Weak? Yes. Unfinished? Absolutely.
Eric refused to pretend life is clean and neat, and he knew he had to tell us the way things were, not the way we wished they were.
We often learn about following Jesus in the desperation of life. It is a myth, or if you choose an out right lie that we have to fix ourselves in order to meet God. God meets us right where we are.
Walking by a pet store, on his way to school, a young boy stopped and stared through the window. Inside were four black puppies playing together. After school he ran home and pleaded with his mother to let him have one of the puppies. “Il take care of it” you know the story.
Finally the mother relents and gives him the ok to buy a puppy.
After determining the boy had enough money the pet owner took the boy over to the window to pick out his puppy. After watching the puppies the boy said ‘Uh, Ill take that one.’
Oh no, said the pet owner you don’t want that one, he’s crippled. Notice how he just sits there; something is wrong with one of his legs, so he can’t run and play like the rest of the puppies. Choose another one.
Without saying a word, the boy reached down, lifted his pant leg to expose a chrome leg brace to the owner. ‘No’ he said firmly, ‘I think I’ll take the puppy in the corner.
It turned out that what disqualifies the puppy from being chosen by others is what most qualified him to be chosen by the little boy.
Think about this for a moment. Its amazing how few of us believe in the unqualified grace of God. Oh, yes God loves us, as long as we are clean, and whole and fixed. But it turns out what disqualifies you and me from ‘spirituality’ the mess of our lives and our crippledness- is what most qualifies us to be chosen by Jesus. Welcome to the land of the misfits.
Again I remind you that God wants to meet you right where you are, right now, today.
How do we follow Jesus?
First we follow Jesus by being honest, dropping the everything is fine routine. Let’s get real together. The world is looking for a place where there is honesty, there is acceptance, there is forgiveness.
When we get real we get vulnerable. To be real means that sometimes, we are exposed, we are showing our sores, our blisters. Will they care about me if they know me? It is scary, but we are not alone we are all in the same boat together, incomplete, unfinished persons of God.
When we are honest with each other we have the fantastic opportunity to be Compassionate like Christ. When someone like Eric shares the pain of his soul for all to see, it allows the community of faith to show the compassion of Christ.
We want to follow Jesus, it is our desire, but we think of all the reasons why it wouldn’t work, and basically say to Jesus, I want to follow you, but I don’t believe I am good enough. We talk our way out of relationship with God. We think that the way we lived yesterday, last week, or years ago, makes us damaged goods, and until we start living right we aren’t God material
The lie we tell ourselves is that until I clean up the mess of my life God won’t have anything to do with me. The opposite is true. Until we admit we are a mess, Jesus won’t have anything to do with us....
Let me conclude with these thoughts/
Once we admit how unlovely we are, how unattractive we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectantly, and whispers in our ears,’ you are special, do you want to dance?’
When we read stories from the New Testament where is Jesus? He prefers to spend time with the lost ones over the found ones, the losers over the winners, the broken instead of the whole, the messy instead of the unmessy, the crippled instead of the non crippled.
Mike tells of sitting in a hotel ballroom with fifteen hundred college students participating in a weekend faith conference. On the last day of the conference, with school starting the following Monday, the students made it clear they wanted to prolong the conference as long as possible. They wanted to party, to dance the afternoon away, to celebrate the Lord of the Dance, to resist going back to the busyness and demands of college life. The morning general session turned into a spontaneous celebration. Young men and women raised their hands, stood on chairs, shouted, cried, and laughed, and suddenly a conga line broke out. Within seconds, hundreds of college students were weaving in and out of the room in long lines praising God.
An older man with cerebral palsy sat in a motorized wheelchair, watching everyone else party. (He wasn’t a college student) I was seated next to him, watching the students celebrate, when suddenly the wheelchair lunged into the celebration. The man’s arms waved, his chair careened around the room with a jerky, captivating motion, hi mouth struggled open and shut making incomprehensible sounds. Somehow a man who couldn’t dance had become part of the graceful dancing of the crowd. Without warning, his motorize wheelchair lurched to the base of the stage, racing back and forth through a series of figure eights, twirls and circles. He was laughing, lost in the joy of the Lord. His joy had taken a cold, ugly piece of motorized machinery and transformed it into an extension of his unconfined worship. He and his wheelchair had become a dancing, living thing. This man with a crippled body found a way to dance the undanceable.
This man was doing what most of us would love to do, in the deep recesses of our souls. We would love to leave the pretense of a cold sterile religion, and exchange it for a faith that is alive and inviting, where the unwelcome receive welcome, the unqualified get qualified. I see a place where Jesus invites us to the dance, where he walks up to the messiest person and whispers in his or her ear ‘you are special, do you want to dance?’
