Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] And actually, I believe that Jesus is showing us something about that, the idea of the mundane things sometimes, or what maybe we would consider boring or take for granted. Jesus is trying to shine a light on those things for us so that we might see the miraculous that is happening in our neighborhoods and our churches, in our city, even if it doesn't quite always feel like a brand new and shiny thing. And here's how I think Jesus does it. In Mark, chapter six and verse one, it says, Jesus left that part of the country and returned with his disciples to Nazareth, his hometown. The next Sabbath, he began teaching in the synagogue. And many who had heard him were amazed. And they asked, where did he get all this wisdom and power to perform such miracles? It says they're amazed, and then it follows in verse three it says, and then they score coughed. Well, he's just a carpenter. The son of Mary and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon. His sisters live right here among us. And they were deeply offended and refused to believe in him. Talk about a group of people that are looking for a reason to be offended. This is them.
[00:01:10] Then Jesus told them, a prophet is honored everywhere except for in his own hometown, among his relatives and own family. And because of their unbelief, he. He couldn't do any miracles among them except to place his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their unbelief. And Jesus went from village to village, teaching the people. He called his 12 disciples together and began sending them out two by two, giving them authority to cast out evil spirits.
[00:01:34] He told them to take nothing for their journey except a walking stick. No food, no traveler's bag, no money. And he allowed them to wear sandals. But don't take a change of clothes where wherever you go, he said, stay in the same house until you leave town. But if any place refuses to welcome you or to listen to you, shake its dust from your feet as you leave to show that you've abandoned these people to their fate. And so the disciples went out telling everybody they met to repent of their sins and to turn to God. And they cast out many demons and healed many sick people, anointing them with olive oil. Let's pray. Father God, we believe that you're here in our midst. We pray that we would see the wonderful and miraculous things that you're doing all around us in every moment of every day. That we would see the people that are prophets, that Usher the love and the mercy and the grace of Jesus into our world, that we would see them, celebrate them, emulate them, and encourage them to keep going. In Jesus name, amen.
[00:02:29] This last summer, I took my son to a baseball camp at Oregon State University over in Corvallis.
[00:02:36] And I did a really classic Ben thing, and that I slightly overbooked myself, which means when I mean slightly overbooked, I mean, I can get everything done if I try hard enough, but I usually make everybody angry all around me. And I did such a thing. I went and took my son over, stayed over there with him in Corvallis, and then on Thursday, I said, here's the thing, Joel. I'm going to leave you with your friends for this one night here over at camp, because I'm going to go speak at youth camp at the Ocho camp. All right? For those of you who don't know, the Ocho camp and Corvallis are not close to each other.
[00:03:16] This is like a three and a half hour drive one way. And I was like, I'm going to go and I'm going to speak, and then I'm going to come right back. It'll be fine, Joel. You'll be great with your friends. And he wanted to go with me, which was a terrible decision on his part. But we loaded up the truck and we went out to camp. And, you know, I ate basically a whole bag of beef jerky on the way there. And we stopped at McDonald's and did all the things. All of my messages are sponsored by McDonald's, by the way, for those of you who've been here.
[00:03:45] And I get to the camp and the service is about to start that I'm going to speak at. And our youth pastor, Josh, did something that was so ridiculous and so nice. He basically gave me an introduction to this group of youth that probably meant more sense in the context of an MBA starting lineup instead of being a pastor at a camp. And he gives me this whole he lists off my resume and he raises his voice a little bit, and by the time he says my name at the end of. Of this introduction, people are hollering, they are clapping, they are screaming. And Joel looks at me while this is going on, and he liter goes.
[00:04:30] And he rolls his eyes as far back into the back of his head as humanly possible. And I was like, in this moment, my son is experiencing this environment very differently than all the other kids in the room, as my son just spent three and a half hours in a pickup truck with me watching me Eat a huge bag of jerky and choking on one of the chili flakes in the spicy jerky in the back of my throat and then hacking up a lung for the next four or five miles. And my son is going, this man is not the one that you think is here.
[00:05:02] The familiarity that my son has with me, right. It changes things. Now, I'm not saying that this is a direct across illustration where if only my son would honor the prophet in the pickup truck with him right now, that's not the idea, but I am trying to illustrate that familiarity changes things for us, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But we experience things differently based on that familiarity. And this is true in this story with Jesus. As Jesus goes back to his hometown, there are people that don't accept him. They don't take in his miracles and they don't see what he is doing in the in their midst simply because he grew up around the corner from them.
[00:05:48] And I wonder for us in our own faith that we have actually silenced so much of what God wants to do, or we have been blind to what God is doing in so many cases because we have come so deeply familiar with what we believe. God is now Christians in my experience, and I've been a Christian for a very, very long time, grew up in a pastor's house. I've seen a lot of versions and additions of Christians. And what I can say is almost universally true for people in the Christian faith is that we like a little bit of novelty that pops out in the faith every once in a while. Christians love it when the athlete at the end of the super bowl acknowledges Jesus in their post game interview. We love that.
[00:06:35] We love it when the musician or the artist that is not known as a Christian artist does a cover of a hymn or one of our favorite worship songs and we go, oh my gosh, immediately. Google is so and so a Christian now. I like these things too. Okay, I'm not making fun. Well, I'm making fun of you, but me too. Okay, we're all in this together. We love these things. Why do we love. Because they're novel. They're little pop outs. They, they, they're a little bit of a change up from how everything goes. And what we often miss is the things that are happening in the neighborhood right around us.
[00:07:14] These things happen, these novelties, and they're beautiful. But I would ask us if we're prepared to be moved by the way of Jesus and the kindness of others in our own city and neighborhoods. I wonder if we could be Moved by those willing to pray for the sick and see them recover right in our own church. If we could be moved by those who are lovingly solving a housing crisis that exists and that many are feeling the impacts of. If we could be moved by those who have already have too many mouths to feed and somehow they're finding a way to feed more. We can be moved by addicts coming to grips with the state of their life and their condition and they make the decision to seek help. Maybe one of the greatest miracles of all is an addict that comes to grip with their state of life and they begin to look outward and not inward. Humility. Maybe we could be moved by seeing a friend sending a late night text to check in on another friend after a long and difficult day.
[00:08:16] If we let these ways of Jesus become too familiar to us, I promise you they will pass us by and we will miss out on the miraculous work of God that is happening every single day.
[00:08:31] Sometimes I believe that we feel like as a faith that the world is going to hell in a handbasket simply because we won't open our eyes to the things that are immediately around us. I'm not going to stand up here and say that everything is right in the world right now and that everything is as it should be. But I will say that every era of this world and in every difficulty in every nation and country, God is doing miraculous works even in the midst of less than ideal circumstances. All the time.
[00:09:00] I wonder if the people of God, instead of using every opportunity in our familiarity with Jesus to crush other people and organizations around us, instead we would stop and we would acknowledge the prophets that are in our hometown, drawing our hearts back to Jesus through love and kindness in what we have now deemed to be very ordinary ways. I wonder if we see these people, if our lives wouldn't be changed forever.
[00:09:29] I love how the message translation puts it. It's Eugene Peterson's translation of the Bible that says in verses four through six says Jesus told him a prophet is little honor in his hometown, among his relatives, on the streets he played in as a child. Jesus wasn't able to do much of anything there. He laid hands on a few sick people and he healed them and that's all. He couldn't get over their stubbornness.
[00:09:52] I want you to elbow somebody next to you that's stubborn. Just kidding. Don't do that.
[00:09:58] He left and made a circuit of the other villages, teaching. I referenced a few weeks ago a dog that I have named roland. Roland is 110 pounds and just sweet and so dumb.
[00:10:10] He's a big. A lot of times I don't call him Roland. He comes up to me and go, oh, big sweet dumb boy. And he's like, yes, it's me.
[00:10:19] Because he doesn't speak English, you see. And he and I have been taking walks.
[00:10:27] He had a leg issue that kind of. The vet was like, oh, you need to actually really, really walk him, not just play with him in the yard. And so I started walking him about a year and a half ago. And we have a pretty similar circuit that we walk on on the sidewalks in our neighborhood.
[00:10:40] And the other day I did something terrible in that I didn't have enough time to do our normal walk. And so instead I took a left where normally I would take a right to go back to the house. And wouldn't you know it, this big sweet, dumb boy was like, no, wrong way.
[00:10:57] And he sat down and he looked at me and I was like, I'm literally, I'm talking. I'm like, no, Roland, we don't have time for this. I have to go home, I gotta go pick up the kids again. Because he totally speaks English and he looks at me as if to say, I know the way.
[00:11:16] Why would you go in that direction? We're supposed to go over here. And often we find ourselves being the Roland in the relationship with Jesus where we're going. No, I know how this is supposed to work. I'm supposed to pray like this, I'm supposed to live like this, and then this result will happen. I'm gonna attend church this much, I'm gonna get involved to this degree and I will give only this much. And then God comes and he wants to actually pull the leash. He wants to direct us into a little bit of a different direction because, you know, God is God and we are truly trying to follow after him in this faith. And we sit down 110 pound dog style and we look at him and go, no, I got this thing planned out. I know where we go next. I found a lot of comfort in our routine, Jesus, and I'm going to go ahead and stick with this one.
[00:12:04] And we want to look at God and say, that didn't come in the correct package. That didn't look and sound the way that I thought it would when I began to follow you, Jesus. So this must not be the right way. But often God is leading us into different or fascinating or curious or uncomfortable spaces where he is encouraging us to follow after him so that we can see and do the work of the will of God, how he has called us to do it. Amen.
[00:12:30] If we are stubborn in these places, we will miss what God is trying to do.
[00:12:42] And then we enter into what is kind of the second half of the story. So after Jesus is rejected in his hometown, he then sends the disciples, which tells us something about the early movement of this, what would become the New Testament church is right from the start, it is a gathering faith where Jesus gathers these disciples around him and then it becomes a scattering faith as well.
[00:13:07] This is a good illustration for us here today as the church that the great work that Jesus does here in Bend is not because we build the coolest services around in this room, this service, this. Sundays are simply a beginning to something that God wants to do through us in our workplaces and our families. Every single day and week, we are called to gather and then scatter from there. And when Jesus does this, he does three things with the disciples that actually encourage them in this scattering. And the first thing is this. Jesus calls them, he lets them know that they're not here on accident, that they actually have something, a new mark on their life that illustrates that they have been called out into these streets and into these villages and cities by someone with intentionality.
[00:13:59] He doesn't give them every single little specific along the way. And you're going to come to this house and then you're going to walk down this street and you're going to meet this person named this instead. He equips them with a new found understanding of love and grace and mercy through this good news that is the gospel.
[00:14:16] And then they go out with that understanding and they are strengthened beneath that understanding.
[00:14:21] Don't make the mistake in Christian faith of believing that you're only called if you've heard some kind of audible voice from heaven giving you very, very specific details about what to do next that may happen for you. It has never happened for me. It may have happened to some of you in this room, for which I am extremely jealous. Well, depending on what God told you to do, we'll see if I'm jealous.
[00:14:44] But what we are all called and equipped with again is this understanding of a new way of love and grace and merc sacrifice that Jesus has brought into the world that we then get to go and give out to the rest of the world. My favorite illustration of this is if we get caught up, if we're gonna be a teacher, if we get caught up on whether or not God is actually calling us to teach in third grade or first grade, we will miss the Fact that God probably doesn't really care if it's first grade or third grade, but he doesn't care where you teach. He cares how you teach.
[00:15:16] He cares how you function with children. He cares about how you care for them in their personal situation. A lot of time is wasted by churches and Christians sitting around going, we're waiting on a very specific word of the Lord. And Jesus is going, I gave you specifics. Go and love your neighbor.
[00:15:35] Yes, but something more direct.
[00:15:38] With what kind of banana bread?
[00:15:42] Jesus is like, don't care.
[00:15:45] Should we move across the country? And Jesus, for many of us, is going, I don't care.
[00:15:51] How are you gonna be when you get there?
[00:15:54] How are you gonna live? Are you gonna look out for lonely people?
[00:15:57] Are you gonna be a light unto the world? No matter who your neighbor is, will you choose to love? I love that story about the Good Samaritan. And a lot of times we forget that the Good Samaritan comes with this preamble of this guy coming to Jesus after Jesus has this great teaching. And Jesus says, love your neighbor. And this guy walks up and he says, well, okay, but who's my neighbor? Like the cul de sac? The whole cul de sac, or the ones like next to me and Jesus, if I were Jesus, Jesus is better than me. But in my mind, Jesus kind of rolls his eyes for a second and is like, oh, my gosh, one of these. Let me tell you a story.
[00:16:33] We get caught up in these silly little questions.
[00:16:36] Who's really my neighbor? What am I called to actually do? What kind of banana bread? First grade or third grade? How we live and how we love and care for the world around us is what Jesus is most invested in. I promise you, if he wants you specifically in that third grade class, you will have a life that feels a little bit like Jonah for a while. And he will make sure that even if you gotta jump in and get swallowed up by a whale before you end up in that third grade class, that you'll end up there. He's calling us to love in our context. So you're called. You are called to this. Every single one of you in this room is called to this. So you can walk with confidence and conviction that you have actually been called to go into the world and love in such a way.
[00:17:17] And then they're sent. Jesus didn't gather his disciples to keep them close again. It's not a simple gathering, and I hope everybody comes and sees, and maybe we can build a stage large enough and we can light the Stage well enough in order to gather enough people around us. No, he sends them out.
[00:17:33] This Christian life isn't passive to where we can kind of isolate ourselves so that we can go through our own formation unchecked and all alone. Instead, we're called to go out into the world. It's a life of mission to bring this gospel into the world.
[00:17:49] Like the disciples were all sent into the world to share this good news. Are we answering the call? And are we willing to let God do a different thing sometimes in order to answer that call? So I grew up very evangelical.
[00:18:03] Some of you may identify with this. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna make you twitch here for a second. I grew up going door to door, people's houses, and cold knocking, you know, hello, do you know Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?
[00:18:15] Oh, boy. Okay, I understand you don't want me here.
[00:18:19] And I gotta tell you something. And I know that there are stories that are not like mine, so I want to acknowledge that. But it never worked when I did it. And some of you are like, well, you were bad at it. Maybe it never worked.
[00:18:38] And what I have seen work in my life is that what I try my best to do, is that every space that I enter into, maybe it's as a volunteer. Maybe it's a gym that I'm a member of or a friendship that I make. I try to genuinely love and care for people in every situation, no matter their background or how much they agree with me or disagree with me. I try to genuinely love and care for them with no ulterior motive.
[00:19:01] Sometimes people come to me and go, I've got this friend, and, you know, they don't go to church, but I'm gonna get them there. And I'm always like, I don't care.
[00:19:08] They don't have to come.
[00:19:11] I love this church. I think this is a great place to bring people. I have a lot of confidence that when people come as visitors here, that they can feel welcome and they belong. And there's not a lot of weird and crazy funky stuff going on here. I do believe that.
[00:19:25] But when people tell me, like, I promise I'm gonna bring him to church, my lack of concern is not because I don't think Westside's great or this is an important place. It's because I see that you are already with them.
[00:19:36] I don't need them to come and hear me talk. I need them to know that they are deeply loved by you with no ulterior motive.
[00:19:42] That is how you change the world. Around you. Not by bringing them in here all the time, not by thinking that this is the main goal and the main finale of the entire thing. We are sent. You are sent into the world. And I have confidence that Jesus is gonna speak to people. Not because my teaching is great and our social media works and we share the videos. Instead, it's because we are a people that are actively sharing of the love of Jesus Christ in every way, shape and form that we can in our lives. That's the change.
[00:20:16] So you're sent.
[00:20:18] Sometimes that's going to come in the form of talking about your faith explicitly. That's wonderful and beautiful and that changes lives. Sometimes it's going to be just about serving someone for more than a decade without even muttering a word and allowing the Holy Spirit do a work on them through your sacrifice.
[00:20:41] And that leads me into the final point that we are given authority. So we are called and we're sent, and then we're given authority.
[00:20:50] Now remember authority in the Book of Mark. We talked about this in the very first week. The authority in the Book of Mark is not about power so that we can walk into a room and we can begin to boss people around. Remember, authority does not look like a boss that is making decisions for a group, but authority looks like a mother who has sacrificed for their children and then loves and cares for and encourages those children. Because of that sacrifice, we are given authority, which means we are given the opportunity to care for and to serve people in the middle of their darkest hour, in the middle of a regular day.
[00:21:33] It's not about their own strength and authority that's given simply to the disciples, but instead it's something that's gained when we step out in obedience and sacrifice. God equips us to then overcome spiritual battles and darkness and serve effectively.
[00:21:51] We are given authority to drive out darkness in our world.
[00:21:57] This is a huge deal. This is where it comes down to being a light.
[00:22:02] Now, sometimes I think this can look exactly like it says in the Scripture, that you can go and you can, you can cast out a demon in a miraculous way.
[00:22:11] I believe that can happen. I believe it has happened. I also believe that darkness doesn't just come in this one form.
[00:22:18] I believe that darkness for many people encourages them to go far inward and to be a recluse and to pull away because the world has become so claustrophobic around them. And we are actually called to come in and to help set people free through this good news of Jesus Christ.
[00:22:39] Which is why I find it extremely difficult to walk out into the world and to care for people this way. It's meant to be difficult.
[00:22:48] You know what's easy?
[00:22:52] What's easy is what I see some street preachers do outside of sporting events. Have you ever seen this? They got a megaphone, and they got a sign that says, y'all are gonna burn in hell. You know, the guys.
[00:23:04] And I actually think there's a. There's a place for public preaching in such a way. But what I watch these guys do is purely an exercise in making themselves feel like they've done the right thing without actually having to go through the work of doing the difficult and deep and beautiful thing.
[00:23:26] And I used to see these guys as a kid, and I used to be like, wow, this is, like, kind of brave and courageous. And now I'm like, no, it's not. Anyone can go outside and scream at traffic.
[00:23:35] Anybody can.
[00:23:37] And it's like that meme, you know, an old man shouts at a cloud for blocking the sun.
[00:23:43] Anybody can do this.
[00:23:45] What's difficult is to walk with somebody through a difficult diagnosis. What's hard and deep and beautiful and dries out darkness and creates space in people's life is when they're experiencing doubt and difficulty, and you simply stand and sit by them and tell them that you believe in them. That takes a lot of work.
[00:24:06] That takes some text messages and some phone calls and some physical space to be made available in your life. Shouting at the world around us, at how awful and condemned it is is not going to do the trick of going into the villages, meeting with the people, seeing the needs and helping address those needs. That's what the church is called to do. Again, it's not just to come and see. It's a go and to scatter and to love and to care for the people in our world all around us.
[00:24:33] And the fruit of this labor should be that we see people around us be set free from this darkness.
[00:24:43] I have an illustration of this from the last couple days, actually. I've told you guys on a few occasions that my family and I are living out of our trailer in our driveway because there's some work being done in our house.
[00:24:56] And I don't keep bringing it up to get some sympathy.
[00:25:02] I did tell my wife. I said, I think the reason that we're doing this is so that I can have more sermon illustrations.
[00:25:08] And she said, that's not funny.
[00:25:12] And I said, yeah, but everybody's gonna think they're pretty funny.
[00:25:16] And she thought that was even less funny.
[00:25:20] But what we did. So we were Kind of. I have another tendency that I have is like, when things are really, really tough, I just kind of like dig deeper, even if there's a better, easier solution.
[00:25:32] And the trailer has just started to feel super claustrophobic. The morale's going in the tank for my four person family and the three dogs that were jamming inside this thing at night. And we've had water leaks, the fridge went out, we did all this stuff. And you know, my wife's waking up and looking at me and going, this is your fault. And I'm going, we can do this through the power of the gospel, you know, I don't know. I don't see anything that weird in my marriage, I promise.
[00:26:01] And I finally went down. I had nobody with me and I went down and I was like, I gotta see if it's affordable for us to get another trailer with a little bit more space. And I got one. It's got a slide out in Jesus name.
[00:26:14] You guys, this is not a big space. It's still a trailer. It is not a big space. And yet I picked up my daughter from school, she hadn't seen it yet. She walked in and she went, oh, dad, it's huge.
[00:26:31] And I was like, oh, sweet Jovie, it's been so long since you've been in the house.
[00:26:37] And then she stood in the middle. She stood in the middle of the area and she went like this.
[00:26:45] And she said, dad, I can spin around and I'm not touching the oven or the couch.
[00:26:52] I like could have cried.
[00:26:55] It's a big moment for me. And in thinking about this message and talking to you guys today, I thought that is a great illustration, a great view of what the fruit of our labor looks like. This when we feel like we know we're called and we're sent. We're given authority to go into the world and to push back darkness. People that have been released from darkness, which can come in so many different ways, shapes and form, sometimes it's addiction, sometimes it's a way of thinking, a mindset that says, because of my dad and his dad before him, I am this, and this is how I'm going to live my life. There's all kinds of ways that we experience this darkness. But what happens when the people of God come in and with authority and with an understanding that we're called and sent? We come in and what happens is we see people, sometimes over a long period of time, and sometimes over a miraculously short period of time, begin to extend their arms in their life and they spin around and they go, I feel like I belong. I feel like I'm seen. I feel like someone loves me. I feel like I have a purpose for my life. And that is what it looks like to drive out darkness from us all.
[00:28:01] This wide arms, this freedom. That's what the gospel does, is it creates this freedom. And so I want to, I want to read you this quote from N.T. wright. It says the longer you look at Jesus, the more you want to serve him in this world. Oh yeah, we want to serve, we want to go out. We look at Jesus but sometimes we feel a little bit less than motivated to do those things. And I wonder if it's because we've missed this neighborhood, Jesus, this thing that we've lost inside the familiarity. And I love how he finishes this quote. That is, of course, if it's the real Jesus we're looking at, we'll want to go out and know that we're called and served and sent. If we've been looking at the real Jesus.
