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] Good morning, everyone.
[00:00:08] How's it going?
[00:00:10] Well, my name is Lindsey Parnell, and I am the worship and spiritual formation pastor here. And today we continue our Westside One series in the Sermon on the Mount. We are in week four, and up until this point, we have learned and hopefully reframed one of the most famous teachings of Jesus from behavior modification, list of rules we now have to follow, checkboxes we must do to be holy to genuine life and heart transformation.
[00:00:41] We've also learned that the kingdom of heaven is available to everyone.
[00:00:48] We don't have to be poor in spirit or meek to access the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God is available to those who are poor in spirit and the meek in the lowliest, most destitute places of our lives. Even there, we can find the kingdom of God. Amen.
[00:01:08] Amen. We've also learned that the teachings of Jesus, especially here on the Sermon on the Mount, are not meant to be burdensome. We should not leave here feeling bogged down and like, oh, great, I now have to do all this stuff. But instead, it should be a liberating, freeing experience, and Jesus's teachings should lead us into that abundant life.
[00:01:31] And so, up until this point, Jesus's teachings have focused more on an outward expression of faith and our scripture passage. Today, he begins to look inward at the conditions of our hearts. And so let's read this together. Matthew, chapter six, starting in verse one, going through 18.
[00:01:50] Watch out.
[00:01:51] Don't do your good deeds publicly to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven when you give to someone in need. Don't do as the hypocrites do, blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity. I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get.
[00:02:14] But when you give to someone in need, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
[00:02:20] Give your gifts in private, and your Father who sees everything will reward you when you pray. Don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get.
[00:02:38] But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you and pray to your Father in private.
[00:02:46] Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you when you pray. Don't babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They Think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. Don't be like them, for your father knows exactly what you need, even before you ask him.
[00:03:06] Pray like this.
[00:03:07] Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.
[00:03:12] May your kingdom come soon.
[00:03:14] May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[00:03:18] Give us today the food we need and forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don't let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.
[00:03:30] If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your father will not forgive your sins.
[00:03:41] And when you fast, don't make it obvious as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and disheveled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth, that is the only reward they will ever get.
[00:03:55] But when you fast, comb your hair and wash your face, then no one will notice that you are fasting except your father, who knows what you do in private. And your father who sees everything will reward you. Let's pray together.
[00:04:10] Jesus, we thank you that your yoke is easy and your burden is light.
[00:04:16] We thank you that your teachings, Lord Jesus, lead us into a free, wide open space, God, where we can live fully abundant lives.
[00:04:26] Holy Spirit, we invite you to make your presence known today, to have your way in this place, to speak to our hearts and to our minds and to transform us to look more like you. Have your way in this place. We pray together today in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:04:43] Amen. Well, let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? It was the year 2004 and I had just moved to Bend, Oregon from Albuquerque, New Mexico to do a two year internship at this very church.
[00:04:57] And I was coming from leading worship regularly in my youth group and my church. All my family members were heavily involved in worship and leading worship. And it's just in my DNA, folks. And so I come here and I'm like, it's only a matter of time. They're gonna give me a mic like, get on the stage girl, we've been waiting for you.
[00:05:20] But what happened instead was they were like, actually here's a mop and a broom and one of those little toilet scrubbers and we'd like you to be in Facilities for the next eight weeks or whatever.
[00:05:33] And my not fully formed 18 year old brain was super disappointed and very humbled. Humble pie, Linds, here you go.
[00:05:44] Hear me, I love Facilities. I love the people that serve in Facilities. We need clean buildings that run smoothly so we can meet and go potty. Right? Like, we need that.
[00:05:54] But I had a really hard time with it. And so I tried my best to suck it up, to sweep with a cheerful heart. And there was one afternoon. I remember it as clear as day.
[00:06:06] I'm mopping what is now the family commons. It was late in the afternoon. There wasn't a ton of people in the building. And I'm mopping, and I hear someone coming down the hall.
[00:06:16] And I'm convinced as Pastor Ken and that he is gonna see me mopping and that he has the ability to take the mop and give me the mic. Right? So I'm mopping, and I decide. Oh, you guys. I decide to start sing. Singing really loudly.
[00:06:35] I know how much I love you guys. I'm throwing myself under the bus here.
[00:06:40] I sing loudly. And not just any song, a worship song, because I wanted Pastor Ken to think she's so talented, and, man, she's also so holy. Wow.
[00:06:53] Okay. It was not Pastor Ken. Couldn't tell you who it was. Again, I was disappointed, and I just continued to mop and go on my merry way.
[00:07:02] Well, fast forward to today in front of you, even just regularly. I am on this stage before you every single week, singing. Today, I am speaking, and I feel this very deeply. I really want you to like me.
[00:07:20] I do.
[00:07:21] Thank you. I love you, too.
[00:07:23] I want you to hear my words and think. She's so smart, and, man, she is so holy, and she knows what she's talking about, and she's got some cute shoes and all the. I want that deeply, and I feel that tension. This is my job to get up and to publicly worship our Lord and Savior. I walk this line every week, and sometimes I do it great and sometimes I don't. And it is the reality of my life, and I bet it is a reality of yours.
[00:07:55] Maybe you can't relate to being the most cringe and going to great lengths to be noticed and applauded and promoted. But as I speak, maybe you can recall a time you've inflated some details, exaggerated something, spoken or prayed a little more loudly than you needed to so the person a couple of seats down would hear you and think you're so awesome and so holy and so spiritual.
[00:08:21] Maybe you've gone to some lengths to make yourself look better than you actually are.
[00:08:29] Dallas Willard wrote that the primary threat to our spiritual life isn't just sin, but the exhausting effort of managing our image before others.
[00:08:43] I propose today that we perform and we Pretend because we forget who we actually are.
[00:08:53] The insatiable need for applause and approval comes from a place of our identities being rooted somewhere other than the love of God.
[00:09:03] It is God's dream for us. His hope that his love for us would become the truest truth of our lives, that everything we do stems from that place, and that that would be enough so we don't have to pretend and put on airs.
[00:09:23] The hunger for approval and applause reveals a hunger for our true identity.
[00:09:31] God's love for us is not based on anything you have done, are doing or will do.
[00:09:39] Romans 8, 38 and 39 says, what can separate us from the love of God?
[00:09:45] Nothing.
[00:09:47] Nothing can. Not death, not life, not angels, not demons, not principalities or powers. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. And let me tell you this.
[00:09:59] You will never be more loved by God than you are in this very moment right now.
[00:10:06] You are the most loved by God right now. And it will never hinge on anything you do or don't do. How well you perform, how well I speak today. God's love does not hinge on that. It is one of the most consistent laws of the universe. His love for you.
[00:10:28] Look at the life of Jesus.
[00:10:30] He's around 30 years old, and he decides to take a walk down to the Jordan river where his cousin John is baptizing people.
[00:10:39] And he gets in the waters and he decides to be baptized. And he comes up out of the water and Scripture tells us an audible voice from heaven was heard. What does this voice say? It is God the Father. Matthew 3:17 says, this is my son, whom I love.
[00:10:57] With him, I am well pleased.
[00:11:00] Before Jesus had done anything with worth note, he did not have a public ministry. He had not cast out demons. He had not healed the sick. He hadn't multiplied food to feed the multitudes. He'd done nothing. And God looks at him and says, that's my kid.
[00:11:18] I love him so much and I am so pleased with him. And I say, today, God looks at every single one of you and says the exact same thing. That's my kid.
[00:11:32] I love them.
[00:11:34] I'm so proud of them.
[00:11:36] And it's not based on performance.
[00:11:39] It's not based on the checklist we make for ourselves.
[00:11:43] It's just because you're his kid and that's who you are. That is the most true thing about you.
[00:11:51] Once we learn that, once that gets into our bones, we are transformed.
[00:11:58] There are so many voices saying otherwise. Right? Prove it.
[00:12:03] Prove God loves you. Prove you're worth something.
[00:12:07] Find Some influence, some power, do something relevant, make a difference.
[00:12:12] Jesus heard this exact same voice right after he was baptized. And God the Father says, this is my kid.
[00:12:20] He hears another voice that says, turn these stones into bread.
[00:12:24] Prove you're the beloved. Prove it. Jump from the temple. Then people will notice you and you'll have some power. That's what you came to do, right? And Jesus says, nope, I don't have to prove anything.
[00:12:40] I am the beloved of God. I am loved by God. And that is the desire of God for all of us, for that to be our identity. When we forget that is when we will search other places for approval and applause. But when we remember this, we will find rest from the exhaustion that comes from always trying to curate our lives.
[00:13:04] Maybe this is the millionth time you've heard Jesus loves you. And can I say, what a shame that that has become such a cliche statement that it doesn't really do anything in us anymore.
[00:13:14] Jesus loves you should be a radical statement that changes everything about us.
[00:13:19] Maybe it's the millionth time you've heard this, or maybe this is news to you. Today, you have been crushed by the burden of feeling like you have to do everything right. Either way, this information must move from our heads to our hearts. It can't just live here. This is not where transformation happens. It must become an integral part of how we live and what we believe. So how are we actually transformed?
[00:13:47] Jesus would say in Matthew, chapter six, it's the secret place.
[00:13:51] It's the secret place.
[00:13:53] He says, go into a room, close the door, pray in secret.
[00:14:00] He's not giving us new rules. He's giving us a better way to live. He knows that performing is exhausting.
[00:14:10] When who we are is rooted in what others think of us, our security will rise and fall with the fickle approval.
[00:14:19] I know this firsthand. It was about six months ago. It was just a tough season of ministry. It really was. Those happen. You do this long enough, just like you do anything long enough. And there's harder seasons than others. And this season particularly, man, people had opinions, a lot of them, and they were all coming my way. And some were awesome and helpful and encouraging, and others were not. And it took a toll on me.
[00:14:46] And I remember my husband and I with our two girls. We were at a restaurant, couldn't tell you where, and I was watching our server, and, you know, he's preparing someone's food or drink or something. And I remember I felt so jealous of him and his job.
[00:15:02] Man, that guy gets to clock in service Food, gather his tips, clock out, go home, and he doesn't have to think of this again.
[00:15:11] Man, what would that be like I had? Let the approval or the disapproval of others determine who I felt I was.
[00:15:21] And can I tell you, it was exhausting.
[00:15:25] Absolutely exhausting. And there's a reason why. It's our brains. The University of Pennsylvania conducted a study on what happens in the human brain when. When we believe we are being watched versus when we know that we are not. And when we do not have an audience, our brain enters what is called the default mode network.
[00:15:48] It's in this state that we're actually able to process our personal history, our moral reasoning, and get this, our identity.
[00:16:00] When no one is watching, our brains are able to do this. When we believe we are watching and we move into performance mode, our brains moves out of the default mode network and into a state that this study called continuous partial attention.
[00:16:16] We can't have complete focus on any one thing when we feel like we're being watched. How tiring does that sound? The brain loses access to self reflection and moral clarity.
[00:16:30] And Jesus knows this. He knows this about our brains, that we were not designed to live in this continuous partial attention.
[00:16:40] And so he says, go into a room and close the door. Find a secret place.
[00:16:45] Now it sounds like he's speaking about a physical place, which.
[00:16:50] Yes, but also intention and motivation. Right? That's everything. If I'm doing this to be seen versus I'm doing this for God and God alone, that makes a big difference. But I would say a physical place is actually gonna be helpful in this. My brain goes to like Harry Potter, his room under the closet or whatever you. Yeah, that's great. Go to a little closet under the stairs, get alone. You know, 90s Christianity did a number on a lot of things. And I think Morning DeVos was one of those where the emphasis was first thing in the morning, you get your Bible, you read your scripture, you journal, you pray, and this is what this has to look like for everyone.
[00:17:30] And I don't think that's the case. I don't think it's a one size fits all situation.
[00:17:35] I do think we need to return to some kind of quiet time.
[00:17:39] We have to get alone with Jesus, go into a room, close the door, pray, read scripture, study the scripture, sit in silence, sing, and do it all with nobody watching except your Father in heaven who will reward you.
[00:18:04] It is in the secret place that we starve our egos and feed our spirits.
[00:18:10] And it is there that our truest identity, loved by God is solidified and reinforced.
[00:18:18] I argue today that the secret place is actually the only place where true transformation can happen, because it is only there that we don't have to perform that. No one but God watching.
[00:18:31] Jesus wants to form us into the kind of people who no longer need to pretend. And he says, start in the secret place. But I want to change you into a different kind of person, a kind of person that no longer needs to pretend.
[00:18:47] He illustrates this in Matthew chapter 7 by telling a story using some flora and fauna, as he does in Matthew chapter 7. Starting in verse 16, he says, can you pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?
[00:19:03] A good tree produces good fruit and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can't produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can't produce good fruit. What is he saying? Essentially, you can't get oranges from an apple tree, and you can't get apples from an orange tree. The kind of people that we actually are will produce that. That kind of fruit. And so if I am living for the applause, I'm living for the approval. The fruit of my life will be exhaustion. I'll be spinning my wheels. I'll be burned out.
[00:19:38] I'm not rooting myself in the goodness and love of Christ. And the fruit of my life will show where if I become the kind of person who only needs the approval of one I know I already have, that if I live my life in that way, then the fruit of my life will be filled with rest and contentment and joy.
[00:20:00] Jesus wants to actually change us to be a different kind of people.
[00:20:07] A good way to kind of gauge where you're at with all of this is to ask yourself a couple of different questions. And the first one is, who am I becoming?
[00:20:17] Most of us in this room today are grownups. We're adults. We have our children, maybe our grandchildren. We have a career. We're retired, and we kind of settle in and we think, I'm good. This is it. I've arrived to some extent. But the reality is you're actually being formed right now as we sit here. Whether you know it or not, you are always being formed into something.
[00:20:42] And I would ask you today to take a step back and ask yourself, what is forming me? What is shaping me? And who am I becoming? Do I like what I see?
[00:20:54] Does Jesus like what he sees? Am I the kind of person that will produce good fruit?
[00:21:01] A second question to ask yourself is, am I allowing Jesus to change me?
[00:21:08] Am I allowing Jesus to change me?
[00:21:12] Last week, Pastor Evan talked about how Christians have a tendency to look at others and pray, God, change their heart to look like mine.
[00:21:22] Or a better way to put that God, change their heart to look like something. I'm comfortable with.
[00:21:29] Guilty as charged.
[00:21:31] But what we need to be doing is God, change my heart to look like yours, change my heart to look like yours. And we gather here together in this space and we say, change our hearts to look like yours. Are you doing that really, truly?
[00:21:53] Are you taking time, go get alone with Jesus and saying, God, change my heart.
[00:22:04] We can't do it on our own. We can't change ourselves. Right? We put effort forward, of course, but it is a supernatural gift of grace.
[00:22:16] I wish I could give you 10 steps to a Transformed Life. I feel like that would be a bestseller in no time.
[00:22:23] I wish I could give you a checklist that says, do these four things and bada bing, bada boom, there you are. You look like Jesus. But it's not that simple, right?
[00:22:34] It is a supernatural act of grace that must be met with our placing ourselves before God and saying, change my heart.
[00:22:46] Jesus seemed to think and consistently taught that the ultimate treasure of our human experience was receiving God's love because he knew that is where we start, with our identity. That is the place that we live out of abundantly. Not an oppressed, burdened life, but a free one, experiencing abundance.
[00:23:15] I think we experience that in the secret place.
[00:23:19] I think that might be the reward that Jesus was talking about in Matthew chapter 6. Your father who sees you will reward you.
[00:23:28] I think it's that love of God that does it.
[00:23:32] So today as we close, I want to pray for two groups of people.
[00:23:37] And the first group is those who feel exhausted, like me, from performing, from pretending.
[00:23:47] Maybe you've pretended and acted a certain way because you want the approval and the applause and the accolades, and you want to appear like you've got it all together. Or maybe you've been pretending because you have felt like you have to look a certain way to fit into spaces like this.
[00:24:08] Either way, Jesus wants something so much better for us. And so I want to pray that he would heal our hearts.
[00:24:16] That those of you who have experienced rejection for not looking or acting a certain way, that you would find healing and hope here today and a newfound security and your identity as God's kid, who he loves so much and he's so pleased with you.
[00:24:38] The second group of people I want to pray for are those who hear about this love, who hear about this spacious place of belonging and living and identity and you want to experience that for the first time today. You want to say yes to Jesus.
[00:24:55] I want to pray for you.
[00:24:57] I also want to pray for healing, for your heart and encouragement as you begin this journey. And I want to celebrate you together today. So let's bow our heads and pray together.
[00:25:10] Jesus, I thank you that you see.
[00:25:15] You know.
[00:25:17] You know how tired some of us are.
[00:25:22] You know how spinning our wheels, searching for some kind of approval or applause has taken a toll.
[00:25:31] And today, Jesus, we invite you to touch our hearts, to heal the hurts, Lord, the constant searching.
[00:25:45] God, would you help us find rest today that there would be no more striving, no more trying in our own strength by sheer willpower, Lord, but that today we would find rest in your love for us.
[00:26:01] And we would meet you, Lord, in the secret place, opening our hearts to your transforming work and power.
[00:26:11] Lord, today I pray for those who want to begin following you.
[00:26:15] They want to start this journey of experiencing your love firsthand.
[00:26:22] Thank you. Thank you God, for drawing them to yourself. I pray that they would find encouragement and hope and healing today.
[00:26:32] We rejoice with all of heaven as they make that decision.
[00:26:37] Thank you God for your work here today.
[00:26:40] Thank you for your work in our hearts and in our lives.
[00:26:43] We're so excited to see what else you're going to do.
[00:26:46] In Jesus name, amen.
