Scripture Reading And Opening

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning, everyone. I hope we're good today. Today, um, my name is Aaron Paget, and I am uh uh graduating a year early from Vision's um dual enrollment program. Today I'm reading Mark 6, 53 through 56. When they had crossed over, they landed at Genesaret and anchored there. As soon as they got out of the boat, people recognized Jesus. They ran throughout the whole region and carried the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages, towns, or countryside, they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed. Next we have Mark 7, 1 through 13. The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash, and they observe many other traditions such as washing of the cups, pitchers, and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating their food with defiled hands? He replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, hypocrites, as it is written, These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain, and their tearling teachings are merely human rules. You have you have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. And he continued, You have a way, a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, Honor your father and mother, and anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death. But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corbin, that is devoted to God, then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother, thus you nullify the word of God by tr by your own tradition that you have handed down, and you do many things like that. This is the word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

All right. Thanks be to God. Um, Aaron, it's super fun to have you reading for us here today. And you are graduating here in a few weeks. Yeah, when are you graduating?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Yes, I'm graduating June 2nd.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Amazing. And you are gonna graduate.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Yes, I am.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Well done. Well done. And next year, do we have plans for next year? What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Yes, I'm going to Montana State in the fall.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Awesome. What like what are they like go bears? What are they?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Um, we are the Bobcats.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

The Bobcats. Those are like deceivingly like they look cute, but you don't want to mess with them. That's a bobcat. All right. And then Montana, what are you going to study there at Montana?

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I'm studying early childhood education and development.

Celebrating Graduation And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Amazing. Amazing. Give it up for airing. Great job this morning. Thanks for reading for us. Hi, friends. It's good to see you. Um, my name's Mike Goldsworthy. You're like, who is this random person interviewing one of our high schoolers here? Uh, my name's Mike Goldsworthy, and I get the pleasure of getting to hang out with you this morning. I um come from Long Beach, where um we are strong Dodger fans, but we can still be friends because Jesus teaches me to love your enemies. So that's that's all right. And in Long Beach, I was uh pastor in a church down there for about 20 years, and when I became the lead pastor of that church, I was 29 years old. I was just a kid. Like it was a poor decision by everybody. Like, what does a 29-year-old know about like leading something like that? But I was like convinced that I I knew like what I was doing. And and one of the things though that I knew I needed to do was that I needed to show up because I had a baby face and I needed to show up looking a little bit mature because you know I didn't need to become mature, I just needed to look mature. And so I decided that what I would do is grow a beard in order to sort of like hide my baby face. And I grew like a good beard. Like, like this is this is kind of like a weak beard compared to what I had. It was big, it was burly. I mean, it was so tough that I was doing some work with an organization in another state, and they asked me to send them a picture of myself for people that I was like corresponding with so that they could see

A Beard Story With A Twist

SPEAKER_01 4:40

like who they were doing some work with. And I sent it over, and one of the people on the team replied by saying, he looks like he could chop down a tree just by staring at it. Like, that is my favorite thing that's ever been said about me. Like, that's how good my beard was. So you need to you need to understand that first. First, you need to understand I had a good beard, good big burly beard going. Second thing that you need to understand is this that I can be a bit awkward when we hang out in person, like one-on-one, sitting down, hanging out, I can be a bit awkward. Sometimes people will see me speak on stage at a church or at another event or something, and they'll think, This is a guy I could hang out with. Like, I think we could be friends. And then we will sit and we'll chat for a little while, and they walk away, and they're like, Nope, we couldn't be friends. Because I can just be a bit awkward. And so, as I was leading this church, people in the church like wanted to get to know their pastor. They wanted to like have a connection between us. And so they would try to find ways to like connect with this awkward guy who is like trying to pastor them and to grow a beard to look mature. And so, what some of them began to do because they were like, What will he actually respond to is they started like asking me about my beard because it was just like some way, like, could we have some sort of connection here? And there's this one particular Sunday where where this older couple who were probably like uh twice my age at the time, that they came up to me after service and trying out of like their good heart to want to connect with their pastor, said to me, like, hey Mike, what's it been like to have this like big beard? You didn't have one, now you have one. What's that been like for you? And I gave an answer that I hadn't given before, and I don't know why I said this, but what came out of my mouth was I said, I had no idea how much manscaping was going to be involved. And this woman, her eyes get all big, and she leans in and she goes, What did you say? And I was like, Oh yeah, I had no idea how much manscaping was involved. Did you know how much manscaping is involved in this? Like I've watched videos that teach me how to manscape, and there's like lotions and products that I have to buy to manscape, and I find myself having to manscape like multiple times a week. And as I'm going on about manscaping, manscaping, manscaping, eventually she stops me and she leans in so that nobody else hears her and she says, Mike, I don't think that means what you think that it means. And I just kind of like giggled, you know, laughing like I knew what she was talking about. She walked away, and then I Googled manscaping, and it does not mean what I thought that it meant. I don't recommend Googling it because it will mess up your algorithm in a way that you won't be happy about. I don't think that means what you think that it means. This is some of what's happening in this encounter that Erin read for us that Mark records between Jesus and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, this encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders. Jesus shows up with his disciples, and then the religious leaders come and they come with this sort of like religious smugness, this way where they want to show how much more devoted they are than Jesus and his disciples. Jesus is getting these crowds and almost in this sort of like indignant jealousy, they show up almost as if to say, like, he must be watering down the faith in order to get all these people to show up. And so they ask Jesus this question why don't your disciples follow the tradition of the elders? Or I love I love the way that

Mark 7 And Religious Smugness

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Eugene Peterson, who translates the message translation, the way he translates it, he writes it this way: that why do your disciples flout the rules? It's this insinuation that there are these religious rules and traditions that are important to show yourself as a people of God, and that Jesus is and his disciples, they seem to ignore those. They seem to not care about them, they seem to flout them and treat them as if they are not a big deal. And in doing that, these religious leaders are like, You are showing yourself that you are not as devoted, you are not as faithful, you are not as committed to God as we are. And Jesus responds to them by quoting from this ancient prophet Isaiah, which is a much more tactful and Jewish and rabbinic way of Jesus essentially saying to them, I don't think that all means what you think that it means. I don't think the rules and laws mean and do what you think they are supposed to mean and do. Now, to get there, for us to like kind of understand what is happening in this moment, I want to paint a bit of a picture for you. I want to fill this in a little bit in a way that helps us get an idea of what's happening in this moment and why it's such a big deal. And so the Jewish people, they had been given instructions about what it looked like to live faithfully. These sort of like markers, these community markers that would distinguish them and their community, these community markers that would set apart the Jewish community. There would be these intentional choices they would make about how they would live, about rhythms of life that they would uh be a part of, about the way that they were going to do things that would be for the good of the greater community. And these distinguishing markers, the word that we'll often use for them, I don't always like to use because sometimes we use words that have like baggage and weight with them in ways that we miss what's actually what they're actually about. But the word that we actually use for those community markers is we call them laws. But sometimes when we hear laws, we think, well, that's just some sort of arbitrary rule that doesn't have a purpose or a point. But that wasn't the case with these, with these laws, with these community markers. That what they were important because not only did they help to set you apart and define you as the people of God, they helped to bind you together as a community. They helped you to live in a way that was actually oftentimes for your own good. They helped to ensure that the needs of every single person was being met. These community markers helped to make sure that the powerful were not exploiting the weak. These community markers, they helped to make sure that the rich were not taking advantage of the poor. They helped to make sure that you were living in a way that allowed for the flourishing of yourself, the flourishing of your family, the flourishing of your community, and even for the flourishing of like the physical creation of the physical earth because you were dependent upon it. And so these laws, these community markers are so important to them. And because they're important, what you want to do is you want to protect them. You want to make sure that they don't get violated. You want to make sure that that you don't violate that community law because if you do, you could be harming yourself. You could be harming others, you could be harming like uh uh what it means for you or others to flourish. And so you want to protect it. And so you want to create some distance from it in order to make sure that you

Building A Fence Around The Law

SPEAKER_01 11:30

don't violate that law, that community marker, because it's so important to you. And so what you do, it's it's a little bit like this. I want you to think of it this way. Let's say that you're on the freeway. And let's just assume for this moment that you want to be a law-abiding citizen. I don't know that that's true of you, but let's just assume for that moment that you want that to be true of you. And now I know that for those of us in California that speed limits are often suggestions, but let's just like play make-believe for a moment that the speed limit matters to you. And so let's say the speed limit is 65 miles an hour on the freeway, and that what if like one of the reasons for that is to actually protect yourself? And it actually is like to create safety for you and safety for the people who are in the car with you. What if there's even like some pragmatic reasons for it? Like maybe perhaps you get better gas mileage than you would if you're driving faster. But it's not even just about you and those who are in your car and what it does for you, but it's actually also about the other drivers who are on the road, these other people whose names and faces you might not ever see, you might not ever know them. But but because you all have said that there's this community marker that we're all going to buy into, what you have done is by doing that, you're looking out for the safety of everyone else on that road. Every person is saying, like, this is about the flourishing, the safety of all of us together. And so there is this marker, this community marker, the speed limit, this law that becomes important to you. And so what you want to do in order to protect that is you say, well, I'm never gonna drive faster than 64 miles an hour because I want to create some distance from it. That if I don't go faster than 64, then I won't actually violate that community marker. I'll stay slower than that. But then you realize that sometimes when I'm driving, I just don't like look down at the speed limit and all of a sudden I could be going 80 or 84. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set the cruise control at 64. And so I'm gonna set the cruise control at 64 in order to make sure that I don't violate this thing, because it's so important to me. Because it's so important not only for my flourishing, for my safety, but for the safety and flourishing of others that because of that, that I'm gonna set the cruise control and I'm gonna make sure that I that I don't violate that. Now, when you do something like this, what theologians call this, theologians call this building a fence around the law. Because that there is this law that's so important to you as a community marker that you don't want to violate it, you want to protect it. And so you build a fence around it in order to help you live out that community marker, to live out that calling, because it's so important to you. And so what begins to happen is that over time, that fence becomes incredibly important, so important that that becomes the thing that for you that you're like, I need to make sure that everybody is following this law, this rule. I'm gonna make sure everybody, I'm gonna go around and I'm gonna teach that what people need to do is they need to set their cruise control at 64 miles an hour. And I'm gonna write books about how people need to set their cruise control at 64 miles an hour. And when I teach my kids to drive, I'm gonna teach them that what you do is you set your cruise control at 64 miles an hour. And then when they teach their kids how to drive, they're gonna teach them what you do is you set your cruise control at 64 miles an hour. And then what you begin to do is you become the cruise control enforcer, making sure that everyone is following this rule of the cruise control. And what begins to happen is slowly over time that there is this community marker that was important for your safety and for the and for your flourishing and for the flourishing of those who are around you. But what begins to happen is that what becomes important is not that marker, but instead the cruise control. It's whether or not people are following the cruise control. That's what's being talked about, that's what's being passed on, that's what's being focused on. And you become the cruise control sort of like uh uh enforcer person. And this is what happens when you build a fence. Notice again what the Pharisees and the teachers of the law are upset with Jesus and his disciples about. Here's the question that they ask him in Mark 7:5. Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands? There's this argument that's going on here, and what's important to know is just simply this they have built a fence around Allah, around a community marker. And what they want to know is not what's the purpose of that community marker. What they want to know is why aren't you following the fence? The fence was put there for a good reason. The fence was put there by our forefathers whose forefathers taught it to them. It's been passed down from generation to generation to generation. We have built this fence. This fence works. Why aren't your disciples following it? We all follow the fence. Why aren't they following it? But the fence was developed with good intentions, but it was never meant to be the point. And friends, this is this unintentional move that happens out of good intentions in every single community of faith. Watch it happen in every single community of faith that the natural gravitational pull is to the fence that you've built. The natural gravitational pull is to this fence. Maybe you didn't build it. Maybe you walked into a community of faith. Maybe you walked into a place like this, and there's fences that have been built here that were important. There's reasons for it, there's a context for it, there's a story behind it, there's reasons why we have put those fences there, and so you've sort of like inherited those fences. Maybe there is somebody who mentored

Modern Church Fences And Numbing

SPEAKER_01 17:05

you and passed their fence onto you. Maybe there is somebody who's a teacher that you've learned from from a distance. You've read their books, you've listened to their talks, and you've inherited their fences. And pretty soon what's happened is the point becomes the fence. Unintentionally, over time, the gravitational pull is towards this fence because there are these markers of your faith, and the purpose of them is so important to you that you build this fence in order to help you live them out. But the problem is that when the community starts to become focused on the fence and forgets the purpose of it altogether, and then we start imposing that fence on others, and we start to become the faith enforcers of the fence. Let me let me tell you some ways that I've seen this work itself out in church. Actually, let me just tell you one way I've seen this work itself out in church. Because I had like five or seven ways, but I realized I don't want to keep you until Memorial Day because you got barbecues to get to. You got things going on. So let me just tell you one way. Maybe we could like um use it as an example to open up our imagination to see other ways that we could do this. So there's this instance in the letter the apostle Paul writes. It's in Ephesians, writing to the church in Ephesus. In Ephesians chapter five, that there's this line. Maybe you've heard it before. Paul writes this, he says, Do not get drunk on wine, but instead be filled with the spirit. Now that line, the purpose of it in that letter, when you put it in its context of what's going on in that place and that time and what's going on there, the purpose is not to say that you should never drink. The purpose of it is not to say that alcohol is bad in and of itself. I would actually argue that the purpose of it isn't about necessarily about getting drunk per se or just about drinking. That's sort of like a cursory reading of it. But there's a uh a more intentional, deeper way of reading it when we understand its context. That's what it's actually talking about is talking about doing things that numb you to being awake, fully awake to your life. Doing things that numb you to being fully awake to what the spirit is doing in your life. And in that particular place, in that particular time, they were using alcohol in a way that they were numbing themselves to being fully awake to their life and to what the spirit is doing in their life. And so Paul writes a specific thing, but it's not just about this specific thing, it's about all the ways, all the ways that we numb ourselves, all the ways that we numb ourselves to living awake and fully awake to our lives that are in front of us and what the spirit is doing in our lives. We numb ourselves in all kinds of ways. Yes, alcohol is one of the ways that we can numb ourselves, but some of us numb ourselves with video games. We can numb ourselves with doom scrolling. Does anybody numb themselves with Netflix on a Saturday night? We numb ourselves in relationships by avoiding difficult conversations, by never opening ourselves up in a way where we're vulnerable and we live this kind of like surface level kind of relationship, and we just numb ourselves in that relationship. What Paul is saying, what Paul is saying is the point, the point, the thing that's at the center here is that you don't want to numb yourself in such a way that you miss living fully awake to the life that's in front of you and to living fully awake to what the spirit is doing in your life. So avoid the things that are gonna numb you to that. That's the point. But for some people, in order to be fully awake to what the spirit is doing in their lives and not to numb themselves to it, they've had to build a fence around it because of a propensity that causes them to overindulge in a way that makes it difficult to be fully awake in their own lives, what the spirit is doing in their lives. And so if you've needed to do that, you're good and strong and courageous because you know yourself and you know your propensity. But there are different things, different fences that different people need for that, right? Like I've got a friend who cannot go into like a bar or where alcohol is being served. That's their fence. I have another friend that's no problem going into that place, but won't order a drink. That's their fence. I have another friend who realized he was numbing himself through video games, unplugs the video games and goes and throws it away because he realized, like, I just can't, like, I just find myself getting sucked into it and I just can't stop. And so he had to go throw it away, which I was like, dude, just sell it on eBay and get some money out of it. But like he needed the drama of like throwing it away. That was his fence. I have this little like device in my house called a brick, where I walk over to it. It's in my kitchen and I touch it with my phone, and it shuts down every social media app on my phone, and it shuts down every game that's on my phone because I realized I was using those things to numb myself. And so I have to do this intentional thing where I walk over and I touch it, and that's what can like unbrick it and re brick it. And I have to do that. That's a fence for me because I don't want to numb myself to the life that's in front of me and to what the spiritual. Doing in my life. And so we need these fences. But here's the problem is that when those fences become the point, and churches will develop all kinds of rules and things around that. And so you take that passage in Ephesians 5, and churches will start to say things like, Well, good Christians don't drink. They've built a fence, and there's probably a good reason why they built that fence, but they start to universalize it and enforce it. Or some churches might say, like, we're much more nuanced than that. What we do is we say, uh, uh, like Christians can drink, but our leaders can't drink. Because surely the people who we believe are the mature people in our church can't be entrusted with alcohol. And so we tell them that they can't drink and we build a fence around it. And I gotta tell you, I have so many weird stories of ways that this has played itself out in pastors across the country. Like I have this one friend, they didn't have an explicit rule in their church, but there was sort of like it was sort of like one of those things that was like an unspoken understanding, you know, those where it's like, you know, in this community we don't do this thing. Nobody says it out loud, but we just kind of like all know we don't do this thing. And he was a pastor on staff of this church and he had gone grocery shopping and he had picked up a six-pack is the first thing that he and he was grocery shopping for the whole week, but the first thing he read was a six-pack, which was his first dumb move. You don't get that first, you get that last to keep it cold, right? But like he gets it first, and he's gonna go get other stuff. And as he gets to the aisle, he sees a woman from his church over there, and she says, Pastor RJ, and he just pushes it and it like goes sailing down the aisle, and he walks over and he's like, How are you on this blessed day? You know, that like you end up creating these like weird things when the fence becomes the point. And so what you can end up doing is you can forget that setting the cruise control, the cruise control was never the point. The cruise control was a tool that somebody needed to help protect that marker of faith. But the marker of faith is what's important. That what was the point of that marker of faith? And so, for my friend who's in that like the marker of faith is to live awake to what God is doing in the present moment and to not numb ourselves to it. Does everybody need to get a brick in their kitchen that they tap their phone to to shot off their social media? No, that's simply for me as a fence that I need right now because I want to live fully awake to my life, what the spirit is doing in my life, and this is gonna numb me to it. And so we've got to keep going back to the point and you keep going back to the point. But here's why this all gets really tricky. And here's why we naturally gravitate towards the fence and why we try to live by the fence and why we enforce the fence, because it all feels a little bit ethereal, and it feels all a little bit abstract, and it's often intangible and not concrete enough. Like, what does this all even look like? What does it even mean in practice in real life? Like, like, how do I know if I'm actually living awake to my life and awake to what the spirit's doing in my life? How do I know that? How do I know if I'm numbing myself? How do I know that? How do I know if I'm keeping the Sabbath? How do I know for sure that I'm honoring my father and mother? How do I know that I'm actually loving my neighbor? How do I know if I'm using my words in a way that are for the edification and building up of others? How do I know? And so here's what I want. I want you to just tell me. Tell me what to do. Tell me these are the seven things you don't do. Here's the five things you do. Build the fence for me. It's a whole lot easier to define the fence and live by the fence and enforce the fence. But the thing is that what has been passed on through Christian tradition throughout the centuries, and what has now been observed by behavioral psychologists for the last about 50-ish years, and I would actually argue it's actually even what the New Testament teaches,

Maturing Beyond Rules Toward Love

SPEAKER_01 26:05

is that there is a maturing movement of faith. And the maturing movement of faith moves from needing black and white fences around the law. You need that at a certain point in your faith journey. We need those clear boundaries and clear expectations. It is helpful at a certain point in our faith journey. But as we mature, and maturing is a lifelong process that we continue and continue and continue in. As we mature, we mature towards a life that is marked by love and not by rule keeping or law keeping. We mature towards a life that lives beyond the law rather than a life that's bound by the law. We mature towards a life that's so immersed in living life with God that we actually stop asking questions about rules and fences because we simply intuitively move towards living the life of God, not because we become obsessed with the fences and with the rules and making sure we're following all of them, but because we have become so fully immersed in the life of God. The best way that I've been able to figure out to describe this process is like this. Think about it like this that when you were young and were like being taught to cross the street, or maybe you've got kids and when you're teaching them about crossing the street, the thing that you wanted for them is that you wanted them to be safe. You wanted them to be safe when they cross the street. And so when they were young, maybe when they were like three or four years old, you told them, you are never allowed to cross a street on your own. You always have to cross with an adult and you always have to hold an adult's hand. That that wasn't like what you wanted them to always do, but you knew developmentally at that stage, at that age, that's what they needed. The point was that they would cross the street safely, but you knew at that age, that stage, that they needed that specific boundary. Maybe a few years later they get a little bit older and you tell them, well, you don't always have to have an adult with you when you cross the street. You can do it on your own, but you can only do it on your own between like 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Because that's when everybody's at work and there's no cars on our street. So you can only cross the street when there are no cars on our street between those hours. Now, again, like your point is that not that they would grow up and one day only be able to cross the street during those hours, right? Your point is you want them to cross the street safely. And because of the age and stage that they're at, that's what they need. Maybe then they get to a point where you say you can cross the street on your own at all times of the day, but you can only do it when you get to an intersection that has a light at it where you push the button and you wait for the green man to show up. And when the green man shows up, that's when you can cross the street and you only do it then. But then you know what happens? One day we grow up and we become big boys and big girls like you and I are, and then we can cross the street all by ourselves. And we don't go through this whole process of like, okay, I can do it here, do it like not like this. No, no, no. Instead, what's happened is it's just become ingrained in us. The point was to cross the street safely. And we had these fences that were built around it that changed over time based off of where we were at and what we needed at the time in order to live out the point so that one day we could get to the point where we could make our own decisions about crossing the street and that we just do it intuitively because it's become so ingrained in us. Now, I want you to imagine that then somebody comes up to you and they said, You know what? My 30-year-old, my 30-year-old son never crosses the street without holding an adult's hand. You would be like, What is going on there? You would know that that's actually not maturity, that's actually regressive. By the way, that is exactly what the Pharisees and the teachers of the law are doing. They show up and they're like, Why, why aren't your disciples holding hands with an adult when they cross the street? Don't they know that's the way to cross the street? Don't they know? You know, though, it's a regressive way of crossing the street. It's based off of a rule, off of a fence. It was created in order to help you when you were less mature. It was created to help you accomplish the purpose. But as you mature, that purpose still mattered. You still want to cross the street safely, but that specific rule no longer mattered in the same way because it had become so ingrained and intuitive to you. And what actually begins to happen is that the fence starts to drift away because the fence was never the point. Jesus has this very rabbinic argument with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law in order to show them, in order to show them that what they're trying to do and the way that they're trying to live, that it ultimately breaks down. About living with these fences, about how it will always, every time create hypocrites. Because no one who's focused on the fence can ever fully keep all of their fences completely. It's too much work, it will always create hypocrisy. So he says it just ends up missing the point when that becomes the point. Because the point, as Jesus would say, I remember this one time that he's asked Jesus, what is the greatest commandment? What is the greatest, like what is the greatest community marker? The thing that allows for the flourishing of our lives and the flourishing of others' lives. What is the greatest commandment? And he says it's to love God and love others. And then what does he say? All the law and prophets hang on these. All of those things, all of those community markers. If I had to boil them down, Jesus says it's about loving God and it's about loving others. Or there's this time where the apostle Paul is writing a letter. It's the letter to the Galatians. And in Galatians that he writes, he says, the entire law, all of the community markers, all of those things. He writes these exact words. The entire law is fulfilled in keeping one command: love your neighbor as yourself. That it was about building an orientation towards love. You become so immersed in the life of God that you simply live a life of love, and that becomes a fulfillment of the law. That becomes a fulfillment of all the community markers. The life of maturity is a life that's so immersed in the life of God that it ends up becoming a life that's oriented around love. And when you live in that way, the rules start to drift away and they start to become unimportant when your life is marked by love. Because those rules were there as training wheels. They helped you orient yourself in that direction. They helped you learn to live a life of love. But at some point, you graduate beyond the training wheels. And I know that to even like talk about rules in this kind of way makes some of you probably kind of nervous that you're sitting there and maybe feel like a little bit uncomfortable, that it's like you can't talk about that stuff that way. Imagine how those Pharisees felt as Jesus was doing that with them. That uncomfortable feeling, sometimes that's what we get when we're moving from one stage of growth to another, isn't it? When you had training wheels and you took them off, you're a little bit wobbly, it was uncomfortable. You were used to riding with training wheels. And then you took them off and you experienced a new level of freedom, but only because the training wheels helped you to get there. Some of us need these fences, some of us need them in different areas of our lives

Training Wheels, Freedom, And Reflection

SPEAKER_01 33:45

than other areas. And some of us have been so holding on to fences that it makes us feel a little bit uncomfortable to loosen our grip on it a little bit. But perhaps, perhaps, perhaps we have been making that fence the point when the point all along was to live a life oriented towards love that was about the flourishing of my life and the flourishing of others' lives. And these community markers were meant to help me move in that kind of direction. I wonder, I wonder if there's anything that you have been holding on to so tightly there that maybe, maybe they have been training wheels for you and you need to let them go a little bit. And then I wonder if there are other areas that you know because of your own propensity that you've got to build some fences around it, but that you know that those fences are for you. They are not for you to enforce on others, they are not meant to be the point, and you keep you keep remembering what's the point of this, what's the point of this? Why am I doing this? Because it's all about moving us to a life that's oriented towards love. The entire law is fulfilled in this commandment. And so we use these training wheels not to hold on to them forever, but we use them to help move us towards a place where we live a life oriented by love. May grace and peace be with you, my Northgate friends.