Speaker 1 0:42

[inaudible]

Speaker 2 0:43

Good morning friends . How are y'all doing good. Hey, there's people in the room. I'm excited about that. If you're with us online, I'm so glad that you're here too. As you can see, we're ready when you are ready to come back here. And now there's lots of summer plans. I would love to be one of those plans, if you would come and check it out. So I think it's really important for us to be in community together. There's something really important about that. One of those options, like Vanessa just mentioned Brendan McDonough. He's going to be here in a couple of weeks killer guy. We have a really cool story. We actually know each other through some different friends and knew one of the guys that one of his brothers that he lost. Vanessa had mentioned the movie. If you wanted to watch the movie, it's called only the brave. It was out a couple of years ago, Jeff Bridges, and as a killer, very emotional, you kind of already know what's going to happen. So you can be prepared if it's appropriate for you. But I talked to him this last week again, and I was like, what would you change about the movie? Like if you thought this has done well or not, well, or miss something. And he said, unfortunately it told his story really well. And you'll see why he says, unfortunately, but there's good news on the back end of that. And then he said, Hey, it's Hollywood. And you can't spend that much time going into each one of these men's life and that intimate level. So to understand them. So hopefully get a better view of all of those things that we can learn from him, what he's learned about God, and then collectively what we can learn about God together with that. So, yeah. Excited about that in a couple of weeks today, I have titled this message moving beyond cultural Christianity. That's going to be a fun one buckle up. It's going to be good. Moving beyond cultural Christianity. If simply believing in stuff is enough to like make a difference. Can you think about how different our lives would be if we just believed in the right thing? Can you think about how different our lives would be like the believing in like, yes, we believe in nutrition and health and exercise and the difference that would actually make in our bodies that have just believing that would actually make that come to fruition, please. Jesus, let it be. So if just believing that stuff, actually, then it came about if, if no one then would struggle addictions because we have this belief that addictions hurt things and hurt people and can hurt us. Or we wouldn't have money issues. Like we wouldn't struggle with our finances because we believe in that there's good decisions financially and having a budget and a structure and not getting into debt. And we believe those things. And so we wouldn't be struggling on preparation for school, right? Our preparations , really, for anything that we believe it's important to be prepared, right? And so then we don't really need to prepare because we believe it that you should be prepared for something and the impact that it's going to make. So rather than this study through Jeremiah, that we started just a couple of weeks ago. And this, this book in Jeremiah is about a prophet named Jeremiah. And he is tasked with the most difficult task of telling God's people, Hey, you're messing it up. You're not living the way that you should be living. And there's going to be destruction. That's going to come upon you because of this. And so today we find ourselves actually in Jeremiah seven in the temple where he gives what would be a message. And so God says, Hey, you need to go there to the temple where these people are hanging out and you're going to give this sermon or this message. A lot of poetry is just before this, that we kind of walked through in the last couple of weeks. And then after this. So Jeremiah seven, that is different. I'm going to read it from here. That's messing with my eyes. This is the word that came from Jeremiah from the Lord. Stand at the gate of the Lord's house and proclaim this message. Hear the word of the Lord. All of the people of Judea came through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord almighty God of Israel says. So this is when he now says, so Jeremiah is now standing. And he's now going to tell and give this word of the Lord to people who are in church or in this temple areas is reformed your way and your actions. And I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, and say, this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. If you really change your ways and your actions in deal with, if you really change your ways and deal with each other justly, if you do not press the foreigner , the fatherless, the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place. And if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you. I live in this place in the land I gave your ancestors forever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words and are worthless. These are like powerful words that he's giving them right now saying, what are you doing? Look at your life outside of here and how you're acting. And you come to this place and you're like , this is the temple of the Lord. This is the temple of the we're good on the reform of many people. At this time, this was just a surface level reform, like a window dressing, where they went to this holy place. They use the right language, the words they understood the vernacular, but they didn't engage. So their lives in the living way and how they lived it out. And you see, we get this, actually, we get this because most of us know, most of us know what we need to know to live better. We know what we need to know to live better. We know that our problem in life, isn't a lack of information. We know we need to be honest. We, no , we need to forgive. We know we need to be more compassionate. We know we need to be more generous, but for the most part, we know everything we need to know or believe everything that we need to believe. But the truth is the truth is that we know this. And we know this, that knowing and believing doesn't really make any difference. And a lot of circumstances, otherwise things would be different. Otherwise things would be different. So here's the thing. God knows this. He knows this. We see all throughout scripture and how it's lived out in the old Testament and lived out through Jesus and the new Testament because of this. He, you didn't invite people to believe. And this might be like really contrary to what you've heard or how you grew up. What you've been taught. We see that in Jesus, that he didn't spend a lot of time trying to get people to believe the things he said, Hey, we should believe this thing that I'm talking about. He actually invited them over and over and again and again. And we see this in God and God through Jesus, that he actually invites us not to know things, but to do things. He invited them to do things because he knows what we know that doing makes all the difference. Friends. If we believe all the right things and don't do it, our faith then becomes weak and fragile. We consistently see in scripture that God and God through Jesus was not just asking people to believe in him. Hey guys, you should really believe in me. His invitation as to follow me, his invitation was to follow me. It was relational. It was active. It was interactive. And over the time the church has actually done this down. Some of you maybe have never actually heard the phrase, follow me. You heard what I heard you. And I heard it a lot. You heard believe in me. And so the reduced follow me to believe in me. You just need to believe in me. And you may know this from experience. Believe in me is a lot easier than follow me. It's a lot easier than follow me. Believe in me is safer. It's far less demanding. How many of you guys by show of hands here in the room? How many guys think my kid should have good grades? Like they should get good grades. A lot of you. Yeah . You believe it. So how many of you guys are going to like start calling and saying, how can I tutor your kids? Because I want to see them have good grades. Like they need to follow this a couple of years out , hit me up. That's great. I got four. It's far less demanding. Like it's from a distance. Yeah. I believe that. How many times have you had an interaction or even found yourself in a season of distance or somebody else? And they're like, no, I believe, I believe in Jesus. I believe in God. This is exactly what we're seeing in Jeremiah right here. And then you're like, what really? That's weird that you could just hit your train to Jesus because I'm watching your life and how you're living or how you're acting. And now I'm going to find myself like Jeremiah at the gates being like, what are you doing? Look at where you're at right now. This is what you're actually doing. Not what you believe. And unfortunately, believe in me can leave you exactly where you are. No change required. Just believe it. God did. And Jesus did not merely invite people to believe in him. As he read and see throughout the scriptures, these face stories, you know, the very beginning with Abraham and God said like , I have this beautiful thing for you. This land, this space, this blessing for you. But you have to leave everything that you know, and you just have to go, right? He could have been like, I believe you. I really do. But I don't want to take that step of faith. He didn't know where it was going to go. And he had to take that step. You see it all throughout. You see Abraham, you see, even Ashley talked about Moses and God calling Moses to go into Egypt and tell, set his people free. He could have been like, I believe you want to set them free and you can do all those things. I believe it. But it took an hour , an actionable step to do something. He said, follow me, follow me, go, you see Noah? Yeah. He could have said, God, I believe there's a flood coming. And then God was like, you better build a boat. Right? He could have just stuck with, I believe it. And then watch the kind of storm come along. And hadn't built the boat. Gideon . You see the story of Gideon and how God used him in his steps forward of faithfulness to her , what God asks him to conquer. You see it in Joshua. This is like the kids' stories and the walls of Jericho. Like, Hey, I'm going to tear down the walls of Jericho. And what did he say? He said, you got to like, actually take some steps. You're going to walk around that. A bunch of times you're going to blow some horns. And then the walls are going to come down. The difference between believing and doing and following you, see it all throughout the gospels. Jesus invited people to live this life that actually reflected our confidence, our faith and our trust in God that he actually is God. And he has to be God and a lot of moments in my life. So we can say, well, what does that look like? Like what does it look like to actually trust in God? Well, God is most honored. And again, through all of these stories, we see it all throughout the entirety of the scriptures. God is most honored by our active faith. That following part you see in Jeremiah, how dishonored he is by the opposite. He says, we , you still, and you'll commit adultery and perjury burn incense to ball and follow other gods that you have not known. And then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name and say, we're safe. We're safe. So safe to do all these detestable things has this house, which bears my name become a den of robbers. We see Jesus say the same thing later in the new Testament. But I have been watching declares the Lord that he sees this Jesus. When he comes into the temple, you know, there's a famous story of him flipping stuff over, and there's a passionate, you know what people call it , passionate rage that is in us . And he talks, well , you're just making this a den of robbers. And this wasn't because these people were doing bad things in the temple they were doing in temple work. Just like these people in Jeremiah, they're doing the temple work. And he's saying, this has become a den of robbers where you're out there doing everything else that we have said, don't do, like, you're not living this out. You are a different person. You know, he used to say like, you , you have your weekend hat or your work hat or your home hat, right. It depends on what hat you're putting on a different hat on. And then you're coming in. This has become a den of robbers where you just hang out and you feel safe in your safe place. You're just going through the motions by showing up and putting on face friends. God is most honored by act of faith. You have a story. I know you have a story. You've heard stories of someone's active faith when they acted on something and it became real, their faith became real a minute grew. I remember I could share so many. I remember I had a , I had a really clear line into the corporate world. I had moved up quickly and corporate industry and had a really clear vision of where that was going to land very quickly in my life. And I remember very clearly how God said you're feeding people, the wrong thing. I happened to be working in the food industry.

Speaker 3 14:46

So it connected a little bit.

Speaker 2 14:49

And, and that was a step I had to take, which led to another step, which led to another step. And I saw God's faithfulness, even though I didn't understand it , I'm getting in my car and driving to another state and showing it with school and being like, I guess I got to do this. I guess I got to figure this out. I'm gonna leave everything that I knew. I remember his faithfulness when this isn't as applicable to everybody in here, but he said, Hey, plant a church. Maybe for you. It's like move and go somewhere else to do a work that I've asking you to do. That's difficult. Maybe doesn't pay as much. So for me, planting a church meant like I'm going to leave all my friends, all my family. We're going to go somewhere and I'm going to live on macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly and hope I survive. Right? It's applicable to you and your situation. But I got to see like the fruitfulness and it grew my faith because I actually had to rely on God and who he was and what he invited me to do. I remember really specifically, God called my wife and I and said, Hey, we really believe orphans are important. And I was like, I believe that too. He was like, what are you gonna do about it? No, I don't want to. And I remember it's actually going to be just in a couple of weeks. We said, okay, we'll , we'll take steps. We don't know where this journey ends. And we took all of these steps towards adopting a little boy in Ethiopia and we continued to go through those. And then we felt like, I felt like at least it was done and prayed to God and was like, Hey, I think that we've learned what we're supposed to learn in . Our faith has grown and we've seen you move. We've done these things. And this has been so hard, but such a blessing. And I remember we even got to a point and it's somewhat embarrassing to say that I fleeced God and said, you told us it is, if you're really going to do this, you better do it like this and now, or I'm done, right. It was a very much a Gideon situation. And lo and behold, that asks specifically was a couple of weeks, which was just a couple of weeks from now is my wife's birthday. And it was like, you know, what would be great for her on our birthday, a birthday present that we'll never forget is that if we hear about this little boy, that you've selected for us to scoop up and take into our house and doggone it on her birthday, we got a call at 10 30 in the morning and said, we've got a little boy for you. And that grew our faith that grew our faith coming here to north gate, leaving this church, plant the family. The thing that we thought we had built in a space, you know, you ever been somewhere, you thought you're just gonna be a lifer leaving that because you felt like you were called to do something different. For me specifically, I felt really called to come here and allow our founding pastor to be my pastor first and my boss second. And to lift him up through what I thought were going to be some of the richest years of ministry of his life. And to experience that collectively, I felt like I was called to be as Aaron to lift him up. And those were hard steps of faith. He didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do the difficult work that that took going over to Uganda with my friend, Rick small, just the two of us to actually deliver a bunch of nickels that in our kids area had raised for nets. We did a small little campaign that took off called niggles for nets, and we were going to help with malaria. And then the school district got involved in it. And then the whole community got involved in this. This is a really cool thing. And we went over and we thought we were just delivering nets. And then we saw the water situation. And we were like, yeah, I believe that that's real bad. And God was like, what you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? And so we came back and we started this thing called the Benicia water project, which then turned into walk for water, where we have all these plaques all over the place for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been raised just through this faith community for water Wells. This goes on, you've heard those stories where your faith grows bigger. You've been connected with them. You're like, wow, look at God moving when I'm doing, when I'm actually following him. Why friends? Because when our active faith intersects with God's faithfulness, our faith grows when our active faith intersects with gods faithfulness, our faith grows. When you feel nudged that little nudge to serve someone else, to make things right with somebody that you do not want to make things right with, right? When you say like, Hey, I should serve that person. And you feel that nudge , I really should reconcile with that person. And you don't want to, but you finally take those steps in doing that afterwards. You're like, man, what a rush? Like what a hi , you're going to serve someone and just been like, feel like the best person in the world, even though it's not really you, but that's what it is. It's this rush God's saying, Hey, your active faith honors me right now. You just reconciled with that person. And you're so thankful that you did because now you see God's faithfulness and your faith grows. So whenever we follow God and Jesus in an area where it's challenging or cost us something, when our faithfulness to God intersects with God's faithfulness, our faith gets bigger and you see our faith. It's like a muscle. And if you want your muscle to grow, you can't just believe that your muscle will grow. You have to do something about it, right? And if you don't ever do anything about it, if you don't ever exercise, then it atrophies and it goes away and that can be difficult and it can be really difficult. And we can go down that trail and just the moment, but you can start with little things and get little links, right. And be like, okay, I'm going to do serve project. Or I'm going to show up in student ministry and children's ministry. And I'm going to show up in a painful situation. And I'm going to flex my muscle little bit and be like, okay, three pounds. It's so hard. No more. I can do this. This is pretty good. Right? Or you can take like that step. And I can remember, you know, when I finally figured out how to, and decided I'm going to reconcile with my dad, I'm going to reconcile with my dad. And I'm going to see the faithfulness God's faithfulness on the other side of that and what that feels like, because I'm going to flex that muscle. Or, you know, you're going to take that next big step into like making sure that you're taking care of you and the other people around you. And I'm , you know what? I'm going to get some help. I'm going to show up right there and believe that God's faithful enough to take care of me, whatever that thing is. And it just gets bigger and bigger and you can keep going to do this. This is scary. This is getting really big.

Speaker 4 21:26

Come on son . You're like, this is a big step Lord in my weakness. You're strong

Speaker 2 21:34

And you get to do that stuff. And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And you get to flex that muscle. And then you get to see those people. That's why we call them spiritual heavyweights because they're just like yoked , right? They're like, God is good. I know this. You're like, whoa, I don't know. I was scared. This is the theme all throughout scriptures. Those who have experienced living out practically what you believe you're , you've experienced the reward. You've experienced the reward of that. Now , if you're with us online , if you're in the room and he took a little nap, her, I lost you for a minute. I'm going to ask you to tune back in. Cause this is, this is what we learn about God from Jeremiah in this moment and what we learn from Jesus in this moment. And it's staggering. We learn, we learn. I learned that it's possible for you and I to attend some kind of gathering every week, maybe every week of your life, maybe twice a week, multiple times a week, that it is possible to hear . And it is possible to believe and yet have a life that ultimately undermines your faith it's possible. And when we do that, when , when we can find ourself in a place where we can believe, and yet have a life that ultimately undermines our faith, this eventually will produce a faith crisis in itself. A crisis of faith in itself. This is where I would say, if that you're not a follower of Jesus yet you're here in this space. You're not a Christian and you're here or you're with us online. This is where I want to apologize. I think an apology could be do , because one of the reasons that you gave up on Christianity, or maybe one of the reasons that you never have explored it, isn't simply that you don't believe it. You wonder sometimes if we, it, you wonder sometimes if we believe it, you've heard our rhetoric and what we've said about God and the Bible and truth and love and all that stuff. And then you look at the way that we actually live the way that we actually treat people the way that we actually treat people, the way that we actually treat people. The reason that you're not more open to believing in what we believe is because you just don't know if we believe it because we don't live it out. And that's actually what God's message was through Jeremiah, wake up guys. That's what he's saying. Hey, look, it , this is like, it's all just window dressing. And here's what I would say to you. If that's the way that you felt, would you just ignore us for a moment, ignore us and read through the gospels or just read through one of them. Matthew, mark, Luke, or John. This is the story . Life is the best way to see this. Follow me, lived out. Cause that's what he constantly asked people to do. He didn't just say, believe me. He said do this. And it was hard stuff. Would you just read one of the gospels and at least consider following Jesus because our inability to do what we believe doesn't undermine the invitation and the love that Jesus has for you and wrapping this up. Um, I'm gonna jump to the new Testament. And James was actually the half-brother of Jesus, which is so cool about the book of James. There's so much in there and right off the bat we see in James one, the first chapter verse 22, it says do not merely listen to the word. And so deceive yourself, do not merely listen to the word and just show up and then deceive yourself. Like I believe it. I think that's a good, Hey, great talk. Right? Good challenge. I believe that says this do not merely listen to the word. And so deceive yourself. Do what it says. Do what it says. Faith is a muscle in faith that does not do any good friends is no good. We need to grow our faith. And then James goes right into this little story about a mirror, about how, Hey, imagine this, imagine that you wake up in the morning and you walk into the bathroom area and you look in the mirror and you go, oh,

Speaker 5 26:14

You're a mess, right? And you're

Speaker 2 26:17

Like, oh man, I need to do some work. I need to do some work on me. Get myself presentable. Right?

Speaker 5 26:23

Professional. Maybe it would clean up the breath situation. All of that.

Speaker 2 26:29

He says, Hey, you wake up. You look in the smear you look at. And you're like, man, I need some work, but then you do nothing about it. You just throw your bathroom. Why don't you show up at work? And everyone's like, whoa,

Speaker 5 26:38

Right?

Speaker 2 26:40

You believed you needed to do the work, but you don't do the work. God says, God says , somehow you can retreat to . But I believe all things are right. If I believe then all the things are right. And you must build a strong faith because one day friends we're going to need

Speaker 5 27:01

It. And it won't be there.

Speaker 2 27:03

You will meet it. And God says, Jesus says, I want you to be ready. Follow me, follow me, follow me. And then James ends this whole statement with, but whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues in it. Not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it. They will be blessed in what they do. If you want to experience God friends, you've got to do something with

Speaker 5 27:30

What you believe.

Speaker 2 27:34

And what we learn all throughout scriptures is what happens to people when they don't listen and they don't respond or live it out, is that like storms come, God knows storms. Just show up.

Speaker 5 27:45

And when the storms come, there's a crash and it's going to expose your faith and who you are. We got to hear powerful testimony from

Speaker 2 27:57

What's like my dad last week, Roger, my pastor of when a storm comes kind of funny as last name storms, what happens when that great crash comes, what's underneath? Why is this going to be difficult? Because our faith could be fragile and weak. Even though you believe, even though you believed you had not exercised to be prepared for the storms in life, and this should disturb some of you, it should disturb some of you that's. What's so disturbing about Jesus's message and God's message about follow me because believing again is easy. Jesus disturbed people when he preached, cause they didn't say, believe this new idea. He says, you need to do this. You need to pray for your enemy. What? No, no, no. This is a follow me. Pray for your enemy. Turn your cheek, that disturbed people. And ultimately you actually see a disturbed people to the point where you see in like the book of Johnny talked about that people actually in the midst of his message were like picking up stones to throw stones in the stone or almost push them off of a cliff, which is why there's a lot of distance right here in a stage. So that way, when we have to have difficult conversations, but from time to time friends

Speaker 5 29:13

There's tension. And we

Speaker 2 29:15

See in Jeremiah right here, this was a tension moment. And it's important that we actually live in that tension. So what our cultural, our current cultural moment needs is not more people attending church. It's not more than people just seeing songs saying the right religious language and the things. But instead , uh , people who are committed to living the way of Jesus

Speaker 5 29:45

Could do the personal

Speaker 2 29:46

Work of examining their interior lives and aligning the reality of their lives to the life, the ministry

Speaker 5 29:53

And the teachings of Jesus. Would you pray with me, father God, we thank you so much that you challenge us, that you push us, that you invite us. You

Speaker 2 30:08

Don't just say, believe this, that you actually invite us into something. And so today may we respond and follow you, not just the knowing,

Speaker 5 30:22

But in doing, and may you be honored by our active faith? God, if you will. And if it's your

Speaker 2 30:33

Will, may we just receive the blessings from that?

Speaker 5 30:37

And if anything grows stronger faith muscle, we love you and your name, we pray. Amen.