Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Good morning, church.
[00:00:04] Thank you so much, everybody who gave generously for our night to shine event, the hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who showed up to serve so that our friends got to be treated with beauty and dignity and respect and have a lovely night to shine. Thank you so much. Let me say a prayer for us. Dear Father, we love you so much. Am thankful that you are a God who is faithful. I'm thank you that you are a God who is a firm foundation that we can trust in to do this life well. I pray, Father, that you would speak to our hearts this morning. I pray that you would soften something within us that we might hear your word in a way that hits home and compels us to do life different. Thank you for all that you do. In Jesus name, I pray. Amen.
[00:00:53] In his book, obstacle the Wet is the way, Ryan Holiday tells this story. It's an old Zen story, and it goes something like this. There's a king, and he has a country, and he wants to teach his people a lesson. He thinks they've kind of grown soft, entitled, and he wants to challenge them and shake up their world a little bit. So he decides to place this huge boulder in the middle of the main road that blocks access to enter the city. It's so big, it's blocking the path. Nobody can get in. So what he does is he moves the boulder, then he hides, and he watches to see what people are going to do when they're faced with this obstacle. How would they respond? What would they do? And so, person after person, they want to go into the city. They come up, and there's this big giant rock blocking the way. And some of them would push at a little bit. They'd get frustrated. They'd walk away. Some of them would get mad, and they'd curse the king, and they'd curse circumstance. But again and again, no matter how much they complained about it, cursed about it, fate, the inconvenience, they all gave up and walked away. So this goes on for several days. Nobody gets past this big boulder until one peasant comes up, finds the boulder, tries to push it out of the way, obviously can't muscle it out of the way, couldn't budget. So he goes into the woods, and he looks around until he finds a branch big enough that he can use for leverage. He comes back to the boulder, he uses it as a lever, and he's able to move this giant boulder that nobody else could move. Underneath the rock, he found two things, a bag filled with gold coins and a note from the king. This is what it said. The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget. Within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition. See, everybody else quit, and they missed. They missed the gold and they missed the advice. And what's so wonderful about this story is how we look at problems, changes everything. Some of us are facing these giant boulders blocking our path. And we've been cursing it and complaining about it and the inconvenience and the frustration and we've missed. Behind every problem, every obstacle, there sits an opportunity.
[00:03:17] An opportunity to change, an opportunity to learn to see things differently, to discover, to create an entirely new path forward. And what gets tricky for us, most of us, the problem is the problem, right? How many times do we say, but the problem is right? We all see the problem and we get lost there. We can't budge the rock. So we eventually give up and move on. And we miss the opportunity. We miss the growth. We can't always change the problems that we face, but we can always change how we think about the problems. We can always change how we respond to the problems. And as we study as a church how to problem solve in healthy, biblical ways. We have to address something, because all problems have something in common.
[00:04:09] People, right? If it wasn't for the people, everything would have been perfect, right? Behind every problem we face, there's a person involved. And maybe it's in our family or at work or in your neighborhood, or the one person who's holding up traffic. For everybody else, it's the leader's fault, the government's fault, right? There's always somebody to blame for the problems that we face.
[00:04:35] But as long as we're blaming somebody else, there's never anything we have to do to change. As long as somebody else is the problem, we aren't at fault and there's nothing we have to do. We get to let ourselves off the hook by blaming everybody else. But I'm going to challenge us today because we're smart and we love Jesus and we're going to solve some problems. And it starts with no longer blaming everybody else. Instead, each of us taking a personal responsibility to say, how do I change my thinking? How do I change my approach? Right? It's not working. What we've been doing hasn't worked up to this point. Maybe there's something I can do different because people are inescapable. No matter what you do or how you live your life, you cannot avoid people. You're going to face them every single day. Which means we have to face how we see people, because people really aren't the problem.
[00:05:36] We like to say they're the problem. We like to blame them for the problems. The problem is how do I see people? How do I think about people and how do I deal with them? And to help us navigate this, we're going to go and look at some awesome words that Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. There's this beautiful section, and it's one of Jesus'most famous teachings. It's called the Sermon on the Mount. And he gives us these principles, these values that we can live by that create a different standard for doing life. And this is what he says in Matthew, chapter five, starting at verse 38. He says, you've heard that it was said eye for an eye and tooth for tooth, but I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them, the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go 1 mile, go with them, too. Give to the one who asks you. And do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. Says, you've heard that it was said, love your neighbor, hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies. And pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends reign on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that. Be perfect. Therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect. Okay. Jesus challenges us so big, and we got to spend a few minutes here. I mean, we could spend a month here, but I promise I won't. We're going to dive in. Okay. Jesus is his approach, it's so fascinating. He doesn't assume that we're never going to have problems with people. Right? He doesn't assume that nothing's ever going to go wrong. He knows humanity. He knows our hearts. And we're going to have tension, and we're going to have disagreements, and we're going to get hurt. And our natural response to being hurt, to getting in disagreements, to getting frustrated with people, it usually doesn't make things better. When we feel upset, when we feel mad, when our feelings have been hurt, our usual responses typically don't make the situation better. They make things worse. So Jesus says, I want to give you a way to work with people that doesn't lead to more hurt. It doesn't lead to more problems. It helps us work through these things in the kind of way that leads to healing and restoration and grace. Now, it's interesting because how he does this creates, it should feel like a tension in our life. He's talking to people who knew the rules. They knew how to quote Bible verses at people. They knew how to pick the right verse at the right time, and they knew how to let them off the hook. I'm not really doing the bad thing. Like, I'm not really breaking the rules here. Look, this is the rule and I'm following it. They use these rules as a way to say, it's okay. I'm not really doing anything wrong, right? Like, this is the letter. I got it. So Jesus challenges these assumptions, right? Like, okay, you got the spirit of it, but, man, you missed the heart of it. You've heard it said, but here's what I say. And he starts with this eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. Right behind those words is the idea that it's okay to get revenge, it's okay to retaliate against other people. I don't really need to forgive them. Jesus, did you see the terrible thing that they did? Right? That's the spirit of the idea. And Jesus challenges them. It's interesting because these guidelines were actually given to the israelite people to help them govern civil and criminal justice. It was never meant to be used in personal relationships. It was actually created to prevent the judges in courts from exacting excessive punishment. It was never supposed to be like the loophole theology that says, well, I don't have to do this because this says this. And then Jesus goes further and he says, you've heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. And this, love your neighbor. You can trace it back to Leviticus.
[00:09:51] But it doesn't say, hate your enemy. That got picked up over time. Because surely if I love one sort of person, I'm allowed to hate another. It got added on over time. And I don't really have to be nice to those kind of people, right? I love these people. Got it. But I don't really have to treat those kind of people well. And so Jesus challenges both of these ways of thinking. Retaliation and hate were never supposed to be in the agenda.
[00:10:20] Getting even religious superiority, that was never the call of Christ.
[00:10:26] And so in the same way that Jesus challenges people 2000 years ago, friends, he's challenging our hearts and our thoughts today. And he gives us this new standard for how we treat people, and it's the heart of who he is and the heart of who he's called us to be. So I want to give us three ways to think about this. It starts with this.
[00:10:49] Stay with me because it's not going to be easy, but I promise it's so good. Okay, we got to let go of ego.
[00:10:57] There's something in each of us that has a sense of pride, ego. But wherever we're doing something with superiority, it will always make it worse. Whatever we're dealing with, whoever we're dealing with, pride and arrogance will always interfere. Selfishness, self centeredness, they never make problems better. They never make the situation easier. If anything, they compound the hurt. They compound the animosity. And if we're ever going to treat people well, with the heart of Christ, we have to take ego off the table, because ego makes things worse.
[00:11:44] Ego says everything is about me, how you treat me, my pride, my feelings, my opinion, my way. And it's so easy to see this in other people, isn't it?
[00:11:58] We can all sit here and we can talk about the relationships, right? The person in the family who hijacks the conversation and makes it all about them. Or the person at work who's manipulative to get their own way, right? The little kid who wants what they want, and they want it right now.
[00:12:14] The passive aggressive friend who basically is insulting you to make themselves look better, right? We see this in other people. We can make a list of all the people who don't appreciate all of the things that I do. They don't get how hard I work. It's so much harder to turn the mirror back on ourselves and say, my pride and arrogance are just as ugly.
[00:12:39] My selfishness is just as divisive as I say it is about everybody else.
[00:12:47] Because when my pride gets wounded, what happens? I want retribution. I want to get even. How dare you hurt my feelings? You hurt me, I'll hurt you. You did me wrong.
[00:13:00] Gloves are off, right? It's fair game.
[00:13:03] You're mean to me, I'm going to be mean to you. But the problem with this kind of thinking, the problem with treating people this way is it creates a circle of hurt and retaliation. We're never going to get even enough to make ourselves feel better, do you know that? We're never going to make somebody else hurt badly enough to erase the pain that we've experienced. And in the end, when we try, like hold my coffee, you don't even know, right? When we try what happens is the pain doesn't go away. The unfairness, the hurt. It just ruins our character. It just drags us down into a perpetuation of more pain and more evil. Some of our families have been cycling through this. Some of our workplaces have been cycling through this, the relationships we have to let go of this sense that we make it right by getting retribution. We make it right by making somebody else hurt. Jesus says, let me show you a different way. Instead of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, instead of revenge and retaliation and retribution, do something nobody would expect you to do.
[00:14:21] Let it go.
[00:14:23] Walk away. You know what? You don't have to fight with everybody. I know. Stay with me because you feel. I know, but you really don't. Jesus says, give more than what was asked for you. You feel like you ripped off. Walk away. Maybe they needed it more than you did, right?
[00:14:42] Go further. See, pride will never let you do this. Pride is like, you don't understand, right? What happened to me. I can't be seen as weak. I can't be seen as less than. I can't be seen as, like, not upholding the rules, right?
[00:15:00] Pride can't stand to look wrong or not get even.
[00:15:05] Because pride's about me. I deserve better. It isn't fair. How many times have we argued over fairness, right?
[00:15:15] But when we let go of the need to make somebody else pay, this whole wide open space opens up for grace.
[00:15:25] See, when I'm at fault, when I do something wrong, which, let's be honest, guys, we all mess up, don't we? Right? When I'm at fault, I want you to understand there's extenuating circumstances, right? When I'm speeding down the road, it's an emergency. I have somewhere else to be. When somebody else is speeding down the road, I'm like, you, jerk, there are children who live here, right?
[00:15:48] I want you to understand the circumstances. I want you to understand the context. But when I'm hurt, there are no extenuating circumstances. There's only justice, right? When I'm mistreated, when I'm misunderstood, I want to get back. See, we're very critical of others and very charitable towards ourselves, right? We exaggerate the terribleness in others while also inflating our own sense of self.
[00:16:22] But here's what's beautiful about Grace. Grace isn't about fairness.
[00:16:27] It's not.
[00:16:29] Grace is simply just treating people better than they deserve.
[00:16:34] And that's how Christ has always treated us with grace.
[00:16:40] When is the last time you took an insult. You were insulted. It's fair. Didn't need to be said. But it was said anyways. But you just didn't say anything back, right? You swallowed it. You let it go. Because who cares?
[00:16:57] Other than your wounded pride, what does it matter?
[00:17:01] When is the last time? Yeah, something unfair happened. It really was unfair. But you know what?
[00:17:08] You just walked away. I know you have the right thing to say, and it's good, and it's like spot on, and it's going to make them understand how terrible they are. But maybe you just don't say it because a gentle answer turns away wrath.
[00:17:24] Maybe that person that you are going to the mat with again and again and again, who's causing you the most trouble, the most stress, the most hurt. Maybe they don't ever change. But maybe you can.
[00:17:39] Maybe instead of hitting your head against that rock and doing the same thing over and over and over again, you can learn, you can try a different way. And that obstacle can become the very opportunity for you to grow and you to heal something broken in a relationship. That's never going to change the way you're acting right now.
[00:18:01] Maybe it was never about them to begin with. Maybe you're there because God wants to teach you something.
[00:18:08] Maybe you're in that spot because God wants to develop something in you that you would not learn any other way.
[00:18:18] See, ego demands revenge. But Grace says I can let it go.
[00:18:23] And the more we let go of ego, the more we are positioned to fight for the heart of people. See, when it comes to people, there's always going to be somebody to disagree with. There's always going to be different opinions, and there's always going to be people who think differently than us and make different life decisions than we make. And that's actually okay. Unity isn't being a cookie cutter version of everybody else. Unity is. We aren't divisive about it. Unity is. We don't have to agree about everything. It's actually okay sometimes to look at it different ways. We learn and we have a bigger, richer, broader picture. Look at this world. God could have created us any way he wanted to. But there's beauty and variety and difference in context.
[00:19:13] But what happens when we have these differences of opinions? Right. There's always going to be reasons to fight. But it matters how we fight.
[00:19:22] When emotions are high, right? When your feelings are hurt and ego is wounded and values are on the line, what happens? We fight to be right. We fight to make our point. And when we fight to be right, it becomes win at all costs. You've been in some of these arguments, haven't you? Knock down, drag down. Like, you're just not going to move me on this point. You're going to give before the world will come to an end. Before I give on this point? Why? Because I'm right and you're wrong.
[00:19:56] And when we're fighting this way, what happens? We get so lost in the fight and making our point, proving our rightness. We hurt people around us. We squash them in the name of rightness. We can win the argument and damage the relationship.
[00:20:16] We can gain compliance, and we can absolutely lose trust.
[00:20:21] You can earn the point, but you lose respect in the process.
[00:20:27] What if we stop fighting to be right with people and we just fight for their hearts instead? It's a little shift in words, but stay with me here. Instead of fighting with everybody, when you shift your mindset to fight for the heart of somebody else, you're fighting for them instead of with them. You're listening to them. They don't agree with you, not because you're right and they're wrong, but they have an opinion and they have a context and they have a background, and they have an education that's taught them something that's got them to where they are right now. Listen to how they feel, listen to what they have to say. Instead of just quieting down until you get a turn to jump in and you rack up those comeback lines in your head, and you're like, oh, I'm primed, right? Like, put me in, coach. I got this. What if you just don't do that for a second? What if you look at this as we're working together.
[00:21:22] We're a family, we're a team, we're a couple. We're coworkers, right? Whatever the group setting is, when you're fighting for somebody, it's beyond just this argument and winning this fight. You're thinking beyond the tension, beyond the disappointment, beyond the hurt. And you're working together for a better relationship, a better future. Remember, we took ego off the table. It's not about me. It's not about me. We've replaced it with grace. I'm looking for the best in the people around me. I'm not looking for confirmation of the worst.
[00:21:57] We're working towards trusting each other better, not validation that I'm great and you're terrible, right? Our insecurities push hard sometimes. And if I don't have that validation, well, forget it.
[00:22:12] Maybe the greatest way you could start fighting for your people is pray for them.
[00:22:19] Just pray for them instead of saying the edgy cuddy line, instead of using whatever ten point dissertation you have on what rule they're breaking. You just walk away and you pray for them regularly and consistently. You know who's going to have a better effort than your coercion and criticism? The spirit of God at work in their heart. And maybe the greatest fight you could fight for your people is you just start praying for them day after day after day.
[00:22:50] Guys, when we're fighting with people, fights happen, right? We disagree, no problem. We can be smart, educated, different backgrounds, people, family, friends, coworkers, social media.
[00:23:06] Please stay with me.
[00:23:08] Stop using your rightness as a way to win arguments and prove other people right. I don't care what you're debating. Politics, religion, medical practices, how to raise your kids, who's dating who, what celebrity drama is going on, right? There's enough hot topics that we could just keep going at this for days. We all have opinions. We all have articles. We could source out and say, here's why I'm right. We could find verses to back up our opinions. But what are we ultimately fighting for if we're fighting for the hearts of people? It doesn't matter how right I am. If I'm using my rightness to squash other people, to manipulate other people, to hurt others friends, we aren't right.
[00:23:57] And you're not doing the work of Jesus Christ.
[00:24:00] Please hear me on this. I don't care how devil infested evil that other person is. They could be the devil themselves. Right?
[00:24:10] Jesus said, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. He did not say prove to them how wrong they are. He didn't say prove to them what rotten corner of hell they're going to live in for eternity. He didn't say that. He didn't say, hate them for believing something different than you hate them for not doing what you want them to do. Fight dirty. Because after all, right, you're right, they're wrong.
[00:24:38] Jesus didn't say any of that. But you know what he did? He taught us how to love. He taught us how to serve. He taught us how to forgive, how to show compassion, how to turn the other cheek and let it go.
[00:24:54] Friends, if when you disagree with others, your words and actions are not showing the loving grace and compassion of Jesus Christ, you are not doing what he commanded you to do. I know. I don't understand what they're saying. I don't understand how terrible they are. I don't understand what values are going to be compromised and what's on the line? I know, but can I remind you for a second? We aren't the first people to ever spend time in the company of others who didn't like us, who didn't agree with us. We're not the first people to have disagreements over politics and religion and life values. It was Christ himself who was mocked and taunted by the religious leaders of his day. He suffered at the hands of political leaders. He was literally slapped across the cheek. He was spit on, laughed at, rejected and cursed. His friends betrayed him and left him.
[00:25:52] How did Christ respond in those moments?
[00:25:55] He didn't lose his temper.
[00:25:58] He didn't scream down hatred and abuse.
[00:26:01] He could have. He has all the power and all the majesty and all the right. He didn't go to war and create violence and vengeance. You know what he did? He said, father, forgive them.
[00:26:13] They don't even really know how terrible it is what they're doing.
[00:26:18] While he was in the act of sacrificing his life for humanity, and humanity treated them with every vile evil they could think of, Christ asked God to forgive them.
[00:26:33] Why would we ever think that we have permission to hate anybody in the name of Jesus Christ? It's never who he taught us to be. Why would we ever think that it was okay for us to treat anybody else as less than? It's never how Christ treated us. Friends, I'm not superior or better than because I'm a Christian.
[00:26:57] I just know how messed up I am.
[00:27:00] At the end of the day, I'm not better. I'm just aware of how much I need the loving grace of Jesus Christ.
[00:27:10] Maybe when it comes to a comparison of who's more right, we stop comparing ourselves to others and we compare ourselves to God. Because, you know, here's the truth. God's more right than me. And the margin is huge. The margin is vast.
[00:27:25] On my best day, God still wins.
[00:27:29] But God hasn't been fighting with humanity to prove us wrong. He's been fighting for our hearts through all eternity and all of history, and it has made all the difference in the world.
[00:27:40] Stop fighting to be right and start fighting for the hearts of the people around you. Because when you do, we get to be known for how we love, if nothing else, if we get everything else wrong, right? I would rather err on the side of love and grace and compassion and generosity than hatred and retribution and vengeance. Christ never said, here's how people are going to know your mind, by how you disagree with everybody about everything else. Christ never said, hey, these are the people who are going to follow me by the ones who have a list that tells you everything they're against.
[00:28:16] He said, it's how you love. That's how the world's going to know that you're mine. And he didn't qualify a certain kind of people. He didn't qualify a certain kind of way. Christ never said, hey, disown your people, disown your family, because they don't do what you want them to do, because they don't make the choices that you want them to make. It's not how Christ treated us. If that were the case, guys, we'd all be disowned. Do you know how many things we've been doing to get kicked out of the family of God repeatedly, regularly, as children, as teenagers, as adults? We don't always get it right yet again and again and again. God pursues us. God finds us. God invites us back in to the family with grace and kindness and love.
[00:29:06] If God only loved the people that were easy to love, we wouldn't make the cut because I know, pride says, but I'm lovely and wonderful. We aren't easy to love. We aren't easy to love because we have all of these things about us in life that create all these tough, hard, rough edges. But, man, God's been loving us eternally, historically pursuing us. And if that is how God treats us, maybe it's time that we took a note from him, right? Maybe it's time that we actually followed the one who called us to be his. And instead of arguing with everybody about who Christ hates and religion and all of these things, we just go out and love some people freely and graciously and kindly. Because the same Christ who gave his life to save me gave his life to save you.
[00:30:02] The same Christ who sacrificially gave it all, he gave his life for others as well. And if God is the creator of all things, if he spoke this world into being, then please listen. Each person has dignity and value because they were made in the image of God.
[00:30:23] If for nothing else, start looking for the image of God in other people, even the ones we don't agree with, the ones whose lives are messy, even the people we don't understand, even the ones who make me uncomfortable. I've never been the arbiter of right and wrong, but God is. And I can show the world how incredibly our awesome right God is just by loving other people.
[00:30:52] Please. Christians should be known for how they love, not how they hate.
[00:30:58] We love others because God first loved us. We know how powerfully life changing that love is. We know how far that love can go. Christ came into the world. He took our part, and he showed us the love, the incredible eternal love that God has for humanity. I love this line from Jen Hatmaker. She's a writer. She said, no one is unlovable. We were literally created by love, with love, and for love, by a God who loves and is love itself. Its extravagance is almost embarrassing. And this love is not just for one type of person the world finds acceptable. It's for all of us.
[00:31:42] If you want to get better at dealing with people, if you want to get smarter at solving the problems that you face, you know what? It starts with me. It starts with, I can't change them, but I can change me. I can let go of my ego. I can challenge myself to say, it is not all about me, and that's okay. I can start fighting for the hearts of the people that God's put in my sphere and influence, and we can be known for how we love. It's not easy, but it's doable. And it's doable because Christ already showed us how. By how he's loved and called each one of us. You have the divine potential within you to love others better.
[00:32:26] But to do that well, you got to let the love of Jesus Christ lead you. You got to let the Holy Spirit challenge you and soften you. And you have to let the grace of God renew you. There's no better time than right now to begin. Doesn't matter how far we've messed up. Doesn't matter how many times we've gotten this wrong. Do you know what goes a really long way? I'm sorry.
[00:32:51] Do you know what makes a world of difference? I didn't get that right, and I'm sorry.
[00:32:58] It changes everything.
[00:33:01] Start today. Start new. Go all in for loving Christ and loving the people he's given you to love. Dear Father, I pray that you would help us. I recognize we face problems. We have people in our life, and it's not always easy to love them well. But I pray that you would help us. I pray that the love of Jesus Christ would influence us. I pray that your spirit would be at work softening the hardest, most bitter places in our heart. And, Father, I pray that your grace would abound in all that we do. I pray that we would start a movement. I pray that we'd start a renewal. I pray that a light of hope would be stirred in our hearts and in our families, in our community. Because you are a God who has called us to love others. I pray that you would be glorified in all that we do. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
