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And open up your Bibles to Ephesians, chapter three.
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We've been doing a series. If you don't own a Bible, you
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can always grab one on your way in. They're just outside the door. You take that one home with you.
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We've been doing a series in the book of Ephesians for a lot of
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months and just kind of unpacking it chapter by chapter, verse by verse.
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And what we begin to see today is Paul has been talking about the Gospel.
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All right?
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So he says in verse seven, this is the verse we're looking at today, verse seven. It says of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace. And so he's saying it's this gospel meaning what? Gospel meaning what I've been talking about for three chapters, that there's a God and he is sovereign and he's perfect. And us, we're a mess. And without renewal of heart and without transformation, we are capable as humankind of horrible things.
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All right?
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We were reminded of that this week, all right, with the tragedy in Connecticut of how horrific and wicked the heart of man can be. And so it's very, very important, as Paul has already said in chapter two, you were dead in trespasses and sins. Listen, if you don't go to church, if you're not a Christian and you're just kind of investigating this thing, this is good for you to hear because you were given a lot of hype about yourself. You are told since you were a little kid that you're basically good. And all that you need is a little bit of an adjustment. All you need is some counseling. All you need is a little bit of advice. You're unique, like a snowflake.
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You have something to offer and you're good. And Paul goes, you are spiritually dead. You don't have a heartbeat. You are in a casket. Ephesians 2, dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this error. That was your spiritual state. And so what does it look like for humankind when they do these tragedies when this happens? I know people who couldn't even get up on Friday. They didn't even go to work.
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They. They just stayed in bed because they were so depressed at what they saw. And there's this angst inside of us where we go, man, there's something wrong with the world. When that happens, something isn't right. And the reason for that is because what God has done is he's built in each of us this idea of what the universe is supposed to be like. And then what we do is when we see something like that happen, we compare and we go, man, this doesn't feel right. This puzzle piece just doesn't fit. There's this angst inside of me that the world should be.
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And Paul is saying, it's this gospel that makes me get up in the morning even when I see tragedy like that. It's this gospel that breathes hope into my life. Meaning this gospel. And not any other gospel, not any other message that if you do really good things, God will love you. If you're a really good person, the universe will bless you. If this idea that if I do this, then he's going. Those messages that you all hear preach to you, that you preach to yourself, they're not true. It's this gospel that breathes hope.
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And the reason is. Cause the Christian gospel's extremely unique in the marketplace of ideas. Because what it says is. It says, you wanna know what Christmas is about? What do we do with Christmas? We dress up in matching sweaters. All right? And we take a picture of our family and send it out as if everyone's loving that thing.
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All right, all right.
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You just put this up on your tree so you can look at me and my weird family. All right? For the month of December. No, thanks. You give it a day and you throw it in the recycling. All right, so what do we do? We make this Christmas. It's about. Let's send cards with deer and squirrels wrestling each other. All right? On the snow.
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Log cabins with smoke pouring out. It's like, this is nostalgia. This is about my happiness. About warm feelings. This is Christmas. And we do. We eat stuff we would never eat. Like, pass me the candied yams.
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It's like, yeah, that's year round. Like, why are we eating these? Everyone's sucking on candy can. It's like the weirdest time of year, man. And that's what we make Christmas into is if that's what it's about, then you open up the Bible. You know what Christmas is? This horribly dark place where there's a
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king and he's murdering kids and he's going on a rampage and he's killing every kid two and under. And into that darkness, John calls Jesus.
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The light came to the world.
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The light Christmas is God lighting a candle. And you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight.
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You light a candle in a room
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that is so dark. And so when the candle's lit it shows just how bad things really are,
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that this is a messed up place and God had to come to us to save us, or he had to stand back and do nothing about it. But what he chose to do was enter in to rescue us. And when he was born, he was born into a dark scenario with teenagers that would have been totally ostracized in their community because they were probably 14 years old. And now she's pregnant, all right, we make Mary. This kind of, oh, there's Mary, she's pregnant. Everyone, everyone's loving her. Everyone would have been judging her. Looking at this unwed 14 year old, they go, who are you? What have you done? And Joseph, yeah, he would have been amped.
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I'm pregnant. I had nothing to do with it. Joseph's a smart guy, all right? She doesn't just come up to him and go, don't worry, God impregnated me by the Holy Spirit.
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And he goes, well, okay, cool.
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Wanna get some Slurpees? That's not how he rolls, man. He's like, actually, no, that sounds crazy
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and I don't believe you. And it takes angels showing up and going, joseph, marry this girl and call his name. Jesus. This is a dark time. This is a horrible time. There is oppression, there is violence, there is jealousy, there are kids getting killed. And into that Jesus comes. Into that, God doesn't stay back.
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He doesn't let evil just take its course. He enters in, he engages it. And he comes in the person and the work of Jesus to defeat it.
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And that's what Paul's going. This gospel, it's different than anything else.
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It's so unique, it changes life.
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Some of you might know, one of the most famous murders in New York City was a woman by the name of Kitty Genovese. She was out on a road, tons of apartments around her late at night, and a guy walked up to her
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and started to beat on her and kill her. And then all the lights of the
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neighborhood came on and everyone kind of
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said, what's going on out there? And they heard the screams of Kitty Genovese. And then the guy ran away.
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And this has been studied in psychology now, because no one came down to help Kitty.
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And the guy came back 20 minutes
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later and finished the job.
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As all the neighbors that were later questioned.
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Psychologists called this the bystander effect.
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All the neighbors did nothing because they assumed everybody else would do something. And God doesn't flick on lights and go, hey, what's going on down there? He comes down, he enters into it, and he goes, let me do something about it. And Paul's going, of this gospel, it's this message, this unique message about Jesus, what he did on the cross, what he did in the resurrection to transform a life. This is the thing that gets me
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up in the morning.
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He's going, this is the thing I
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have been called to as a minister.
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And so he says, I was made a minister of this, of this gospel, of this message. And some of you. He's been constantly calling this gospel a mystery, all right? He calls it a mysterion. It's this fuzzy thing that once you come to know Jesus, it gets revealed and exposed. That's the way the word mysterion worked
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back in Paul's day.
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It wasn't hidden, it was now this open secret. But for some of you, Christianity is still a. It's still fuzzy. You haven't embraced it, you haven't given your life to Jesus. So the gospel is still this thing you keep at arm's length. You haven't gone there yet. And you got lots of reasons for that. Christianity's concept of God, Christianity's idea of truth.
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Christianity's so judgmental, they're so narrow minded. The concept of hell. I remember, I mean, I grew up like that. I had this opinion of God, this opinion of the gospel. I was 8 years old. I didn't grow up in a Christian home where we prayed or we met or we talked about God. I mean, Christmas to me was this thing, right? It was about Santa and elves and
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getting a teddy rock spin. And that's what my life was about.
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And then when I was eight years
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old, I went up to a summer camp and a guy sat us all down around the campfire and he said, all you kids, you gotta understand something.
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If you don't accept Jesus, you're gonna go to hell. And then he had this little gasoline thing and the thing lit up. We're like, he's like, repent. And we all came forward. I accept Jesus. Freak it out. All the counselors were accepting Christ. There's animals coming out of the forest.
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I mean, it was like, it was crazy. It was crazy. That last part is a joke that didn't happen. But there was like this thing where everyone is like, man, I'm scared. And that jacked me up. I went home, I was eight years old. I gathered my. I had a birthday party and all these guys came.
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There was eight guys sleeping over. And I said, guys, if you don't
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accept Jesus tonight, you're all gonna die and go to hell.
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They're like, we're eight. I'm like, I don't care. You die and go to hell right now. You all have to accept Christ. No, I'm not gonna let you sleep until you do. They're like, fine. They all came forward. It was sweet.
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Now, here's the thing.
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None of that stuck. I stopped caring about God. I stopped caring. Why?
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Because heaven is not full of people who are afraid of hell. It's full of people who love God.
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It's not full of people running from something. It's full of people running towards something. This gospel, this God in Jesus Christ, let me run toward him this positive affection that happens in your volition and your will. It's not that I get to run from this. That will never hold. It will never keep you motivated. Because when I became a teenager, hell became a caricature, and it didn't keep me motivated. Jesus says the same thing.
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He tells this parable in Luke 16 where there's this guy, and he's actually in hell, and he says, let me get out of hell so I can go and tell my family and my friends never to come here.
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And Jesus said, it won't do them any good if they don't already believe Moses and the prophets and what they say about me.
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Not even if you rise from the
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dead and you go to them, will it convince them. Because what this is about, is your
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heart ready to accept what Jesus has done for you? Are you ready to be in awe of him? Are you ready to gravitate toward him? And what the Apostle Paul is saying, is he saying it is of this gospel. He says, I was made a minister.
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Right?
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Notice he doesn't say I chose it. I wanted to become a minister. I wanted to become. I wanted to plant churches. I wanted to write 13 books of the New Testament. I wanted to leave. He doesn't say any of that. He says, I was made this.
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God interrupted my life. Like some of you. You're just going along in life. That was the Apostle Paul. He was going along. He was doing his thing. He was a religious teacher. He was a schol.
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He was earning. He actually killed the first Christian martyr. He oversaw it. He had a call. He was going about his life, like many of you. You were doing school. You're paying the bills, you're paying the mortgage, you're running your business, you're working for it. Whatever you're doing, you're going about your life.
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And he says, I was made this. Jesus Christ interrupted me and shook me up. I was on the road To Damascus. He beat me down, blinded me, and said, I want to interrupt your life and use you as an apostle.
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This is what happens. Jesus interrupts our life. Listen, I didn't. When I became a Christian, when I was 17 years old, I wasn't waking
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up in the morning going, you know what, man?
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I'm really miserable without Jesus Christ as Lord and savior of my heart.
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That's not how it works. You don't function like that if you don't know God. You didn't walk in here going, I Wonder what.
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Ephesians 3, verse 7. You know, I'm just. I heard this church is talking about, let's go there. And I'm just wondering. I got this deep longing in my soul to make Jesus the all satisfying person.
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That's not how this works.
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You're going about your life and Jesus comes in and he interrupts you and he shakes you up. And this is what happened with the Apostle Paul. I was doing this thing, I was living this life.
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And Jesus came and he shook me up, he challenged me, he confronted me.
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He created this crisis of faith in my life.
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What are you gonna do with this? And some of you are like, yeah, but you don't know me.
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You don't know the things I've done.
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You don't know who I am.
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All these people sitting around me, all
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right, they're all squeaky clean.
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They don't say any swear words like me, except invented Christian swear words like, oh, fudge muffin.
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They don't know me. They don't know what I've done. You have no idea.
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And Apostle Paul would go, ch, you ever murdered someone? Don't raise your hand if that's true. But I'm just rhetorically asking. Apostle Paul is going, you ever murdered someone? Yeah, that's my story. And listen, if you talk to the people around you, even though they look
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good and they look squeaky clean,
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almost every single one of them has darkness,
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wickedness of their heart. And if they're in touch with it and have repented of sin and given their life to Jesus, you will be surprised at what you find in the stories of the people around you.
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And I know because I meet with them. There's abuse here, there's adultery here. There's pain and tragedy that you couldn't even imagine in this room. And Paul goes, man, I was made this. I was living my life.
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And God moved in and grabbed me. And this has to be the case. He's gotta move on us first because we would never choose him. We would Never say, yes, this is what I want. And this is why Jesus said some really scandalous things when he was teaching. He said things like this, talking to believers, unbelievers, as he's walking around his ministry. He says in Matthew 11, no one can know the Father unless the Son chooses to reveal him. No one can come to know God unless I choose of my will to go, let me reveal the Father to you.
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And so we talked about this a couple weeks ago. How do you ever become an heir of God, a son of God rather than a son of man? The Spirit works on you, verse five, to make that alive in you, to transform you. He moves on you first. That's the Spirit's work. And of course that makes sense because if you just line up Christianity, we believe a lot of weird, messed up
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things that are hard to believe.
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Like try to get yourself to believe the things that there's a God. He's invisible, but don't worry, he exists. And there's an ark and it's got animals and Jesus didn't have a daddy. It's like, I can't functionally get my mind there. So you need, of course you need the Spirit to move in your life. Of course you need him to make you.
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And so Jesus says in John chapter 10, he says to a whole group of unbelievers who you know are like, hey, I don't want to believe in you yet. And Jesus says, here's the reason you do not believe because you are not my sheep. Notice he doesn't say, you're not my sheep because you don't believe. He goes, you do not believe because I didn't make you a sheep.
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I didn't make you. I didn't move on you. That's why you don't believe. Of course you need God to move on you, to make your mind alert and alive to the ways of God.
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And he's going, I didn't. Paul's going, I didn't choose this job. Now some of us go, yeah, that just seems. I struggle with that. It doesn't seem fair, it doesn't seem logical, it doesn't seem rational. And I'm a type A personality, and I need to systematize God and I need to put God in categories and I need to understand everything about him. And then you pick up the Gospels.
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He just blow you out. He'll blow you up. He'll blow your mind up. You're trying to consistently think of God and go, let me put him here. Let me boil him down to these Three points. Let me do that. And then you pick up the Gospels and you read John, chapter five, where Jesus walks into a place where there's a mass of hurting people who are blind, decrepit, lame. And he walks past all of them, and he walks up to one guy who's been sitting there for 38 years, waiting to get healed.
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I love it.
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Jesus walks up to me and goes,
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do you want me to make you well?
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No, I'm just chilling.
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Do you want me to make you well?
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You've been here for 38 years. You're paralyzed. You want me to make you well? Yeah, please. And then Jesus does. But you know what he doesn't do?
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He doesn't heal anyone else.
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He's not fair. I thought he's supposed to treat everybody the same. I thought he's supposed to do. If he does one thing good for, doesn't he have to do it to everybody? Jesus will just blow all that up. Here's the thing. Jesus doesn't heal everybody. He doesn't heal everybody. I met a woman this week.
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We're working on this project, and she's terminally ill. And she's got. As we talked about her testimony and how she views this, she's like, yeah, you know what? I started out going, God, why didn't you make these sinful people get this kind of cancer rather than me? I mean, look at me. I love my kids. I'm walking with Jesus. Why would I? But then I began to notice, man, I've had 50 years. By the grace of God, I've had it. And if God so chooses.
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And then she said this. She said, you know what? I see people get healed around me, and that's good. And I praise God for it. And I pray and I cry out for healing. And we believe that. But you know what? If he chooses not to heal me, then it's my time. Cause here's the thing. God doesn't heal everybody.
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And even if he does heal you, at some point in your life, the answer to that prayer is gonna be no, because we all have to die. At some point in your life, you're gonna be crying out to God on
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a deathbed, heal me. Save me.
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And his answer will be no. I'm going to take you now.
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What about consistency? What about fairness? Where's the fairness? Jesus walks up to a guy who loves money, and he says, come, follow me. This rich young ruler. Jesus looks into his idol, sees his heart, that his God is money. And he says, okay, here's what I
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got for you, you want to be my follower?
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You got to give away all your
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money and then come follow me. The guy, excuse me, I have to do what? You have to give away all your money and then come follow me. And the text says, he went away sad because he wasn't willing to give all that money up. He meets another guy whose father died
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and he's like, I want to go
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and bury my dad and go to his funeral. And Jesus goes, no, let the dead bury the dead. Forget that, come follow me, let's go. He's like, no, no, I just want
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to do the funeral.
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No. You don't even know what it means to be a follower of Christ, do you? You don't know the cost. Forget it. And then a couple months later, he's hanging on a cross and the guy beside him is like, I'm pretty sure you're the son of God. What do I need to do? He's like, oh, don't worry about it. We'll be in heaven together in five minutes.
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How's that fair? He looks at a 30 year old rich guy who's killing it and goes,
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by the way, you gotta sell your business and become poor and come follow me for the next 60 years. The guy's like, what? Guy beside the guy's like, don't worry about it. We'll be together. Paradise. Five minutes, we're good. Do I have to do anything? No, no, don't worry about it. You're good. This God is going to mess you up.
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All of your paradigms will be shattered when you start to read the life of Jesus and begin to go, what does it actually mean, this gospel that can change a life? What does it mean when he moves on us? Even though, hey, that doesn't really fit my logic. And Paul says, I didn't choose this to be a minister, he chose me. All right. Of this gospel, I was made a minister.
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The word minister.
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For those of you who aren't used to going to church, that sounds like a really churchy word minister. I remember kind of growing up with my ideas of what it like when people. I remember when people started to talk to me about, I think you should go into ministry.
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I think you should become a minister.
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I was like, okay, hold on.
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That's the guy who lives at the
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church who dresses like a Jedi
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and who has made an oath to God never to have sex. I want to do the opposite to that job. What's the job that's the opposite to minister?
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Because that's the one I want.
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Cause that Job sounds horrible. That was my idea of minister. That's what a minister does. And he cries on cue.
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That's not what I wanted. That's not how Paul's using this. The word minister is diakonos. It means servant. That your posture, your role in the mystery is to be a servant is to be what he's gonna go on to say, a slave.
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Where literally you serve people. You come on. And this is what Paul's trying to do. He's trying to get into your worldview and trying to shake you up a little bit, because you belong to a 21st century, post enlightenment worldview. You live in west coast Canada, and some of you come at this and you go, this is exactly what I don't like about Christianity. I don't like how you're all saying slaves. All of you are slaves. You believe the same stuff, you look the same, you submit to all of these rules and all of these things that are over you.
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I don't like that.
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I like to walk in freedom, which means I got no constraints. I'm not enslaved, baby, I'm free. And Paul would go, this whole book is trying to just break your entire worldview up and go. You don't even understand. You're a slave. The question is not if you're gonna be a slave. The question is, what are you a slave of?
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Because many of you, you're enslaved. You're enslaved to the worldview that is pumped to you around the pub. You're enslaved to the worldview that's given to you by your friends, by your family. You're a slave. We're all slaves. The question is, who are we a slave of?
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He's gonna go, you gotta be a servant. You gotta be a slave of God.
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You gotta follow him.
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And you've got to understand, man, you got dreams that are downloaded on you by the culture that you live in
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that cause you in the suburbs to just shrivel everything down to these little dreams about, hey, the biggest thing I
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can dream for my kids is that they do well at soccer and that they're on a lot and maybe they'll make that, you know, that front line, whatever it is,
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or that my kids will do really well in school.
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That's what I'm.
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That's the man.
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That's my dream for my kids, or
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that they'll succeed in whatever way the cul de sac mentality gets us to say, my kids are succeeding. And these are the dreams we come up with for our culture and for our kids. These are the things that we muster up for success and glory.
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And Paul's going, you gotta get out of that mentality. He's been saying to chapter one, you gotta tap into this cosmic vision of what's going on.
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There's a God and he's sovereign and he's moving globally. He's doing things through Jesus Christ to transform people. And your dreams for your kids need to be more than. I hope they don't end up socially awkward. And your dreams for your kids need to be more than I hope they have a nice wedding.
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That your dreams for your kids need to be. I hope my kids get captivated by the person and work of Jesus Christ. So much so maybe they end up getting married, maybe they don't. Maybe they're single for the rest of their days. Praise God. But what about my grandkids? Maybe your kids end up living in Surrey or wherever you live from now until the end of time and you have every Christmas together and you all sit around drinking hot cider,
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eating candied
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yams until the day you die. And it's wonderful. Or maybe they feel a call of God on their life to move to a third world country where people don't know about Jesus and they die at 21 for the name and the renown and the glory of Christ. Praise God. Because there's a far bigger story going on in the Universe than your 86 years.
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But isn't the goal to make this thing as long as possible and be a king and a leader and build an empire? And he's going,
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you're a slave, your posture is not. To be a king is not to be a leader and build an empire that's going to burn in the end. Your posture in the world is to serve. Your posture in the world is to be a slave of God. So much so that you're a slave to something that's the reality.
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So what are you gonna be a slave to?
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Go over to mark chapter 10, a few books back. If you're not familiar with your Bible, a few books back, mark chapter 10. There's this great story where Jesus teaches the same thing. Trying to break his disciples mindset of who they think they are and trying to build a new identity for them. It says this in verse 35. And James and John, the sons of Zebedee came up to him and said
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to him, teacher, we want you to
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do for us whatever we ask of you. I love that. That's our mentality.
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We come to God, we're like, we want you to do for us what we Want. That's our prayer life. Hey, Jesus, we're friends now. Dance. I want to watch you go, not you. Dance, Jesus, do whatever I ask you. Move left, move right. Give me this, give me that.
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Ching. That's what they're doing. He said to them, verse 36, what
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do you want me to do for you?
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And they said to him, grant us to sit one at your right and one at your left in your glory. Right, that's us.
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We like leadership. We like power. We like. That's the way we think we can influence people. Let us sit at your left and your right in your kingdom.
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I own my own business.
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Why shouldn't I? I'm a teacher. I run the classroom. Why shouldn't I? Jesus, you do what we ask you. We're going to sit in your left and your right.
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Jesus said to them, you do not know what you're asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink? What he's about to do is go to the cross and drink the cup of God's wrath.
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Are you ready to suff? Are you ready to take the wrath
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of God on yourself? You think that following me is just all pleasure, all the time?
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Are you able to be baptized with
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the baptism with which I am baptized? And they said to him, we are able. And Jesus said to them, the cup that I drink, you will drink. You're gonna be enveloped in suffering. You're gonna face persecution.
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You're gonna be up against it. That's true. If you follow me, that's gonna be your story.
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And with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized. But to sit at my right and
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or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those whom it has been prepared. And when the ten heard it, these
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are the other ten disciples, they began
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to be indignant at James and John. They're choked that they got up there. I mean, they're all walking together. What did you talk to Jesus about?
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I heard you talking left and right.
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I want to be left and right. What are you talking about? They're angry.
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How did you ask him to go
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on his left and right? I want power. How did you get to him before me?
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Jesus called them and he said to them, you know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles, Lord it over them. You want to know about power.
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You want to know about leadership.
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You want to know about influence. And their great ones exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your Servant. Same word that Paul uses in Ephesians 3, Diakonos, servant. And whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.
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You want to be different. You want people to powerfully feel the truth of the gospel in your life. Because the reality is, of this gospel, when people look at your life, the
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gospel is only as powerful as your life.
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You can tell people till you're blue
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in the face, Jesus is all satisfying.
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He's my everything. But then they watch you, and you
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jump from job to job, from spouse to spouse.
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You're greedy and anxious about everything. And they go, jesus, this isn't all satisfying to you. You're trying to be satisfied by everything but him. But I'm a slave of Jesus. No, you're not. And he goes, you want to stand out. You want to be different. You want to point people away from yourself and roll out the red carpet so that people meet God.
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Be a slave. Serve them. There was a guy named Seth Godin who's a business marketing guru. He wrote a book a few years ago called Purple Cow.
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And the idea of the purple cow is that in business and marketing, everybody just kind of sees it all the time. But in order to really grab someone's
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attention, you gotta be different.
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If you're driving along the road, you
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see brown, black and white cows. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Falling asleep, falling asleep. But all of a sudden, you see this bright shining purple cow.
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You're gonna stop, right? You're gonna Instagram that thing. Oh, my goodness, purple cow. And he says, you want to stand out. You want to be different.
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You be a purple cow.
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You want to be counter empire, countercultural people. Feel the gospel in your life.
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Be a slave, be a servant. You'll stand out. Remember that story in the Gospels where that woman comes in with all that perfume, thousands of dollars worth of perfume in that culture, and she rubs it
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all over the feet of Jesus and takes her own hair and starts cleaning her. And the disciples like, what are you doing? He's like, hold up, hold up, hold up. Look at this woman. Look at what she's doing. She's a purple cow.
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He doesn't say that to her because
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that would crush her, right? But he says, look at her. She stands out. She's different. And then he says in the text, something that I never really understood until I started seeing this idea of standing out.
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He says, the story of this woman, wherever the gospel is proclaimed, the story of this woman will be told with it. Why?
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Because she's weird. Because she stands out. Because she's different. That's precisely what it's talking about. You wanna stand out, you wanna be different. You be a servant, you wanna influence. You be a slave to people, serve them and see what happens. You get all kinds of credibility.
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Lord it over them. That's what he's saying.
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You want to be great, you want
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to be great, you become a servant. Andy Stanley, who's a pastor down in the States, tells a story in his book Deep and Wide about his church, very conservative church down in the South. And one day they heard that there was the gay pride parade, and it was going to come right by the front doors of the church. And so all the leaders got together
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and they're like, what are we going to do?
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It's a gay pride parade.
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Some of these people have never seen a gay person. And they're like, what are we gonna do?
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And they're like, I have an idea. Let's trick the church. What we'll do is we'll change our service times for that day. We'll make sure the front doors, no one can get out of them, and we'll send everyone out the back. Yeah, good plan. So the day came, and they all came to church, and then they were told, don't go out the front. There's a gay pride parade out there. And everyone said, okay, I'll go out
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the front then, because that's what people do. Don't go out there. Of course we will.
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So he said all his church was standing there holding their bibles with handles on them. And their jaws were on the ground as they watched the gay pride parade pass. And he said, I'll never forget it. I looked across the street at the church that was directly across the road from us. And all the people were standing out there handing out glasses of water to the people in the parade. And I realized the power of serving other people, the power of my identity shift. I'm here to lay down my life for you. You.
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I'm here to serve you, to make much of you versus you're a tool in my life to make much of me. I'm here to serve you humbly.
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To take a posture where you can meet the God that I love, the God that I'm enslaved to.
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That's the power of what he's talking about here. And it's hard for us because our hearts gravitate toward. I want to be leader. I want to have power over everybody. And he's saying, you want to be different. You want to be a purple cow. You want to stand out Serve people. Get to a point in your life where, as Paul says in Galatians 2, that I have been crucified with Christ and is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
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This idea that I've been so. My reputation as a person is so crucified that I don't care what people think of me anymore.
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I can be weird.
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I can be different. I can be a purple cow.
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I can stand out. I can serve people.
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I don't have to have it all
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together all the time. So much so that you're saying to
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the world around you, there's so much more to this world than the years
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that we've got here. There's something bigger going on in the world, and then your life begins to reflect that, and you're freed up to do stuff for the kingdom of God with your money, with your time, with your energy.
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My kids, we support this kid Raphael in Africa, and every month we send him money. And my kids see that this is money that we don't get to spend on ourself. We get to send it off to Raphael so he can have clothes and an education and meet Jesus. And what are we saying in that act? We're saying there's something bigger going on. There's a much bigger story than all the little things you could enjoy here with that money per month. There's a bigger thing that we're enslaved to, that we want to be servants who powerfully look to the world and say, this is the God that we serve, and this image is God putting us in our place. And he's going, check yourself. When you start to get a haughty heart, when you start to get a proud heart, your identity is servant.
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When we went to interview all of the people who oversee Aaron, what was encouraging to us as we heard, what you're getting is a pastor that serves people, that loves people, that he's not
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going to sit like some artists.
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I love artists, but.
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And when you got a need at the church, you got someone in the
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hospital, he's not gonna sit and go,
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sorry, man, I'm writing.
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You're getting a guy who loves people. I mean, that's what we try to do as a staff, constantly. Go, man, we're serving these people. This is our job.
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We're not lording it over them. And so I remember I started going
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to church when I was 19, and
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the church had a parking lot. And this always stayed with me.
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I pulled into the parking lot and I saw these signs. There were these signs, and one of the signs said senior pastor bold, closest to the door. Then it said associate pastor, then it said associate pastor, then it said secretary, then it said janitor. And I remember one day I was driving by the church, it was a snowy Ontario day and I drove by the church and I saw the senior pastor dusting off his senior pastor sign because there was snow on it. I was like, you're deranged, man, because your parking spot should be the furthest one from the front door.
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You're a servant. Who do you think you are? So we as staff, we have to, we park the furthest we can away from the front door here, right? And half our staff's pregnant,
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Right?
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They're like, I gotta carry stuff. I'm like, too bad. Your servant.
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How does our identity shift so that the gospel becomes powerful? And he says it here that it's a gift of grace. So let me just close by giving you the image of grace we were singing about. Grace in tenderness, grace for those of you who are new to church, is this idea of undeserved favor that we didn't earn. This, there's nothing we did that said, you know, God looked down and went, you're being a great person, I'd love to save you, you're so good. It's undeserved. It's the idea that we're caught completely red handed in our sin, in our wretchedness, that we got wicked hearts
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and
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God through Jesus Christ says, I did this for you anyway, I'll save you anyway. This is like when we were going down to interview Aaron. I was getting up to the airport here in Vancouver and Rob and I were in the car and we're driving up and I saw this cop and I tried to be nice and so I thought he was going to have
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to get like forced to pull off in this lane.
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So I sped up and shot around him like this.
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He didn't like that. So I get the sirens on and he pulls me over.
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He's like, what are you doing?
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I'm like helping you out.
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He said, do you know how fast you're going? I said, no. He said, it's a 50, you're going 70. Now that's the stone cold facts.
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I was going 20 over. Do I deserve a ticket? Yes. I'm caught red handed.
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So he goes back to his car, 20 minutes now I'm going to miss the flight. And he comes up, he says, just a warning.
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Yeah.
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Why? The mathematics of it, give me a ticket. That's undeserved favor that's the image of grace. He doesn't have to save you. You don't have to breathe one more day, and you don't deserve to. And because he's so full of grace, he goes, okay, I'm going to give you the opportunity not to be a king, to build up an empire that's going to burn, but to be a servant, to point people toward the one who will love and save them and transform them. And that's what's on offer for you. Some of you haven't given your life to Jesus yet. We baptized a bunch of people at 10:30 who said publicly, I have come to the place where I want to be a servant.
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I want to be a slave of God and give my life to Jesus. Some of you have never done that. The mystery's still far. The mystery's at arm's length. This is an opportunity to go, let me turn it all around, Father, I pray that each person here would feel the confrontation, the challenge of grace, the challenge being laid out in front of them to give up everything, to count the cost, to become a servant, a slave of Christ, rather than the slave
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of what they're already in. And they might be completely ignorant to that. Whatever they're enslaved to right now, the gospel of humanism, the gospel of post enlightenment, whatever it is, the gospel that says, we can earn this, that you would free them from that they would
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come out from being a servant of that story and give their life to the story of Jesus, of this gospel, of which Paul says, I was made a minister by the gift of God's grace, that you would do that work in their heart and their mind right now, even in this moment, that they would repent of sin and give their life to you. And now, as we sing in response to the truth of your word, as we give our resources to the building up of the church for the glory of God and the good of this city, that we would do so with our eyes and our hearts fixed on you in Jesus good name, amen.