Second Message - Joel Haldeman
Message Description
Guest speaker Joel Haldeman continues the Second Message series asking us to slow down and be present in God's perfect timing.
Message Transcript
Well, Orchard Hill, it is really a pleasure to be back here and to see so many of you. We've been on the road for almost a year now and have spent time in lots of different churches and lots of different places. And there is just something about Orchard Hill that feels like home. Leaving Orchard Hill and leaving the Strip District, especially was the hardest part about moving away from Pittsburgh. And my biggest regret this weekend is that I can't be in the Strip District but want to welcome the Strip District as well as Butler and the Chapel to join us together today.
My wife and I are re-watching a TV show that was popular about 10 years ago. The Office was a story about an everyday paper company, Dunder Mifflin, with some extraordinary people. And anyone who got caught up in the show knows that besides being just a hilarious, riff on management styles, extreme personalities, and business life, at its heart, the show was a story about people and relationships. And it was a heart-tugging story about love, friendships, meaning, and hope.
And throughout nine seasons, you watch this group of people really do life together. Some marriages start, families that begin, people go back to school, and people who have career changes. And in the final episode, there's this emotional moment where Andy Bernard, the "Nard dog," he's lamenting about how he's moved on from Dunder Mifflin. And he now has his dream job at Cornell, but how he still misses his old pals that he did life with at Dunder Mifflin. And he looks right at the camera, and he says in this final interview, "I wish there was a way to know that you were living in the good old days before you actually left them."
That's a gut check. Isn't it? What if we were so hurried to get through today, so distracted that we never realized that we were living in the good old days. What if those days flew past us? And instead of enjoying those moments as precious gifts, we squandered them. And as we said in that video, this is why we set off because we felt like our kids were growing up so fast that we just wanted to take a pause from the hustle and spend intentional time together as a family. We felt like the good old days were racing past us. And frankly, our life was just too busy. And I know it sounds crazy because I was a pastor at the time, but we often found ourselves too busy to spend time on some of the most important things in life.
And so, we wanted to make sure that we were not squandering the good old days, the gift of the present moment. You see what I struggled with, and to be honest, still do struggle with is living in the present moment. I want you to think about what some of the most enjoyable and memorable moments in your life are. It's those moments when you're laughing so hard with a group of friends that your side hurts. When you have a slow meal out with someone that you really love, tickling your kids who are simultaneously yelling for you to stop, but also begging for more, crossing the finish line or standing on a summit, getting lost in beautiful scenery or a familiar smell that evokes a certain emotion in you.
What do all of these things have in common? That in those moments you are living fully present. You're not thinking about the future. You're not worried about the past. You are right there. But we are a people who struggle to live in the moment, aren't we? Today, what I want us to see is that these are the good old days, that you and I are actually caught in a spiritual battle over how we perceive time and how we treat the very moment that we live in. And what I want us to see is how God wants us to think about time so we can come to see these days as the good old days, like days that are meant to be treasured so that we can live fully present, so that we can recognize the gifts and enjoy it.
In June, we bought our truck and RV that you saw, and we needed to pick up our truck in South Carolina. And so, we went there and let me just tell you, it was love at first sight. I absolutely love this truck. It was a beast, 6.6-liter diesel dually. Ugh. I have this Tim the Tool Man Taylor-like clip in my head of him just grunting, "More power." Right? And our first drive was to go pick up our RV, which we had to go west through Asheville, North Carolina. So up over the Smokey Mountains and it was so beautiful, but I was going up these mountains in my big, powerful truck. I was giddy.
Okay. So, we get to the RV and spend some time moving in, getting situated, but we need to learn how to tow this thing. The previous owner, he's there and he's going to give us some pointers and we get in the truck and go out and he's riding upfront with me and telling me what to do. How to take wide turns, how to drive this huge trailer.
And so, we can go take a tow, go down the highway, come back. And now it's time to learn to back up. This is the hard part. And I'm listening to him because I've never really done anything like this before. And I'm just trusting my co-pilot, turn your wheel this way, turn your wheel that way, give it some gas, watch your mirrors for these certain things. And so, I'm doing everything that he tells me to do and give it a little gas. And then I hear that sickening metal on metal crunch. Oh, and what had happened was the hitch in the bed of the truck, we were turned in such a way that it turned too sharp and impacted the side of the truck and it put a dent on the inside of the bed of the truck, which was fine. It was a garbage hitch we got rid of so that'll never happen again, but this was my truck. I loved it so much and now it was dented up.
So, I had a little bit of regret. Rule number one, by the way, of RVing is that you never trust anyone when you're backing up unless they're your spouse that says, "Oh yeah, you're good. Go ahead." So that's an easy example, right, because that wasn't like 100% my fault.
But I could tell you about the time I drove a boat under a bridge. I was about an inch too low for the canopy of the boat. Or I could tell you a lot of more significant moments where I did something hurtful to someone, I failed to care for someone, I didn't plan, I invested wrongly, or where I assumed too much.
The point is we all sometimes look at the past with regret. Sometimes we look back and we see the consequences, don't we? And it hurts. And we think, I wish I could go back and change that. Sometimes it's a dent on something like a truck, but sometimes it's a dent on a relationship. I don't know. Maybe when you look at the past, you don't feel that way. Maybe you have pride because of who you were, what you did, and you maybe feel a little bit invincible.
In either case, Paul speaks to this in Philippians 3. Paul's a guy who could brag about the past. He had accomplished a lot, but he also had a lot to be ashamed of. Yet even though he was quite successful, he could also think of himself and refer to himself as the worst of sinners. But when he looked back on his path and all the success, the worldly success that he had, he said "All of that was a loss in his mind compared to knowing Christ." And then listen to what he says in Philippians 3:13, "Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things."
See? Paul teaches you and me how to think about the past. "A mature person," he says, "will take on this very same attitude. That regardless of what lies in your past, whether it's really great or really bad, that there is something more important for you to fix your mind on, that God has something better for you, a better mission, a better purpose." And the power that you have to do all of this is written right in this. I didn't read this. This is verse 12. The verse that comes before all this. He says, "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." I love the way the ESV translates that last part. It says because Christ has made me his own.
If you have been owned by Christ, you look at the past differently because the past doesn't define you. The person who owns you defines you. And that is Christ. We don't ignore the past, right? He's not saying forget about the past. In fact, he's the one who brought it up, but he's saying, see it for what it is.
More on that in a minute. But first I want us to think about the future because, for you and me, the future can be equally problematic. We have a society in which we can shape our future, which is an awesome reality, but it's also one that comes with risks. And one of those risks would be that we are constantly working towards the future, such that we miss out on the present.
We're all different people, but this is where I struggle. How can I work today so that I can rest tomorrow? How can I spend, save, invest money today to better tomorrow? How can I put my time in today so that tomorrow is more enjoyable? And this attitude honestly can be toxic because it can rob you and me of the ability to enjoy the present moment because we're never in it. We're always living for what's next. We're always living for tomorrow. And the problem is the future is never here.
And so, James writes these very practical words about how we should regard the future. This is James 4, starting in 13. He says, "Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why? You don't even know what will happen tomorrow? What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that."
And so, James helps us see two things. Number one is you don't know what will happen tomorrow. You can make the best plans that could ever be written but that doesn't mean tomorrow's going to come. Those plans are never guaranteed. And you already know that, right? Now, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't make plans. James actually says the opposite, right? He says, make your plans, but acknowledge that you don't control the future, acknowledge the God who does. So, make your plans, think about the future consequences of the decisions that we make today, but see it all through God's perspective.
The second thing that James teaches us here is that our lives vanish quickly. Friends do not take yourself more seriously than you ought to. You're just here for a little while. And before you know it, you'll be gone, and you will be surprised at how quickly on earth you'll be forgotten. Do not spend your life trying to build something that's going to vanish. And so, we seek the Lord, and we make plans, but we don't put our hope in our plans. We don't save up our enjoyment for tomorrow because tomorrow might never come.
My dad died from cancer when he was 62 years old. Almost right after he retired, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Now, he was right to save for retirement, I think, but don't go on living for tomorrow as if it's your only hope because tomorrow may never come.
I don't want to give the impression here that happiness comes from a successfully executed retirement plan. That's not my point. Far from it. Infinite blessings were my dad's the moment he stepped into the presence of Jesus, so much so, that missing out on retirement was inconsequential. Retirement is not the goal. Enjoying Jesus is the goal. But how can we possibly enjoy the God who is present with us here and now when our mind is stuck on tomorrow, next month, or next year?
So, the problem that I've tried to show you is that you are not created to live in the future. You are not created to live in the past. You were created for right here, right now for the God who is present with you. C.S. Lewis has a really great explanation of this in a book that he wrote called the Screw Tape Letters. And this book is about a demon, a fallen angel of Satan, who's mentoring a younger demon on how to distract, how to lead his human client away from God. And so, you have to sort of see it through the perspective of the demon, kind of read it backwards, right?
And so, here's what's Screw Tape writes to his nephew about how to deceive his human client. He says, "The humans live in time, but our enemy, that is God, our enemy destines them to eternity." Now, by eternity, what Lewis means here, he's talking about heaven. He's talking about the eternal state that is beyond this life that has an actual succession of time in it. He, therefore, God, I believe wants them to attend chiefly to two things to eternity itself and to the point of time, which they call the present, for the present is the point at which time touches eternity."
The present moment is the time in which time touches eternity. And his point is that the experience of heaven is this experience of being fully present at the moment, even though there still will be a concept of the future and a concept of the past, in heaven, people will live fully present, enjoying the presence of God. And the thing on earth that most resembles that experience are those moments when we get caught up in the present. And Screw Tape goes on and he says, "Our business is to get them away from the eternal and away from the present." And he goes on to say, "Let's tempt them to live in the past." But more powerfully, he says, "Let's tempt them to live in the future." Because when you and I are not in the present, we cannot enjoy the goodness of God.
So, I hope you see the problem. I've tried to show you from scripture that fixating on the past or fixating in the future is neither helpful nor good. Now, if you're here today and you don't call yourself a Christian, I think you'd agree with everything that I just said. I think this is just sort of a pretty obvious human-level knowledge thing that when we're stuck in the past, or when we're stuck in the future, which doesn't do us a whole lot of good, that we're better off by living in the present. But I want you to see how this becomes distinctly Christian because the gospel of Jesus actually unlocks this ability within us to live fully in the present and that's what I want you to see.
Think for a moment about why we live in the future or live in the past. It usually has something to do with control, right? That we want to be in control. We want to shape our own story, the story that our life tells. And maybe we look at the past because we think I wish I would have done that. I wish I would've done that differently because it would've shaped my story differently. Or when we think about the future, we're thinking about how I can steer my life so that it tells this certain story. But the truth of the gospel, the very center of Christianity is left to yourself. You're the one who actually wrecks your story, that you don't choose what's best for you. In fact, we made a wreck of our own story, a wreck of our lives so much so that Christ had to intervene without your permission to shake things up and turn it into a beautiful story. He literally had to rescue you from yourself to interrupt your story and tell a different story, a better story.
What story are you trying to create? The story of someone wealthy, a story of someone comfortable, a story of someone who has power, who's envied, a story of someone well-liked? Those are lousy stories, the kind of stories that will be very quickly forgotten. But Jesus interrupts our lives to tell a better story. A story of a human who is born into this world for the glory of God, yet gets caught up in themselves, gets sidetracked, and starts telling a self-serving lousy, short-lived story, but is rescued by a glorious God through another human stepping into this earth who lives the perfect life on your behalf, died the death that you and I deserve to die for our sins, and personally intervenes in each of our lives. And he tells that beautiful, old story to change you and me so that we no longer serve those silly, short-lived stories, but God's big, great eternal glorious story.
As it turns out, my grandma passed away early yesterday morning. She was 92 years old and loved the Lord and was ready to be with him. Do you know what's impressive about my grandma? That in her life she proclaimed the glory of God. No doubt in her many decades of living, she was probably tempted to tell all of those same lousy stories that you and I are tempted to tell with our life. But in the end, the only story that matters, the only story that will truly last is the story that Jesus saved her from herself, for his eternal glory.
See, the story that God tells is a better story than you and I could ever tell. We want to get our story right, don't we? But here's where the rubber hits the road. If you and I were given 1,000 lives to live, we still could not tell a better story than the one that God is currently telling with your life. See, what we don't understand is that our failures, the failures that we're living in right now, the failures that we see in the past, and unfortunately the failures that are going to lie in your future, all of those work together to tell a beautiful story. God is using those. It's the story of God rescuing us from our sinfulness, from our failures. That's a beautiful story. Think about it, why did God allow sin into the world and thus suffering to begin with? In order to tell a glorious story, a story of a God who intervenes and rescues us from ourselves to Himself.
And if God had 1,000 redoes, he wouldn't change the story one bit. He'd still create Satan. He'd still create that tree in the center of the garden. He'd still have Jesus choose Judas. What makes you think that you can tell a better story than the story that God is going to tell with your life? See, the glory and the beauty of your story come not from getting it right. It comes from owning our weaknesses and depending on Christ. This is why Paul could say, "For when I am weak, then I am strong."
See, you and I think that if our life could just tell the right story, then we'd be happy. And we're not totally wrong in thinking that. If we do get the right story with our life, then we will be happy. We will find contentment and satisfaction and deep joy. The problem is you have the wrong story in mind. The story that's going to make you happy is not a story of money or comfort or being well-liked by your kids or friends. The story that's going to cause you deep and lasting happiness is a story of a person enjoying the glory of God.
There is no better past than the one that Jesus has already written for you. There is no better future than the one Jesus has already written for you. And because of this, you and I can be present. We can be right here right now. We have nothing to worry about.
I want to share a few ways that we can teach ourselves to be present. But the biggest hurdle is coming to believe what I just showed you. And if you walk away with nothing else today, I want you to get this, that Jesus has written a better past and a better future than you can ever write. He's written a better past and a better future than you can ever write. When we get that into our minds, we can live fully present. That changes everything. But here are just a few other helps along the way.
The first is to pray. I know that sounds so “Christiany,” like you knew I was going to say that, right? I spent two years praying every day for four things. And one of them was God helped me to be fully present. And I can't tell you that every day for two years, all day long, I was 100% present, but I know that every day when I looked in the mirror or when I was driving to work and I prayed that prayer, I had that moment of just going, okay, I'm here. God is with me. I have nothing to fear. This moment is a gift. You train yourself to do that every single day. That makes a difference. And God answers prayers.
Number two is to pay attention to what is present with you. Pay attention and find pleasure in the little things. I find it most helpful to do this in nature because I can clearly see the good gifts from God. I found an acorn the other day and I was so amazed by the colors and the texture and the shape. And I just kept looking at it. My family's looking at me like I'm crazy because there's like 1,000 of them on the ground all around, and I'm just all caught up in this one. But what happened was I was caught up in the beauty of this simple thing and seeing this little thing that there are millions of as this perfect gift from God.
Allow yourself to get wrapped up in the beauty of something because when you do that, you are fully present. Listen, I'm not like an art guy. So, don't get me wrong here. You don't have to be an art person for this to happen. There is something that you find beautiful and whether it is an acorn or a sunset or a muscle car when we find ourselves be being wrapped up in beauty, we live fully present. That doesn't happen when we're moving 1,000 miles per hour. That doesn't happen when our mark of a successful day is how many emails we can respond to. And so, we slow down, we pay attention. We enjoy nature. We enjoy the details. We look for artistic designs. We can breathe deeply.
I went on a bike ride recently with my family. We were in Northern Michigan, and I think it must have been late August, but some of the leaves have had already started to fall off the trees. And I had this moment where we went through this short patch on the bike trail where I breathed in and had that familiar sense of fall. That familiar sense that I hadn't had, hadn't experience for, I don't know, 10 months or whatever it was. And there was something so distinct about it. And at that moment, I realized, wow, what a gift from God this is, how creative, how unique and it helped me to be present and to have peace.
So, paying attention is not really a good end in itself. It's just a step, right? And so, what I want you to do is I want you to notice the detail, but more importantly, I want you to turn around and thank God for it because all of those details are a gift from God. Recognize it as a gift and give credit to the gift giver. And now what you've done is you've taken an ordinary moment of being present and you've turned that into this spiritual moment, which is exactly what you were created for, to experience the goodness of God in this very moment.
Andy Bernard wanted a way to know that you were living in the good old days before you actually left them. And we can say there is a way because every day is the good old days. No matter what season of life you are in, you are living in the good old days. Don't let them race past you. What if we stopped waiting all week for Friday? What if we stopped waiting all year for summer? What if we stopped waiting our whole life for that season of time when we'll be able to slow down and be present? What if we could enjoy the season of life of being single, soaking in the freedom and simplicity of it, of not having to wrestle the covers off of someone else?
What if we enjoy the season of life where you're not quite where you want to be with your career, enjoyed maybe some of the freedom that you have because of it? What if we learned to savor every moment as if it were a gift from God if we slowed down and saved those moments, every time we said goodbye, we did so slowly? What if instead of rushing through bedtime, we crawled into bed with our love bugs and giggled with them, squeezed them, and made sure that we were the last ones to let go?
I bet that you'd find a lot more joy, a lot more happiness in your daily life. Jesus has already written your story and it's a good one. He has a better past and a better future than you could ever write. And so slow down, smell the flowers, take in the scenery, enjoy every moment. You have nothing to worry about and you can be right here, right now.
Let me pray for us. Father, this is hard. We are people that are so easily distracted, thinking about the past, and thinking about what's next. Will you just help us learn to be right here, to sense your presence, to see you as the good gift giver? And we just trust you, love you, and know that you are such an amazing God for wanting us to find joy and pleasure in your glory. In Jesus’ name. Amen.