Welcome to Your Life
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund kicks off the year 2022 with an encouraging reminder for Christians to engage in the world and surrounding community. Jesus is the light of the world and Christians are to be His light in the darkness.
Message Transcript
Let me ask you, as you look back at the year that was, do you generally find yourself encouraged or discouraged when you think about what has been? Now, I guess that there are a few optimists here who say, "Oh, I am encouraged," but that the vast majority look back and say, "When I pay attention to what's going on in the world when I take in news, however, I take it in, when I observe what's going on, I'm not encouraged. I'm discouraged with what's going on." Certainly, we could talk about the health issues and challenges, and not just the health itself, but even the differences that have arisen around that, where people have chosen sides often based on politics or kind of a faith basis around that, rather than purely just saying, "This is what's important health-wise." There've been financial tremors at times during this year.
For some of us, maybe it's looking at some of the racial tension that has existed in our country over the last year, or maybe the political divide. You can certainly look and say, "Well, there's been what appears to be an increase in crime," although some would say that it hasn't actually increased if you go back to 2019. It's just because no one was out in 2020, but whatever your take is, there are things that you look at right now and say, "That's not really encouraging." It isn't just things that happen globally. Sometimes it's things that happen to you and me. Some of us are just fighting to survive something or to find our way through a difficulty, and so we don't necessarily feel overly encouraged. As you face something like that, the question becomes, how do you deal with that? One option is to simply ignore it, to simply say, "You know what? I'm not going to pay attention to it. That's why I don't pay attention to what's going on," or "I don't want to deal with it."
Maybe we try to dull something in us by entertaining ourselves and amusing ourselves to avoid thinking about it. Or maybe we drink to avoid it. Or maybe we work too much so that we don't have to think about it. Some of us obsess about what's going on. We check the news constantly. We're reading every story, every opinion. We're thinking about everything. Some of us might hit the point of despair, just simply saying, "There's no hope. This is hopeless," but I'd like to just say, very simply today, that God is a God of hope, and he does not intend that his people, or people in general, live without a sense of hope, no matter what's going on in our world.
Let me just show you one psalm that points to this, and this isn't the text that we'll be reading from, studying from today, but this is a text that tells us about hope in the midst of despair. This is David when he was in a desert when he was in a difficult space. He says, "You, God are my God. Earnestly I seek you. I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you." We just sang this, the whole, "Your love is better than life. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name, I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods, with singing on my lips, and my mouth will praise you. On my bed, I remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night because you are my help. I sing in the shadow of your wings." Then, he says this, "I cling to you. Your right hand upholds me."
Now, the reason I read this is because here's what this psalm does. The psalmist is in a tough spot, and he says, "I cling to you." My guess is, even when I read that, that some of us glossed over a little because you know that the psalmists had these situations, and then you're like, "Sure, your love's better than life. I cling to you. Whatever it is you're going to say, sure, that's important," but it's a little bit like a Sunday school answer. Do you know what I mean when I say a Sunday school answer? If you've ever been around kids in Sunday school... We don't have Sunday school here. We have Kidzburgh, much cooler.
But kids in Sunday school, when you say to a kid, "What color is the sky?" and they think to themselves, "It's blue." They live in Pittsburgh. It's gray. They have this moment where they say, "That's the color of the sky, but I'm in church, so I should say Jesus because that has to be the right answer to every question." So, they say, "I think the color's blue, but I'm going to answer Jesus." Sometimes when you hear cling to God when it's difficult or hope in God when it's difficult because God is better than life, you have a little bit of that Sunday school answer mentality, not that it isn't true, not that you don't believe it's true, but there's a piece of you that says, "I've heard that, and it doesn't really help me navigate what I'm navigating right now."
Well, in 1 Thessalonians, this was written to the church at Thessalonica, the Apostle Paul wrote it, and the church there was stuck in some messy situations. You could say that they had lots of reasons for despair. When Paul comes to the end of the letter, he says to them several things, and I'm going to frame it this way. He encourages them to welcome things into their lives, three things that I believe are expressions of hope. It's a way to live in hope when things around you don't seem very hopeful. What Paul does is he says, "Here are some things you can welcome into your life," and you know a little bit about welcoming something into your life because, when somebody comes to your home, your apartment, your dorm, whatever, wherever you live, if you welcome them, you open your arms. You embrace them. You welcome them.
The opposite of welcoming is to close your arms and say, "Nope, you're not coming here. You're not welcome here." I believe what Paul does, the Apostle Paul does here is he says, "Here are three things to welcome into your life even when it feels hopeless because they are expressions of hope." Here's the first thing. That is, I believe that we are called, encouraged to welcome life as it comes. These are these three really quick verses, 16, 17, and 18. "Rejoice always. Pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this as God's will for you in Christ Jesus." One of the things that are natural for many of us is that when we have hardship is we resent it and we say, "Where is God in this? God isn't present. God isn't at work," when something hard is happening in our lives.
This isn't just simply saying, "Well, look on the bright side." This is saying, "Find a reason for thanks in the midst of things that are not pleasing to you." It's not simply saying, "Accept it. You can pray and try to make it better," but it's saying ultimately I accept what comes because I say that God is in this. Here's what's true, and that is, if God is good, and God is sovereign, meaning he's in charge, then even when things happen that you and I say, "This doesn't make sense," or, "I don't like this," we can say, "If I believe God is good and that God is sovereign, then I can say, 'I can be thankful even in this because, somehow, in a way that I don't see, a way that I don't understand, God is working in this for something that's better than I can understand right now.'"
There's an old story. I've told it before about an old man who lives in an ancient village, and in the agricultural village that he lives in, your horse is very important to your economic livelihood. One day, his horse runs away, and all the villagers come around and say to him, "How unfortunate you are that your horse ran away." The man says, "Well, we'll see."A few days later, his horse comes back, and it brings with it three other wild horses, so now he has four horses, and all the villagers come around and say, "How fortunate you are that now you have four horses," and the man says, "Well, we'll see."A few days later, his son is out trying to break one of the horses, and he's bucked from the horse, and he breaks his leg, and the villagers come around again and say, "How unfortunate you are that your son broke his leg," and the man says again, "We'll see."
Then, the military comes through the ancient village to conscript young men to the military, and his son can't be assigned to the military because of his broken leg, and all the villagers come around and say, "How fortunate," and again, the man says, "We'll see." The point is this, and that is you and I think that when something happens that we know whether it's good or bad instantly, but a good God who is sovereign does understand and sees things that we don't always understand and see. So, to accept life as it comes is to say, "God, even if this isn't pleasing to me in this exact moment, I am going to choose to be thankful because I know that, somehow, you're at work in this even if I don't understand or see how." When you and I can live with that kind of an attitude, what we're basically doing is saying, God, "Whatever you send, I will accept."
Now, you don't have a choice, in a sense, but it's an attitude, a disposition. I'll never forget when I was first working at a church. I was young. I was in my early 20s. I was going to grad school, seminary, and I was at a church overseeing kind of young adult, youth ministry, recreational ministry, all kinds of stuff. The first time that I was invited into a couple's... infidelity took place there. What I mean when I say I was invited in is that the couple, we knew them. The woman came to our house one day where my wife and I lived, and she said, "My husband's been cheating on me," and we walked with them through the devastation. I remember going over to where the guy worked, talking with him and the whole thing, and they ended up choosing to stay together.
What I remember most about this is a few years later sitting with them after we had moved to a new town, a new place, and a few years later sitting with them, and I'll never forget. She stopped. We were sitting, the four of us, and she said, "I would never choose to go through that again. I'd never wish it on my worst enemy, but God has used that to build things in our marriage that never would've been built without going through that." The reason that has stayed with me is that, from an earthly standpoint, having lived a little bit near them in it, what I saw was nothing but devastation, and yet God used it for good. Now, I'm not suggesting that, if you're in a place where somebody's being unfaithful, that there isn't a time to say, "That's enough," or, "We're going to have boundaries." That's not what I'm saying. She chose to stay, but in choosing to stay, she was able to look back and say, "Even in that, God worked in ways that I didn't expect."
So, the first thing we want to do is just say, "I'm going to welcome life as it comes." But here's the second thing, and that is I believe that this passage teaches us to welcome the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. If you understand or have thought about Christian theology, Christian theology basically says God exists as a Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit brings out conviction. Here's what we read in this passage. It just says, "Do not quench the Spirit." To quench meant to put out a fire. So, the Spirit is sometimes seen as fire, wind, some other things in the Bible, but the fire, the idea here being when the Spirit's moving, don't extinguish the movement of the Spirit in your life. That's what he's saying.
Then, he says, "Don't treat prophecies with contempt. Test them all. Hold on to what's good. Reject every kind of evil. May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through." When we're talking about the convicting work of the Holy Spirit here, what we're talking about is the work of the Spirit to bring about some kind of a different direction in our lives. Now, just for some context here, in the New Testament, the Spirit, one of its jobs is to convict us of sin. John 16, if you read through it, you'll see this very clearly. One of the ways the Spirit convicts people of sin is, initially, he convicts us of our need for a savior, and so what happens is, for some people, they go through life, most people, thinking "I'm pretty good. I'm better than other people."
Then, the Spirit, at some point, convicts us that we're not good enough, that we need a savior, that it's Jesus' work, not our work, that brings us to salvation. But even once we believe that the Spirit's still at work convicting us, correcting us, molding us to the image of Jesus Christ if we'll listen to the Spirit. But here's one of the things that happens. Sometimes people will say, "I've been a Christian for a while, and I'm not experiencing God," or "I'm not feeling very drawn or compelled in my faith." Can I just tell you? If you don't feel conviction, or compelled in your faith, or alive in your faith, it's probably because you've been quenching the Spirit of God in your life. After all, the Spirit of God is not boring and does not leave you in a place of saying, "Oh, well. This is just kind of a ho-hum thing in my life."
It's because you have stopped listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and you've quenched the work of the Holy Spirit in you. Now, he uses the word prophecy here, and this is something that can be confusing. I'm going to simplify something that's somewhat complex, but I get the privilege of doing that in 30 minutes so that it's quick. There are two basic ways to understand this, and anytime you say there are two basic ways there's more, okay? I'm going to try to simplify, two basic ways. One is, people will say prophecy means that God reveals something to you immediately, and then you speak it forward into a group, and it has the force of God at that moment. Okay? That's not how I understand it, but that's one way that a lot of people understand it.
The other way that people understand it... This is more in a line with how I see it... is that prophecy means that you are speaking, publicly speaking before a group, the ideas of God, the application of God in scripture, and so you're not coming up with something new on the spot, but you're taking and applying scripture and speaking it into existence, not into existence but into the group that's there, into that space. Now, the reason that I point this out is that sometimes people will say, "Well, prophecy is equal to or even above scripture." We did a podcast on this, and this is my not going to go into depth, simplify. It's online. You can go online into the search bar and type in prophecy in the old Perspectives podcast we used to do.
About a year ago, when a bunch of Christian people, and I don't use air quotes to say they're not Christian but to say it's not really Christian prophecy, were prophesying that Donald Trump would come back into Office after he had lost the election. Okay? What are they doing? They're saying, "God told me..." That's over here. "God told me that Donald Trump's going to be president again on this date. Therefore, you should believe me because I'm speaking for God." That's part of why I say this is a little problematic for me because, as soon as you start saying, "I speak for God," if it doesn't come true, you don't speak for God, and in the Old Testament, if that happened, you got stoned.
But if you understand prophecy differently, then you start saying, "Prophecy is when somebody is applying scripture," what's clear, maybe a little more pointedly. This is part of why small groups are so important to our DNA here at Orchard Hill because when you're in a group, sometimes you get a chance to sit with people who will, when you're reading scripture, when you're talking about things together, say something important for you to hear and understand. If you go on that podcast, you'll be able to hear it explain those views a little more clearly and some of the thought behind it. But here's what I want to say to you today, and that is the convicting work of the Holy Spirit is when God reveals something to you through scripture, and you say, "That is God's word to me," and when you hear it, and you listen to it, you draw closer to God, you get more into the adventure of God. When you resist it, you end up stepping away from God, hardening your heart, and not hearing the voice of God as clearly anymore.
I can tell you stories. I won't, but I could tell you stories for a long time about people who were convicted of something and said, "I don't want to hear that right now," and they drop out of a group maybe because they don't want people to call them on something. They stop going to church because they don't want to hear things anymore, and what happens is, in time, their heart gets hard, and they get to a point where they start to say, "I am not interested in the things of God." You and I, when God speaks in some way, need to heed the word of God. "God, whatever you send, I'll accept. God, whatever you ask, I'll do," are the two attitudes here, to welcome life as it comes, to welcome the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.
But one of the reasons we don't often hear the voice of God is we don't like being corrected, just if we're honest with ourselves. We like to think we have it figured out. I mentioned that, when my wife and I were away last Fall, we didn't really have Internet, and we purposely didn't have good cell reception and things, so we were really disconnected from the Internet. When we came back and got reconnected to the Internet, which even saying that makes me ask the question, "Why did I do that?" but when we got reconnected to the news and Internet, and everything, here's what struck me. When you kind of step out of it for a little while, and then you come back in, it was the outrage that existed on every side of an issue. As soon as somebody would talk about something, they would have this outrage. They would just be like, "Oh, the people on the other side, they're idiots, they're fools, they don't get it."
But then I started listening to some of the Christian podcasts and some of the outlets, the articles I read there, and do you know what struck me? It wasn't that different. There was outrage there, and here's what I think is happening with outrage. When we have outrage, do you know what we're doing? We're saying, "I'm good. They're bad, and since they're bad, I'm good. Therefore, I don't have anything that I need to do differently." In other words, "Holy Spirit convict other people of everything that's wrong with them. I'm good."
What outrage does is it feeds self-righteousness that lets us feel good about ourselves, look down on others, and not have to deal with what God might actually want to renovate in our hearts and lives. As a result, we don't heed the word of God. We don't respond to the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. I'm not talking here about just kind of random applications that somebody throws at you. When I say don't treat prophecies with contempt or respond to the sanctifying work, what I'm talking about is when there's a clear implication of scripture, and somebody speaks it, and your spirit agrees with it. Let me just give you one example.
In the 10 commandments, there's a commandment that is largely ignored in our culture and even in our Christian subculture. Take one day, make it holy as unto the Lord. Six days work, the seventh day is for God. Okay? What does that mean? Well, I don't think you can take it out of the 10 commandments. Most Christians say it got transferred to the first day of the week, and they would say a lot of the Old Testament ceremonial law around it doesn't apply, like don't carry something, all of that, would say that was unique to that time. But what's happened is, for some of us, we've made it mean very little, but if you understand it, what it means is God created you, created me, to be people with rhythm who work six days, take one day for worship, rest, friendship, things that are restorative to our soul. What happens is...
Let's just use this as an example. Say you're sitting in a group, and your group talks about the message, and you say, "Wow, what do you think about this idea of the Sabbath and keeping the Sabbath? How do you do it?" Somebody says something, and you say, "Wow, I need to change something because I've started to use my Sunday or my Saturday, whatever day is my day, just like I use every other day. All of a sudden, you need to be in a place where you say, "Is God doing something in me?" Do you see how that will change you from being in a place of Christianity's boring, it doesn't do much for me, when you start saying, "Anything God asks, I will do?" It changes how you live. In Psalm 19, there are a few different words that are used for sin.
Here's what we read, Psalm 19 verse 12. "But who can discern their own errors?" Errors here mean unintentional, inadvertent things that we do. "Forgive my hidden faults." That means just what you think it would mean, something we hide, we conceal, we keep secret, but then there's this third category. "Keep your servant from willful sins," and what willful sins are, are the things that we know what God has said, and we say, "I just don't want to do that." Welcoming the convicting work of the Holy Spirit means that we're saying, "God, whatever you ask, I will do even if it doesn't make sense to me." Now, I want to just say this as well. I've been talking about this in terms of sin and conviction of sin, and that is one of the clear roles of the Holy Spirit. But sometimes the Spirit doesn't just convict us of sin, but the Spirit prompts us to action that will do something in our lives that will put us on a path that we wouldn't have been on otherwise. It says here that God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you, and sanctify means to be set apart. It means to be held in distinction. Sometimes what God will do is he will draw us, the Spirit will draw us to something that is more set apart than we would otherwise choose.
This fall, my wife and I went to a family wedding. It was up in Detroit. Our nephew was getting married, and we were driving my wife's parents to the wedding. They're at the age where they don't like driving long road trips anymore, and so they asked if we would pick them up and drive them. We've done this a few times, and we've gone different places. Somewhere along the line, I got put on the no-drive list with my in-laws. Evidently, I drive a little faster than they want me to drive, and so I'm the designated non-driver, which I kind of like that title. I think I'm going to embrace it for myself in all settings, but anyway, I'm the designated non-driver with my in-laws.
We're in the car. My wife's in the front seat, driving. My father-in-law's sitting in the front seat. I'm in the back seat with my mother-in-law, and we're going to our nephew's wedding, their grandson's wedding. As we're driving, we were going near Detroit. It's a place we knew because we'd lived not far from there, and so I knew the roads. I knew how they should go, where we should go to get to the basic area we were going. But at one point my wife said, "Would you just put the hotel in the GPS for me so that you can tell me where to go?" I said, "Sure, this is your guy's rodeo. It's all good." So, I put it in the GPS, and we come to a place where the way that I would have gone was on this one highway that went this way, and the GPS told us to go on a highway that went this way. Have any of you ever been in this moment, where you're sitting there saying, "That does not make sense? That is not the way I would go?"
But I'm sitting in the back seat. I'm just like, "You know what? Knock yourselves out. Follow the GPS." We take this road out and around, and we end up getting to the hotel, and it probably took us half an hour longer than I thought it should have taken us. I'm having that moment where I'm like, "Yeah, well, we followed the GPS." A little later, I get in the car. The in-laws weren't with me, so I could drive, and I drive to pick up one of our sons at the airport who was flying in to be at the wedding. I took the road that we would've been on had we not... and it was under construction, and I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour. The GPS was right. Here's my point.
Sometimes the convicting work of the Holy Spirit will be to tell you to go somewhere that doesn't make sense to you, and you will have that moment of saying, "Will I follow the prompting, the leading of God where the adventure is? Or, will I say, 'I'm doing what I've always done because I know that this is the way?'" and the convicting work of the Holy Spirit will lead you, will lead me into places where we have an opportunity to invest in people and in things that we wouldn't have a chance to invest in otherwise. So, welcome into your life, life as it comes. "Lord, whatever you send, I'll accept." Welcome into your life the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. "God, whatever you ask, I'll do." Then, finally, I would say welcome others into your life.
Here's where we see this, verses 25 and 26. "Brothers and sisters, pray for us. Greet all God's people with a holy kiss." Pray for us, this is Paul saying, "Pray for your leadership," probably because they were in an intense spiritual battle, and then he says, "Greet one another with a holy kiss." Now, this is one of these verses that sometimes middle school boys really like. They're like, "Cool. The Bible says greet with a holy kiss. Hey." You know, without a whole lot of Bible training, that's not exactly what that means or how to interpret it, so if you walk out in the lobby today afterward, and you say, "Hey, the holy kiss," bad idea, socially inappropriate. Don't do it. Okay?
But it doesn't take a lot to understand what it's saying. That is, it's saying, "Welcome one another. Be warm in your greetings and affect with one another," because to welcome people was to, in essence, say, "I'm extending friendship to you," and a holy kiss was where... and you still see this sometimes in Eastern cultures where people will come up, and they'll kiss and do kind of the dab on both sides. It's a way of saying, "I'm welcoming you into my home or my life." In our culture, probably the closest equivalent pre-pandemic was the handshake. Now, it's the fist bump, maybe. But it's the idea of saying. "I welcome you," and so to welcome people into your life is what this is saying and to make a genuine, warm way of saying, "I am finding a way to welcome people into our lives."
What does this mean when we say welcome others into your lives? Well, in part, it may mean that we're open to welcoming new people into our lives, new to you. I think it's an incredible thought to think that, as you sit here today, as you watch online, whenever you're watching, that you would say, "Maybe the best friends that I will have been people I haven't met yet. Maybe my best friends in the next few years of my life are people that I barely know today," if you're willing to welcome people into your life. Now, that doesn't mean you leave people that have been your friends behind. Sometimes welcoming people means continuing to welcome the same people. But it's a cool thought to say, what expansion of your network could happen if you said, "I'll welcome people into my life?"
Sometimes it might mean welcoming people that you've written off. Have you written anybody out of your life, you've made them dead to you, so to speak, where you've said, "I'm not dealing with them anymore?" Now, certainly, there's a time for boundaries. There's a time to say, "You can't do to me what you used to do to me. Therefore, you don't have access to me." I'm not saying that those things don't exist, but what I'm saying is sometimes we write people out of our lives for petty reasons, for little things, where we say, "I don't like how you treated me there," and what we've done is we've eliminated people from our lives over petty differences and hurts, rather than saying, "I will welcome you and practice what it is to be forgiving." I think it means welcoming people into our lives who are different from us.
Sometimes, especially in this last year, people have tended to congregate or to kind of migrate to people who are just like them, who think like them and do everything like them, instead of saying, "There are people who are different," and part of the value and beauty of life is being around people who are different from you, different from me, and it certainly could mean welcoming people into your lives, into my life who don't know or trust Jesus Christ. If you're a person who knows Jesus Christ, one of the great commands of scripture is to take the message into all the world and make disciples. Yet, statistics show that a lot of people, once they come to faith in Jesus Christ, insulate from the rest of the world and don't have friends who don't believe, and so maybe, for some of us, this is a way to think about our next year and say, "Who can I welcome into my life that is outside of the circle of faith?"
One of the things that happened for me with Christmas Eve this last year, and this happens every year, but I was reminded of just how outward-facing the church is called to be and yet, during the last year and a half, how inward the church has become. I don't say that negatively because, in part, that was the right thing to do during a pandemic, but the call of the church is not to say, "We have a group that all think and believe the same." It's to say, "How can we welcome people into our midst?" So, as you think about the year that's ahead, one of the ways to express hope and confidence in who God is, is to say, "I'm going to choose to be open-handed, open-armed, to welcome these things into my life, rather than to be closed. I'm going to choose to welcome life as it comes. God, whatever you send, I'll accept. I'm going to choose to welcome the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. God, whatever you ask, I will do, and I will choose to welcome others into my life. God, whoever you send, I will welcome."
As a church community, how great would it be if we could mirror those things? They'd be true personally but be true corporately, if we would be the kind of a place that doesn't sit around and say, "Look at how awful the world is," but express real hope that people felt and experience tangibly because they said, "These people accept life as it comes and understand that there's a good God, loving God, who's in charge, and there's a reason for hope." How good would it be if we, as a community, were able to say, "Wherever God leads, even if it's a little detour or outside of what we're thinking, that we'll go there because we want to be in step with the Holy Spirit?"
How good would it be if we welcomed with open arms people who are different, who haven't come to faith yet, who are new to us, maybe who've been alienated in some way and said, "The community of faith transcends all of our petty differences in this world?" That brings hope, and I hope that it brings some hope for you. Here's where you and I can get what we need for this because, if you just walk out and say, "Okay, check, check, check, I'm going to do these three things," you know as well as I do what will happen is you'll hit the parking lot, and you'll be convicted to let the other car go first, and you're like, "No way. I'm getting to lunch."
Where you get the strength for this, where I get the strength for this, is savoring God's welcome of me in Jesus Christ, who doesn't deserve it, who can't earn my way, can't perform enough, can't be good enough for God to say, "Oh yes, you belong now," but because of what Jesus did on the cross and fully welcomed with every flaw, every mistake, and when I can celebrate and savor that, then I can welcome life as it comes, welcome the correcting work of God because I'm not doing it to get something. I'm doing it from a place of acceptance of what Jesus has already done, and I can welcome others because I've been welcomed. When we live that, then we live in the reality of hope in a world that, at times, does not feel very hopeful. God, I pray today that you would help me help each person here to embrace the convicting work of your Spirit in us, and your faithfulness, and your goodness for us, that we could savor all of your goodness, and we pray this in Jesus's name. Amen.
