Made for Relationship: Loving God
First B Jackson
2025-03-02

Automatically transcribed. Where this and the recording disagree, the recording is the record.

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Welcome, everybody. It's wonderful to see you. I'm glad here to be with you. Would you stand up? I'd love to to join together in song, an encouraging word from first Peter five seven here to lead us in worship.

It's cast all your cares and your worries on him. Why? Because he cares for you. Would you join us in singing, leave it there. Bring your burdens to the Lord.

Leave him there.

Leave it there. Leave it there. Take your burdens to Lord and leave it there. If you trust him with your doubt, he will surely bring you out. Take your burdens body suffers pain and your health you can't again, and your soul is almost sinking in despair.

Jesus knows the pain you feel. He can save and he can take burden to the Lord and leave it there. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there. If you trust him with your doubts, he will surely bring you out. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

And your enemies are safe and your heart begins to fail. Don't forget that God in heaven answers for aid. We will make a way for you. We will guide you safely through. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

Leave it there. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there. If

Yeehaw, Alright. You can have a seat here for a moment.

Good morning, and welcome to First Baptist Baptist Church, everybody. We're so glad you're here. We got a couple announcements for you. Blake's gonna sorry. Thanks, buddy.

First of all, we have a missions moment. We're trying to let you all know about the many missionaries that we sponsor here through First Baptist Church, and there's plenty of opportunities to learn more about them by joining the mission team or joining us on Wednesday mornings for prayer group. But first, we're gonna highlight the Eon family, who's actually coming back to Jackson here in just a little bit. I got some claps. I agree.

Yeah.

Yeah. We'll be excited to see them again. They have been over in Romania for quite some time now, and you guys y'all have been very generous in supporting them. Keep please keep praying for them. We just had a letter from them, like, a week and a half ago, and it's been in the church email.

So if you wanna read the most recent update from them, you can see it there. May I? Keep them in your prayers.

Yeah. May I? Just right now. Well, we're aware of them, and we're together as a church family. May I pray for the Eon family.

God, we do lift them up to you. That this is a sweet, sweet, precious family. So many talents and a a huge heart for you. Lord, would you bless them as they move forward, God, not knowing exactly what's next, but desiring to to come back here to Wyoming and even Jackson. God, would you make the way clear for them?

And, God, we're ready to to receive them when they are here again, but we're asking for your will be done in your way. In Jesus' name, would you bless this family. Amen.

Amen. Okay. And Awana is on tomorrow night. Carl, do you have anything to say about Awana?

I think it's duct tape night. So make something out of duct tape, and you get an award.

It's so exciting. I recommend not putting it directly on your hair. So that's that's what happened up here. Just a warning to you. And for more information, go to our church website.

We have lots of Bible studies, weekly groups that get together. If you want to get plugged in, there's no reason to be alone, no reason to be lonely. Would you just check on our website? Plenty of events to get together. Now, we're gonna stand up.

And in just a moment, I'm gonna ask you all, would you please move to the center of here and not leave any seats between you? Because if you leave the aisles open, more people can come in along the sides because there's about to be a lot more people. But we've got one more message in the back.

Good hustle. Thank you, Nick. This is my fault because I didn't email Nick earlier this week. But Men's Alliance is on this Wednesday morning for breakfast in the Fellowship Hall at 06:30. I'm super excited.

We just had an awesome men's retreat, snowmobile men's retreat. Can I get a whoop whoop if you were there? Some people were there. And this this Wednesday morning, we're just gonna do kind of a a recap for those who weren't there. Like, hey.

These were super impactful things that we discussed, that we learned about at this men's retreat. Kind of like to galvanize for those who were there what was discussed, and for those who weren't there, a way to be in on that discussion.

So we're super excited. Thank you. Thanks, Berkeley. Now would you all stand up? Please greet one another, and let's move into the center of the aisle if you can.

Thank you so much.

God, it is so good to sing to you this morning as the body of Christ. And truly, you are the king of heaven, the king of our hearts. Thank you, Lord, for your perfect life, your sacrificial death, your resurrection, your ascension, sending your Holy Spirit to live in us. Lord, you tell us to abide in you, just to stay connected. And God, this is us as a church family here this morning to stay to say, we want to stay connected to you, to abide in you, to remain in you.

Because as we do, we will bear fruit. You say, apart from you, we can't. God, thank you for the fruit of the spirit. Would you would you fill this place with your love and your joy and peace in all that you are, God? And and not just here, but would you send us out from here too.

We are preparing to hear the word. We're preparing to hear what you have to say to us. And we do this by singing to you and singing the truths of scripture. So God, would you bless our our little efforts here and may these songs rise up like an incense to you. In Jesus name.

Amen.

Be thou my

This is such a a great Psalm here. It's Psalm sixteen eleven, and and the Psalmist is saying, you make known to me the path of life, and in your presence, there is fullness of joy. Are you feeling that joy this morning? And maybe you're not there yet, and that's okay. But, as we keep on singing, really, as we make that step in obedience to continue to worship, it's gonna get there.

I promise, it's gonna get there. That joy, he fills us up. At his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

And let us bless. Oh, let us bless the Lord every day and night, never ending praise. May our sins rise.

Amen. You can have a seat here for a moment. This is the worship through giving part of service. I'll invite our ushers to come come on forward, and Tim, your stores. He's one of oh, there you are, Tim.

And if you're new to first b, please don't feel obligated to give as the plates pass. Please let us get to know you. Please get to know us. Get to know the heart of this church. Second Corinthians, this will be my theme verse for the worship of giving this month.

Second Corinthians nine, it's not to give reluctantly or under compulsion, but cheerfully from the heart. It's a predetermined thing that we've determined in advance before we came here. That's the kind of giving that the Lord wants us to do. Tim, may may I ask you to pray?

Our father everlasting, the old creating one, God almighty. Through your Holy Spirit, conceiving Christ the son, Jesus our Savior. I believe in God our Father. I believe in Christ the Son. I believe in the Holy Spirit.

Our God

Amen. I think it's about that time for children's church. Is that right, Blake? It is. I got a thumbs up.

Children, you are more than welcome to stay up here always, but also Children's Church. And Brad, this do you if you don't know this handsome guy, this is Brad. Yeah. I'm talking to you. And Brad, may I pray for you too before you Please.

There I am. Lord, thank you. Thank you for the privilege of being able to open your word today and see what you have for us. God, we receive here with open hands and and open hearts, open minds to what you would have for us. Thank you, God, for your truth proclaimed.

This is what we're here to do. We're here to hear and understand and apply your word. God, would you use my friend and his personality and his prep this morning to speak to your people? We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Good morning. So thank you for the privilege of being here. If you're new to First Bee, thank you for trusting us with your time. We hope that you will find this place to feel like home very soon. But I'm excited for this message today because this is something that I've been working through in my personal life, and it's really blessed me in my walk.

So today, we're going to look at Matthew two I'm sorry, Matthew twenty-two 36 through 38. Somebody asked Jesus, teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second this is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. So that's our key text for today. We're going to use two other supporting texts out of Genesis, Genesis one twenty seven. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created a male and female, he created them.

In Genesis three eight through nine, now they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? We're using something in the way that it was not created for usually has negative consequences. And who gets to say what something is made for? The creator.

Swap a hammer, for example, for an iPhone. One of these is good for getting your attention and for communication, and the other is good for pounding nails. If I use this for pounding a nail or this to get your attention, it's not going to go very well, and I might go to prison. Similarly, each of us have a creator. He made us in his image and for a specific purpose.

God made us for relationship with him and with each other. Amen. But believing a lie about God, each and every one of us have rejected God, and now relationships are hard. We live in a fallen world. But God's rescue plan cannot be forwarded, not by us and not by the enemy.

So we're going to spend two weeks looking at how we were made for relationship. First with God today, and next with other people. And this is straight from the core text that we saw here in Matthew. We are to love God and love people, but we have to define these terms and take a look at what they mean in order to rightly do it. We need a right view of God, a right view of ourselves, and a right view of others to fulfill this command.

And before we go any further, I wanna lay a definition down of love. Because in our culture, we use one word love to describe everything. I love tacos. I love mountain biking. I love my wife, my children, and Jesus.

And that's not very descriptive. So for today, we're going to use that love, in light of the gospel is a sacrificial active outpouring of an inward desire to want the highest good for someone. That's love. Now we'll unpack that later, and I'll put it up on the screen and we'll talk about it. But I just wanna give it to you upfront.

As Mike D says, put the cookies on the bottom shelf. But to make this personal, I've always had this feeling that I had to earn the right to be loved, that I had to achieve in order to be worth loving, that my worth was somehow directly tied to my utility. Now, not that I necessarily had to earn love like every day, but that I had to earn the right to be loved. But the problem with earning love is that also means that you can unearn love. If I'm loved only because of what I do, what happens when what I do changes?

And the more I talk about it with other people, the more I find that others have similar compulsions. And to be honest with you, I still have that feeling sometimes. But now at least I have the counter narrative that in Christ, I am loved not because of what I do. If anything, I'm loved in spite of what I do. But I'm loved because of who God is and who I am to him.

And who I actually am is not some aggregation of good works. It's not being a moral man. It's being a child of God. As that song says that we're gonna sing later, I am no longer a slave to fear. I am a child of God.

And this is a lot of what we're gathered here today and every Sunday to do. Mutual encouragement, worship of God, and reminder of the truth about us and about him. Now in reformed and biblical circles, we tend to talk a lot about the holiness of God, the justice of God, the righteousness of God, and those are all really important. But if you look at scripture, if you look at the early church, and if you look at Jesus, the most primary attribute of God is that he is love and has been. God has been triune, father, son, and Holy Spirit since well before creation.

He is inherently relational. He created us in his image then out of that love to be like him. So we pursue holiness, we pursue justice, but to be like God, to fulfill our calling, we have to love. And God gets to be the one to define what love is. Because he is love, and at great cost to him, he rescued us from our sin, not because of our works, but because of our special relationship with him.

We are his children. And then because of that, we are a kingdom of priests. So we gather together every Sunday to remind ourselves of the truth so that we might go out into the world and live our lives as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. So that's our intro today, our outline, where we're going. So we're gonna look at repairing three things in our lives.

Our image of God and what it means to be made in his image, our lived concept of love, and our identity. But with each of these, in order to repair it, you first have to diagnose what's wrong. I had a truck breakdown recently. And the first thing you do when a truck stops working is you look at the gauges, and then you take that little diagnostic diagnostic code reader tool, you plug it in under the dashboard, and it tells you what's going on. Because if you're just out of fuel or low on oil or something easy like that, that's an easy fix.

But as was the case for me, the fuel injectors weren't working, and that's way down in the guts of the engine. So you've to bring an expert in to help you, to pull apart help is generous. I did nothing. But to to pull out the turbo, to pull out the intake manifold where's where's Galloway? And but I needed expert help.

I need them really to do the work to make that change. And that's what we're going look at today, getting down into the guts of the busted engine and fixing it. So our first point for today, we're gonna look at the Imago Dei. It's a fancy Latin term for repairing our image or the fact that we were made in the image of God. So we are repairing our image of God.

Because God knew you. He knew everything about you, and he made you for a purpose, to know him and to love him and to enjoy him forever as the great catechism says. He knew what you would look like. He knew your sins. He knew your talents.

And he looks at you and he goes, yes, that one. That's my child. And I delight in them. If you're a parent, think about how you feel when you look at your sleeping child. It does not matter how they behaved that day because, boy, they can test you.

But your love in that moment, looking at them, recognizing who they are to you, that's not dependent upon any behavioral conditions. And that's us with God if we are in Christ. But do we know that on a gut level? Or are we just merely affirming academic truths the same way that we might about a Facebook friend or about our favorite pro athlete? It's been well said that a lot of people are gonna miss heaven by 14 inches, which is the distance between your head and your heart, because there is a big difference between knowing God and knowing about him.

To make it crystal clear, there are people with advanced degrees in seminaries that are teaching classes in seminaries that know all the Greek, know all the Hebrew, know all the church history, and they're going to hell because for all that they know, they do not know their savior. And you compare that with downstairs, with some of the kids that are learning the singular most basic truth, but it's the most important one in the world. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. And there is a massive difference between those two. Or to put it another way, Frito's scoops are pretty obviously the greatest snack ever made.

I can tell you all about them. I can tell you about simple ingredients, about the balance of saltiness and sweetness and crunch. I actually have a friend that's an extrusion engineer back in Dallas for Frito Lay. He can send you videos of how they make Fritos, and I would not recommend you watch them. But here's the thing, you can accumulate all of this intellectual knowledge, but if you never taste a Frito, you have no idea what a Frito actually is.

And just like we just sang, the Bible tells us the same thing about God. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. We cannot just know about him, we have to know him. We have to take refuge in him.

And only then can we know the most important thing about ourselves that we were made in God's image. Church, you were made in the image of God. Do you understand that? And who is God? God is love.

And to explain this, we need to talk about the Trinity for a second. I know this gets a lot of people hung up, but bear with me because it's important. Because the Trinity is the core, uncompromisable Christian doctrine that God has been one being in three persons since before time and space. That means the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been eternally existent as God. Each of them are God, and together, they are God.

The three persons of the trinity, they exist in perfect love, and they exist to glorify one another. And what's crazy is we were made in that image. We as humans, we're not complete in and of ourselves, but God is and has always been inherently relational within himself. But God was complete without us. He does not depend upon us, but in his perfect love, he wanted to share the glory of his creation with us and thus further glorify himself.

Now what all that means is that if we don't prioritize relationships with God and with other people, we are missing out on the very purpose for what we were created. So the basic premise here from a philosophical standpoint is that God is inherently relational. We are made in God's image. Therefore, we are inherently relational. And the neurobiology behind this stuff is fascinating.

I love it when science catches up with what the Bible has said for thousands of years. But my friends at the Eden Project, who wrote a lot of the basis of this message, they've done some really cool writing on it. But the the gist of it is that we are not just walking computers. We are inherently relational and experiential beings. We are made in the image of a loving God.

And to ignore that is to ignore our design and to do likely great damage to ourselves and to those around us. Because when bad experiences interrupt our ability to process rationally, we actually get the mental equivalent of scar tissue. So whether you're angry or you're hurt or you're scared, you develop basically mental scar tissue. And so we can memorize Romans. We can read Christian books.

We can attend all the seminars. But if we were hurt by church or by a parent or by a loved one, we can have a wrong image of God in our minds, especially when it comes to thinking of him as father. We project wrongly. We'll even process scripture wrongly and have no idea that we're doing it. Because that image of God that we carry around is who we tend to think of as we go through our day to day or as we're praying to him.

And that's often a very different God than who we would recognize if we were to fill out a theology test. And the gap between those two leaves us vulnerable to the lies of the enemy. Now, I am not saying that we should not study our bibles. We started a daily Bible reading plan for exactly that purpose so that you may be in God's word and understand it every single day. Memorize as much of the scripture as you can.

Use the iPhone apps. You want to redeem your iPhone? Use your iPhone to memorize scripture. Because the scripture is the most easily accessible way to learn about God. When Jesus was in the wilderness, he triumphed over the temptations of the devil by quoting Deuteronomy six.

Any hands in here for who's ready to do that? I can't. But what I am saying is that your Bible is less of a research project and more like getting to know someone. We read the Bible because the heart cannot love what the mind does not know. The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.

And we need to correct our broken images of God. So then our quiet times are not to achieve anything. They are to receive the grace of God, remind ourselves of the truth. And that truth is that you are loved, but that in believing a lie, you rejected God and that he still made provision for you through Jesus, and that through the Holy Spirit, God can and does meet you and love you and delight in you. Church, we are most fully living into our calling then when we love God and love others as Jesus says in the great commandment.

But how do we love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind as Jesus told us to? We have to know ourselves and know others and know God and rightly. And we have to know what Jesus meant by love. We have to repair our concept of love. What is love?

Good luck getting that out of your head. Part of being made in the image of God is that we have a special relationship with him unlike any animal, unlike any angel. Look at how intimate the relationship is between God and man in the garden in Genesis two and three and see what happened there. Because God was in communion with man. He delighted in us.

He spent time with us. He walked with Adam in the cool of the day. Can you just imagine how delighted God was to see what Adam would name the animals? Right? Imagine being there and imagine God's delight.

So God formed from the dirt of the ground all the animals of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. Can you imagine being there? But here's a question for you to consider for a moment. Do you believe that God rejoices in you in that same way?

That he enjoys spending time with you? That he delights in seeing what you create the same way that God delighted with Adam? It's like a father with a toddler. You're so excited to see him develop and do things and build things, and that's God with us. But that can be hard for me to believe sometimes.

It's I've said this before, but it's much easier for me to feel useful for God than it is to feel beloved by him. And that's something I'm working on. But the truth is that God does delight in us, and it is not because we're useful for him. Paul really efficiently destroys that idea in Romans five eight when he says, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Church, you were not only unuseful when God rescued you, you were an enemy of his, and I was too.

And it takes deep work and reflection for me to remind myself of that on a core level that he loves me. And the simplest way for me to remind myself of that on a regular basis is by looking at the cross. Because when you know that God rejoices in you, it changes everything. It's how we have joy in the midst of trials, and church, we are promised trials. It's how we can work for God and not be too puffed up in our success or too deflated in our failure because we know that God is in charge of the outcomes.

Following Christ means recognizing God's sacrificial love for us and then responding in love for him, not just trying to be a better version of yourself. But as Jesus told Nicodemus in John three, we are born again. Now that said, scripture does make it clear that if we love Jesus, we will keep his commands. Jesus said it pretty straightforward in John 14. If you love me, you will keep my commands.

You can even distill Jesus' ministry to the Jews down to two simple messages. One is that God is love and that we should love as he loves. And two, that Jesus is God, that Jesus himself was proof of God's love sent to Israel. And Jesus said that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law, and this is exactly what he was talking about. It's why he was able to distill like we see in our slide today or in our text today.

He can distill the entire law and the prophets down into two commands. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And church, these are not tips and tricks. This is not self help for living the good life. These are in these are commands from God in the flesh, and they are in our best interest because these are the manufacturer's instructions.

This is the guidebook on what to do with yourself. And if you love God, you will submit to him joyfully and seek to obey his commands, and Jesus made clear that his commands are not burdensome. He said effectively, you can do all the right things, but if you do not have love for God and for others, you are not of God, you are of the devil. And boy, is that a harsh warning for all of us. Because this was the message that he preached against the pharisees, and it made him so mad that they created a conspiracy to kill him.

And maybe you're feeling some of that anger or some of that discomfort right now. Maybe you don't want to trust God by giving away your whole life. I mean, all of your life, for all of your life, all of your time, all of your money, all of your talent, all of your resources, that sounds like a lot. But if you're aware of that feeling inside you, that's a good thing because that means God isn't done working on you yet. That means the Holy Spirit can work on you so that you can love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

But how can Jesus command us to love? Isn't love a feeling? It's what our culture tells us. And this is where we get to our our definition of love for today. That love, in light of the gospel, is a sacrificial, active outpouring of an inward desire to want the highest good for someone.

Said simply, a pure feeling acted outward sacrificially. Or the shortest version is that love is desiring the best for the object loved. And just so we're perfectly clear, the greatest good for anyone is not affirming sin or making them just feel good in that moment. It is having a relationship with God through Jesus. That is loving people in light of the eternal truth that this world is just a vapor in a mist.

But love cannot be done in isolation. It cannot be done alone. And it cannot be done through the power of will or through gritted teeth. Love defeats anxiety, defeats fear, shame, and ultimately even sin. First Corinthians 13 details a lot of this.

But this isn't some cheap imitation of love or some shallow form of it or out of sexual desire or out of the idea, this classic assumption that you're going to get back roughly what you put into it. That love somehow needs to be fair. No. This is the highest form of love, the self sacrificial kind. If you've hung around in church circles long enough, you've heard of this referred to as agape love, and this is what Jesus is talking about here.

Because like first John four says, when God poured out his love for you, it was not a temporary emotion. It was not an expression of some shallow form. It was the deepest form of true love. It was that you would know the permanent and personal love of God. No matter what you have done, your sin is not more powerful than the cross.

And this is so important that we need to dwell on it for a minute because in a gathering of this size, somebody here believes the lie that God cannot love them because of something they've done in their past. And if that's you, I'm asking you just hone in for a minute. Because there's this idea that God could never forgive them. And if that's you, I want you to just listen and read your Bible. You don't have to trust me on this.

It's all over God's word. Because it's not just a low view of self to think that you're unredeemable. It's a low view of God. And any view of God that limits his power or his love is a wrong one. Instead, a right view of God recognizes that no matter what you did, thought, or said, it cannot overcome the power of the cross.

The cross overcomes everything. Jesus looked at his very executioners, the guys that drove the nails into his hands and into his feet, and he offered each and every one of them forgiveness. The thief next to him on the cross that was also being crucified went from mocking Jesus to in his final moments acknowledging him as lord and savior. And how did Jesus respond to that? Did he say, no.

You haven't done enough? No. He said, truly, you will be with me this day in paradise. I love the story of the thief on the cross. It solves a lot of theology complex for me Because he didn't do a single good work.

He wasn't baptized. Baptism is important, don't get me wrong. But he wasn't baptized. He didn't go to church. He didn't give, he didn't serve.

But all he did was in that one moment, he gave his entire life for his entire life over to Jesus. He did nothing good with his life except declare Jesus as Lord with his mouth and with his heart. Or you can think about it this way, that sin can be defined relationally as the unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness. Any actions or thoughts that come from this distrust are actually symptom, not cause. This is the root cause.

So we have to deal with this first, and that's what we're talking about today. Because when you don't believe that God has your best interest in mind for you, you might give over 80% and hold back 20. And then your tendency as humans is to think that God somehow owes you for the 80% that you did give over to him. But that isn't how God works. Remember, God says he wants our hearts, all of it, forever.

He wants you to be dependent, not only on your own strength, in fact, not on your own strength, but on his. And that's something I've been really learning over the last several years. Instead, you can remind yourself that if you say yes to God for his yes to you, everything is wiped clean, and it doesn't matter what it is. So murder, adultery, abortion, satanism, homosexuality, lust, lying, stealing, gossip, slander, drunkenness, independence, it doesn't matter. The list goes on and on.

They don't hold but a foothold at the cross. If you would just but turn away from your sin and turn towards Jesus, your sin is forgiven fully, freely, and forever. And it was at great cost to God. But he was so glad to pay that cost because your redemption is to God's great glory and love. And yet, I have such a hard time believing and living out of that.

Take your quiet time, for example. It's a really important discipline. I can't really function without one. But sometimes I lose my purpose because I can either make my quiet time purely academic, or I can make it some sort of performative thing as if I'm proving something to somebody that I spent time reading my Bible, and neither of those are right because they're not relational. My quiet time is to know myself and to know God.

And having a relationship with Almighty God is a little different from how we humans relate to each other. For example, if you and I go out to coffee and I ask you a question, I can generally expect a direct and audible answer back. But that's not how God works, and that's okay, to be honest about it, that that makes it hard. Because God has made himself known to us in several ways. Holy scripture, other believers, life circumstances should even hit the glory of his creation.

He's made himself known to us, the convictions of the Holy Spirit. But in order to interface with any of those correctly, we have to do one thing, and we have to abide. This is what Jesus talks about in John fifteen five in particular. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing.

Abide. It basically means to actively choose to remain in. It's actively passive, if that makes sense. It's being still, and that is so hard for us today. For comparison, we can think about what is the opposite of abiding.

It's hurry. Think about how it feels when you're in a human conversation with somebody and you can tell they're in a hurry. Like you go to lunch with someone and you get that feeling that you're a to do item on their checklist to be crossed off, not that they're invested in you personally or relationally. You don't feel loved in that moment. And we can think about that same with our quiet time.

When we're distracted, when it's perfunctory, when it's purely academic, there's lots of ways to have a quiet time that's not relational, that is not abiding. And this is where our Western model for maturity runs smack into the immovable object of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our model in America these days for Christian maturity looks an awful lot like just accumulating knowledge. Ever since Descartes, we've generally assumed that if you get more knowledge, you become more mature. That if we read enough books, memorize enough scripture, if we attend church for long enough, that we will be mature.

And it's not entirely wrong, it's just really incomplete. Because that ignores that we are inherently relational and experiential beings, that we are made in the image of God. So we can cultivate our love for God instead the same way that a vintner cultivates a vine. We stay attached to the one true vine, and that takes time. Basically means making sure that my primary identity is in Christ as a child of God.

So this is our third point, repairing our perceived identity. Most of us don't realize it, but here in the West, we have these wildly unanchored concepts of identity. So we tend to latch on to achievement, or we latch on to these artificial constructs of team. So that can be politics, that can be race, that can be your college, that can be your family, that can be a sport you play. But think about the volatility or the instability of any of those concepts of identity, because any of those can change.

If I identify primarily as Natalie's husband or as Jack and Abby's dad, As painful as it is to think about, those are things that can be taken away from me in this world. The one thing that cannot be taken away from me in this world is my relationship as a child of God. This is why we sometimes have disproportionate reactions to someone's criticism or even when there's just a lack of positive affirmation. That's usually a signal or a check engine light that we're experiencing a perceived attack on some subconscious model of identity. So for example, if Natalie tries to help me become a better father, but just pointing out something where I'm I'm just not seeing it, where I've got a blind spot.

If I identify primarily as a good father, then I'm I'm feeling attacked in that moment, and I can't hear what she's saying. And I might lash out, and all she was trying to do was help me. And if my identity is based on being good at my job, as is so often the case, if I have a bad week, month or year, it can crush me and manifest in so many ways. And it's impossible without reflection and without help to identify where we are truly putting our foundation. And it even drifts subtly over time if we don't course correct.

Because we humans, we are fickle creatures. We need to be reminded of the truth constantly. And that truth, regards to our identity, is that, as I've said, we are children of God. And think about what's required to become a child. Nothing.

The baby doesn't help. I've been in the delivery room a couple of times, and I was not much help. But you know who was even less help? The baby. And it's the same thing with being adopted.

We've had several friends go through the process of adoption, and it's beautiful. But the child doesn't do anything. They are a passive recipient of this new love that the parent has for the child and the legal status that is bestowed upon them. So God is calling us as children, and yet like the prodigal son, God is rushing out to meet us to slay the fatted calf to put a ring on our finger and a robe on our shoulders, and we keep wanting to make ourselves the servant. Or we can fall prey to the temptation that we don't want God, we just want his stuff.

Just like Adam and Eve in the garden, we don't trust God's good provision for us. Or you can think about your prayer life. Think about how much time you spend in prayer praising God or thanking him for the blessings in your life or how good he is. Mine tends to look the same, just so we're clear. I can bring this laundry list of of of things that I wanna see God do, but I can spend very little time just dwelling on his love and his grace and his kindness and his glory and the fact that all of that is available to me because I am his child.

And that fullness of relationship is available to me right now. Yes. We see darkly now as through a glass, but one day we will see face to face. And yet, that relationship is still available to us through the Holy Spirit. So church, the greatest gift that God can give us is more of him.

Not more stuff, not more comfort, not less suffering, not more time on this earth. The greatest gift that God can give us is more of him. And if you take that simple truth and you bring it into your prayer life, if you're anything like me, it has brought a depth to my prayer life that I previously did not have. Because I'm no longer bringing a to do list for him, as if he's Amazon Prime. I'm having a relationship with my creator.

So how do we do this? How do we transform the nature of our relationship from God with God from servant to son? How do we repair our broken relationship with God? First, we need to recognize that God's already done it. Through Jesus Christ, God has done all the work necessary, but then we need to make that truth alive in us.

That happens through prayer, through the study of scripture, and through taking the deep truths of scripture and praying them down into our hearts and talking about it in community. So I'm gonna say something I don't say very often in church, which is everybody do me a favor right now and pull out your phones. Or if you're a note taker, I left some note cards in some of the seat backs in front of you. Because I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions, and I want you to write down your thoughts. But so pull out your notes, your reminders, or your calendar app because you're gonna remind write a note to yourself for later this week.

Pick a time so that you can come back to this. Here's the question that I'm asking you. What is stopping you from drawing nearer to God? And be honest with yourself. What is stopping you from drawing nearer to God?

What's stopping you from taking the next step in faith towards him? I want you to write down just whatever comes to mind. There's no right or wrong answer here. Tell tell yourself what you are feeling. What are some barriers?

And these can be feelings, they can be concrete things towards your relationship with God. Is it busyness? Is it fear of truly surrendering to God and giving over him control? Is it uncertainty about what the next steps look like? Write it down.

And now I wanna give you a moment for all of us to just pray. And I want you to name that thing, and I want you to give it over to God. Just go ahead. God, we're thinking of so many things that are barriers in the way of our relationship to you. We wanna give those over to you, Lord.

Would you help us? Amen. And now if you'd be so bold, you can bring your community in, and it doesn't have to be a formal community group. Who do you do life with? Who are you willing to talk to about this?

And the way you'd start this conversation is you'd say something along the lines of like, look, I've realized that there's something in the way for me drawing nearer to God. I wanna talk with you about it. If you have that conversation with another believer, it's gonna bless the socks off both of you, And it'll encourage and mature you both. So as I said earlier, our tendency is to want God's stuff, not God. And it's usually because we don't trust what God has for us.

That's true of the garden. And for some of us, it's true of our mental model of heaven. But here's the thing about heaven. It is not us floating on the clouds. This isn't Looney Tunes.

Heaven is God living in perfect communion with us and us with each other. Here it is in Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is among them, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them. Keep reading. There will be no longer any mourning or crying or pain.

He will wipe away every tear. How's your relationship with God right now? Do you feel excited for this? Take a moment and think about it. Because when Adam and he Adam and Eve.

When Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden, God called out to them, where are you? And God knew where they were. But he was telling them, do you know where you are in relationship to me? And that's what I'm asking you today, church. Where are you in relationship to your God?

So maybe you can even jot down a couple notes about how you're feeling around that. Do you want more of God? I'll invite the band back up. I'm gonna have you close your eyes just for a minute. And I want you to create a picture in your mind of your relationship with God.

Is he angry? Is he distant? Is he disappointed in you? No. The truth is, church, he loves you.

Think about that image for a second. And now you can come back to me because for a long time, I thought that Christ being my legal advocate meant that he was up there with the father going, father, Brad did it again. He didn't have a very good quiet time. He was a jerk with his kids and he hasn't been as generous as I've called him to be. Can you forgive him just this one more time?

Because it's me, Jesus. But that's not it at all. Jesus being my advocate means that he fully aware not of just what I did or didn't do, but even the very sin nature in my rebellious heart. But because I have placed my trust in his righteousness and not my own, God can look at me and he can forget my sin. Because he looks at me and he sees his child.

He sees Jesus. And that was always the plan. So churches, we start singing together. If you wanna stay in your seat and do some business with God. If you wanna pray to him.

If you wanna ask him to show you something about him, do that. We're not gonna think you're weird. Ask him to draw nearer to you. Feel the warmth in your heart of knowing that the amazing love of God is available to you in your soul through the Holy Spirit. And that's how we can love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind.

And that, church, is how we have a great week of worship. Thank you.

Would you stand and join us in song?

Have chosen me. Love has called my name. I've been born again. And to your

I wanna leave you this benediction here. This one's from Romans. Romans eight fifteen and sixteen. It's, you've not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God's spirit when he adopted you as his own children.

Are we hearing this? His spirit when he has adopted us into his family by faith, through by by grace through faith. And now we call him Abba, father, for his spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God's children. Thank you, God, for the privilege of being called your children. God, may we have a right view of you.

God, may we leave this place knowing how dear and precious we are to you. God, would we look at you and want to grow in you and know you, Be saturated with the gospel this week. In Jesus name. Amen.