Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Well, good morning.
[00:00:02] Powerful testimony from the Haglers. I'm excited about what they're doing.
[00:00:08] Those of you who don't know me, my name is Jay Ferguson. I'm the head of school at Grace Community School. And for those of you who don't know much about Grace Community School, we partner with Grace Community Church. We're a ministry of this church. And with the addition this year of our Mother's Day out program here in Tyler, we operate on eight campuses in Tyler and Lindale about close to 1600 kids and their families. So we have the opportunity to touch and serve about 5,000 family or kids and their parents per week.
[00:00:47] So it's a. It's a huge blessing to be able to extend the scope of this ministry every single week. And for those of you who are in the school business or if you have kids in school, you know that this time of year marks the season when we're preparing once again for the beginning of school. So if you're an elementary school kid, whoo. Let's go. If you're a high schooler, sorry, bro, but this has been a great summer.
[00:01:17] It's summer in the school business and opportunity to rest and travel. And for me this year to take on and gain an appreciation for a new sport. This year, as the FIFA World cup was played here in the US I was determined that this was going to be the year, unlike in any of the five decades that I have lived through, when I was actually going to force myself to like soccer.
[00:01:46] And in fact, I did. I force fed myself a diet of a lot of soccer games, and I developed an appreciation for it. I appreciate the strategy, the motion, the artistry. I appreciate the fact that I don't have to sit through a bunch of beer and truck commercials.
[00:02:05] I still don't appreciate the flopping. I don't understand that at all. Don't get it at all. But most of all, I do appreciate the athleticism. I gained an appreciation for these athletes and the stars of the game. People like Cristiano Ronaldo, most of you who are soccer people like I've now become, know that Cristiano Ronaldo is a forward for the Portuguese national team and the Saudi Pro league. Al Nasser team, widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the game, having been named such five times by FIFA. He's still going strong at 41 years old. And I asked myself, what does it take to play at this level in this game at 41 years of age? And so I looked into it. During peak season, Ronaldo trains up to five sessions per day, team training on the pitch. See what I did there? I used the lingo because I'm a soccer guy now. Combined with speed, drills, strength and technical work. He does ab work twice a day, six small meals. He eats built around lean protein, complex carbohydrates and vegetables.
[00:03:21] He does intense cryotherapy and massage for recovery. And he does these things every single day of his life. And what's amazing about this remarkable training regimen is that Ronaldo doesn't rely on motivation to feel like it to keep him engaged. He treats discipline as the framework for his training. Because motivation is unreliable, he trains on days when he doesn't feel like it because the routine itself, not how he feels about it, is non negotiable.
[00:04:06] And it doesn't matter whether it's Tom Brady or LeBron James or Ronaldo that we're talking about here. Those who want to see results over the long haul stay in the game every day, whether they feel like it or not.
[00:04:23] Hearing about discipline like Ronaldo's may inspire you, or it may just exhaust you.
[00:04:32] And if you're exhausted, you're not alone. The idea of feeling tired, exhausted and burned out is a common malady in our culture. A study by the Anatomy of work found that seven in 10 workers have experienced burnout in the last three years, including generation Zers, a group previously thought to be too young for burnout. And for many of us, it's not burnout that gets us. It's just a Tuesday, you know, a normal day, not the best day you've ever had, not the worst day you've ever had. Just a day.
[00:05:12] In an article for the New York Times, Adam Grant said the predominant feeling for our current cultural state is called languishing. The in between state, between depression and flourishing. A feeling of aimlessness, of the blahs just kind of moving forward day to day as followers of Jesus. This feeling of the blahs, of just going through life, of our lives as a Tuesday, just a day, is not unusual. It's not a sign that we're doing life in Jesus incorrectly or. Or wrong or that we're not spiritual enough. In fact, as we'll see today, it's exactly how it should be most of the time.
[00:05:59] But there's cultural reasons why we expect something different, like in this evangelical movement, why it has so many benefits. The primacy of scripture, the preaching of the Word, grace is the activating force of our salvation principle. But one unintended consequence is this expectation of continuous, elevated emotional experience. In my daily walk with Jesus, if I'm not feeling some kind of passionate feeling at the moment, if I'm not shedding tears of joy even in worship all the time, I must be not doing it correctly. I must be spiritually dry.
[00:06:43] And contributing to this expectation is the fact that we live in this emotionally intense culture with these extreme feelings of anger and outrage and romantic feeling constantly surrounding us. Here in the US even our food tastes are extreme. You've heard the story of World cup visitors gaining the FIFA 15 and trying to smuggle ranch dressing home because it tastes so good. The problem with all of this intensity, this cultural and evangelical intensity, is that we bring these expectations of intense emotional experiences into our relationships, our earthly relationships, and especially our relationship with the Lord. We think every day should be this ecstatic, over the top emotional experience where, where I'm ripping my shirt open out of passion for Jesus. And if I'm not, I must be doing something wrong. This Jesus thing may not be all it's cracked up to be. He isn't meeting my needs and maybe I should go try to find these experiences someplace else.
[00:07:58] But no real relationship with a person, whether it's God or someone else, is intended to be that way. In fact, most of it is just the daily slog of life. Sometimes it's monotonous and sometimes it's hard.
[00:08:15] It requires perseverance and resilience because most of life is just meeting God on a Tuesday.
[00:08:25] Today I want to look at First Corinthians 15:50 through 58 as a foundation for perseverance and revolution. Resilience, empowering us to persevere through sameness, suffering and silence.
[00:08:41] Let's look at 1 Corinthians 15:58, which is a well known verse of Scripture first, and then we'll look at the therefore that precedes it later.
[00:08:51] In that verse, Paul encourages the Corinthian church and us. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
[00:09:09] Being steadfast in the work of the Lord is another word for perseverance.
[00:09:15] Perseverance is the desire we have to keep pressing forward, the stamina to hold the course and keep the faith. This is what gets rid of Rinaldo out of bed every morning. Resilience is the capacity to heal, to bounce back, to adapt. You need resilience to get up and recover so that you can persevere.
[00:09:39] If you aren't resilient, if you crumble when Things get hard or monotonous, you won't have the stamina to be steadfast and always abounding in God's work.
[00:09:52] Perseverance and resilience allow us to meet God on a Tuesday through sameness, suffering and silence.
[00:10:04] First, perseverance allows us to embrace the sameness, the monotony, the daily slog of life and living through every day. That's just a day, a Tuesday.
[00:10:17] As I said before, no real relationship with a person like God is intended to be this continuous ecstatic experience. It's often just monotonous and sameness, the daily slog.
[00:10:32] I love my wife. I'm very grateful that God gave Ashley to me 32 years ago. When we first started dating, I had to be like in constant touch with her. I had to hold. Hold her hand, have my arm around her, sit up close to her. I drove 25 minutes each way every night to her parents house to be with her. I had these intense feelings for her. And now, 32 years later, well, there may be times when my heart periodically swells up with affection for her. When my love brings her, brings me to tears. And incidentally, I'm probably more likely to feel that way with her. Like my family always says, I'm kind of the girl in the relationship.
[00:11:26] But not on a Tuesday.
[00:11:30] On a Tuesday. Most of life is about logistics.
[00:11:34] Who's picking up whom, and when.
[00:11:37] Doing the dishes after she's done the meal, talking about our day, who's hurting, who needs prayer, or at this stage of life, the needs of our adult children and aging parents. Not particularly exciting, not very intense.
[00:11:57] Yet as we make these decisions daily, to spend time together, to engage in conversation, to ask about the other's day and work through conflict. Something transcendent happens in the midst of the ordinariness, the sameness, the dailiness, the slog.
[00:12:21] And there in the middle of the week, God transforms her and me. I somehow become a more patient, slower to speak, quicker to forgive, less extreme guy than I was all those years ago. And she changes too. Miracles don't always happen immediately, like Jesus turning water into wine or Bartimaeus being healed from blindness.
[00:12:49] Sometimes they happen 20 or 30 or 40 years later as we trudge through the slogan. And it seems like we're just languishing. And then we look back and we've become this guy or gal who isn't so angry all the time, who's actually learned how to love people better. Even people who are really hard to love. Even people like I've realized that I am More like people that we will one day be in the new Jerusalem and are becoming even now. And this is what it looks like to follow Jesus most of the time through sameness, where every day is like a Tuesday.
[00:13:41] We tell the great stories of the martyrs, people like Ridley and Latimer burned at the stake in Oxford in the 16th century for creating the Book of Common Prayer with, with Thomas Cranmer. Latimer yelling at Ridley to play the man, you know, man up as they were burning. Or Cranmer himself voluntarily thrusting his arm into the fire first because that was the hand he used to sign the recantation before recanting the recantation.
[00:14:14] But for most of us, life isn't that dramatic.
[00:14:18] For us, life looks like getting out of bed and showing up in that chair in my study every morning at 5:00am Bible in one hand and cup of coffee in the other, ready for another Tuesday, whether I feel like it or not.
[00:14:35] And the reality is that Ridley and Latimer and Cranmer became the guys who stepped into the flame when their day came because they too, walked through the slog and lived through a lot of Tuesdays.
[00:14:51] Perseverance also allows us to embrace suffering.
[00:14:56] My father passed away this past November after a four to five year bout with Alzheimer's disease.
[00:15:04] In my early years, my father and I had a complex relationship brought about by my own immaturity, but also by a lot of anger on my father's part, which drove us apart. And he had valid reasons for that anger, but explanations aren't excuses and it negatively impacted our relationship.
[00:15:24] In our later years, the Lord formed him into a gentler man and we grew much closer.
[00:15:32] But over the past couple of years, as Alzheimer's took him from us, every day I went to see him. Every time I went to see him, it was harder and harder to have a conversation. We went from simple forgetfulness to having the same conversations over and over, to him forgetting who I was and then to just kind of gibberish.
[00:15:55] It was hard to watch him suffer. And in those really bad years, you might say, as I thought, these years are wasted. He's just killing time here in suffering. Nothing's happening with him spiritually. He might as well be dead.
[00:16:13] And if you thought that as I did, you would be dead wrong. Because in the weeks and months leading up to his death, as he would say things I didn't understand and he didn't realize recognize me, the people who cared for him in his memory care facility would make it a point to stop me as I came in and out.
[00:16:39] Are you Mr. John's son?
[00:16:44] Yes, ma', am, I am.
[00:16:46] Your daddy is the kindest man in here.
[00:16:50] Lots of these people are so mean to us, but he is kind and courteous and polite and a loving man.
[00:17:01] He's a Jesus man, ain't he?
[00:17:04] Yes, ma'. Am. He's a Jesus man.
[00:17:08] Even when to me it seemed like nothing was happening, God was using my Father's suffering in beautiful, miraculous ways that I still don't understand. To continue to form and shape and mold him into the image of Christ so that he could teach those caretakers and me how to live and how to die. And if the Lord can do that in the midst of that kind of suffering, what is he in the middle of doing right now? As we show up every day, pursuing and enduring whatever we're called to do, even when it's really, really hard, even though we don't want suffering, we wouldn't choose it.
[00:17:50] We can embrace it because it's giving us an eternal weight of glory, making us something deeper and richer than we could ever be without it.
[00:18:01] And because suffering is a ministry, it's a way to teach others how to live in Christ.
[00:18:10] And third, perseverance allows us to embrace the silence. St. John of the Cross was the 16th century Spanish poet who talked about the dark night of the soul, a season in the life of any mature Christian that you may have felt if you followed Jesus long enough. It's not suffering for bad things that happen to us, it's something else. It's a time of spiritual dryness when all the things you used to do that brought feelings of intimacy with God, prayer, meditation on Scripture, worship, solitude and silence, quite frankly, don't seem like they're working anymore. It feels like God's not answering you, like he's not there.
[00:18:55] These feelings aren't due to sin. You've asked the Lord to examine your heart and the Holy Spirit hasn't convicted you of sin. In fact, he's given you peace there.
[00:19:05] And yet you still feel dry and distant.
[00:19:10] You're not doing it wrong. There's nothing wrong with you.
[00:19:15] There are seasons where God disciplines our heart not to seek after him because we want a feeling or intense positive emotions.
[00:19:24] Because pursuing him as another self help tool is similar to wanting him for prosperity or good health, wanting him for his stuff.
[00:19:36] As we mature, God wants us to want him for Him.
[00:19:42] And so at times he'll teach us that not by leaving us, because he never leaves, but by being silent and in the silence, he's teaching Us perseverance and resilience, and to continue pursuing him in the way that he pursues us, to have the heart of God and to love differently than people love.
[00:20:10] So if perseverance is this powerful and this transformational, how do we persevere? How do we build this kind of resilience?
[00:20:20] Well, the first way is just doing every day what we know to be right and good, what we've been called by God to do. The daily disciplines of our faith. Showing up every morning and opening our hearts to God's word. Talking and listening to God in prayer, being quiet and still, letting the Lord prepare our hearts for the days ahead.
[00:20:45] Spiritual disciplines are also called the means of grace because they're how God puts us in the path of the Holy Spirit so that he can transform us by his grace.
[00:20:58] My former middle school principal at Grace, Joe Dirksen, used to tell his people to bring their best lamb every day.
[00:21:06] The idea that Romans 12:1 talks about when God when Paul says, present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, because this is your spiritual act of worship. Every day bring your lamb, and some days you're excited and enthusiastic to delve into God's word. Your lamb is beautiful, without blemish and looking great. And sometimes you're worn out and you don't really feel like it.
[00:21:36] You may feel a little like you're going through the motions. Your lamb may look a little peaked that day. Pretty sad.
[00:21:44] But it's your best lamb for the day, like Rinaldo. It's the discipline, not how you feel about it that day that matters.
[00:21:55] Show up for the lord every day.
[00:21:59] Second, build resilience by anchoring yourself to over 2,000 years of faith. Witness. Hebrews 12:1 says, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. We have many, many, many who went before us, who persevered and were resilient to give us examples.
[00:22:28] We did not build our faith. It was given to us, passed down from generation to generation to generation of believers.
[00:22:39] It is not our truth. It is the truth. We know more form or change it than a drop of water falling on granite.
[00:22:49] The drop can roll off or land square and rest, but the granite remains. And this should be great comfort and help you press on. Because if this faith's ability to provide life and salvation and healing and meaning depended on whether you felt like it or had a bad day or a lost job or a Cancer diagnosis rendered it non credible. That would be tragic.
[00:23:17] Hold on through the pain, the suffering and the silence.
[00:23:23] Trust in what you've been given. The truth waits for you like an expected father at the roadside.
[00:23:29] Will you come today and finally build resilience and the ability to persevere by connecting yourself to others who live how you want to live? Paul tells the Corinthians, to be imitators of me as I am of Christ. In this church, in our community, there are spiritual rinaldos, men and women who have shown up every day and walked through the slog for years, who have conditioned their spirits to be victors in Jesus, worthy of imitation and live long lives of faithful service. And many of them are in this room.
[00:24:07] Seek these people out, attach yourselves to them and learn from them.
[00:24:13] In my conversations with my alumni who attended the U.S. military Academy at West Point, I've learned that cadets go through the rigors of their plebe year, and they've developed a survival strategy known as embrace the suck.
[00:24:31] It means accepting unavoidable hardship and stress not by complaining, but by digging in and finding pride in pushing through with your team.
[00:24:43] The perseverance and resilience of following Jesus, of meeting God on a Tuesday, is not embracing the suck. It's not suck it up, buttercup.
[00:24:58] Life stinks and then you die. It's not that mindset. It's not rooted in stoicism or sticking it out or digging in or even in teamwork. It's something much deeper, much more profound, much more hopeful than that.
[00:25:16] Where is our Hope?
[00:25:18] Look at First Corinthians 15:50 through 57.
[00:25:23] I tell you this, brothers. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
[00:25:56] When the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?
[00:26:12] The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, perseverance teaches us not to embrace futility, but patience and hope, two things that we can't live in this world without our hope to persevere is that we are in the process of being changed into something imperishable and eternal. From mortality to immortality. There is nothing happening to you right now, even on a Tuesday, even in the sameness. Your suffering or the Lord's silence that when you surrender it to God's hand is not making you into who you will one day be.
[00:27:04] In that instant everything is changed.
[00:27:08] Everything has eternal weight. Everything matters. Nothing is wasted.
[00:27:16] In Tish Harrison Warren's book what Grows in Weary Lands, which has shaped a lot of my thinking on resilience this summer, she says why we don't give up quote not because we are promised that life will get easier, or because we must simply gutted out to the end, but because in due season the harvest will come.
[00:27:38] We will be consumed by the presence of God. We will become all flame and glory.
[00:27:51] Let's pray. Lord, teach us to persevere and give us the resilience to do so through thank you that you transform us into who we are becoming and will one day be by your grace, because we could never become it alone.
[00:28:09] Thank you also for inviting us into this process, calling us to show up and meet you every day, anchoring ourselves to this faith we've been given and imitating those who imitate you.
[00:28:25] Give us hearts that chase after you through the sameness, the suffering and the silence.
[00:28:33] Change us into your flame and glory.
[00:28:37] Amen.
