Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] As Kyle said, I am Jay Ferguson and I am the head of school at Grace Community school. We serve 1500 kids, diapers and diplomas from early education all the way through 12th grade in Lindale and in Tyler. And we're excited to get going. As you know, probably know, this time of year marks the beginning of start starting up school. And so if you're a kid in this room, I apologize for that.
[00:00:29] This has been a great summer. It's a great opportunity, has been a great opportunity to rest and travel and for me to learn to like a new sport.
[00:00:43] This year, as FIFA World cup was played here in the US I determined that this is going to be the summer that I actually convince myself to like soccer.
[00:00:55] And so after watching I haven't in the previous five decades of my life, so this was going to be the year. And in fact, after watching so much of it, I actually found myself enjoying soccer. I appreciate the strategy, the motion, the artistry, not the flopping. I still don't get what's up with all of that, but I appreciate the athleticism, especially when I saw, like England defeat Mexico when they were operating at 10,000ft in Mexico City, which was incredible.
[00:01:29] And I gained an appreciation for the athletes and stars of the game, players like Cristiano Ronaldo. Some of you know that Ronaldo is a forward for the Portuguese national team and the Saudi pro league. Al Nasser. He's widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes really in the world and greatest players in the history of this game. Been named as such five times by FIFA. And he's still going strong at 41 years old. And I always wonder what it takes to play at that level at 41 years of age. And so I looked into it. He trains up to five sessions a day, combining team training with individual work on speed, strength, technical skills, multiple recovery sessions. This is like hours on the pitch. And for those of you like me now in the know, for soccer, that means field concentrating on explosive speed drills, interval training, strength work involving heavy leg strength for jumping and sprinting, pull movements and rear deltoid work to protect his shoulders, core and back work through cable jumps, lunges that strengthen the trunk without overloading joints. He does ab works twice a day.
[00:02:49] Unbelievable. Like a six pack like you wouldn't believe. Six small meals a day that he eats, built around lean protein, complex carbohydrates and vegetables prepared by a personal chef. He uses a cryotherapy chamber that he has on in his house alongside ice baths, massage guns and personalized supplementation. And he does this every single day of his life.
[00:03:19] And what's amazing about this remarkable regimen is that he doesn't rely on motivation to keep him engaged. A recurring theme that I've seen among people who study his psychology is that he treats discipline the framework for his training. Because for him, motivation is unreliable. He trains on days he doesn't feel like it because the routine itself, not how he feels about it, day to day is non negotiable.
[00:03:54] And it doesn't matter whether it's Tom Brady or LeBron James or Ronaldo. Those who want to see results over the long haul stay in the game every day, whether they feel it or not.
[00:04:12] Hearing about discipline like a guy like Ronaldo may inspire you, or it may just make you very, very tired.
[00:04:22] If you're exhausted, you're not alone. The idea of feeling tired, exhausted or burned out is common in our culture. A study by the Anatomy of work found that seven out of 10 workers have experienced burnout in the last three years, including generation zers who should be too young to burn out.
[00:04:45] 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 in our lives, not the worst day in our lives, just a day.
[00:05:00] In an article for the New York Times, Adam Grant said that the predominant feeling for our current cultural state is called languishing. It's the in between state between depression and flourishing, a feeling of aimlessness. It's the blahs just kind of moving forward day to day. And as followers of Jesus, this feeling of just going through life of our lives as a Tuesday, just a day, is not unusual.
[00:05:32] It's not a sign that we're doing life in Jesus correctly or wrong, or that we're not spiritual enough. In fact, the dailiness of life doing life on a Tuesday is kind of how it should be.
[00:05:50] There are cultural reasons though, that we expect things to be different.
[00:05:57] While there are many benefits to this evangelical movement that so many of us have spent so much of our lives engaged in, including the primacy of scripture, the preaching of the Word, the focus on grace as the activating force in our salvation, one of the unintended, uninvited consequences is the expectation that we're going to have this continuous, elevated emotional experience every day in our walk with Jesus. Meaning that if I'm not feeling this passionate feeling in the moment, if I'm not like right on the verge of tears, even in worship, if I'm not having some ecstatic experience, I. I must not be doing it right.
[00:06:41] I must be spiritually dry. Contributing to that expectation is the fact that we live in such an emotionally intense culture with these extreme feelings of anger, of outrage, of romantic feeling constantly surrounding us.
[00:06:58] Here in the US Even our food tastes are extreme. You've heard the stories of people from around the world coming to the US for the World cup this summer and, and gaining the FIFA 15 because of the intense flavor and abundance of food. This tastes amazing with all of these spices here, and then you guys put ranch dressing on top of it.
[00:07:21] I mean, people are trying to smuggle gallons of ranch dressing out of here.
[00:07:27] The problem with all of this intensity, cultural and evangelical, is that we bring these expectations of intense emotional experience into our relationships, our earthly relationships, and especially our relationship with the Lord. We think every day should be this over the top emotional experience where I'm ripping my shirt open out of passion for Jesus, and if I'm not, maybe I'm doing it wrong, or this Jesus thing isn't all that it's cracked up to be, or he isn't meeting my needs and, and maybe I should go out and find these extreme experiences elsewhere.
[00:08:06] But no relationship with a person like God is intended to be that way. In fact, most of it is just the dailiness, the daily slog of life. And sometimes it's monotonous and sometimes it's hard.
[00:08:24] It requires perseverance, resilience, because most of life is just meeting God on a Tuesday.
[00:08:34] Today I want to look at First Corinthians 15:50 through 58 as a foundation for perseverance and resilience, empowering us to persevere through sameness, suffering and silence.
[00:08:51] Let's begin with the end, First Corinthians 15:58, which is a well known verse of Scripture. And then we'll look at the therefore that precedes it. Later, Paul tells the Corinthian Church encourages them and us. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in your labor in the Lord, your labor is never in vain.
[00:09:21] Being steadfast in the work of the Lord is another word for perseverance.
[00:09:28] Perseverance is the desire that we have to keep pushing forward, the stamina, to hold the course and keep the faith. This is what gets Rinaldo out of bed every morning.
[00:09:40] Resilience, on the other hand, is the capacity to heal, to bounce back, to adapt. You need resilience to get up and recover so that you can persevere. If you aren't Resilience, if 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. Perseverance and resilience allows us to meet God on a Tuesday.
[00:10:13] Perseverance first allows us to embrace the sameness, the monotony, the dailiness of life and living through every day that's just a day, a Tuesday.
[00:10:29] As I said before, no real relationship with a person like God is intended to be this continuous high emotional experience. It's often just monotonous and sameness.
[00:10:44] I love my wife. I'm so grateful that God gave her to me 32 years ago. And when we started dating, I couldn't keep my hands off of her. I had to hold her hand, I had to have my arm around her. I had to be sitting up close next to her at all times. I drove when we lived in Dallas, I drove 25 minutes each way every single night to her parents house to hang out with her because I had these intense feelings.
[00:11:15] And now, 32 years later, yeah, there may be times when my heart periodically swells up in affection for her and when my love for her brings me to tears.
[00:11:31] But not on a Tuesday, not in the ordinary day to day of life. Because most of life, you guys know, this is logistics.
[00:11:43] Who's picking up who and when and doing the dishes after she's done the meal and talking about our day and who's hurting and who needs prayer or at this stage in our life, the needs of our adult children and aging parents. You know, the dailiness of life, it's not particularly exciting or intense, but as we make those decisions daily to spend time together and engage in conversation and ask about the other's day and be genuinely concerned about what each other is feeling and not trying to solve each other's problems unless they want their problem solved, which incidentally is almost never.
[00:12:30] And working through conflict, something transcendent happens in the midst of this ordinariness, this dailiness, this sameness there in the middle of the week.
[00:12:46] God transforms her and me.
[00:12:50] I become a more patient, slower to speak, quicker to forgive, less extreme guy than I was all those years ago. And she changes too.
[00:13:01] Because you know, miracles don't always happen immediately, like Jesus turning water into wine or healing Bartimaeus blindness. Sometimes they happen over 20 or 30 or 40 years as we trudge through the slog and it seems like we're languishing and then we look back and we become this guy or this gal who isn't so angry all the time and who's actually learned how to love people better.
[00:13:33] Even people who are really hard to love. People like I realize that I actually am, you know, more like the people that we will be the new Jerusalem. And this is what it's like to follow Jesus most of the time through sameness, when every day feels like a Tuesday.
[00:13:56] We tell of the great stories of the martyrs, people like Ridley and Latimer burned at the stake in Oxford, England in the 16th century for creating the Book of Common Prayer together with Thomas Cranmer. And Latimer yelling at Ridley to play the man, which means man up as he's burning at the stake and Cranmer himself voluntarily thrusting his arm into the fire first, because that was the hand that he used to sign his recantation before recanting his recantation. But for most of us, life isn't that dramatic.
[00:14:35] For us, life just looks like getting out of bed and showing up in that chair in my study every morning, 5am or whatever time you get up, with that Bible in my hand and that cup of coffee in the other, ready for another morning with the Lord, another Tuesday, whether I actually feel like it or not. And the reality is that Ridley and Latimer and Cranmer became the guys who stepped into that flame when their day came. Because they too, walked through this log and lived through a lot of Tuesdays. A lot of sameness.
[00:15:18] Perseverance also allows us to embrace suffering.
[00:15:22] My father passed away this last November after a four to five year bout with Alzheimer's disease.
[00:15:29] In my early years, my father and I had a complex relationship brought about by my own mature immaturity, but also by a lot of anger on his part, which drove us apart. But in our later years, the Lord formed him into a gentler man and we grew much closer. And over the past five years, as Alzheimer took him from us, 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 then to just gibberish.
[00:16:07] And it was hard to watch him suffer. And in those really bad years, you might say, as I thought these years, this time is wasted.
[00:16:17] He's just killing time and suffering. Nothing's happening with him spiritually. He might as well just be dead.
[00:16:26] And if you thought that as I did, you'd be dead wrong.
[00:16:32] Because in the weeks and months leading up to his death, as he would say things I didn't understand.
[00:16:41] And as he wouldn't recognize me, the people who cared for him in the memory care facility where he was staying would make it a point to stop me.
[00:16:52] Are you Mr. John's son?
[00:16:55] Yes, ma', am, I am.
[00:16:57] Your daddy is the kindest man in here.
[00:17:01] Lots of these people are mean to us, but he is kind and courteous and polite and a loving man.
[00:17:10] He's a Jesus man, isn't he?
[00:17:13] Yes, ma'. Am. He's a Jesus man.
[00:17:17] Even when it seemed to me 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 enduring and persevering whatever it is we're called to, even when it's really, really hard, even though we don't want suffering and we would never, ever choose it, 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. Because suffering is a ministry, a way to teach other people how to live in Christ.
[00:18:18] And third, perseverance teaches us how to embrace the silence.
[00:18:24] St John of the Cross was a 15th century Spanish poet who talked about the dark night of the soul, a season in the life of mature Christians that you may have felt if you've been a follower of Jesus long enough. This isn't spiritual suffering.
[00:18:41] It's something else. It's a time of spiritual dryness, a time when all the things that you used to do reading your Bible, listening to worship music, spending time in nature, solitude, silence, or whatever that brought feelings of intimacy and closeness with God, quite frankly, don't seem to be working anymore.
[00:19:03] It feels like God isn't answering you, like he's not there, like he's not listening. Your prayer life loses focus. You continue on in what you know to be true.
[00:19:15] But there's silence.
[00:19:17] These feelings aren't due to sin because you've prayed and asked the Lord to examine your heart. And the Holy Spirit not only hasn't convicted you of sin, but perhaps has even given you peace on the need to confess. And yet you still feel dry and distant from the Lord.
[00:19:37] And in those seasons, you're not doing it wrong.
[00:19:41] There's nothing wrong with you. These are seasons in Our spiritual life with the Lord, where God disciplines our heart not to seek after him because we want a feeling or intense positive emotions, because pursuing him as another self help tool is similar to wanting him for prosperity or good health, wanting him for his stuff.
[00:20:08] As we mature, God wants us to want him for Him.
[00:20:13] And so at times he'll teach us to have this heart, this mindset, not by leaving us because he never leaves, but by being silent and in the silence.
[00:20:24] He's teaching us perseverance, resilience, and to continue pursuing him in the way that he pursues us, to have the heart of God, which loves differently than the way people love. And teaching us to love this way means embracing the silence and persevering in love through it.
[00:20:49] And so if perseverance is this powerful, this transformational, how do we persevere? How do we build resilience?
[00:20:59] 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 or wherever it works in your schedule, and opening our hearts and our lives to, to God's word, to talking to God in prayer, being quiet and still, and letting the Lord prepare our hearts for the days ahead.
[00:21:24] Spiritual disciplines are also called means of grace. And they're called that because they're the way that I position myself in the shower of the Holy Spirit so that he can transform me by his grace.
[00:21:39] My former middle school principal at Grace Church, Joe Dirksen, used to tell his people, bring your best lamb every day. The idea that Romans 12:1 talks about when Paul says, present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, because this is your spiritual act of worship.
[00:22:00] Some days you're excited and enthusiastic to worship, to delve into God's word. Your lamb is beautiful, without blemish and looking great. And sometimes you, you're worn out, you don't really feel like it.
[00:22:15] You may feel a little bit like you're going through the motions and yet you still show up. Your lamb may be a little sad looking, but it's your best lamb that day.
[00:22:26] Like Ronaldo, it's the discipline, not your motivation that matters.
[00:22:32] Show up for the lord every day.
[00:22:36] Second, build resilience by anchoring yourself to over 2,000 years of faith witness. Hebrews 12:1 says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which weighs so closely, and let us run with endurance the race before us. We have many, many, many who went before us who persevered and were resilient in the faith to give us examples.
[00:23:07] We did not build our faith, y'. All. It was given to us, passed down to us from generation to generation of believers for over 2000 years. It is not our truth, but it is the truth.
[00:23:23] You can have faith to choose to believe it, but you no more form it or change it than a water, than a drop of water falling on granite.
[00:23:33] The drop of water can roll off the granite, or it can land on the granite and remain, but the granite still stays there. And this should bring great comfort to us and help us to press on. Because if you could change this faith, if its tenets and its believability and its ability to provide life and salvation and, and breath and meaning depended on whether you felt like it or you were motivated to believe it, or a bad day or a lost job or a cancer diagnosis would render it non credible. That would be tragic.
[00:24:13] Hold on through the pain and suffering and silence. Trust what you have been given. The truth waits for you like an expectant father. Father at the roadside. 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, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. In this church, in our community, there are spiritual Ronaldo's 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 lived long lives of faithful service. Seek these people out, attach yourself to them and learn from them to persevere.
[00:25:09] There's a saying at the United States Military Academy at West Point as cadets go through the rigors of their police and beyond, a survival strategy known as embrace the suck.
[00:25:23] It means accepting unavoidable hardship, physical exertion and stress not by complaining, but by digging in, maintaining discipline, and finding pride in pushing through the challenge with your team.
[00:25:39] The perseverance of following Jesus, of meeting God on a Tuesday, is not embracing the suck.
[00:25:50] It's not rooted in stoicism, in sticking it out, in digging in or even teamwork. It's something much, much deeper, much more hopeful than that.
[00:26:02] Where is our Hope?
[00:26:05] Look at First Corinthians 15, 50, 57. 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 which 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.
[00:26:38] For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
[00:26:46] 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? 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 cannot live in this world without our hope to persevere, to maintain the resilience of our faith, is that we are in the process of being changed into something imperishable and eternal. From mortality to immortality. Not someday, but right now. There is nothing that is happening to you right now. Even on a Tuesday, even in the sameness and the slog in your suffering, even when the Lord is silent. That when you surrender to God's hand working in you through it is not making you into who you will one day be, both now and then and in that instant when everything is changed.
[00:28:12] Starting today, everything and every second has eternal weight.
[00:28:18] Everything matters and nothing is wasted.
[00:28:23] In Tish Harrison Warren's new book, what Grows in Weary Lands, a remarkable book on Christian resilience that's inspired a lot of my thinking this summer, she says, this is why we don't give up.
[00:28:37] Not because we were promised that life will get easier, or because we must simply gut it out to the end, fearfully grasping a dying faith, but because in due season the harvest will come, we will be consumed by the presence of God.
[00:28:58] We will become all flame and glory.
[00:29:03] Let's pray.
[00:29:06] Lord, teach us to persevere and give us the resilience to do so.
[00:29:12] Thank you that you transform us into who we are becoming and will one day be by your grace.
[00:29:19] Because we would never become it alone.
[00:29:24] But thank you also that you invite us into this process, calling us to engage with you and your spirit by showing up, to meet you every day, seeking to abide in you, by anchoring ourselves to this faith we've been given, and by imitating those who imitate you.
[00:29:44] Give us hearts that chase after you through the sameness, through suffering, and through seasons of silence.
[00:29:53] Change us into your flame and glory.
[00:29:56] Amen.
