Sure today comes from Deuteronomy 8 one through 5.
Carefully follow every command I'm giving you today so that you
may live and increase and may enter and take possession of the
land the Lord swear to your ancestors.
Remember that the Lord your God LED you on a journey these 40
years in the wilderness so He might humble you and test you to
know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep
His commands. He humbled you by letting you go
hungry. Then He gave you mana to eat,
which you and your ancestors had not known, so that you may learn
that man does not live on bread alone, but by every word that
comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Your clothing did not wear out and your feet did not swell.
These 40 years, keep in mind that the Lord your God has been
discipling you just as men disciples His Son.
This is the word of the Lord. Amen.
As we begin, I want to talk about this amazing technological
feat called the noise cancelling headphone.
Anybody. My wife recently bought me a
pair not too long ago as a gift of these babies right here.
They're Sony's, so they're pretty nice noise cancelling
headphones. I don't usually buy myself nice
things, but she loves me so much she was willing to get these.
And if you've never tried a good pair of noise cancelling
headphones, it'll change your life.
OK, It's pretty amazing the first time you actually put
these on and activate the noise cancelling feature, it's like a
different world. Do you guys know what I'm
talking about? You ever had one of these?
And it's pretty amazing. How it works is basically
there's microphones in the speakers picking up the ambient
noise around you. And then what it does is it
produces the exact opposite frequency of the noise around
you, thus cancelling it out so you don't actually hear the
noise. How cool is that?
It's amazing. OK, I, I'm a technology nerd,
but it's great. And so it's great.
Like I'll be working in a coffee shop and I'll put these on and I
can just concentrate and it, it drowns out the noise around it.
And so I liked it so much, I actually bought Susan a pair of
noise cancelling headphones and which she uses sometimes when
like the kids TV shows are getting maybe a little like
jarring on the nerves, you know what I'm saying, moms, And just
just slip those babies on and enter into your own world.
And she seems to love it. So the thing about noise
cancelling headphones is that you don't even realize sometimes
how noisy the outside world is until you actually enter into
the quiet. You don't realize how many
distractions there are around you until all of a sudden the
HVAC is no longer humming and the murmur of the crowd can't be
heard, or the traffic outside, or whatever.
And to be honest with you, it can be a little bit unnerving at
first because you can hear your own breath.
You can sometimes even like feel and hear your heartbeat.
And it's a very strange phenomenon to suddenly be in
such quiet can actually feel a bit uncomfortable at first.
The reality is this, our world around us is very, very fast and
it's very, very loud, even even literally.
There's studies being done about noise pollution and the effects
it's having on our psyche and our minds, but not just the the
physical loudness, but just the noise that each of us have to
deal with every single day. Our world is speeding up
constantly. In fact, Doctor Gloria Mark,
she's been tracking attention spans for the last two decades.
Any guesses on how attention spans are trending?
In a recent American Psychological Association
podcast, she shared the findings from her research.
Again, over 2 decades, she said our average or the the findings
were that our average attention span on screens has declined
from 2.5 minutes in 2004. OK, so you're on, you're on your
screen, you're working. How many different times are you
multitasking and going to different screens?
So in 2004 is 2.5 minutes, 2 1/2 minutes, and now today it's gone
down all the way to just 47 seconds.
OK. And I'm guessing it's even worse
in today's day and age with Reels and TikTok and so on and
so forth. And her research actually shows
that this rapid switching comes with the cost, increased stress,
more errors and slower performance.
We think we're getting better. We think we're by by speeding up
and and taking on more, but we're actually getting worse.
These studies are finding how can we actively as believers,
cancel out the noise and the hurry of the world around us so
we can actually hear the quiet voice of God?
And what would it look like for us to to pause long enough to
actually hear what God has for us?
And what if the intentional soul level stripping back of our
comforts could expose the very things that are debilitating us
every single day? How can we as believers deal
with the hurry and the anxiety and the noise that's all around
us? What would it look like for us
to set intentional time to step into this?
Well, today we're kicking off a brand new sermon series called
Wisdom in the Desert, and we're doing this right before we begin
the season of Lent. If you've never heard of Lent
before, it's this window of time in church history between Ash
Wednesday and Easter Sunday. So the Lent season, according to
the church calendar, actually begins this coming Wednesday.
And so as a church, we're going to be intentionally slowing down
and taking some time during Lent to focus in on quieting out the
noise and listening to God. Now, if you've never heard of
Lent before, that is totally OK. If I can confess something to
you, when I first started hearing about Lent and the idea
of fasting for 40 days and stripping things away for 40
days, to be honest, I was like, that sounds like a major bummer.
And I don't want to do it. You know, for me, Lent, you
know, felt like something that was just like this old and
irrelevant thing that, you know, Catholics or some other
denominations practice. And I I didn't really like the
idea of others sort of enforcing how I was meant to experience
God. If I'm honest, it felt like one
more big ought to when it comes to your faith, one more things I
one more thing I should be doing, but I'm not actually
practicing. And when I heard about the idea
of like, fasting for 40 days, I'm like, that is something that
only spiritual giants do, you know, like it made me ask the
question, does anyone actually do that?
Or do they just say that they do?
And when I did try to engage in Lent, historically, it ended up
being this sort of like, how long can I go until I eventually
fizzle out, sort of like power through the pain exercise.
I'm going to fast as long as I can.
So it's like this weird success, shame thing and failure.
And what I didn't realize was that it was my own ignorance and
my own unwillingness to really understand what Lent was about
that caused me to actually avoid it.
OK, I didn't really understand it.
So we're going to take some time to really begin to understand
the heart of Lent and see if there's a way like in our modern
age that that we can learn from it and engage with it in a
healthy way to hear God's voice. So let's begin.
Like I said, Lent marks the 40 days of between being Ash
Wednesday and Easter Sunday where we choose to intentionally
slow down, to fast, to pray, and to give our alms or alms giving,
which is just basically generosity, especially to the
poor. Now, why 40?
The number 40 is pretty significant throughout the Bible
#1 the 40 days are modeled after Jesus when he went out into the
wilderness to be tempted by the enemy.
And he was out there and he prayed and he fasted for 40 days
and 40 nights. Now, that story of Jesus is also
connected to an earlier story in the Bible.
It's found with the Israelites where they had to travel through
the desert for how many years, 40 years?
You catching a theme here, 40 days of Lent, 40 days Jesus in
the wilderness, connected to 40 years in the wilderness from the
Israelites. So we have to understand
something. The number 40 in Scripture is
often used symbolically to represent periods of testing,
preparation, or expected waiting on God.
So again, we're going to be in Matthew chapter 4 today.
Matthew chapter 4 is where we find Jesus being tempted in the
wilderness. Now, a little bit of background,
right before Jesus is being tempted, he's actually baptized.
It's sort of the beginning of his public ministry.
It's this amazing moment where Jesus goes into the water and
then he hears the voice of God from heaven who says this is my
son whom I love with him. I am well pleased.
Beautiful passage. All of us want to hear God say
that about us. This is my son with whom I'm
well pleased. I love him.
Immediately after that in Matthew's Gospel, he goes out
into the wilderness again for 40 days.
I'm going to read the passage here.
Beginning in verse one says then Jesus was led by the Spirit into
the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry.
The tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God,
tell these stones to become bread.
Jesus answered It is written, Man shall not live on bread
alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand in
the highest point in the temple. If you are the Son of God, he
said, throw yourself down, for it is written, He will command
his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their
hands, so that you will not strike your foot against the
stone. Jesus answered him, It is also
written, Do not put the Lord your God to the test again.
The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all
the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.
All this I will give to you. He said, If you will bow down
and worship me. Jesus said to him, Away from me
Satan. For it is written, worship the
Lord your God and serve him only then the devil left him and
angels came and attended him. Pretty powerful story a lot that
is packed into that short amount.
And we're going to begin kind of re examining this story in the
weeks ahead. But we what we see here
initially is that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the
wilderness to be tempted. Now we need to understand
something about the word wilderness here.
This is the word a Ramos in the Greek has multiple meanings, but
it usually means a solitary place or a desert.
It's a significant place all throughout Scripture, and we're
going to look into that a little bit.
But what we see in Jesus's ministry, for instance in Luke
5, is that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed That
word there for lonely places is the word a Ramos.
It's a place of testing and it's a place to meet God.
So Jesus wasn't just going off to lonely places to take a
little like me time. OK, this isn't like self-care as
we might understand it. Sometimes that's good, but it's
not like a relaxation or it's not just like a vacation time.
No, Jesus is not retreating from his problems and he's not
attempting to escape from reality.
Instead, Scripture says that that the Holy Spirit leads him
to a solitary place. And in this passage we just
read, he's engaging against his temptations of the enemy and
he's being tested by God. So when we think of like the
spirit leading us or being like a spirit LED church, sometimes
spirit LED isn't always just like miracles and warm fuzzies
and like, you know, tingles during worship.
OK, that's that's not always it or signs and wonders.
Sometimes being spirit LED is actually a time where God leads
us into a stripping back, leads us into a time of of dryness and
of wilderness. And Jesus was willingly going
into this solitary place, this arraymos, in order to meet God.
Like I mentioned before, this 40 days of Jesus in the wilderness
was also very much connected to the Israelites wanting for 40
years in the desert of their own.
This is what it says in Deuteronomy 8 regarding the
Israelites. This is God's chosen people.
It says, remember how the Lord your God LED you all the way
into the wilderness? So their God is again leading
people to the wilderness for these 40 years.
Why did He do that? To humble and to test you in
order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would
keep His commands. He humbled you, causing you to
hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor
your ancestors had known to teach you that man does not live
on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth
of the Lord. So this is what Jesus is quoting
in the wilderness. Man does not live on bread
alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the
Lord. This story here in the Old
Testament is a direct connection to Jesus in the wilderness.
So again, we see the wilderness as a place of testing, as a
place of preparation, and of waiting.
The wilderness or the Aramas is a place of necessary separation
from culture and the cultural forces around us to reveal whose
Kingdom you're actually living for, to reveal what's actually
going on in your hearts. And so for the Israelites here,
they had a choice to make. They could either keep on living
into their former way of life, the Egyptian lifestyle and the
Egyptian values, or they could allow God to shape them into
Kingdom values, the new values that would be represented in the
promised land that they would one day inherit.
The wilderness was a time of testing of the hearts to say,
who are you really going to follow?
Which Kingdom are you going to live into?
It says this in Leviticus 26 a little bit earlier, talking
about the former way of life in Egypt versus the future
lifestyle. It says in verse 12, I will walk
among you and be your God and you will be my people.
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt so that
you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians.
That was their former way of life.
I broke the bars of your yoke and did what enabled you to walk
with heads held high. Wow.
So for the Egyptians, they were slaves under Egypt and so they
carried the yoke and the burden of slavery.
All right. Just imagine like a heavy wooden
work tool on your back, a yoke. And they were just, they were
just bowing over to their slave masters.
They were under the heavy toil of their Egyptian slave masters.
But then what does it say? God says I broke that yoke off
of you to do what it says this so that I could enable you to
walk with your head held high. Do you see the difference?
And so in the wilderness, this is the place where God is
teaching them and training them. He's saying you're no longer
slaves to your former way of life.
I am now lifting your head so you can walk into the promised
land. I'm shaping you.
I'm testing you. But you have to choose which
Kingdom are you going to be living into?
Are you going to let the old ways die out and choose the new
ways that I have for you? Church, listen, all of us are,
are tempted in many ways to carry the yoke yoke of the
culture around us. We're tempted to be burdened and
weighed down by the values and the traditions and the
expectations of our culture around us.
None of us are immune in in America, especially in 2026 and
beyond, right, like our cultural values are very much ones of
individualism. It's very much focused on
consumerism, materialism. Even in our city, you know,
we've identified like what are the, what are like the spiritual
forces or like the territorial forces at play even in our
community, in our city here in Ankeny.
And there's very much a cultural, spiritual sort of of
weightiness regarding self importance.
We think we're really important. We think life is about us.
Not only that, but we carry the weight and the yoke of just
living in an outrage culture. All the noise, all the all the
issues, all the arguing, etcetera.
You see, Egypt trained Israel to think like slaves.
And maybe in a similar way, America trains us to think like
we're this all sovereign consumers in charge of our own
lives. But here's the thing.
Here's the point. The wilderness retrains us to
live like sons and daughters, trusting God for our manna,
trusting God for Our Daily Bread, for provision, for
nourishment and direction. Michael Wilkins puts it this
way. The desert is a place of the
first showdown between competing kingdoms and their rulers,
between two figures who lay claim to the hearts and souls of
men and women. Rather than retreat, Jesus now
advances the Kingdom of God. In other words, where the
Israelites groaned and failed their testing in the wilderness,
Jesus is the true Israelite who succeeded.
And he proved it in the wilderness.
He overcame. There was another group in
history, a little bit more ancient history, who chose to
willingly venture out into the wilderness in the desert, and
they were intentionally choosing a different Kingdom than the one
that they were living in. They're called the Desert
fathers and the Desert mothers. Many of you have never heard of
this bunch. It's it's a bunch of early
Christians actually who really arose in the 3rd century AD.
And it's a bunch of men and women who began to who leave
their sort of sophisticated metropolitan cities of Cairo and
Alexandria. And they wanted to pursue deeper
lives of prayer and holiness. And they did it out in the
wilderness. They were so hungry for holiness
and they were so troubled by the compromise state of the church,
which was looking less and less like Jesus the more power and
prestige it gained. And instead, they chose to
abandon it and wander out into the desert.
So they went out into the Wilds of Egypt and Syria and Arabia.
And part of the reason was because Christianity was
becoming increasingly politicized by Rome and the
Roman government, which was sort of the superpower of their day.
So it's estimated that like hundreds of thousands of people
eventually went out and formed these communities, these
monastic cities. They people would, would trek
out into the desert in order to seek these desert fathers and
mothers, just to learn from them and to hear from them.
They went out there to do spiritual warfare, to learn
about themselves, to starve their flesh and their desires.
They craved silence and solitude and spiritually they were living
in a in a world that was busy like ours.
It was noisy like ours. So what they did was they chose
to live off grid for a simpler, truer life.
And they were modelling this after Jesus, of course, who went
out into wilderness. OK, radical group of people.
Radical group. And I'm thinking about like,
what's the modern day parallel of this?
And I don't know that we really have one, but maybe today this
is the the group of people who would be looking at our current
cultural moment and they'd be looking at our culture sort of
strange mix of political power meets religion meets corruption
and moral depravity from the elites.
And this is be a group of people who said, you know, I don't know
that I want any of that. I want to seek a different
lifestyle. So this would be the group
modern day where rather than arguing over which Super Bowl
halftime show was the most righteous, this would be the
group of people who said, you know what?
I'm not sure I really see Jesus in either of them.
I'm not sure I'm seeing Jesus in anything that I'm witnessing out
in the culture and what it values.
So I'm going to choose instead to retreat and go off and truly
seek the way of Jesus. So be the group of people who
like that, go out into the the desert of Nevada with tents, you
know, to really figure out what is the sin that drives mankind,
the sin that's actually living in me and how can I be free of
it? How can I take on a new way, the
way of Jesus? How can I actually see him?
And so they went out and people followed radical group.
I'm not saying all of their practices were good.
They were ascetics. So they would, you know, starve
themselves essentially and do radical practices.
But there was a ton of great wisdom that came out of this
era. One of them was named Anthony
the Great, probably one of the most famous of the Desert
Fathers. And he wrote this.
See if this kind of makes sense for our time.
A time is coming when men will go mad and when they see someone
who is not mad, they will attack him saying you are mad, you are
not like us. Many times if we're actually
trying to live the way of Jesus in our current cultural moment,
people are going to look around at us and they're going to say
you guys are a bunch of crazies. What are you doing living in
community together? What are you doing sacrificing
for others? What do you mean holiness?
In a time where anything goes, when it comes to God leading
Israel to the desert, when it comes to Jesus willingly going
to the wilderness to be tempted, and even when it comes to the
desert fathers, here's something I think we can learn.
Intentional separation from the world is often necessary for
spiritual formation and for growth.
Intentional separation is often necessary if we really want to
grow in Christ likeness. This is not just on a macro
level, but even on a micro level.
Jesus encouraged us. In Matthew 6.
He says when you pray, go into your room, close the door and
pray to your Father who is unseen.
Then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward
you. The context here is not
performing like your righteousness in front of
others, but I think there's also something to be said about going
off into a distraction free environment where you can really
actually meet the Lord. Again, in Luke 5, Jesus often
withdrew to solitary places, a Ramos like environment so he
could connect with God. You and I also, we need this
kind of separation from distraction and disruption.
We live in an age of distraction.
Hurry, hustle, go, go, go, go, go.
Years ago, Richard Foster put it this way.
In contemporary society, our adversary majors on three
things. Noise, hurry and crowds.
If he can keep us engaged in muchness and manyness, he will
rest satisfied. How many of us like our default,
is muchness and manyness squeezing it All in all the
time? I know I'm prey to it.
And what we see here is that the enemy loves to prey on our
fears, especially when it comes to survival.
The enemy loves to whisper lies into our ears and say you won't
survive unless you can keep up. And what he does is he sort of
creates this hurricane of activity.
In this hurricane of noise, we have to find a way to distance
ourselves from it. How are we going to hear God's
voice if we're living in hurricane winds?
I really enjoy swimming with my kids.
They take swim lessons every summer.
At least Jane does. And when it comes to teaching
anyone how to swim, it's not usually a good idea to throw
them into the wave pool to learn how to do their strokes right.
That's a bad idea. If you're teaching someone how
to swim, first bring them to calm, quiet waters.
Teach them how to swim where they can actually hear your
voice and learn the motions without being tossed around all
the time. Look, you and I, church, we are
in a wave pool of culture all the time.
You and I are constantly being pushed and pulled by the voices
all around us. And so holy separation from the
world provides those kind of still waters.
We need to learn how to swim, to learn how to actually hear God's
voice so we will be anchored in the chaos waters of this world.
We need to learn how to trust the voice of Jesus, who is quote
the anchor for our soul, firm and secure as Hebrew says, the
anchor for our soul. It's the only way.
Because if you're, it's only until you're you're anchored
that you realize how far you've been drifting.
The waves and the tides will pull you all over the place.
We need a firm and secure anchor for our souls so we can remain
resolute even in the face of changing culture around us.
This is the invitation of the wilderness.
This is the invitation of Jesus. And so practically speaking, as
a church, we would like to invite you to take the next 40
days of Lent to seek calmer waters.
The invitation during Lent is to shut the door and to go out into
the wilderness for an intentional time of holy
separation. We're asking the question, what
if we could disengage for a short window of time so that we
can re engage? Well, what does it look like to
retreat so we can come back more, healthy, more free, more,
and walk and in tune with the Spirit so we can engage the
broken world around us. Not so that we can retreat so we
can hide or pretend like there's no problems in the world, but
actually allow God to shape and amorphous into people of love so
we can engage in the world around us.
So our church invites you to come with us in the wilderness
to do three things. Number one is to detach from the
patterns of this world. Romans 12/2 says do not conform
to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test
and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing and perfect
will. We need to find a way to to
detach from the noise. To detach from all the patterns
in the cultural norms that we find ourselves in #2 is to
starve the flesh's unhealthy appetites.
What do I mean by that? All of us have many cravings of
many kinds. It's not just Valentine
chocolates, right? It's not just McDonald's.
It's not just the entertainment and Netflix, right?
All of us have fleshly desires are primal urges that we wrestle
with every single day. And so Lent is an invitation to
starve those unhealthy appetites.
Galatians. Galatians 5 says for the flesh
desires what is contrary to the spirit.
We have to find a way to say no so we can walk in the spirit.
And finally, the third goal of this season is to confront the
lies and temptations of the devil.
Scripture says that the the native language of the devil,
who is a very real sentient adversary for every single one
of us, he's not just this mythical figure.
It's an actual diabolical entity.
It says that the native language of the enemy is lies.
The native language is lies. Constantly whispering in our
ears. Go faster.
You won't be able to keep up. There won't be enough.
You're getting left behind. You're not doing good enough.
You need to be more. You need to be better.
On and on and on. It whispers lies.
And so how do we identify those lies and instead bring the truth
of God's Word to them? So we're going to be engaging in
a few different practices or spiritual disciplines through
this through these next 40-40 days.
So each of you should have a piece of paper next to you.
It looks something like this on the screen here.
This is an invitation for you. This is not mandatory.
We can't force you to do any of us.
This is just an opportunity to step into this Lenten practice.
I want to kind of walk through what this is.
It's an invitation to step into solitude, into fasting, into
prayer. One of the ways that we can
detach from the world is through the practice of silence and
solitude. Silence and solitude is
basically going off by yourself, being alone and not having any
distractions around you. At first.
If you go off all by yourself with no phone, no screens, it
may feel agonizing at first. OK, you're going to be left
alone with your thoughts. And you might find that there's
a lot of thoughts, OK. But the spiritual discipline of
silence and solitude is just our way of going out and meeting
with God. It's sort of like going off into
the wilderness. The other day I tried to
practice this. I had a a meeting on Wednesday
that got cancelled. And normally my temptation in
that those moments is like, Oh yeah, I just got another hour
and a half to, to get stuff done, baby.
Right, I'm going to keep grinding.
I'm going to keep moving. I'm going to keep, you know, get
ahead or whatever. And instead the Lord just kind
of met me and he's just like, hey, no, actually, what would it
look like for you to take this hour and a half and just just
go, go be alone. And so I did.
I turned my phone all the way off so no one could track me.
Sorry, government, right? I turned my phone all the way
off included. My wife couldn't even track me.
She didn't know where I was. Sorry.
And I just, I hopped in the car and I just drove out to nature
and it was only like 45 minutes by myself, just me and the Lord.
And in those moments, it wasn't as if like heaven opened up and,
you know, angels descended and like comforted me or anything
like that. OK, It wasn't this euphoric,
like majestic thing. But for me, it was just a moment
that I could offer the Lord and say, here I am God, just you and
me. I'm not even going to say I like
heard his voice or anything like that.
But there was this sense of his presence and I just sat there
offering myself to him, silence and solitude.
And so maybe for you, you would like to step into that spiritual
practice. And there's lots of amazing
resources we could give you about learning more about those.
Just let us know if you're interested, but maybe you want
to make a commitment in the next 40 days to to practice this.
Maybe it's once a week you find an hour just to get away
completely alone. Moms, I know that's hard for
you, especially have young if you have young children, right,
an hour away from the kids somehow.
And maybe that's not totally feasible right now in your stage
of life, but even finding 15 minutes to go into the closet
with God detaching from the world #2 starving the flesh is
unhealthy appetites. We're going to do this by
encouraging some time of intentional fasting and
intentional abstinence. Again, a short word on each
Fasting is basically going without food or water for an
intentional set amount of time. Sometimes in church history,
this is means going going once a week without food for for
breakfast and for lunch. For me and my community, we
oftentimes try to fast. For instance, on Wednesdays we
will eat maybe a meal on Tuesday and then we will eat on
Wednesday night. Again, this is just something
we've been trying to get into that the habit and rhythm of
together. The reason we intentionally go
without food is really simple. It's to increase our hunger for
God. We increase our physical hunger
in order to increase our spiritual hunger for God.
Man does not live on bread alone, but he lives on every
word that comes from the mouth of God.
And so from you. Maybe you'd like to try that out
for the first time. Again, disclaimer, it may feel
really uncomfortable when you first start it out.
These spiritual practices are not something that we do in
order to earn God's favor. It does not make you more holy.
It does not save you, but rather it's just an opportunity for us
to open up ourselves to the transformative work of God.
And so we encourage you. Again, we have resources on how
to fast. But maybe you just say, you
know, I'm one meal, one meal a day, or maybe I'm going to pick
one whole day during the week. Many of us probably won't go
like the full, full 40 days of Lent without food.
OK, although it can be done. Let me know if you try that out,
by the way, because I will be praying for you.
OK, But actually then we say 40 days of fasting.
There's actually 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter because
we encourage you to take one day a week to not fast.
Traditionally it's on Sunday if that's your Sabbath, or it can
be Saturday depending on on your flow of the week.
If you're not familiar with what Sabbath is or anything like
that, that's OK. You're you're totally good.
But the point is this maybe choose to have a day where you
feast and celebrate. For instance, we're going to
have AI think we're going to have a potluck as a church
coming up on on Sunday in a few weeks here.
The point is this intentionally removing the comfort of food in
order to starve the flesh spiritually.
Now, for some of you, maybe you can't fast from food, and so you
may instead choose abstinence, which is basically just saying
no to various comforts for a season of time.
So some people say, you know what, this season of Lent, I'm
just going to try going without social media for 40 days.
Do you guys think you could do that?
Some of you're like, yeah, no sweat.
Or maybe you choose to go without sugary foods or meats or
whatever it may be. Bottom line, it's basically
saying no to something and offering that over to the Lord.
So again, maybe it's shopping or mindless TV, what have you.
We just encourage you to prayerfully consider abstaining
from something during this season.
Whatever you choose to do, the goal is this to increase our
hunger in God alone. We're going to have
opportunities, for instance, with the worship night coming up
again a week from Tuesday, and we encourage you to to press
into God's Word during this time as well.
We have Bible reading plans in the back.
Basically, this is sort of like a choose your own adventure sort
of deal. Whatever you choose to step
into, and all of this is Invitational, all of this is
just. If you choose to step into it,
don't be like me where you felt pressured into it, you felt like
you had to do certain things, but instead just listen like
God. How might you be calling me to
step into this next season of beginning on Wednesday?
So all of this, all of the spiritual disciplines, is a way
of us practicing active noise cancellation.
It's like putting on the noise cancelling headphones and it's
allowing God to produce the exact opposite frequency of our
surroundings. Not so that we can ignore the
world or drown it out, but instead so that we can learn to
listen and obey to the Lord's instructions, so that we can
learn to obey him when he says, be still and know that I am God.
This is not earned salvation for us.
It is only by grace that you have been saved through faith
and it is not from yourselves. It's a gift of God.
It's only through the cross and resurrection of Jesus that we
can be saved. But the spiritual disciplines
are tried and true practices throughout church history for us
to engage in the transformative work that he wants to continue
to do in each of us. And so we begin this week, if
you'd like my encouragement to you, it's starting today to just
lift the foot off of the accelerator of your life and
begin to slow down into Ash Wednesday coming up and allow
God to lead you out into the wilderness to pray and to
encounter Him. We want to encourage you if
you'd like. There's this entire series is
based on content from the Lectio 365 organization.
They're an incredible organization.
Along with 24/7 prayer, there is an app that has daily prompts
for you to follow along with. The QR code is on your sheet as
well. And we just encourage you,
whatever it is, find a way to to daily engage with God.
My wife and I have used this app many times.
They have a great sort of guided prayer that we use in the
evenings as well. But I just want to put that
resource out in front of you today.
Real quick at our upcoming series, as we're laying in the
plane here, these are the weeks that we're going to be looking
at ahead week, next week, we're going to talk about intensifying
our hunger for holiness. We'll talk more about what
silence and solitude is. Talk about the idea of
renunciation. What is that?
OK, And the beauty of that overcoming temptation, choosing
the way of humility. And then we'll be into Holy
Week. But I really, really encourage
you to come back for the next few weeks.
I think God's going to do a transformative work in US.
We're going to have more time of just like slowing down and
interaction and listening to the Spirit as well.
OK, as we close, I just want to ask a question.
What could God do with a little bit of separation from the noise
of the world around us? What is God longing to do in our
spirits? Let's follow Jesus into the
wilderness this Lenten season. Let's slow down.
Let's strip away. Let's deny our comforts.
And choose to allow God to quote, humble, and test you in
order to know what is in your heart.
This season of Lent is an opportunity for us to go from
having our our heads down being burdened by the expectation of
the world around us. And it's an opportunity to allow
God to lift our heads like He did his own children.
Because every single one of us, we worship a God who longs to be
with us. He longs to guide us.
And as Scripture reminds us, he longs to be our people.
That's what's on offer. God loves each and everyone of
you so much and he longs to have a real thriving relationship
with you and that's only available through the cross of
Jesus. And so if you're here today and
you haven't yet accepted Christ as your Savior, if you haven't
yet surrendered and said, you know what?
I'm a, I'm a Sinner. I've made so many mistakes.
I can't right my own wrongs. I need something higher, more
powerful than me. I need Jesus in the power of the
resurrection in my life. That invitation is for for you
today. You can accept that and become a
Christian in a moment, and it's going to take a lifetime of
figuring out what that means and figuring out how to more and
more walk into the way of Jesus. But know this, God loves you
deeply and he wants relationship with you.
So what's on offer is Wilderness or Ramos.
What's on offer is a little bit of separation to have actual
space where we can hear the voice of God.
We can open ourselves up to Him and live into everything that He
has for us, the full freedom and life that He has.
Life to the full. And so, as the world rages and
spins faster and louder, may we choose now to enter the quiet
with our Savior and in the wilderness.
May God test us, refine us, and refresh us.
May we find wisdom in the desert during the season of Lent.