Friends are teaching Scripture this morning and we'll have a
little bit of teaching and a little bit of lectio comes from
two places, Hebrews chapter 12, verses one and two, and chapter
4, verse 16. It says.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin
that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the
race that is set before us. Looking to Jesus, the pioneer
and perfector of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set
before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has
taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
Chapter 4 verse 16 says. Let us therefore approach the
throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and
find grace to help in time of need.
This is the word of the Lord. It's good to be with you this
morning. It's a gorgeous Sunday morning.
I always love how the light comes through and if you're in
the back, you'll have to wear sunglasses.
So Carl's demonstrating that I'm just seeing that that's how
bright it is in Ohio on this wonderful day.
So this, this Sunday, is the last Sunday in the liturgical
year of the church for churches that follow closely the church
calendar. And at Central Vineyard, we
roughly follow the calendar during Advent, leaning up to
Christmas and Lent leading up to Easter and then Easter tide
leading up to the day of Pentecost.
So you might not know that, but we try kind of intentionally to
follow the church category and those the, the church calendar
in those particular seasons. And those are the seasons that
we lean into the calendar of the church and allow our imagination
to be shaped alongside the whole church.
And next week, you might know, is the first Sunday of Advent.
And so we have an Advent series that we're super excited about.
Advent is that time in the church calendar where we are, we
are holding and waiting an expectation for the birth of the
Savior, Jesus the Messiah, the one who would bring
reconciliation between God and all of the humans.
But what he would also do and what he would preach about and
enact with his life and, and his death and resurrection and
ascension is he would be enacting a new Kingdom and a new
reality, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God.
That's what Jesus is coming to bring.
And this Sunday at the very end of the church calendar is a
Sunday and initially A feast day called Christ the King Sunday.
Today is Christ the King Sunday. Christ the King Sunday was a
late addition actually to the church calendar. 100 years ago
is when Christ the King Sunday came to be a part of the church
liturgical calendar. And it happened on the heels of
the end of the First World War. And I want to just say a little
bit about Christ the King Sunday and why it was implemented
because from our scripture text this morning, we are headed into
the lectio of a passage that has us approaching the throne of
grace with confidence. And on that throne is Christ
himself. So around 100 years ago, the
whole world was reeling with the trauma of the First World War.
And at the time there was a, a leader who is the Pope, Pope
Pius the 11th, and he began talking about and writing about
the shifting landscape of the world.
And this shifting landscape came to be known sort of
sociologically as the Secular age.
The Secular Age began around the early 20th century, just on the
heels of the end of the of the First World World War.
And in in an age that is most succinctly defined like this,
belief in God in the secular age is no longer the default belief.
It's just sort of one option among many.
And even when people do choose to believe in God, it's kind of
a fragile option to believe in God.
The whole, you know, experience of faith is sort of contestable
in the secular age, in the 20th century.
It's they, they may, they might you.
You might say that belief in God had become a bit SUS from a
cultural perspective because honestly, for the first time in
all of society, all of Western society, you knew really smart
people in your real life who didn't believe in God or go to
church. It's like a first time in
Western society. It's now possible and plausible
and culturally acceptable to live your whole life without
reference to God. This is how the secular age is
defined. And this reality where you you
would go to the market, you would go to your job, you would
go to the university, and you would meet really smart people
who did not Orient their life around God and church.
This reality begin to shape the framework and the understanding
of how people experience the world.
Not just believers, not just non believers, but believers as
well. What begins to happen
simultaneous with this and because of this is the world
also begins to become disenchanted.
Hang with me here for a second. The trauma of the World War One
creates a world where people leave behind the mysteries of
religion and the idea that the world is filled with the
supernatural and the miraculous. In the enchanted world before
the war, things happened because people who were made in the
image of God were actively working alongside of God to do
good in the world. That's how people understood the
world prior to the First World War.
It was an enchanted age story really, really mattered, and
mystery and like sacrament and like power from on high were
things that people talked about. But in the disenchanted world,
after the war, the world is kind of run by impersonal forces, the
tyrant leaders, they kind of just do what they want and
prayer might as well just be pretending.
They would say the whole world is no longer a drama unfolding
where some supernatural and other world Kingdom is being
birthed into the world by God and his presence and his grace
and his kindness. That's how everyone thought
before the world. But after the war, the Kingdom
of this world is being managed and ruled and measured and
controlled by men with power and money and prestige.
The world became disenchanted, lost its mystery.
And it was in this world that one of the religious leaders of
the time post Pope Pius, said that in the face of all of this
shifting change, that the thing that we must do is that we must
worship. And that the thing that we must
remember is that there is no other king but Christ, no other
king but Christ. Christ is king.
And he declared the last Sunday of the liturgical year Christ
the King Sunday. The presence of God is real, and
this king is alive and among us. Friends, this morning, there is
no king. There is no king but Christ.
Does it feel like that's the world we live in?
It doesn't, does it? It's because we are being
trained and taught to live in a disenchanted world.
And the reason that we gather together and worship and lift
our voices and come into prayer is to remind ourselves that the
real world that we are inhabiting is an enchanted world
with the mystery of God alive in community in the room.
Which is why we say, come Holy Spirit, Christ is king and he is
among us. He is ushering in a Kingdom with
His love and His mercy and His grace, and He is inviting you to
participate into that. I want you to hang on to that.
That's where we're headed in prayer this morning.
We've been in this series over the past eight weeks. 8 weeks,
Man, that's a long series, isn't it?
8 weeks. We've been discussing the
passions. The passions are desires and
attitudes and the sometimes obsessive emotions and thoughts
that are at work inside of us. And so if you imagine that
there's this place inside of you that is full of energy and
desire and resistance, and God has made this place inside of
you for life and vitality and goodness and love and courage,
all of that stuff is meant to flow out into the world.
It's designed to be a factory of thoughts and feelings and love
and desire that is meant to flow out of an enchanted place into a
disenchanted place. But because of sin, a lot of
that energy that God has placed inside of us and in that little
desire factory inside of us gets dissipated and fragmented and
disordered. And this disorder or this
fragmentation of our desire keeps us from loving in the way
in which we were meant to love. I've just described for you in
just about a couple of minutes all of the problems of the
world. Did you know that that could be
done? But that's the reason The reason
is that we were meant for love and our loves have grabbed a
hold of so many things. And so if you could imagine that
you have this great stream that is meant to flow out of you with
this rushing sort of river kind of mentality.
But because the stream gets divided in 1000 different
directions, all of the force of that love gets divided, which is
why you and I struggle to love in the way in which we were
designed to love. So the passions are named in the
formation tradition like this. If you've been with us, these
will feel familiar, and if this is your first time, these will
feel very familiar to you. Gluttony, lust, avarice and
greed. A sadness or a despondency that
simply will not go away. Anger, Acedia, which is that
sort of like leaned back posture in life.
Vainglory and pride and where we began this series was looking at
this really honest confession by the apostle Paul.
He says to the churches in Rome in his letter to them, he says,
effectively, there are all kinds of things that I wish that I did
not do, and yet I find myself doing them.
And there are a whole other set of things that I really want to
do and yet I cannot get myself to do.
I do not understand anybody can relate to this.
This is one of those passages where we find ourselves so
easily in the scriptures. Even if this were read outside
of the church and nobody thought it was from the Bible, you would
get a bunch of head nods. Yep, that is how my life works.
I actually have a friend who just this week told me he, he
happens to be one of those guys that regularly interacts with
like Hollywood execs and producers and all that kind of
stuff. And he was in a meeting over the
past couple of weeks where he read a small portion that
included this passage. And people who do not have life
with God, people who do not refer to themselves as a
Christian, are in the room. And there's something coming
alive in the room because people are like, I've never heard some
piece of literature describe my life so clearly as that.
These are people who live in a disenchanted world and they're
grabbing a hold of truth. So later on in Paul's letter, he
gets to this section in the letter where he's trying to
offer a little bit of guidance, and he says this to the people
he's writing to. He says, I appeal to you.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to
present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable
to God, which is your spiritual form of worship.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will
of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not
to think of yourselves more highly than you ought to think,
but think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of
his faith. He says, think about yourselves
with some sobriety. Don't overlook the reality of
your real life. Take a real hard look at what is
actually going on in your life, in the way that your life has
taken on the shape of the whole rest of the world without any
distinction, that you inhabit an enchanted story while the whole
rest of the world has become disenchanted.
And then once you do that assessment and once you get to
that place of sobriety where you're really able to see maybe
kind of what's wrong with your life, he says.
Because of God's mercy, come before God and offer your life
and allow your whole being to be transformed from the place that
it is right now to the place where God is taking you.
And this is what we've been talking about, friends, over the
past eight or so weeks. We've been trying to help all of
us get in touch with the way our life tends to just take on the
shape of a disenchanted world where we grab a hold of so many
things and our love gets dissipated.
And listen, this list, I don't know what your experience has
been, but I have been able to see myself and basically all of
this. We run to food and drink.
We have sexual desires in ways that, outside the healthy
fulfilment of that desire, we tend to want more than we need.
We fall into large seasons of helpless despondency.
We allow our anger to Stew and spill out sideways.
Our attention gets fragmented in all kinds of ways, and we easily
run to any number of things to satisfy our boredom and our lack
of zeal for life. We want to be seen by others in
certain ways, and we often have a hard time imagining ourselves
as the person in the story that needs to be saved and rescued
and cared for. You know, when I was praying
about this sermon series and just like meeting with our
teaching team, I think what I thought was, you know, I think
most people would find themselves in maybe one or two
of these. Like, that'd be a good win if if
people would be like, oh, yeah. Like, I can see myself in in
that despondency or that lust or that greed.
But as I have, like, met with people and talked with many of
you, as I have reflected on myself, I have become confronted
with the reality that every single one of those things is
active in my life to some degree, some more than others,
for sure. We tend to grab a hold of and
fall into patterns on one or two of these things.
But we've been talking through the way that we're transformed
over the past eight weeks. We've been trying to figure out
and lean into how is it that we actually then become
transformed? And we've been reciting week
after week, a little prayer, a little liturgy that Parker LED
us in. And it goes like this.
We are infinitely loved by God, and God's infinite love is in
the process of healing everything in us that clings to
false things. The invitation of God is to
allow God to be the divine physician, and the medicine of
God is God's own love poured out into our heart through the Holy
Spirit. So friends, we are changed by
coming into the presence of God and allowing ourselves to be
loved by God and then partnering with God in our transformation
by receiving the mercy and the grace of God.
That is the thing that heals us. The mercy and the grace of God
is the thing that heals us. It's the thing that allows our
hands to become sort of untightened from all of the
things that we're hanging on to. And this healing is an enchanted
healing. It is a mystery about the way in
which it works. It's miraculous, but it is not
Pixie dust or magic. It doesn't happen in a moment or
in an instant. It's kind of like the healing
that feels a little bit like a long process of chemotherapy or
a long road back from the surgery with all of the physical
therapy included. It's the kind where you start
where you can barely stand up, but over time you learn how to
walk again slowly. There are things being healed in
our life. It's that kind of healing that
our friends at a A and recovery know how to walk through.
It's that one day at a time kind of healing.
God is doing a healing work inside of us and it will take
the rest of our life. And so if you find that.
As we've been reflecting on these things or have you been
reflecting on your life that it just feels so slow?
I just want to say it just is what it is.
You know, all throughout the Scriptures, there's a sense of
slowness, of change, and there's a frustration that can come when
we look at our lives and we're like, Lord, really?
Is it going to take this long? And the Apostle Paul at
different times, he kind of has these kinds of prayers that he
prays to God like he talks about these afflictions that he has or
this this thorn in his flesh. And he says, I, I pleaded with
God to take this thing away from me.
And God's response to him is my grace is sufficient for you, for
my power is made perfect in your weakness.
And so if over the past eight weeks, if you've leaned into any
of this series and it has brought you in touch with a
sense of weakness of your own humanity, my encouragement to
you would be for you to really understand that it doesn't mean
that you're doing it wrong to feel so weak or to feel the
slowness of God's work in your in your life.
My grace is sufficient for you is what Paul says.
And then the writer of Hebrews, which gives us to our text this
morning, he echoes the apostle Paul.
So Paul encouraged us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices.
He says give your whole self to God, and God will transform you
into something new by his mercy. And the writer of Hebrews is
making a similar appeal as he encourages and exhorts his
recipients to persevere, to take courage, to keep the faith, and
to keep walking in faith, believing that God is the one
who is carrying them. And if they do not give up, that
in the end everything that they have longed for and hoped for
will come to completion, he says.
There's this whole host of people that has been on this
journey before you, this great cloud of witnesses in the story
of the Scriptures, and they kept this vision of God's promises to
them out in front of them, even in the midst of the
circumstances in their life falling apart or being
confronted and sobered by their own weakness.
He says, just keep believing that it is God's grace and mercy
that rescues you. And so in our passage this
morning, he invites them to keep in mind that there's this whole
bunch of people surrounding us who live their life in this
enchanted story of the Kingdom of God.
And he invites his readers to consider what it might be that
is weighing them down. Listen to what the writer of
Hebrew says. He says, Therefore, since we are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside
every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us
run with perseverance the race that has been marked out for us.
There's these weights and wounds of sin that weigh us down.
And the invitation of the writer of Hebrews is to throw that
stuff off, the weight of all of that stuff that we cling to,
that we that we think is going to satisfy us.
There's an active role for us to play in kind of disentangling
ourselves from that stuff. So if you could imagine that
there's just like this weighty rope that is tied around you
because of our engagement and all of those things, and that
rope is weighing us down. There's a sense in which what
the writer of Hebrews says is figure out what that rope is in
your life and partner with God and throwing that off so that
you can actually run a race without being tripped up.
There's another image that has been really helpful for me to
understand this. There's this image that comes to
us from a a pastor and a theologian in the 12th century.
His name is Bernard. Everybody say Bernard.
OK, strange name. So Bernard of Clervau LED a
group of monks and he asks us to imagine that in our most
original form, our our created form of, of being a human being,
that we are naked before God, that we bear the image of God,
that we are made in the likeness of God.
And that in our most original form, we are able to love
exactly the way that God loves. But it's as though over time we
get covered and we cover ourselves with coats and cloaks
like 1 after another. Like, imagine your body covered
with like 10 different coats. All of those things that we
cling onto so tightly, all of those lesser goods that occupy
us and they split our love and affection, the ways that our
desires leak out in lust and gluttony and Vainglory and
pride. They're like coats and cloaks
that cover over our naked body. And what Bernard says is that
over time, God and his grace is trying to help unburden us from
all of those extra layers and to return us to that original form
where we take those clothes off and come into God's presence and
join God. But it it's really important how
you think about that process of taking off the cloaks.
And this brings us to our second reading.
He says this. Let us therefore approach the
throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy and
find grace to help us in our time of need.
So friends, here's how I want to end this whole series and begin
a new Advent year. I want to say this to you.
The way that we allow ourselves to be transformed is to come
into the presence of God, to approach the throne where Christ
is king and is present to us, and to simply receive mercy and
grace to help us in our time of need.
That's how you become someone different is you come before God
with all of those layers, all of the things that we've been
talking about and without any shame because there's no
condemnation for those that are in Christ.
We simply come before God and we receive mercy and find grace.
And it's as though that mercy and grace over time removes
those cloaks because in the presence of God we come to know
that even in our most naked form, without all of the stuff
that we're clinging on to, that we can come before God and be
loved. Does this make sense?
God loves you with 10 coats on, and God loves you with 50 coats
on. Whatever is going on in your
life, the invitation of the writer of Hebrews and of the
whole of the Scriptures is to come into the presence of God
and to be met with kindness and love.
This is not a throne of judgement.
It is a throne of mercy and it's a throne of grace.
This is how we get changed. And I suspect that most of you
are like, really? This is really how it works.
And I just want to say to you that I do believe this is how it
works. I think this is how we get
better, not better in a sense of, but better in a sense of
like this is how we we gain our healing is that we come to the
presence of God. We approach the throne where
Christ is king to receive mercy and to find grace.
So we're going to spend a little bit of time in a form of prayer
called Lexio Divina. And lexio is just when we take a
piece of scripture. And this morning, the kind of
lectio that we're going to lean into is a form of imaginative
prayer. I want to ask you to use your
imagination. This is all throughout the
scriptures. People have prayed with their
imagination. And the temptation in this
moment is going to be to check out or to fall asleep.
So one more time, say Bernard. OK, so now see you're awake
again. So I want to invite you to go
ahead and get comfortable. I'm just going to lead you into
a time of imaginatively praying ourselves into the Scripture,
and if that's helpful for you to close your eyes, you can go
ahead and do that. If not, if you think you'll fall
asleep, I encourage you not to close your eyes.
Come, Holy Spirit, I want you to imagine that you are weighed
down with hindrance, that you are weighed down with things,
that you cling tightly to lesser goods, and that you are weighed
down with afflictive thoughts that simply will not go away.
And imagine that all of those hindrances and sin and
afflictive thoughts are like cloaks or coats layered upon
layer. And imagine that you walk into a
room. It was a sweet aroma.
It's filled with light and beauty.
You feel the weight of God's presence there.
You're in the very throne room of Christ the King and you have
all of these cloaks and coats that you're wearing.
Just take a moment and let yourself feel the weight of the
things that you are struggling with in your life.
So together we come into the presence of God.
And I want you to ask God this morning to speak directly to
your heart. We believe that God can speak
directly to your heart about 3 things this morning.
Things that are hindering you, the sin that is entangling you,
and the thoughts that are afflicting you.
To imagine Christ on the throne, the presence of God is with you,
and you simply ask God, what are the things in my life that are a
hindrance to the life that you're inviting me to?
Let us throw off everything that hinders.
Just let the Lord see you for who you are and say to you what
He will. And then I invite you just to
say to the Lord Christ the King on the throne.
Is there any sin that you would want to point out to me that is
an entanglement for me? What are the things that I'm
presently clinging to too tightly?
Just speak to God. He's he's on the throne, and
it's a throne of mercy and grace.
With great boldness, we approach the throne of Christ the King so
that we may receive mercy and find the grace that we need.
Have mercy, O Lord. And if you feel timid, be bold.
Ask for the mercy and the grace that you need.
Let us approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we
may receive mercy and find grace to help in the time of our need.
Come Holy Spirit, pour out your love into our hearts.
Let your heart be filled with the love of Christ, the mercy,
and the grace of God for whatever it is that is hindering
you and entangling you. And last, we invite God to speak
to us about those areas of our life that feel like afflictive
thoughts. You know, where are you having a
hard time resting? Like where do your thoughts tend
to drift and pull you away from peace?
We bring these afflictive thoughts into the throne room of
Christ the King and we ask God to speak to us about them.
And I want to encourage you to get specific, particular God I
name in your presence my anxiety about whether or not you will
provide. I cry out to you, Lord, I have
clung to security. Have mercy on me, whatever that
is for you. Just get specific with God.
Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness,
so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in a time of
need. In Christ's name, Amen.
I want to close with one last time, just the reading of this
liturgy. We'll move into a time of of
ministry. You want to invite Parker to
come up and see if you have anything here.
But we we close with this last here we are together.
We say I am infinitely loved by God, and God's infinite love is
in the process of healing everything in me that clings to
false things. The invitation of God is to
allow God to be the divine physician.
The medicine of God is God's own love poured out into my heart
through the Holy Spirit. So friends, as always, we're
going to make some time to pray. I'm going to invite the worship
team back up. You know, my sense as I was
praying this morning, You know, last week, if you were with us
last week, there was a a real tenderness in the room with us
last week during worship. And my sense and my desire is
that that tenderness continues. I just have a real sense that
God is leading us into a time of tenderness where his presence
feels a little weighty, where we feel like we can come before God
and something is sort of being opened up.
And I just had a sense even as I, you know, I get this unique
position as I lead you in, in this lectio to see the Holy
Spirit kind of resting a little bit on you.
And I think there's some of you in the room that are feeling
really tender to the Lord this morning.
And we would love to pray for you.
So if you have some stuff that's come up for you this morning,
please don't hesitate to get some prayer.