Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Luke's
Gospel, the 12th chapter, verses 13 to 21.
It says someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my
brother to divide the family inheritance with me.
But he said to him, Friend, who set me to be a judge or
arbitrator over you? And he said to them, take care,
be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one's life
does not consist in the abundance of possessions.
Then he told them a parable, the land of a rich man produced
abundantly. And he thought to himself, what
should I do, for I have no place to store my crops.
Then he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and
build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my
goods, and I will say to my soul, soul, You have ample goods
laid up for many years. Relax, eat and drink, be merry.
But God said to him, You fool, this very night your life is
being demanded of you, and the things you have prepared, whose
will they be? So it is with those who store up
treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.
This is the word of the Lord. Are you guys doing this morning?
It's good to be with you. How about that extra hour?
Did you guys soak that up so good?
Woke up this morning, asked my wife what time it was and I
thought to myself, wait, is that the real time or is that the
fake time? Like you know that moment?
It's good to be with you this morning.
If you are new or newish, my name is Jared.
I'm one of the pastors here and we've been in this series over
the past number of weeks on the passions, which I will tell you
more about in just a minute. A few years ago, I was talking
to a volunteer who was serving on the West side of our city at
a drop in center. Some of you know and are already
involved in the work of Sanctuary Night.
Sanctuary Night was founded by Hannah Esterbrook and Heather
Mormon, both of which are part of this community.
I know that many of you have given to Sanctuary Night, you
have volunteered with Sanctuary Night.
And we consider Sanctuary Night to be some of the work that we
partner with in the city and we hope to continue to partner
with. And it's a drop in center that
offers a place of sanctuary to women who are on the West side
who are caught up in a cycle of poverty or human trafficking.
Did I get that right? Does that does that sound good?
You can talk to these two right here if you are interested in
hearing a little bit more. But I heard this story from
someone that had been serving on a Monday night and she overheard
a conversation between two women as the drop in center was
closing for the evening. So that's like setting the scene
a little bit there for you. These two women from the
streets, they walked in the front doors and one of these
women was extremely hungry and one of them did not have
adequate clothing. So the the food from the meal
that was served at Sanctuary Night.
So one of the things that Sanctuary Night has done is
serve meals as they are available, but the food from
that evening's meal was completely gone.
And so the first woman became distraught even more so because
she walked in thinking that she was going to get a meal and it
was gone. She's super hungry.
Meanwhile, the second woman was helped by some of the volunteers
to grab a pair of boots. You know, the winter was on its
way. And so as it came time to lock
up the doors, the first woman is still trying to figure out where
she's going to get her next meal.
And the second woman says to her, why didn't you tell me that
you were hungry? When have you ever asked me for
food? And I have not been able to find
you food. Everything I have at home is
yours. Let's go get something to eat.
Everything I have is yours. But when was the last time that
anyone ever said that to you? Or when was the last time you
ever said that to someone else? We're going to come back to
that. So within a few weeks of hearing
that particular story, I was at the grocery store where you
could find people on the front side of a snowstorm stocking up
with household goods, filling up grocery carts with toilet paper.
You may remember a few weeks or not a few weeks, though.
It feels like that. Do you guys remember the
pandemic? The COVID times, you might
remember during the early days of 2020, you might remember
reading several stories about people across the country who
bought up hand sanitizer. There's a guy in Tennessee that
bought 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer all that he could
find, only to attempt to resell it at a marked up price of $70 a
bottle. Do you guys remember reading
stories about this? I know, kind of gross.
It's OK. Wash, let it wash over you.
It's all right, or maybe you have been witness to just after
the midnight opening of a store on Black Friday, which is coming
by the way, and you know, people are literally stampeding over
others to try to get to that 40% markdown on a new flat screen
TV. Listen, by the way, I'm not
necessarily throwing shade at Black Friday.
I got my eye on a dishwasher. I'm not going to lie, because
our dishwasher is leaking, it works about half the time.
So listen, if you can find a good deal, that's wonderful.
Please just do not push somebody out of the way in order to get
there. Everything I have is yours, she
said. And listen, you don't have to be
religious or trying to follow Jesus to understand that there
is at a deep level. There's something really right
and resonant about that kind of posture and invitation to
another human being. And something doesn't quite feel
right about the hoarding of toilet paper out of fear, or
trying to make a quick buck in a moment of crisis, or upgrading
your TV to what is new and bigger every other year.
How do we become the kind of person that would so
instinctively posture ourselves towards others?
Like the first woman in the story, Everything I have is
yours. And how do we be on the lookout
for ways that some version of those other stories might be at
work in our daily lives? That's the question.
Those are the two questions that I'm trying to wrestle with us
this morning. This first story about the
hungry woman feeling some anxiety about where her next
meal is coming from is met with what the biblical authors call
mercy. And all of those other stories
are different versions of what the early church fathers and
what the biblical narrative calls avarice or greed.
Avarice or greed? So we've been in this teaching
series over the past number of weeks called The Passions.
And if you were with us a number of weeks ago, one of the ways
that we described with the Passions are is to say that the
passions are desires and attitudes and the sometimes
obsessive emotions and thoughts that are at work inside of us.
Can anybody sort of pinpoint the reality that there are those
kinds of things that work inside of your eye?
Had coffee with somebody this week and they said, you know,
you know, Jared, you keep saying that, you know, could you
identify with one or two of these?
And, and they said to me, well, how about all of them?
And the reality is, is that there is there is something of
all of these passions at work inside of all of us that much of
the time there are these sort of unspoken desires and thoughts
that work their way out in the everyday actions and the habits
of our lives. And the men and women in the
first few centuries of the church on their journey of
formation after the death of Jesus, they begin to develop
some preliminary psychological categories and a tradition that
began to recognize that there were all sorts of things that
seem to be getting into the in, in the way of my adoration of
God and my desire to follow after Jesus, to live a life of
prayer and self sacrifice and to stay present to the reality of
our lives. There's all kinds of things that
are kind of in the way of that project, aren't there?
And so they begin to see all of these things that work within
them and and they begin to recognize that of the things
that are in my life that are taking away my freedom to love,
we can basically enumerate those things like a little bit of a
list. And they came up with these
eight different kinds of what they called afflictions.
And these are afflictions that often originate in our thoughts.
For example, we might find desire some things in an outside
way related to our sexuality. The early church fathers and the
biblical authors call that lust. Or we might discover that, you
know, we tend to gravitate towards sort of distracting
ourselves or numbing ourselves with food or drink.
And the early church fathers and the biblical authors call that
gluttony. So here's the list if you're
wondering sort of where we've been and what we've been up to.
Gluttony, lust, avarice and greed, sadness or despondency,
anger, acedia, Vainglory, and pride.
I promise you there's really good news coming.
By the way, I know that's a heavy list.
We're not just making our way through this list of the
passions as information, by the way, like we're not just trying
to learn all that we can about this.
What we're trying to do is we're trying to see together as a
community is that we all have these various ways and in which
are habitual and mental and, and like, like spiritual condition
is 1 in which we just don't quite see the world clearly.
And these are the kinds of things that are standing in the
way. They cause us to see one another
in skewed ways and they blind us to the needs of others.
They take away our capacity to see the way that God is wanting
to work in US. And they form us in this way
where they kind of like terrorize us on the inside.
Do you have anything that you're aware of that you're kind of
being terrorized by in this like little microwave and up for
today is this passion of avarice or sometimes referred to as
greed? Avarice is not like the
household name, but it is the list that shows up in the early
church. And so I just felt like we
should keep it. But greed, think about greed.
John Cashin, one of the early Church fathers, he says that
avarice is not only the desire for money, but the fear of
losing what one has. And his buddy Evagrius says that
avarice is the desire to possess more than one needs.
So for Evagrius, excuse me, who helped articulate this tradition
of the passions in the 5th century, he talks about a
vaguerous or avarice is not just about actual wealth, but it's
about this interior attachment that we have to security that we
maintain by gathering possessions or seeking after
wealth and possessions. It's really about what's
happening on the inside. There's all kinds of people who
who I know who have actually quite a bit of money, but their
disposition to that money is not to grab onto it.
It's actually to relinquish it and to give it away.
And so it's really what is happening on the inside interior
attachment to security through possession.
So avarice is present when we place trust in our material
means rather than in God's care or in the care that we might
receive from somebody else. It's that it's that feeling that
you might have when you, you or I are paying too much attention
to the stock market or to your investment accounts.
Some of you, like, I have no idea what those are.
Some people have those, by the way.
It's also that feeling that might arise for you when there's
money in your pocket and you're walking maybe downtown or you're
walking in a public place and you know that there's somebody
around you that probably needs that money more than you do.
But it's just sitting there and there's this little bit of
anxiety that comes up with the thought of reaching into your
pocket and handing over that 20 to the person.
And I'm not talking about the kind of anxiety that is
thoughtful, like, hey, is this going to be the best use of this
money for this particular person?
I'm not talking about that kind of pause inside.
I'm talking about the kind of pause about just actually
allowing the money to release from your hands.
Avarice is that feeling or that fear or anxiety that comes up
when the 20 or the 50 leads your hand or if you decide to sort of
make a donation to our shared economy fund, you drop $100 in
there and and it doesn't feel joyful.
It feels like, oh, that's going to hurt.
That's avarice. It's the inability to simply say
everything I have is yours. Everything I have is yours.
That's where we're headed in our life of following Jesus.
That's where my hope is, is that we can head together over time
as a community. But I want you to hold on to
that because we're going to come back to it.
In Luke chapter 12, Jesus is giving us a clear remedy of how
to spot avarice or greed and how to respond to it when it shows
up in our life. Let's look back at the text.
He says this beginning in verse 13.
Someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to
divide the fair, the the family inheritance with me.
So Luke just sort of throws us into the middle of a scene, by
the way. And there's this guy who wants
Jesus to settle a little family dispute.
And in the ancient Near East, here's how the inheritance
concept would work. The eldest brother would receive
twice the inheritance of the younger brothers.
This was called a double portion.
It is just the way it worked. It goes all the way back to the
Jewish roots. And so if there was an
inheritance say of like 10,000, whatever dollars or whatever it
is that they use 10,000 bars of gold, I doubt it was that.
But if if there are three brothers, they would divide the
10,000 by 4 and each of the brothers would get a single
portion and then the oldest brother would get a double
portion. And so clearly this guy who's
trying to use Jesus authority as a teacher is a younger brother.
But it's not that the older brother is withholding what is
rightfully the younger brother's portion.
It's not really an issue of justice.
It's that the younger brother is stuck in a story.
He's stuck in a narrative. He's fixated on getting more
than he actually has, and he's feeling slighted in some way
because someone, namely his older brother, has more than he
has the the free money or the cattle or the sheep or the land
that was given to him out of the abundance of the family estate.
It simply wasn't enough. And it's kind of under his skin
a little bit. And so he is carrying around
this outside desire to have more than he actually needs such that
he can't see the abundance of what has already been provided
to him. I mean, this guy is listening to
Jesus teach. So there's this giant crowd
around and Luke tells us there's probably like 1000 people
around. And Jesus is getting into some
really good stuff about what it means to acknowledge him in
public. And Jesus basically says to to
the people is like, if you claim that you know me in front of
other people, I will declare that I know you in front of the
Father and all of the angels. And so there's this great
teaching that swells up and then this guy says, hey, could you
tell my brother to give me some money?
Do you, do you ever have this moment?
You know, you're just kind of going about your day.
You have this sort of outsized desire that just sort of springs
out of you. Is that just me, like you just
sort of blurting out things in conversations with people that
don't really belong? Great.
Thank you so much, man. I was like, OK, man, maybe it is
just me. No one is responding right now.
You sort of date. You're daydreaming about the
anxiety about the thing, the conversation, the finances,
whatever it is. OK, So out of the middle of
nowhere, this guy pulls Jesus into his own pattern of thinking
and into his own anxiety about money and the inheritance and
some perceived slight that he is fixated on.
And Jesus's response to him is this.
He says be careful, be on your guard against all kinds of
greed, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of
possessions. Isn't that interesting?
Because so much of our life actually is consisting of the
abundance of possessions, what we do with our time and our
energy and our focus of our attention in this modern 21st
century world. So side trail that will leave.
But then he told them a parable. He says this.
He says the land of a rich man produced abundantly.
So this guy has a bumper crop and he thought to himself, what
should I do? For I have no place to store my
crops. And then he said, he said, I
will do this. I will pull down my barns and
build larger ones, and there I will store all of my grain in my
goods. And I will say to my soul, soul,
you have ample goods laid up for many years.
Relax, eat, drink and be merry. But you kind of notice what he
doesn't say here, right? He doesn't think about his
neighbor. He doesn't consider that maybe
this abundance is not just for himself.
He's making plans for increasing his own comforts.
He's thinking to himself, You know, I'm going to be able to
retire early, man. I'm going to make a plan for
this. I can buy better wine.
I can eat at better restaurants. I can spend the extra I have on
more enjoyment and the security of knowing that everything is
going to be taken care of for me.
And in a sermon on this particular passage, again, one
of the early church fathers, St. Basil the Great, he's one of the
church leaders in the 6th century, he talks about how this
kind of abundance, this kind of abundance that has us thinking
of creative ways of storing all of that extra.
He says that it's a form of stealing from the poor because
in his mind, in the minds of those following Jesus in those
first few centuries, was that storing up treasures on earth
just for yourself eventually corrodes one's own view of what
your life is. For.
He says this. The bread in your cupboard
belongs to the hungry. The coat hanging unused in your
closet, it belongs to the one who needs it.
And if we do not have the disposition, he says, to think
about our neighbors and to think about the people in need, it is
just the same as though we stole the thing that is now in our
closet. You know, the stuff in the back,
the very back, back of your closet, he says.
It belongs to the poor. So the person who tears down a
perfectly good barn or a perfectly good ballroom to build
a bigger one, to to, to to store more than what they need
externally might have what appears to be abundance, but
internally, this is the kind of person who's living within a
scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is when a
person believes that the resources that they care about
is in short supply. You know, whether that be money
or time or emotional support or security.
They believe that, you know, all of that stuff is in short supply
and that the lack of it or even the perception that there isn't
going to be enough begins to shape their thinking and their
behavior. So social scientists and
psychologists actually have done some research on a scarcity
mentality and what it actually does to our brain and what it
does to our mindset. They they tell us that if we
believe that a resource is scarce or will be scarce in the
future, it can shrink our vision for what we're paying attention
to. It can close us off to the
capacity for seeing the world for what it really is.
It can cause us to filter our life in ways that align our
priorities to taking care of the thing that we think is scarce
off into the detriment of other things that maybe we could be
paying attention to. Now, that was all a very fancy
way of saying that if we're afraid that something we need is
not going to be there for us, it will cause our attention to
focus on the thing that we think that we need.
That is running dry. You ever been in a season where
you just feel like your relational network is kind of
shrinking? Your friendships are kind of we
have an name in from the sister down here.
OK, what do you become fixated on then?
Finding new friends. If your if your grocery budget
is expanding and your bank account is shrinking, what are
you going to be focused on? You're going to be focused on
where can I find the cheapest groceries?
How can I keep enough money in in the bank?
It's just human behavior. It's human psychology.
So modern psychology and behavioral science are telling
us exactly the same thing that John Cashin and Evagrius, living
in monastic communities in the 4th century, writing about.
When we become too focused on the accumulation of resources,
it's usually because we're looking for control and
security, and we think that whatever we need is not going to
be there in the future. And so we build bigger barns to
help us feel safe and more in control.
Man, what a terrible way to live, isn't it?
But what it actually does is it changes the way that we see the
world. It changes the way we Orient our
lives, and our vision gets blurred and narrowed.
And building on the tradition of those early desert fathers and
long before psychologists discovered the ways that
scarcity can narrow our vision and reduce empathy and
imagination that our life might be for others.
Basil the Great Again says this. He says you are poorer than all
your insatiable desires. So a scarcity mindset tells us
that we're never going to have enough and avarice and greed
acts on that mindset and builds bigger barns.
But the story that Jesus invites us into confronts both of those
things. He says this, you fool.
He says to the man, this very night your life is being
demanded of you and the things that you have prepared, where
were they go? All of that stuff that you store
in barns. This is how it is, he says, with
those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich
towards God. So the story that Jesus tells in
order to confront the man who's caught up in scarcity about his
inheritance is a story about scarcity and a scarcity
mentality. But the scarcity isn't real for
this guy, is it? Like he has an inheritance and
he just want, he just wants more?
What about when scarcity is real?
What about when the resources are actually shrinking?
How do we, how do we manage that?
Any anybody see what's happening in our world right now?
Doesn't it feel like the resources are shrinking for lots
and lots of people? If it's not shrinking for you,
you're in like the top 5% of the world.
You know, in the ancient world, 90% of the people lived at a
subsistence level. There is no storage of wealth.
90% of the people were just getting by in various degrees.
So what about when scarcity is real?
When we feel like we actually don't have enough, when we're
not, When we're we're not trying to figure out what to do with
the bumper crop or the bonus check.
We're just trying to make ends meet.
We're just trying to balance that grocery budget.
Last year, I was having dinner. It was actually a pretty nice
dinner with a friend down in Atlanta as a new friend.
And we're we're still sort of getting to know each other.
And he's a businessman, he's a follower of Jesus.
He loves the Lord. And we're talking about kind of
what it feels like to to be a startup person, to be starting
something. He has started 8 businesses over
the past 12 years. And some of you know that my
work outside of the church is to to lead a nonprofit
organization. And so for better or worse, and
in a way that I hadn't planned on it, I, I'm like an
entrepreneur. I'm a start up guy and I'm not a
typical one. And so I was sitting with this
guy over dinner and I was asking him how it has felt for him to
be a founder of all of these businesses.
And I'm listening, we're getting to know each other.
And he says, well, how's it felt for you?
And we were talking just about the pressures.
Some of you who lead nonprofits or part of nonprofits, you might
know there's some pressure involved in leading a nonprofit
organization. And I had one of those moments
where I, I realized that we were talking a little bit about fear.
And I asked him whether he struggles at all with fear and
which is the thing that I have struggled with.
And so we're talking about all this and he just sets down his
fork and he looks at me. He's like, what is it that
you're afraid of? And I knew that we were in one
of those moments of like a new relationship where like, I had a
choice to make about whether or not I was going to demonstrate a
little bit of vulnerability and just to kind of lean in a little
bit. And I'm like thinking to myself,
man, we're eating great chicken wings right now and drinking
some beer and what I'm about to say.
So I just paused a bit and I said, honestly, I think the
thing I'm afraid of and starting a new venture is that I'm going
to run out of money, plain and simple.
I've got people on payroll, I've got families that I support.
I've got my family that I support.
I've got kids in college. You know, the whole thing.
I just started saying to him. And then he says to me, he says,
well, have you ever run out of money?
And I thought that was a great question and never really
thought about that before. And then my answer back to him
was yes. And he was like, really?
I said yes. There was a season in my life in
the late 90s as a college student.
You know, I had bumped up against some really challenging
years. I was working my way through
college. My parents had done the best
they can to support me. I had a season where I was
really struggling and I was doing the whole thing, the cans
of tuna and the ramen noodles. I got free sandwiches three days
a week at Brennan's Cafe where I worked, free coffee, half price
bagels. And I still ran out of money.
Like $20 in my bank account. Run out of money.
I know some of you have been there.
And as I relayed this story to my friend, I began to realize in
that moment that my own struggle with the fear of running out of
money was rooted in an actual event in my life.
It wasn't make believe. It was real and I, I share that
to say to you friends that this whole series on the passions all
leave that list of things that we're talking about.
We're not trying to pull the curtain back to expose us to our
faults in some great like aha moment where where we're
overwhelmed with shame or we're trying to hustle our way out of
that thing. We're not trying to do that so
that we can wag our finger at our self in some ridiculous way
or bootstrap ourselves and set us out on a course of self
improvement just to do better. This whole series and the whole
tradition that we're drawing on recognizes that these complex
sets of emotions and thought patterns and behaviors, these
automated responses and coping mechanisms are almost always
rooted in stories in our life. There's wounding and there's
trauma. There's, there's feeling
overwhelmed in some way. And so all of these things that
we've been looking at over the past few weeks, the lust and the
anger and the acedia and the gluttony and the avarice, we're
seeking to pull back the curtain and see if we can get a good
look at the way these things are at work in our lives so that we
can cry out for the mercy of God and to say to God, God, I know
that there are things in my story that are causing these
thought patterns and this sort of miniature terrorizing things
going on inside of me. And I know that the only way out
is mercy. The only way out is for you to
heal me. That's the reason that we're
doing this work, friends. The passions are not necessarily
evil. And if you spend any amount of
time sitting before God in prayer asking God to reveal
where these things might be at work in your life, what you'll
notice is that most of these things are showing up not as
conscious acts of rebellion, but as deeply rooted patterns that
have formed us in reaction to some of the really hard things
that have happened to us. And so, friends, listen.
I know that you are sitting here and you are a human being, and
you will hear me say over and over again, I think being a
human being is incredibly difficult.
I think there's struggle that is built into the whole thing.
And the reason that we're trying to build a community that can
actually do the real conversations is because at the
end of the day, God has us on a journey to healing.
And we need each other. We attach ourselves to things
because we find them useful at some point in dealing with these
sort of outsized emotions. And then those things that we
attach to, they curve back in on us and they end up controlling
us. And God is inviting us on a
healing journey. So one of those journeys for me
has been in this this journey of avarice, of greed, and it hasn't
really shown up and tearing down barns and building a bigger one.
Let me tell you, it's mostly shown up for me in an anxiety
that I'm going to run out of money.
In my young adulthood, I had very little resources.
And what that season did to my brain was it made me hyper
fixated on scarcity and I developed this outsized fear.
And then in that same season, my parents went bankrupt and they
lost their home. They lost everything they had.
And So what do you think that did to my brain?
It impacted it. And so I have never really had
to think about what it would look like to tear down a barn
and to build a bigger one. But I have been in seasons when
I could feel myself hoarding more than I needed in a way that
had me fixated on security. And do you know what that does
to us? It narrows our vision.
It causes us to forget the needs of others.
And it causes us to forget God. So this guy in the middle of a
teaching blurts out in front of Jesus.
Teacher tell my brother to divide the family inheritance
with me. And Jesus reveals how narrow
this guy's focus is by telling a story about a rich man who has a
good year and he decides to build a bigger barn to store up
the extra. He says, you fool, this very
night your life is being demanded of you and the things
that you have prepared and set aside.
Where all of those things going to go?
So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are
not rich towards God, which is another way of saying
accumulating a bunch of stuff and fixating on the control and
the security of possessions and investments is a really narrow
and short sighted way of living in the world.
And then he says there's a there's a better story for you
to live in. If we keep reading the passage
which I have up here, He says this, Jesus says to his
disciples. Therefore, because of this story
I have just told you, do not worry about your life, what you
will eat, or about your body and what you will wear.
For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.
Consider the Ravens. They neither sow nor reap.
They have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them of.
How much more value are you than the birds?
And can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to the span of
life? If then you are not able to do
so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest of it?
Consider the lilies, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you that Solomon in
all of his glory was not clothed like one of those flowers.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive
today, and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, how much more will he
clothe you, you of little faith. And do not keep seeking what you
are to eat and what you are to drink.
And do not keep worrying, for it is the nations of the world that
seek all of these things, and your Father knows that you need
them. Instead, seek His Kingdom, and
these things will be given to you as well.
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good
pleasure to give you the Kingdom.
Feel free to sell your possessions and give to the
poor. Make purses for yourself that do
not wear out an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no
thief comes near and no moth destroys.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be.
Also. Remember, avarice is the desire
to possess more than you need. But it's also about loop, the
fear of losing what you already have and the healing path.
And the invitation of God is to live in a story that believes
that God's posture towards us is everything I have is yours.
That's what God's posture is towards us.
Everything that we have, we have been given by God and we think
that our desire for the next thing, or you know, what we
think we need is going to satisfy us.
And listen, friends, if you struggle with avarice as I have,
if you're trying to break free from a scarcity mentality and be
healed of the passion of avarice.
The temptation that we're fighting is this belief that if
we get a little bit more, if we store up a little bit more that
that anxiety that we have or that need for control that just
sits below the surface, it will somehow go away if we just get
the thing right. If I could just get my savings
account above that particular marker, but you know that this
is not how desire actually works, right?
Desire. All of your desires that you
could possibly name. Stay with me here.
They're unquenchable. There's no satisfaction in the
things that you desire. And the moment I know that I'm
saying this, I know that there are some of you who are agreeing
with me in a very deep way that you just know that you have
insatiable desire for something. Intimacy, security, being well
thought of, getting to the top of the food chain, getting that
promotion, having enough in the bank.
Those desires are insatiable desire itself.
Is not the problem. And we try to fight all of this
stuff by somehow minimizing our desire.
The problem is that we think that there is anything in this
world that can quench those desires, but the capacity of our
desire is actually infinite. Why?
Why is the capacity of our desire infinite?
Because God is infinite. Gold Star for this one.
And the only thing, the only reason that God has made your
desires infinite is so that he can be the only thing that fills
it. And if you think about your
desire that way, it's like, oh, thank you.
Thank you for giving me this little wonder inside of me.
It's just the natural consequence of our life that we
have this fire that is burning inside of us and we're
constantly trying to to quench that desire.
And God's like, you could try whatever it is that you want, go
for it because it's a drop in the bucket to the degree of the
desire that God has given us. And the reason that God has
given us that great desire is to lead us to Him and to one
another. So our soul is shaped such that
our desire is stretched out towards what it longs for, and
it longs for God. And God gives us what we need,
and His hope for us is that we could just keep wanting.
He actually wants us to want, but He wants us to know that He
is the fulfiller of those desires.
Desire is not a defect, friends. It's a signal.
It's in a it's a, it's an alarm bell in our soul that says there
is something infinite that I have put in front of you.
It's why the birds aren't anxious.
They take the food that they receive for that day with the
expectation that there's going to be more food for tomorrow.
Because God is a God who says everything I have is yours.
Everything I have belongs to you.
I'm getting signals from the room that perhaps my time is up,
which is great because I'm at the end of my notes.
But here's what we're going to do.
Everything I have is yours. That's God's posture towards us.
God also desires us to become like him in this particular way
so that we get to the point where we say to one another,
everything I have is yours. So I'm going to invite the
worship team to come back up. We're going to get really
practical for our time of ministry.
Welcome kids. It's OK.
We're going to start the music any minute now.
Can those who are on our prayer team, can you guys begin to make
your way around? Here's a couple ways that I want
to invite you to maybe respond. If, if you can notice that fear
inside of you that you're going to run out, if you can notice
that that's actually true, I would love for you to get some
prayer today. Friends, we cannot combat what
needs to be healed by ourselves. And the second thing that I
would just invite you really practically to do is to make use
of that shared economy fund, both asking of it, but even more
important is if you notice some anxiety around money in your
life, around having enough. I would invite you to give to
the shared economy fund as a way of discipling your heart towards
recognizing that God is going to supply everything that you need.
And some of that will come through the community.
What I would much rather have happen is for you to give a
bunch of money to the shared economy fund and then six months
from now realize I think I need some of that money back.
And then you make a request. Does that make sense?
That creates A mutuality that we're trying to build.
So think about what's in your savings account.
And what we're trying to do with the shared economy fund is
imagine a shared savings account so that maybe in this season
you're giving into that account with the trust that when you
have need some time down the road that you can actually just
ask for some of that money. OK, so we can do this together.
I want to invite you to stand and worship Parker.
Do you have anything that you want to add?
No Parker's like you got it. OK, Come forward for prayer.
Let's worship together.