The Strength of Christianity
From the Series: Primal
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: January 24, 2010
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Transcript
Welcome! How are you guys doing? It’s great to see you! Thanks so much for making NCC part of your weekend. Welcome to each of you at all four of our locations. I believe the Lord has a word for us this weekend. We continue our ‘Primal’ series. 2,000 years ago, Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind and all of your strength.” We call it the Great Commandment and this series is really all about being great at the Great Commandment. It starts with the heart. When you give your heart to Christ, He gives his heart to you and your heart begins to break for the things that break the heart of God. Then you recapture that childlike wonder. We talked about that and we talked about the soul of love, and last week we talked about loving God with all of our minds, and this weekend we wrap up by talking about strength. This is really the final frontier. This is where the rubber meets the road. If we miss this, we have not loved God the way that He wants us to.
To put it in practical terms, this may sound a little off topic, but would you like my pre-marital counseling cliff notes? We got a lot of single people running around here. In case you really care, here’s my number one piece of advice, all of my wisdom from 17 years of marriage wrapped up into one little statement, this is for the guys – take out the garbage! It is sexy. I’m going to tell you why, because love is not measured in spoken words, love is measured in calories burned! You gotta burn some calories if you want your spouse to know you love her. That’s what we are going to talk about this weekend.
Let me share this as a way of celebrating what the Lord did last weekend and thanking you for your generosity. As you know, we are partnering with Convoy of Hope and they have folks on the ground in Haiti providing supplies and relief, and last weekend I said we wanted to give a container with things like food, water, and medical supplies for 12,000 people, and I thank you because we are giving two containers! Thank the Lord for that! Last weekend, you gave $18,872.23 and here’s what I love about that, this is exactly what I’m talking about this weekend, it is not enough for your heart to break when people are hurting, you’ve got to do something about it. You have to translate it into action, into energy and that’s what we have done. I know you are sitting there thinking, ‘I gave, but what does that have to do with energy?’ Well listen, you aren’t fully thinking about what you are doing because the bottom line is this, how do you get your paycheck? You give time and energy and that paycheck represents every second of time, every calorie of energy, so when you give, you are giving the energy that you’ve expended. So I want to say a huge thanks. By the way, we want to try to send a team over there, we are working on some details, but we need to keep praying and making a difference.
If you have a Bible, turn over to Ephesians Chapter 3, we are going to look at one passage of Scripture, I’m going to let you just read the book Primal, because you can read, and I didn’t want to just get up and preach what I wrote, and at the same time, I want to leverage it, so I want to talk on some themes that I think will challenge us this weekend. Ephesians 3:14
For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
20Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.
What a passage of Scripture, what a prayer! Can I say up front that when Paul is praying this, he is not just praying for the people that this letter was intended for, for the Church of Ephesus, he was praying for you, he was praying for National Community Church. I want to unpack this passage together, starting in verse 14.
For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
A few weeks ago, we had an amazing worship service at our Ebenezers location on Saturday night. It was one of those nights that we didn’t want to stop. The Lord was working with tremendous intensity and praising Him, and after that service, I tweeted this thought: sometimes our shoulders ought to be sore in raising them in worship to the Lord. The reason I tweeted it is because my shoulders were sore. We were singing about glory to God, and the Lord reigns, and when we sing those songs, the body talks a lot about body posture, and as I lift my spirit to the Lord, sometimes I want to lift my hands to the Lord so that my outer physical body represents what’s happening in here. Sometimes, it’s way up there! So my shoulders were sore that night from worshiping. Let me share a related thought, if you will, because it has to do with body posture and that’s what this passage is speaking of. Listen, sometimes our knees ought to be sore from humbling ourselves before the Lord. I think we need to look at this passage literally. For this reason, I kneel before the Lord. I want to suggest that this may be the most important posture in the entire Bible, because I’m absolutely convinced that if you stay humble, then there is nothing that God cannot do in you and through you. The Bible says that God opposes the proud. That is scary to me, I do not want God opposing me. Let me say this, even as a pastor who is trying to serve the Lord, if I’m doing it with pride, then here is the crazy thing, God will oppose the very thing He called me to do, because God doesn’t bless, He doesn’t grace or favor pride. But if you find a way to humble yourself and stay humble before the Lord, oh, I have never once knelt in prayer and gotten up and not felt better. And very specifically, what happens is this, a lot of anxiety is alleviated. It is lifted off of my shoulders, and when I get up after kneeling, there is a confident, but it is not self-confidence, like I can do it, because I can’t do it, but there is a God confidence, that He is in control and that I’m back in alignment with who He is and what He wants to do and I’m doing this for the glory of God. When you are in that posture, it is a powerful position. If you want to move forward spiritually, you better get on your knees. I’m going to challenge right here, when was the last time you spent some time on your knees before the Lord?
Our family, this week during our family meeting, we all knelt together and I went around and laid hands on our family because I just want to stay in that posture. It is really weird because this is a preface thought, it is not really the heart of what I want to share, but it may be the most important thing. I think here is your homework, spend some time this weekend kneeling before the Lord and humbling yourself before Him again.
Let’s keep going. Verse 16
16I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
Last week, we talked about the mind and we juxtaposed a little bit of neurology with a little bit of theology and I hope it helped you realize the importance of reading the Word of God. When you do, it recruits new nerve cells and it re-routes neuronal connections, and before you know it, in a physiological way, you begin to cultivate the mind of Christ.
Let me juxtapose physics and theology for a moment this weekend. Remember last weekend, I said the battle is won or lost in the mind? And then this thought that every thing was once a thought. In a similar sense, try to wrap your mind around this if you can. At am atomic level, everything is 99.99% empty space. I am not a physicist nor the son of a physicist, but I’ve read enough of quantum mechanics, it is really an amazing thing, I don’t know if this is scientific or spiritual or what but the bottom line is this, when we look at something that appears to be solid, do I look pretty solid? Thank you. But I’m not solid at all, because at an atomic level, what you have are these atoms that are really more empty space than anything else. When you break it down at that level, at a very microscopic level, the distance between the electron and nucleus and these little tiny atoms that make me up, that distance is as great as the distance from the sun to the earth. So, I know this sounds weird, but we are primarily empty space. What’s the point?
Quantum physicists have identified four forces. You know this from classes you’ve taken, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitation. But what’s really interesting is this postulation that there is a fifth force that really can’t quite be pinned down, this mysterious fifth force that eludes science. I would suggest that the fifth force is the Spirit of God. You have to go all the way back to Genesis and it says God breathed into the dust. It was the Spirit of God that animated those molecules. Job 34:15 says that if God were to withdraw his breath, his breath that He breathed to animate creation in Genesis, if He withdrew his breath, all mankind would return to dust. We would implode because it is that Spirit of God, that fifth force that sustains us and energizes us and animates us. In Acts 17, it says in Him we live and move and have our beyond. The Greek word for ‘move’ is where we get our word ‘kinetic’ as in kinetic energy. In other words, God is the one who animates and energizes us. So, part of the reason I want to bring that up is that, like, I’m reading this and is so mysterious to me. Strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being. What? How does that work? I don’t understand that, but I know this – He is the One who spoke everything into existence and it is out of his omnipotence that we are even sustain on a physical level, but then beyond that, God wants to strengthen us and empower us. We are going to talk a little bit about how He does that.
Let me get painfully practical after getting so scientific. The word ‘strengthen’ in this passage is the same word that Jesus used in the Great Commandment, Love the Lord your God with all of your strength, and here is says I will strengthen you with power in your inner being. What does it mean to love God with all of our strength? Let me put some skin on it. I don’t want us to just be philosophical, I want us to be practical. So here is the first thing I think of when I think about loving God with all my strength. I immediately think about a May day a few years ago when I was part of a missions team to Ethiopia. We’ve sent several teams to Ethiopia. We have a church that we planted there and continue to invest in them and support them and have wonderful relationship with them. We went and helped them launch that church, we were there for the first service, but one day in particular was so unforgettable. Our team built a mud hut. Anybody ever built a mud hut? It was like Habitat for Humanity Ethiopia style and here’s the crazy thing, we had to mix the mud ourselves. It wasn’t like we could go over to Home Depot and there weren’t any wheelbarrows so we had a sheet of plywood on wood sticks that then we carried and we would take the mud with our bare hands and we would literally throw it on the wall and it would stick, and by the end of the day, that was the best workout I’ve ever had! My quads were screaming because we had to mix the mud like this, it was fun and gross, and my quads were screaming and my arms were so tired, then we all went back and I do not take warm showers for granted because all we had was cold water, but what are you gonna do? I remember collapsing into bed at the end of the day and this sensation, it was the first time and the most definitive time where I’ve ever had this impression. I think I came as close as I’ve ever come to loving God with all of my strength. I was so exhausted but I was so energized. You know you can feel those two things at the same time. I felt like I had given God every calorie I had, and to be able to be a blessing and the precious Ethiopian grandmother that we built that hut for. We had loved her and we had loved God and I think that’s where it gets very practical.
Let me break it down. I think there is a parallel, in this respect, between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. How do you gain energy in the physical realm? I would suggest that you do it be expending energy. When you go work out, you are expending energy but nothing is more energizing than a good workout. The way you build up your body is you break it back down. That’s how you gain strength. I think the same is true spiritually. I think the danger is this, if you come to church to get fed, then you are just going to get fat. And here’s where I feel like I’m your spiritual coach, because I have coaches that push me beyond. This is where I feel like I want to push us a little bit, because I think some of us feel like to be a part of a church means that that is where you go to get fed, and that is part of it, but I want to be very clear, we want every NCCer to plug into a small group and plug into a ministry. Small group is where you are going to find relationship and do this journey together with other people and build community, where you are going to continue to be discipled, but ministry is that place where you are going to use those gifts that God has given you and you are going to expend energy and build up a little sweat equity, if you will, in the kingdom of God. In case you haven’t noticed, we have a vision around here. We don’t sit around too long, I’ll talk more about this in February when we get into our ‘Vision’ series and we’ll define a little bit more of where God is taking us and some of the things we want to see happen, but here’s the deal, we are going to launch more than one location this year. Some of you just got the wind knocked out of you, but the bottom line is this, if everybody is serving, we need to launch a lot of locations to keep us busy. It is about all of us finding those gifts. We want to be a place where you can find the joy of loving God with all your strength.
That takes lots of different forms. On Thursday night, Josiah and I came down to ‘In the Beginnings’ and what an event! It showcased our NCC artists and the amazing gifts and talents that they have and to see that expression of how they are loving God with their creativity. It was awesome, and I know I’m biased but I think this is one of the most gifted congregations on the planet. I tell you what, sometimes I’m up here and I look out, and as I’m at our different locations and I’m just overwhelmed by the collective potential that we have to make a difference. But that means each one of us stepping up, stepping in and doing it. So, there are lots of ways to do it around here. We’ll take ten missions trips this year, please go on one of those trips. What a great opportunity. It will change your mindset and your world view forever, especially if you go on a trip with Pastor Joel, you will love God with all your strength! He will push you from sun up to sun down. We want to work hard and serve the Lord.
Our second Saturday outreaches, the thing that we are doing around the city, yes, it means expending some energy on a Saturday and serving the community, but what a great opportunity to love God in that way. Here’s where I want to get really specific. Grab your bulletin and pull out a little card that says serve. Here’s what we want to do this weekend, as we begin a new year, and going into a small group semester, and hundreds of folks who have just started coming to NCC in the last couple of weeks, we want to give you an opportunity to get plugged in. This isn’t a church where you’ve got to sit around for a year, no, we want you to get involved next week! If it is a worship team, you’ve got to try out for that, or if it is our kid’s ministry, we have a process that we go through, we are very careful with who serves in that capacity. But there are a lot of ministries where you can start serving next week. We need production teams at our movie theater locations to pull off all our services with lights and sounds and everything that happens. We need some geeks to step up and do it.
Prayer, some of you have such a heart for prayer. And hospitality, are you nice? Then you qualify! Can you smile? Everybody smile, give me a big smile, ok, we’ll work on it. If you can smile and you love people and you are excited about people coming to NCC and finding a relationship with Christ and seeing people’s lives transformed, are you excited about that? Then what an opportunity to have a first touch as they come in. I’ll let you in on a little secret, the first impression that people have of NCC is not my sermon, for better or worse, it is not our worship team, for better or for worse, it is the person they meet first when they walk in the door. All of you are now donned as part of our hospitality team. I’ve got emails in the last couple of weeks, at some point I will share these, it made me cry, because some NCCers, their sensitivity, just to the person who was sitting next to them. We’ve had people give their heart to Christ, people who just needed a hand on their shoulder and someone to pray for them. I’m talking about incredible transformation and in those stories that we’ve heard over the last couple of weeks, certainly the worship and the message made a difference, but it was just an ordinary NCCer who actually thought maybe the person sitting next to me is a divine appointment. Praise God for that! All of you are part of our hospitality team. Nursery, who doesn’t love those babies! So, I want you, if you aren’t involved, fill out this card. You can’t miss this! Here’s what will happen, instead of just coming and being part of our services, you can attend one and serve at one, or you could come on a Saturday night and serve on a Sunday morning, or as we begin to launch new locations, we will need hundreds of people to step up. So there are going to be awesome opportunities in the next couple of months and I encourage you to fill out that card and be a shareholder in what God is doing. Get some sweat equity in the kingdom of God.
Last thought on that, I go to the gym a couple times a week, and right now the thing that I’m working out for is that I’ll hike the Inca Trail to Machu Piccu this summer. It was a cool invitation. Someone invited me to come and so Parker and I are going on that trip. I have asthma and with high altitudes I’m honestly a little bit nervous about it, so I get on an elliptical a couple times a week and here’s what do, I plug in what I want to do, how long, my weight and then I track watts and heart rate and distance, but one thing I’m looking at, partly because I want to lose a couple of pounds, is I’m always tracking calories. It is interesting that it’s so easy to measure in that physical sense, like I burned 400 calories on the elliptical, and I think sometimes, we leave things a mystery spiritually when they aren’t. Now, I’m not trying to reduce a relationship with God down to how much you give or how much you serve, because it starts with us simply receiving what He has already done for us. But do you really think that God is not keeping track? Here’s the beautiful thing, you can’t give a penny, you can’t invest a calorie in the kingdom and it go unnoticed and unrewarded, it doesn’t happen. I’m going to tell you why, because we think about the justice of God on the negative side of the equation, that He is going to punish everything we do wrong. Here’s the good news, when we put our faith in Christ, He took that punishment for us. He sacrificed Himself for us so we could be forgiven and forgotten and that negative side of the ledger is clean. But here’s what I love about the justice of God. Not only does He punish what’s wrong, He rewards what’s right. Every calorie you burn for his kingdom’s cause, God rewards it. He rewards it and you begin to grow in this love relationship with God. It takes that relationship to the next level.
Let’s keep going.
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Let me ask you a question, what is your relationship with God rooted in? For some of you, it is not rooted in love, which is described in this passage. It says rooted and established in love. I think for many of you, this is going to be a revelation that could totally change your relationship with God because, if you are honest, you would admit that your relationship with God is rooted in fear, and in legalism, and in knowledge, it is rooted in works, but listen, if your relationship with God is rooted in those things, then you are not going to experience spiritual growth in the way God intended it to happen. You’ve got make sure your relationship with God is rooted in love. Here’s some good news, God loves you unconditionally. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more or less. Why? Because He loves you perfectly, He loves you unconditionally. We have a core value around here, love people when they least expect it and least deserve it. The reason we say that is because that’s how God loves us. Romans 5, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man, someone might possibly dare to die, but God demonstrates his love for us in this that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. In other words, when we were at our worst, He was at his best. When we didn’t deserve it and thereby didn’t expect it. God said, “I love you.” And if your relationship is not fully rooted in that love, then you are not going to grow the way He intended. That’s why, really at the heart of this thing, it is about us getting back to that place where God loves us and we love God and that’s what matters most. Where you are rooted in God’s love for you.
Last verse, 20
20Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.
Isn’t that one of the most exciting verses in the Bible? That’s exciting. You want to know what I love about following Christ, about living a Spirit-filled, Spirit-led life? This, the best I can do is no longer the best I can do. The best I can do is the best God can do. He can do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine. How? According to his power that is at work within us. There is not a person here that would say, ‘I have fully exhausted my potential spiritually.’ I’m living at a level that you really wouldn’t believe. The things I do, my back is sore from patting it. Don’t you sense deep down inside that we need to be more rooted in the love of God, that we need more of his power to strengthen my inner being. I need more in here, I need more internal pressure from the Spirit of God filling me so that that is what’s coming out of me, and we want to do things that we can’t even ask or imagine. I just think this speaks to a deep, deep human longing. The way I thought about it this week, the longer I live, the more bored I am with things that I’m able to do in my own strength, the natural things, and the more I crave the supernatural. The more I want to see God move in my life in a way that there is no way I can take credit for that. I want to experience the miraculous, I want to experience the supernatural and that means the Spirit of God filling us and empowering us.
I don’t know if I can do this justice but let me frame this and then we are going to pray together. In the realm of physics, there is something that is called an event horizon. Technically speaking, an event horizon defines a boundary between anything on this side of the speed of light and anything on the other side of the space-time continuum. It is the boundary that represents the maximum distance at which events can concurrently be observed. For events beyond that distance, light hasn’t had time to reach a location and even if it were admitted at the time the universe began. So, long story short, there are parts of the universe that will never be observable. Let me take that concept and see if I can apply it intellectually and spiritually.
I think intellectually, any place where your knowledge ends is an event horizon. Your knowledge will take you here but it doesn’t take you any further than that. In a sense, anything beyond is kinda beyond reason, if you will. Just to get a handle on this, I think it will help you get a grasp of this concept. During World War II, allied troops dropped supplies from the sky, and the islanders had no concept of what a plane was, so they built straw effigies of them and prayed for them to return because they thought it was some kind of supernatural or God thing. So, what we ordinary technology for us was an event horizon for them. Does that make sense? I think all of us have different event horizons intellectually that takes us to a different point. I think what I would say is this – tell me it’s beyond your five senses. I think a lot of us are like, if I can comprehend it with my five senses, ok. But God has so much more for us.
Now, spiritually speaking, I think what Paul is getting at here is that we need to keep pushing our event horizon. I think at some point, most of us just settle for where we are spiritually, for the level or knowledge or revelation that we have, for the level of experience or power that we have, and we become comfortable. This is where I am, this is my event horizon. And honestly, those who have a little bit more experience or a little bit more knowledge, if we aren’t careful, we look at them and think they are weird. But maybe it is because we haven’t fully experienced or we don’t have a full revelation of all the God wants to do. What I’m suggesting is that God wants to continue to expand our spiritual event horizon so that He begins to do things that are beyond what we can even ask or imagine. I believe that, and I believe that for each one of us.
How does it happen? Let’s go full circle. How does this passage begin? Kneeling before the Lord. I don’t have a formula for you today, it’s not that there aren’t things you can do and way to prepare for it, but what I would suggest is that God wants to do it in you more than you want Him to do it. One way that we love God is with all of our strength, and with all of his strength working in us. The whole end of this passage, the whole goal is that God would be glorified. How is God glorified? When you do things that are beyond your ability. When you allow God to work in your life in a way that is wow! That’s how we glorify God. That’s how we grow in our love for God.
So, some of you have never flipped a switch. I really think it is that simple. Some of you have never flipped the switch and said, ‘God, empower me and fill me with your Spirit.’ Some of us have done it once or twice, then we stop doing it. Ephesians 5:18 says be filled with the Spirit. The verb tense is keep on being filled. If we keep on being filled with the Spirit of God, then is strength is at work within us and there is nothing that God can’t do in us and through us.
I want to pray for us and pray that God, as we humble ourselves, would do something in our inner being, some of you need strength from the Lord today, you need emotional strength, you need physical strength, you need spiritual strength. He wants to strengthen you in your inner being. Let’s ask Him for it.
Lord we come before You right now and we humble ourselves before You and we acknowledge that we need You. God we need your strength and your power and right now we ask for it. God I pray that somehow, we would be inspired, that we would see that this event horizon that we have needs to be expanded and stretched. God I pray that You would put a desire in our hearts to experience more of your power at work within us. We simply ask You to do it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
