Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlife gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:27] Good morning.
[00:00:28] I hope you're well this morning. Good morning to everybody joining us on Church 307, whether you're at Hills Alive or in the Big Horns or anywhere else in Wyoming, to our friends over at the prison and at the jail, we are going to be in Genesis chapter two today. If you got a Bible, go ahead and open up there. We're actually reading just a few verses before where we read last week, Genesis chapter two. While you're turning there, I want to give you some information about sermons that's important and it's going to be important this morning.
[00:01:00] A sermon doesn't stand alone.
[00:01:04] A sermon works within all of the sermons that we preach and more specifically, within all of the story of scripture.
[00:01:12] There's kind of an ecosystem of sermons and one sermon fits within it. That's why we do our Ecosystem podcast to talk about the big picture of scripture. But here's, here's why I say that, because you might come to church on a Sunday morning and hear a sermon that's all about grace and forgiveness and mercy. And it might be easy for you to think, oh, man, they never talk about sin. They don't talk about obedience. It's just all mercy there.
[00:01:35] But that's because you heard one sermon, you might have come to church last week and been like, man, all their sermons are really awkward. I'm never coming back again.
[00:01:43] But sermons fit within the ecosystem of all the other sermons. So today we are talking about work from Genesis chapter two, but it fits within the ecosystem of everything else that we talk about. So we're going to start reading in verse 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. The Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die. Very uplifting, right? Let's pray.
[00:02:19] God, we love you. This is your word and it's your truth. We've been singing this morning. It's your character that we are here for Jesus today. Let us hear from you anything that's my ideas, my opinions. Let us notice it. Not just overlook it, but notice it so we can reject it. But if there's Anything that's faithful to your word, consistent with your character, plant it deeply in our hearts because we're here for you, Jesus. Amen.
[00:02:46] All right, there is going to be a common phrase right here on the screen. I'm going to read it, and when I get to this blank, I want you to just.
[00:02:54] If you know what the blank is. Okay?
[00:02:58] That did not give me confidence that you're going to shout it out.
[00:03:01] All right. I know there are a bunch of people at Hills Alive, but you guys got to make up for it this morning. Okay? All right. Can you do that?
[00:03:07] That's better. All right. If you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life. If you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life. Isn't that beautiful? Just incredible, right? I mean, don't you just want to get every recent graduate together in a room and just say, make you pick a job that you love, because if you do, you'll never work? Doesn't it sound like something that should be in your boss's office on a poster with some penguins behind it or something like that? Like, really inspiring. It's beautiful. It's not true.
[00:03:39] It's not even a little bit true. It's actually garbage.
[00:03:43] But it's really inspiring, Right?
[00:03:46] When I was in college, me and my close friends, we were all into rock climbing and the outdoors. I didn't start hunting yet, but we loved to do outdoor stuff. And after college, most of my good friends moved to St. George, Utah. Now, if you know anything about rock climbing and mountain biking, you know that St. George is one of the destinations for that type of activity. I moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is a wonderful city, but not exactly known for rock climbing or things like that. It's known for corn and soybeans as far as you can see in any direction.
[00:04:21] My friends worked for a wilderness therapy company.
[00:04:26] They spent their days. They would work eight days on in the field and basically being backcountry wilderness guides for the therapists and their clients, keeping them safe, which is what we did for fun. We went camping back into the wilderness. We loved it. I was so jealous. They worked for eight days and then they got six days off. So every 14 days, eight days of work and six days off to do whatever they wanted. I was always seeing pictures of mountain biking and rock climbing. One day my buddy called me and he's like, yeah, we're going to go raft the Grand Canyon next weekend. And I isn't it like a six year wait to draw the lottery to raft the Grand Canyon. He said, yeah, but our buddy's a river guide, and his clients canceled, so we're going next week. And I was like, we're not friends anymore. Don't call me. Because I wasn't doing that. I was working a fairly normal 9 to 5, and they shared a house together. They rented the house and it was 2012, so rent was like a dollar split between five people.
[00:05:23] They worked eight days with no expenses because they didn't pay for gas, they didn't pay for food, and then they got six days off to just live the dream in southern Utah.
[00:05:33] It was the dream. If there's a job that was a job they loved, that was it. Interestingly enough, not one of them still works that job.
[00:05:42] Not one of them. In fact, I don't think any of them lasted more than three years in that job. They all moved back to the Midwest, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan to work normal jobs. Why? Because the dream starts to feel like work when you're sleeping on the ground eight days out of every 14.
[00:05:59] And when you're back and forth in the wilderness and the dream starts to wear on you, I've got another good friend, one of my best friends, who owns a recording studio. If you are musical at all, then a recording studio, Owning a studio sounds like the dream job. Sounds like something you would love. He studied audio engineering in college. He's the best musician I've ever encountered.
[00:06:19] Not just playing music, but taking someone's raw ideas and turning it into a piece of art that they could put out for the world to engage with. He was incredibly gifted, is incredibly gifted at those things. And you would think that that is the job, that's the dream. If there's a job that's never going to feel like work, that's it. In fact, I would go just hang out in his office sometimes blowing off my job, you know, watch him work because it was so much fun. It was so cool. But I remember him sitting in his office saying stuff like, I didn't want to come to work today.
[00:06:50] I've got a client who hasn't paid me and I've got to ask him for another time to pay me. Or he'd say, I've got people trying to negotiate my prices down because they don't want to pay for quality work. Or he'd say something like, it's been six months and I've had almost no work. I can barely even pay the bills. And then he would. He would have so much work that he couldn't even keep up with it. And if you've owned a business, you know how that works. You go through times where it's not nothing, and then you go through times where you can't keep up. And both are stressful because you can't pay the bills, and then you can't do the work. There's so much of it.
[00:07:24] And the dream job started to feel like work to the point where he didn't want to do it anymore.
[00:07:32] There's some sort of idea in our world that says that, you know, you're successful when things are easier. You know you have a good marriage if the marriage is easy, you know you're good at parenting. If things are going easy with your kids, you know, you know you have a good job if the job is easier. If it's getting progressively easier, you're getting better at it, and it's less and less work over time. The Cultural Anchor now, we need to be clear again. When we say culture, we don't mean some ambiguous villain that we can blame our problems on. Because culture is just all of us added together. Culture is what you get when you put all of us together. So our culture, meaning us, the anchor that's dragging us down. One of them says this and says, the goal is ease.
[00:08:22] You find yourself swinging a hammer or working out in the heat, and you look at the guy in the truck or in the office who's got air conditioning, and you think, that's the job I want.
[00:08:31] I can't wait till I'm the one running this crew, sitting in the ac. Funny thing is, the guy in the truck probably dreams about swinging a hammer again because he's so tired of being on the phone, making deals with people and trying to keep everything afloat. Because every job you look at, you can imagine something that seems easier, something that seems like less stress.
[00:08:49] I don't just hear this in work, career.
[00:08:54] I hear this. You probably hear this in all kinds of stuff. Marriage. Why should it be so hard? If you love someone, why should it be so hard? Shouldn't love be easy? Shouldn't it be easy to get along with somebody that you love?
[00:09:06] Parenting, man, I thought parenting was just going to be easier. If I'm doing it right, why am I having so much difficulty?
[00:09:15] Even faith? If God wanted me to understand this book, why would. Why wouldn't he have made it easier?
[00:09:20] Why would I read this? I can't understand it.
[00:09:23] Or if. If God wanted me to be free from this sin struggle, then he needs to make it easier for me to overcome this because it's too much work. It's too hard. How can I find victory in this? It's.
[00:09:33] It's just a struggle in our minds, in the world around us, we equate ease, things being easier with success.
[00:09:43] Now, I know there's some dudes here who you work 16 hour days in the heat. You work hard. You know, you're like dirty hands, clean money, and you're saying, cj, I don't take it easy. That does not apply to me. And I respect that. I want you to know I respect that a lot. But my question for you is, why are you working?
[00:10:04] Are you working so that someday you don't have to.
[00:10:08] Are you working hard now so that it's easier later?
[00:10:11] Are you working so you can buy a new truck and it's easier to make people respect you?
[00:10:16] Are you working so you can buy stuff that makes it easier to date?
[00:10:20] Are you working really hard so your kids don't have to work?
[00:10:24] Because the evaluation is not am I working hard? The evaluation is what is the goal?
[00:10:30] Is the goal ease?
[00:10:33] Is the goal for things to get simpler over time?
[00:10:39] Because if it is, that's an anchor pulling us down.
[00:10:44] Now, in this story that we read, is God's intent, his ideal for humanity. This is before sin entered the story. The timeline is very important here. Sin does not enter the human story, the story of scripture, until Genesis 3. We read Genesis 2. And if you want to know what the goal of human life is, if you want to know what the goal is, then the best place to look is going to be how God created humanity, how he created it in its perfect state. So in this perfect ideal, no pain, no suffering, nobody gossiping next to you at work, no drama, no toil, no no pointlessness. None of that. In this perfect world, God gave humans three things. Here's the first thing. He gave humans a place. Everybody say a place.
[00:11:36] Hey, you guys nailed it. God gave humans a place. Now, that might seem strange to say, because of course he put humans on earth. Of course we're in a place. But God didn't just give humans earth. He put humans into a garden. He put the humans in a garden. And not just any garden, not just a random garden, a garden with a name. The Garden of Eden. And if you back up a couple of verses, what you find is that that garden has very clear boundaries. Scripture goes into great detail to show us what the boundaries of that garden and the names of the rivers that surround that garden are. And here's a free Bible study Tip for you. Anytime you find extra detail in scripture, pay attention, because the extra details are important. They were writing with, like, quills and ink and stuff. They didn't waste time on details that weren't crucial to the story we are told that humanity was given a specific place.
[00:12:34] Here's what that means.
[00:12:36] It means you and I have a specific place that God has given us.
[00:12:43] You and I have a specific place in which we are to do what God has called us to do.
[00:12:52] Now, you might be asking, cj, how do I know if I'm in the right place or not? Now, this is pretty complicated, all right? You need to pay a lot of attention. If you're taking notes, write this down. There is a formula biblically that you need to follow to make sure that you are in the place God's called you to be. And here's what it is.
[00:13:06] Are you there?
[00:13:08] Then that's where God's called you.
[00:13:10] This is very similar to what Mike said a couple of weeks ago. Wherever you are, that's where God's called you. How do you know that you're in the right place?
[00:13:18] Wherever you are is the right place. Now, don't take this too literally. If you're watching from, like, a crack house or something, please get out of that. But.
[00:13:25] But besides that, generally in life, the place you are is the place that you're supposed to be. And that doesn't mean that moving is wrong. I have moved a bunch of times in my life. I think I hope I never have to move again. Actually. I think moving is maybe the worst thing a human can do. It's right behind running a marathon. It's just really bad.
[00:13:44] There's nothing wrong with moving or anything like that. But the danger is that we start to think that there's a better place that's going to make things easier.
[00:13:55] If I could just get out of Gillette, man, things would be better.
[00:13:59] If I could just get out of the field and into the office.
[00:14:04] Things would be better if I could just get out of this marriage and into a marriage that was easier, things would be better. By the way, do you know how you know if you're in the right marriage?
[00:14:13] If you're married, as long as it's not an abusive relationship or your spouse is not being physically unfaithful to you, if you're married, then you're in the right marriage. That's how we know.
[00:14:26] Because marriage is a covenant, not a contract.
[00:14:29] Lifelong commitment.
[00:14:31] We start to think, if I could get in a different marriage, if I could get into an easier situation. If I could work my way up the ladder at this company, then things would be easier. Man, if I could live where it's not so cold all the time, then things would be easier. There's nothing wrong with wanting to move. There's nothing wrong with changing your location. But the problem becomes when I start thinking I'll make a difference later, the problem comes when I start thinking, you know what? Someday I'll have enough money to tithe. Someday I'll have enough free time to volunteer. Someday later, when my family, when I have kids, that's when I'll start going to church. Because someday doesn't exist. It's only ever today. You will never arrive at someday, which means you will never have enough money to tithe, you will never have enough time to volunteer, and you will never have the right family to prioritize church. It's only what you have today. The only place that actually exists is the place that you're in right now. Everything else is a hypothetical in the future.
[00:15:27] Which means wherever you are is where God has placed you right now. Wherever you are is where God has placed you right now. Do you hate your job? It's okay, try to get a different job. But while you're there, choose to wield your influence for the kingdom of God with your coworkers. Make a difference with your coworkers. Are you stay at home, parent. You feel like you're wasting your time? You're not wasting your time. God has put you with influence over your kids and all your kids, friends and every other parent at the park. When you take your kids for a play date, he has put you in that place. Wherever you are right now, do you have two weeks left at your job? Then make the last two weeks two weeks of influence because that's the place God's given you. There's no place where it's going to get better. Now I need. This is very important because there are priorities of place.
[00:16:15] We tend to think that our primary calling is in the work that we do, that our primary place is wherever we are employed.
[00:16:26] But biblically, there is a hierarchy of place.
[00:16:29] The first place I have as a human is with God.
[00:16:35] The first thing that takes my time and my energy and my resources is with God. That is the first place.
[00:16:42] Now if I'm married, then my second place, the second priority is my spouse.
[00:16:50] That is the thing that takes the second most time, resources, energy. And I actually serve God by loving my spouse well. So the second place is my spouse. If I am a parent Then my third place is my kids.
[00:17:06] And I work to become a better parent. I work to raise my kids well. And then below all of that is the thing I get paid to do.
[00:17:18] Now, I'm not saying we should be lazy at work, but what I'm saying is our priority biblically is to God and family and everything else comes after that.
[00:17:28] Because it doesn't really matter how much money you make if you don't have family that you love, if you have a family, if you have a family that you are not loving them.
[00:17:43] Now, if you're single, then God has given you a calling to him and then a calling to work in the world around you. And your responsibility is not to that family.
[00:17:52] And that's okay. That's a gift of being single.
[00:17:55] But God gave us a place.
[00:17:59] Here's the second thing that God gave us.
[00:18:02] Work. Now, if you look at the Hebrew word translated work in verse 15 and you really dive in and you examine the parsings and tenses of the verb and you put it into its original content context. Can you guess what it means?
[00:18:15] Work.
[00:18:18] Word means work. There's no surprise in there. Word means work. Same thing you mean when you say work. Calloused hands, sore back, sweaty work. It means work. In fact, they were put into a garden. How many of you have a garden?
[00:18:31] Okay, if you have a garden, you know that that garden will not reach its potential unless you work it right.
[00:18:39] There is absolutely no way that garden is going to produce all that it is capable of producing if you don't work the garden. Right? They were put into a garden, but not a 10 by 5 backyard garden. A garden big enough to house all of the animals and all the fruit bearing trees. And they were given the responsibility, they were given the task to work that garden. I think somehow we imagine that like God invented pain cells that could cause a sore back and calluses and sweat glands, like after Genesis 3, after sin. But there's nothing in the story that would tell us that. What we are told is that we are human beings created in the image of God with work to do. So I think, you know, at new life we say, come as you are and become who God's created you to be. I personally think whoever God has created us to be has calloused hands.
[00:19:28] I don't mean that maybe literally you might work in an office, but whoever God's created you to be works in a perfect world with no sin and no pain and no suffering and no meaninglessness. We had work to do.
[00:19:46] You know, when I was young. Something I struggled with. Struggle sounds glorifying. Something that I was just really bad at and something I still have to fight against is I thought it was just my personality. You've probably noticed that I'm easily distracted. I thought it was just my personality that I would work really hard if I cared about something.
[00:20:08] But if I wasn't passionate about it, I wasn't going to put in the time.
[00:20:13] If there was a workday at the church and I didn't really care about the project, I would gladly volunteer to get everybody coffee. But you weren't going to catch me with a shovel.
[00:20:21] I was just. Easy for me. And I would just say, you know what? That's just who I am. I'm just this. I'm really passionate about certain things. But if I don't have the passion, it's really hard for me to get motivated. And I realized later that that is part of my personality. It's a sinful part of my personality.
[00:20:35] Because God said to work at all things. In the New Testament, Paul said to do everything as if it's unto the Lord. He didn't say, do everything you like doing as unto the Lord. Everything you're passionate about, as unto the Lord. Everything that you are given to do, do it as unto the Lord. In a perfect world, we are created with work to do.
[00:20:56] Now, I brought a soapbox with me this morning that I'm planning to get on. It's metaphorical, it's not literal. I don't actually know what a soapbox is, but we talk about them.
[00:21:07] I want to talk to the guys for a second.
[00:21:10] I'm sure we could find something similar to say to the women in the room.
[00:21:16] But I want to talk to the guys because this is my struggle. And the struggle I see very regularly.
[00:21:22] As guys, it's pretty easy for us to work hard at the job.
[00:21:27] We will break our backs at the job. We'll work as hard as we can. We'll work overtime. We'll work weekends. We will put in 20 miles in a day to pack an elk out of the woods. We love working, but we will work as hard as we can for the job and then not lift a finger to work on our marriage.
[00:21:49] We will work as hard as we can in the woods and not lift a finger to become a better parent.
[00:21:57] Because we convince ourselves that, no, I provide for this family. I deserve to have it easy when I get home. I deserve for my wife to work for me when I work hard in the office. I deserve for my kids to let Me just take a nap when I get home as long as I'm working hard during the day. But there is nothing biblically that says a man has to work outside the home so that he can come home and be tended to. No, God says our first priority is him. That's the first place. The second place we do the work is with our spouse and our families and everything after that is what we give outside of our homes, outside of our family and our spouse and our kids. And I want to listen. This might sound like I'm being harsh, but if I can just say some statistics real quick. We are not facing a motherlessness epidemic in the us. We are facing a fatherlessness epidemic. So the numbers tell me that it's not just an idea, that men aren't working very hard at home. Actually, the numbers say that we are very likely to bust it for a promotion and then forget our families.
[00:23:10] The numbers tell us that it's easy for us to work for a dollar and hard for us to work on being a dad.
[00:23:23] But God didn't tell us it should be easy.
[00:23:27] In a perfect world, you would have to work on your marriage. I would have to work on my marriage.
[00:23:33] In a perfect world, I would have to work at parenting.
[00:23:39] In a perfect world, I don't earn the recliner because I worked hard outside the home. In a perfect world, my first work is to God and my second work is to my family.
[00:23:53] Listen, it would be way better to be broken with people that you love, with relationships you're working on than it would be to be able to afford a three week vacation with people you don't even talk to.
[00:24:08] It's not supposed to be easy.
[00:24:10] Easy was never the goal.
[00:24:17] God has given us work to do.
[00:24:23] I said earlier that every sermon fits within an ecosystem.
[00:24:27] The ecosystem that it fits into is grace and mercy. And I want to keep talking to the guys for just a second because I realize I just slammed us pretty hard. And I did that because I'm looking in a mirror when I say it.
[00:24:38] What I struggle with is I feel like, no, I worked really hard.
[00:24:42] Somebody else should work for me on my behalf. I've been providing everything else for everyone else. Why doesn't someone take care of me? I fail.
[00:24:49] I feel like I deserve a nap when I get home instead of being present with my son.
[00:24:55] But what I want you to know is that as a man and a woman, you are made in the image of God, that everything we say is shrouded. It's covered in God's mercy and his Love and forgiveness.
[00:25:06] And whatever place God has given you, it's because he will empower you to accomplish the work that's there so you can walk with confidence. There is no shame. There is no shame.
[00:25:17] There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
[00:25:21] So hear a challenge, but don't hear condemnation.
[00:25:24] God's given us a place and he's given us work. Here's the last thing that God's given us. Responsibility.
[00:25:30] I have three dogs, which is two too many, and two of them are Labrador retrievers. Now, when you think labs, don't think like those hardcore hunting labs, you know, who are well trained. Please think like overweight couch potatoes. That's what I have.
[00:25:47] They retrieve food from the counter. That's what they retrieve.
[00:25:52] My both of my wife's brothers are big time upland bird and waterfowl hunters and they spend a lot of money and a lot of time on labs. They have excellent dogs and they spend time and energy training those dogs. I mean, it's impressive to watch them work. A couple years ago, I was out shooting clays with my brother in law and he had his dog there. And I was so impressed that this dog would just sit so disciplined, it would not break. You could see the anxiety and the energy in the dog, but it would not break until he gave it the command. And I said, shouldn't have said it. But I said, man, I wish my dog was as disciplined as your dog. And he chuckled and he said, oh, it's not the dog.
[00:26:34] Because my dog has potential, right? My dog's a lab. Labs are easy to train. Doesn't matter if you have an expensive one or a cheap one. Labs are easy to train. They have a high desire to please. Now, they might not all become competition hunting dogs, but they can all become disciplined dogs. Which means I can't complain about my dog's lack of discipline if I'm not putting in the effort to teach that dog discipline and behavior.
[00:27:01] Because my dog has the potential and I have the responsibility.
[00:27:07] The dog has the potential. I have the responsibility.
[00:27:10] God created a world with potential.
[00:27:13] In this chapter, in this ver, this verse, verse 15, it says, he put the human in the garden to work it and tend it, or to work it and care for it. It's the same idea as Genesis, chapter one, where it says, God gave us dominion.
[00:27:30] He created a world with potential. God created a world with the potential for increasing goodness.
[00:27:37] God created a world. It is a good world. And he gave that world the potential to grow. You can see that around us. You can see how God made fruit trees, but we made orchards with the fruit trees he gave us. You can see how God made minerals, and then we created metal, and we created all of these things out of what God gave us. God gave us a good world, but he created us with the beautiful responsibility, with the potential to maximize the goodness of the world. Now you can also see that God, because it's a world with the potential for increasing goodness, it's also a world with the potential for decreasing goodness.
[00:28:15] It's possible to misuse the potential God has gave us because we have responsibility.
[00:28:22] Now. Out of all of these things, this is the most uncomfortable one. Because responsibility means I can't blame other people for what's wrong in my place and my work, because it's my responsibility.
[00:28:37] It's one of the most uncomfortable truths to realize is that every place I've been, there's one common denominator.
[00:28:44] Me.
[00:28:46] Doesn't mean everything was my fault.
[00:28:48] Some things happened to me that were beyond my control.
[00:28:53] But it does mean I'm the common denominator.
[00:28:56] That's my responsibility now. I can't control anyone else. It's not my job to make my kids follow Jesus.
[00:29:05] What is my responsibility is to show my children a life of obedience and surrender to Jesus so that they see the joy and hope of Christ. I can't control what they choose. I can't make my spouse not leave me. But I can love them in submission to one another out of reverence for Christ. As Ephesians 5:21 says, Loving the other person, as Christ loved the church, I can do that. That is my responsibility.
[00:29:31] I can't force a healthy work environment or fix a toxic work environment at my office. I can't do that. But it is my responsibility to be the healthiest person emotionally and spiritually there to take care of what's under my control, what I can influence. I have responsibility. One of my friends and mentors, Phil, he says people ask pastors often, well, what is God going to do about all the people in all the unreached nations who have never heard the gospel before? And Phil always responds, that's what I put you here for. That's what God put us here for.
[00:30:09] God gave us responsibility.
[00:30:12] Well, what about all. What about all the people who are starving? And we can look at the world and we can say, God, how could you let a world like this happen?
[00:30:21] And I think God says, I gave you dominion.
[00:30:24] How could you let a world like this happen?
[00:30:32] Now I believe God is actively involved in the world around Us. The theological term for that is prevenient grace. I believe God is actively working beyond us and in the world all around us. And. But what I think is that can you imagine what it would be like if God removed his work?
[00:30:50] What God wants to do now is work through us. It doesn't all rest on our shoulders. God multiplies the impact of what we do when we take responsibility. I do not earn my salvation by work, but God has given me salvation and it is so good that I trust him and do the work.
[00:31:09] The theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard said, grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort. I cannot earn my salvation, but I do put in the effort.
[00:31:19] It's my responsibility. My friends, I believe and I want this to be as direct as it can be. But please hear the love and grace that's behind this. I believe that if we look at the world around us, we look at the, at Gillette and we say, well, why don't people care about the unborn? Why don't people care about life? Then God looks at us and he says, when was the last time you fostered a child? Who have you adopted? When was the last time you mentored a young mother so that she knew she had options? Or when was the last time you took a teenage pregnancy? You took that couple under your wings and showed them how to live their life? God says, I do care about life. Do you? I gave you responsibility.
[00:31:54] I think when we look at the world around us, we say, there are so many people who don't follow Jesus in Gillette, God, God, why don't you do something about it? I think God says, I did do something about it. I put you there. When was the last time you invited someone to church?
[00:32:06] When was the last time you prayed for your co workers? When was the last time you shared the gospel with the person that makes your coffee?
[00:32:16] We say, God, how could you let this happen? And God is saying, I'm not letting it happen.
[00:32:22] I put my hands and feet as 1st Corinthians 12 says, the body of Christ. My body is working in the world and I gave my body the response, responsibility to do the work.
[00:32:34] It's easier to blame whatever political party we don't like.
[00:32:39] It's easier to blame whatever person we don't like.
[00:32:44] It's easier to blame whatever movement we don't understand and don't agree with.
[00:32:49] But God says, no, I didn't give them the responsibility.
[00:32:53] I gave you the responsibility to do what I can in my place. With the work in front of me.
[00:33:00] We have a rule in my house.
[00:33:03] And it is. You can't complain about it unless you've tried to fix it.
[00:33:08] Because if it's not worth fixing, it's certainly not worth complaining about.
[00:33:15] I think we can complain to God all we want.
[00:33:18] I think he loves to hear it, honestly, because he likes for us to talk to Him.
[00:33:22] But I do think he says, are you trying to fix it?
[00:33:27] God has given us a place and work to do in that place, and he's given us the responsibility to do that. He does not leave it on our shoulders alone. He gives us a church that we're surrounded by and His Spirit in us. We are filled by the Spirit of God. We sang that earlier. We are filled by the Spirit of God who multiplies the work out of our obedience, who makes up for our failures and shortcomings. To accomplish the good work, we do not do it perfectly. We fail and we fall short. But we get back up and keep, keep going. Why? Because God has given us a place and work to do and responsibility to do it. And he's filled us with a. With His Holy Spirit so that the work will be accomplished whether we perfect it or not.
[00:34:08] The goal is not ease, my friends. An easy life is not a good life.
[00:34:13] In the perfect world, there was work to do.
[00:34:17] And once again, the ecosystem that this sermon is couched in is the love and mercy and forgiveness of God.
[00:34:27] We sit knowing that we do not work to earn God's love, but we work because of God's love.
[00:34:36] We do not work to try to force God to give us good things.
[00:34:40] We work because God is good and work is a gift.
[00:34:45] Work is good.
[00:34:48] So here's how we're going to close.
[00:34:50] I've gone over again. I also don't care that much.
[00:34:57] At New Life we have. We talk about life on mission a lot. We talk about these five skills of life on mission. Connect deeply, gather purposefully, give generously, influence daily, and serve selflessly. If you become a baseball player, then you're going to have to learn skills. You're going to have to learn to catch a fly. You're going to have to learn to pick up a grounder. You're going to have to learn to hit a fastball. Those are skills you're going to have to learn in the process of becoming a baseball player. You don't become a baseball player once you have mastered those skills. You become a baseball player because you are learning those skills.
[00:35:25] Now, we believe that these are the skills of discipleship. These are the skills of becoming who God's created me to be. I am not a disciple because I have mastered these skills. But if I am to become who God's created me to be, then these are the skills I need to learn. I need to learn to connect in life groups, in accountability with God and with other people. I need to gather purposely what you're doing right now, meaning prioritizing the community of God's people above other things and with purpose and intentionality gathering. I give generously, which can be tithing, which can be giving above and beyond tithes, which can be helping pay for your neighbor's broken car. Give generously. I influence daily, meaning I see that God has put me in a place where I can share the gospel with both my actions and my words to the people around me. And I choose to influence the world around me in a positive way. And I serve selflessly, meaning I volunteer in the kids ministry, or I serve at Blessings in a backpack, or I pay for the parts and then I help my neighbor fix his car. Whatever it is that you do. We serve selflessly. We get. We connect, gather, give, influence and serve. These are the skills that we learn as we become who God's created us to be. These are the skills that we will always live with as we become who God's created us to be. Here's my challenge for you today. And it is a challenge. Pick whichever one of these is the most difficult.
[00:36:40] Pick whichever one of these for you takes the most work and dedicate the rest of the summer between now and Labor Day to growing in that skill.
[00:36:50] Putting in the work now, you're not going to perfect it between now and Labor Day. The goal isn't to perfect it, but pick whichever one of these skills will take the most work for you to learn. And between now and Labor Day, decide to put in the work to grow in your ability. Be.
[00:37:07] Let's pray.
[00:37:10] God, you are good and merciful and we love you.
[00:37:13] Thank you for the work you do in our hearts.
[00:37:18] Thank you that you've given us good work to do in the world. May we have the courage to do it. We love you, Jesus. Amen.
