The God Who Shakes Us

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Thanks for joining us today as you listen to a portion of the message recorded at Fine Life Church in Boulder, Colorado. If you'd like to connect with us further, you can visit us online at www.finelife.com.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Inviting you straight into a 40-day fast. Welcome. Welcome to the family. You're like, these guys are intense. 40-day fast. Uh hey, hey guys, it's good to double dip today. Get to sing a little, get to talk a little. You guys doing well? Man, I'm stoked. I'm stoked for Dennis going off to Nepal. Um, he shared that just brief little snippet of gosh, people walking. You know, there's parts of the world people walk six days to travel three days just to be with other believers, right? I don't know if I would do that for anything. I can't think of anything I would do that for. And so that's uh slightly amusing, slightly convicting, you know, it's a little convicting. And but man, that's that's what we're believing God for. We're believing God to stir up hunger. And so even the whole fast idea, we're not fasting because we thought that that would just be the next great event to do at Vine Life. Um we just we've had this sense since the end of last year that we're that God is leading us into a time where there's going to be more of an intentional seeking of God. And uh, and if if you've been with us at the beginning of the year, we we start we started the year with a series called Reorient, and a lot of that had to do with, yeah, while God comes to us, there's also times in our walk where we we step out, we make a choice within ourselves. It's an internal uh it's an internal um uh reality that we say, God, I'm going to make some steps, I'm gonna take some steps to position myself to better see you, to hear you. And that's what we believe fasting is. And uh and that's what we we believe that we're in a time where even as we fast, we don't fast to earn anything from God, we're not trying to prove anything to God. Can we just be clear there? Um this isn't this isn't some super spiritual, ultra-elitist spiritual activity that if we can just do this hard enough and with just a painful enough face each day, and we fast to the depth that you know, just one up everybody else that he's finally gonna meet us. That's not the point, that's not the heart. The heart is God, there's a hunger for you, and even for some of us, maybe there's not quite the hunger, but you want there to be a hunger. That's the point of fasting. And uh, and not all of us are gonna be the same as far as what we're fasting, and we're not gonna prescribe anything to you, uh, what that's gonna be like, but I'm just telling you, like, as you in your life um submit yourself to God and even withhold and remove some things from your life that have been either conveniences or uh um have been staples of your everyday life, there's something that happens inside, it enlarges our heart to hunger and to and to thirst for God in our life. And so that you know, that's kind of where we're at right now. And today and next week, uh, I think you know, as far as the message component, I'm not gonna talk for super long today, but um, we feel like we're in this preparation time. We're still inviting each of us to be a part. We're not looking for extravagance, but we are looking for participation. We would love for every single one of you, if you call Fine Life Home and if you feel called in heart and spirit to join in this, to be a part of this. So we're gonna be digging into this just in the next couple weeks. Um, and then after we start the fast, we're gonna spend a few weeks on um uh the topic of the fear of the Lord. And we're gonna have a we're gonna launch a series called Aw Struck. I love the subtitle, Walking in the Fear of the Lord without being afraid. Because we believe that's something the Lord wants to re-intro reintroduce us to. We think at Vine Life, but I think on a broader scale, you know, there's this um there's this place of walking in a in a holy, righteous fear of the Lord, not a you know, not a shameful guilt-laden fear of the Lord, but uh but but an understanding, a new revelation of the awe of God. Um and we feel like there's there's some places He wants to take us there. I hope that you think that too. Um, because I I think if we press into that together, it's gonna be, there's gonna be some good days ahead. Amen? Hey, you guys ready to jump into the word for a little bit? So when we talk about uh fasting and prayer, again, part of the heart cry for us is God, we want to see you do something more. We want to encounter more of your presence in our lives, right? We want more of God. Is anybody can we is that a safe landing place here? Do all of us we want more of God in our lives? Um but when I say, when you when you think about uh more of God coming, encountering God, I just want to ask you, what types of words come to mind? When I say when we talk about encountering more of God here at the church in your life, what types of words come to mind? I just want you to shout out a few words that come to mind. Revelation presence, what was that? Intimacy, prophecy, hunger, freedom, fullness, love, joy. These are wonderful words. Anything else? Gifts, surrender, that's a good one. Conviction. There we go, now we're talking. Yeah. What's interesting as we just saw, until the very end, when we talk about encountering God, uh oftentimes I think what happens is we talk about what God is going to add to our already existing lives. Right? And so his presence comes and we're gonna get more joy and more peace and more of this and more of that, and fullness and intimacy, and we're gonna take it's gonna be like my life, except it's gonna be better than my life. Right? And so we talk about the God. It's easy to get to the God who adds and multiplies, and that's not untrue because that's what the gospel is. The gospel is good news to us. When you encounter the presence of God, the love of God, come on, when you encounter God, there's something that happens inside of each and every one of us that we need, right? We need the more of God, the more of heaven in our lives. But I wonder, though, if sometimes we lack an imagination for a different side of God. It's actually not a different side, it's just a different outworking. So we sometimes talk about the God who adds and multiplies, but very few times do we spend enough time with the God who subtracts and divides. We're gonna talk math here for a second. And that might sound, that even might sound like, oh my gosh, where's it going with this? God doesn't divide anything. Well, I don't know. Let's look at the scripture here. Because what happens when we encounter God, not only does he bring a new revelation of his love, but he also removes what does not belong. And it's something as the church we need to be reminded of, especially as we we start praying for more of God. When you start fasting, you need to know what you're getting into. Because it doesn't necessarily mean up and to the right. You know, most of our lives at work and most of the things we do, we measure up and to the right. A good year is if everything growed and was on track, moving up and to the right. Financially, blessings, uh, you know, health, all the things. And again, we we pray for those things, we believe those things, we believe that God loves to heal us, he loves to deliver us, and that's available to us in his name. We believe those things, but in his mercy, there's also other things available in the heart of God. And let me show you a couple passages. One is in Matthew chapter 3. And again, we're digging into a couple passages that I don't know about you, but when I read these passages, it's better to quickly hurry through them. Matthew 3, verse 11. Now, this is when John the Baptist is introduced introducing Jesus. And as you know, John the Baptist is a feel-good kind of guy. Right? He's really sensitive to what everybody else thinks around him. He chooses his words wisely, he's tactful, he's winsome, right? He smells great. Matthew chapter 3. So John the Baptist is this bizarre character in scripture. I just think it's if if you don't think God is funny, look at John the Baptist. I'm not saying John the Baptist is God, but God chose John the Baptist to be his forerunner to announce his coming. And it's like, this is the perfect, this is it, this is this is so great. This is a great story here. But as John the Baptist is introducing Jesus, he says this, verse 11, I baptize you with water for repentance. But he who is coming after me, who is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. I want to invite you to try this out next time you invite somebody to church. If they ask you, like, hey, you know, you hey, would you come to church and say, sure, what's what's it gonna be like? Well, it's gonna be great because we're gonna go, and in this time of worship, we're gonna get before God, and he's going to get his winnowing fork, and he's going to divide us from the inside out. And he's gonna separate the wheat from the chaff, and then the word is gonna come and divide the thoughts and intentions of the heart until everything that does not remain is burned in an unquenchable fire. So, what time can I pick you up, right? It's okay. There's free coffee in the foyer. Don't worry about that part. There's free coffee for first-time guests. It's a hard one to know how to set up, how to talk about this side of God. But it's but but we have to remember this side of God is no less loving and no less merciful. When we talk about, and he talks about this, we're not just talking, you know, when he's talking about burning with unquenchable fire, there's a lot of ways to go, like to interpret what he's actually talking about, but in a in a broad sense, the work of Jesus as the kingdom of God unfolds in our lives, there there are it's the mercy of God that he would come into our lives and he would actually expose the things that are temporary from the things that are internal. And he does that not to humiliate us or to torment us, he does it for our good. Another passage that we mentioned this, we've actually mentioned this a few times the last couple weeks. I'm gonna mention it again because it seems to be present with us in Hebrews chapter 26 to 28. The writer of Hebrews is is is talking and he says, At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens. The phrase yet once more indicates the removal of things that are shaken, that is, things that have been made, in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. And again, this is a this is a throwback to Haggai chapter two. But it's another one that's like, oh wow. Okay, so he has there's an intention of God, and in the in the original um passage in Haggai, it's returning it's referring to the coming of the Messiah when he comes. He's not only gonna shake the earth, he's gonna shake the heavens, so that the things, what did he say, so that um the removal of things that are shaken, that is things that have been made, in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Now, this is there's a little bit of a paradox here, and I don't know about you, this is this is something that has been highlighted for me this week, and we were even singing it this morning. Um, in some of the songs, we sing a lot about not being shaken, and so we take great comfort in that. I'm not shaken. It's very true. In Psalm 16, he even says, I've set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. So there's this truth in Scripture that when the Lord is with us, there is a there's that we are safe in his hand. We are secure in the Lord. And I just want to declare to you, you are you are secure. Your true self in Christ is secure in the Lord. Okay? And that's a that's a good news for all of us here. But part of the reason, part of the way that God establishes us and He secures us is actually by shaking us. That there's things that shake all the way around us in our lives. There's things that God allows us to experience, not to shake us, but to reveal what can be shaken. And sometimes it feels so integrated, we feel like we're the ones being shaken. But I'm telling you, that this is such an important principle because if we don't understand that God actually allows us to walk through scenarios and circumstances where there's a shaking that takes place, then we're gonna misunderstand when that happens that what He's actually doing is establishing us. So one of the one of the ways that we see this in nature is with trees. Now, some of you have seen this image. Um, as we've started describing uh some of the work at Vine Life, uh we we've been uh referring to this tree image, and some of you maybe saw this uh recently. If not, I'll explain this to you. But we just have a sense as God is producing a life in us, it starts underneath the surface of our life, what we're calling just being rooted in the presence of God, right? What happens underneath the surface of our life has everything to do with the with what takes shape above the surface of our life, with what can be seen. So for all of us, there's this establishment in the presence of God, our gospel identity in God, and that grows us up not just to a collection of individuals. You don't just go straight from roots to branches. You grow into a family, and that's part of how God, that was his plan from the beginning, to establish his work and his kingdom even on earth, the kingdom reality that as a family, as the people of God, that there's something, there's a collective identity that then becomes a gift to the world around us. And then ultimately, out of the family, we launch expressions to Nepal, to to Uganda, to your neighborhood, to Erie, to Longmont, to all these places. We launch expressions of ministry so we can bear fruit for the good of the world, right? And and we've just this tree is just a fantastic way to for us to understand how life develops in us. Now, in Psalm 1, you probably have heard this before, it's a similar type of encouragement. As the writer in Psalm, uh the first Psalm says this, this is the Passion Translation. He says, What delight comes to one who follows God's ways? He won't walk and step with the wicked, nor share the sinner's way, nor be found sitting in the scorner's seat. His pleasure and passion is remaining true to the word of I am. Meditating day and night in the true revelation of light. He will be standing firm like a flourishing tree planted by God's design, deeply rooted by the brooks of bliss, bearing fruit in every season of life. He is never dry, never fainting, ever blessed, and ever prosperous. Come on, who wants to sign up for that? Come on, come on, every hand in this room should be. What are you doing here if your hand is not in the air? What the heck are you doing here? Who wants to flourish? Oh my gosh. I want to flourish. I think you do too. Um, I want to bear fruit in every season. I don't want to wither and die. And so there's these promises that come of seeing true, like meditating on the ways of God, right? Giving ourselves to the ways of Jesus and meditating on his word, that it would be inside of us. That we'd walk in step with the Spirit of God, right? And so this describes some of the life of flourishing in the life of even a tree. As a tree would bear fruit. And so, as we showed the tree just a minute ago and the roots going deep and growing up, we have to say, what is God's process for actually deepening those roots and establishing that tree? And it's probably different than most of us would think. Because like Psalm 1, there are certain things that we need. We need the nourishment, you know, the water, the sunlight, planted by streams, by the brook. It's planted by streams of water so the roots can get the nourishment. We need those things, but we also know in nature that trees need other things in order to develop resilience, in order to develop deep roots. And in the words of the great prophet Dolly Parton, storms make trees take deeper roots. Storms make trees take deeper roots. And the reality is that trees grow deep roots when they're subject to storms, when they're subject to resistance, when they're subject to pressure. It forces the tree to go deeper. And it's it's true not only for trees, it's true for us. And so there's these places of shaking that have to happen. Not because God is trying to mess with us, but he's trying to establish us. Let me give you an illustration of this. Back in the 80s. Do you guys ever remember you remember that movie Biodome, like in the mid-90s? Okay. Um Pauly Shore, anybody? No? Okay. So there is an actual facility called the Biosphere II in Arizona, built in the 1980s. There's a great experiment done in the early 1980s in a desert called the Biodome. It was an exercise to create the perfect living environment for human beings, plants, and animal life. A huge glass dome was constructed, and an artificial controlled environment was created with purified air and water, filter light, and so on, offering the perfect growing conditions for trees, fruits, and vegetables and humans. People lived in the biodome for many months at a time. And it was wonderful because everything seemed to do well, with one exception. When the trees that were planted grew to be a certain height, they would simply topple over. It baffled scientists for the longest time until one day they realized the one natural element they forgot to recreate in the biodome wind. Trees need wind to blow against them, which in turn causes the root systems to grow deeper into the soil, which in turn supports the tree as it grows taller. What does all that mean? When we encounter God, even the wind of God, we refer to the Holy Spirit of God as the wind of God, but we usually think of it as a gentle breeze, not a mighty force. When we encounter God in new ways, what happens is, again, God does, there's a dividing that starts to happen in our lives, and we begin to realize what we've held on to versus what's eternal. What we've trusted in for our own significance and security and belonging and love versus what God is trying to establish us in, namely in his kingdom. And so sometimes as we come to him, it feels like a shaking. Now, a lot of Christians, what we do when we're shaken, we do what we know best, we rebuke it right away. It's like Satan's obviously in this. I am I'm being shaken, I'm going to rebuke the heck out of this thing, so that there's no kind of resistance in my life. And I'm not saying that there's not time for that. You know, to take authority in the name of Jesus over the thing the things in your life and circumstances. But what happens though, the writers of scripture would even say that when things start to shake, rather than running from it, we're to turn our eyes in gratitude to the one who is actually showing us what didn't belong the whole time. And this is something that even this last week, I wish I was ahead of you on this. I wish I could stand in front of you and say, man, I got this nailed, and so now I'm gonna preach it because I have it nailed. And that's the unfortunate part with sermons, is usually the sermons God leads me to are the ones like, actually, buddy, you need this yourself. And even this week, some things happened, and and I just I just felt disturbed, I felt provoked. And you can switch the word shake out to be shaken. If you feel provoked, if you feel agitated, if you feel let down and disappointed, if you feel like something that should have been, but it's not quite there, that's usually revealing something about where God is at work in your life. It's God's way of getting our attention. It's the dashboards. It's the dashboards behind the steering wheel in our car. Saying, hey, listen, buddy, there's something going on under the hood. There's a crisis under the hood. And I remember this week just that feeling of there's there's like some shaking here. But you know, as as I have come back to the Lord and settled into this this little this week, the Lord's saying, hey, listen, no, actually, you you feel like it's shaken. You actually are not being shaken. What's actually being shaken are the things that you've become so used to that you think that they're normal in your life, the things that you're depending on, everybody doing what they should be doing at the right time. Everybody being there for you in every every way that you think they need to be there for you, every circumstance lining up just the way you thought. And so the resistance this week that I felt, maybe you felt this too, just in general, um I was starting to internalize it, what's going on. But I just I just felt this invitation from the Father. I just want to submit this to you this morning. In a time like that, where you feel this resistance, you feel something pushing back, you feel something being shaken loose a little bit in your life, that it's not time to run from it, but it's a time to respond in gratitude, knowing that with every wind that comes your way, just like a tree, every wind that comes your way, there's something that's going deep. Every wind that comes your way, there's something going deep. Have you ever been out in the wind, like out in the mountains, and you're like pushing through the wind, you're pressing into it. I just wonder these trees, if these trees could talk, I'm not sure that they would be frustrated. But with every blow, every sway, every time there there's something that pushes back a little bit, there's something inside and says, Ooh, thank you, because now I get to go deeper. Ooh, thank you. I get to go deeper now. Count it all joy, brothers, when you face trials of many kinds. There's something that God is developing in us that to create resilience and endurance, and it requires a different way to think about the things that we actually face and the places that we're actually shaken. So in Haggai 2, the scripture I referred to earlier, that Hebrews is actually referring to this scripture. Here's what it says. This is 2 verses 6. For thus says the Lord of hosts, once more I will shake heaven and earth, the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the desire of all nations, and I will fill this temple with glory, says the Lord of hosts. There's a few different translations of that verse, but what I love about this New King James version, he says, I'm going to shake the heavens and the earth, I'm going to shake the nations, and they shall come to know the desire of all nations. And what that would mean to me, I mean, the way I would read that, would be that sometimes part of shaking is to reveal desire. Sometimes we don't know what we actually want until we're shaken up a little bit to reveal what we actually want underneath the surface of our lives. We think we know what we want, but it's in times like this that it reveals what we actually want. And I love that the promise here, the reason this is all good news is because any shaking that happens, even when we encounter God and things that, you know, he applies a little pressure, even for our good, when he when he allows shaking to happen in our lives, again, it is not to diminish us, it's not to throw us off, it's to get us closer with our desire. And in this passage, refer your desire, the desire of the nations is actually him. And so when he shakes the desire, when he shakes the nations, he's revealing himself as the desire of all nations. You guys know that every nation has a desire. And those desires get placed in different places. And what and what he's saying here is I'm going to one day reveal that the thing that they've always wanted was actually me. And so, back to Hebrews, he ends the passage in Hebrews with all of this in mind, saying this in verse 28. Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. So here's the deal this morning. Again, in a time of preparation, as you're praying about fasting, as you're asking God for more of them in your life. Let's be clear here. We're encountering the love of God, we're encountering the holiness of God too. And he loves us, he embraces us, he welcomes us in. Part of the job of the Holy Spirit is to convict us. And at first that's not fun. At first, it's like, I didn't sign up for this. I did not sign up for this part of God. Yes, you did, because God in his mercy is letting things fade away that might not lead to your good or his glory in the end. And this is the point in time where I was expecting everybody to erupt and applause, but I get it. Listen, I get it. I get it. That's a hard one to know how to how to handle that. But here, this morning, here's what I here's what I believe. There's an invitation here, even this morning. So you think about your life. Maybe you felt some wind, maybe you felt you felt pushed back. You feel the deepening happening in your root system because there's things that have happened in your life. There's things that you've lost, there's dreams that have been rearranged, there's a shaking that you would probably uh, you know, maybe you would raise your hand in this room and you've had a hard time making sense of that. And I and I think that there's a there's an invitation for you here this morning that God, again, he's not trying to torment you. I believe that he wants you to know that he's establishing you and he's giving you a chance to send your roots deep into the soil of his love and the gospel and his presence. So receive encouragement in your heart. For those of you who are praying for more of God, just be very careful when things go differently than what you imagine. And I don't say that. I don't say that in a way to say that there's not joy and there's not love and the blessings and the fruit. Yes, thank you, God, for all of those things. But we have to understand we're talking about the king above all kings. We're talking about the sovereign Lord. Majesty surrounds him, righteousness surrounds him, holiness surrounds him on every side. And so as we encounter him and he begins to reveal things to us, or maybe we start to walk through things that start to, they feel like they're sifting us of what used to work but no longer works for what God is calling us into, rather than rebuking those moments, ask God for where he wants you to be thankful and to come to him in gratitude for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. And so let's do that this morning as we end our time. That we're rejoicing this morning that all of God's work is about reminding us of his eternal ongoing story and his work in our lives, and he's establishing us in his unshakable kingdom. And so let's just be quiet for a moment together. And then we're gonna spend some time in gratitude, thanking God in the midst of anything that seems to be pushing against us. So let's take a moment, just settle our hearts together, and then we'll then we'll move into some gratitude. As we become aware of your presence here among us. That we get to be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. And so in this room, I just pray across the room that you begin to stir up a sense of thankfulness, Lord God, that in all of your ways, that you are establishing our faith and our root system in to you. And God, for each of us, would you give us the language and bring to mind the scenarios that you want us to thank you for what you're doing in our life. And as things come to mind, just begin to speak out in your own words, maybe just quietly to the Lord. And just thank him. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. I thank you, Father, for all of us that that might even be a really difficult exercise to find ways to thank you, even despite the things that we face. I just I pray that for a deeper revelation, even as we leave this place, God, that you are working all things for our good. And I pray that even as we go to our cars today, as we feel that wind against our face, may it be a reminder that you are your faithfulness and your mercy is following us all the days of our life. And that you are committed. You are committed to our flourishing, God. You are committed to us. And even in ways that confuse us, you're committed to us. And so today, God, as we receive your word, as we even end our time in this place, God, let your let your word and your love saturate our hearts, establish us in you, Lord God, for the day that we live in. I just believe, God, that you've called us to seek your face because it is important days that we are in, and that you're developing a strong, purified bride. I really believe that, God, that you are strengthening your bride to know how to walk in holiness and goodness and joy and love, and that you are doing that here at Vine Life, and you're doing that in your church, God. And so together in our hearts we say yes and amen to you. And we receive, God, we receive all that you have for us in the coming season, even here at Vine Life. We love you today, and it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Yeah. So, yeah, guys, hey, let's stand together.