...and there he was transfigured before them…

Series: …and… | The Movement of God and his people through Mark
Title: ...and there he was transfigured before them…
Text: Mark 9:1-13 (NIV)

Transcript

The Grand Canyon Problem

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So, Parker family recently got back from a trip. Uh, and part of that trip, it was a big road trip uh with some friends, was visiting the Grand Canyon. And if you've ever been there, uh, you know what it's like to be there. You know that feeling, you stand at the rim, you see this giant mile-deep chasm, all these ancient layers of crimson and gold uh as the canyons you look down and you're just odd. We were there, my son Gavin took it, looks to me and he says, Dad, I didn't think it'd be so big. I made a joke about it not being called the medium canyon. Um but as you sit in that place, you're really hit by the weight of your own smallness in light of how giant this canyon is. Uh, and what's the first thing we do when we get to a place like this? Pull out our phone, we snap a photo, we try and capture that moment, capture the scale, capture the majesty. And you look back at those pictures later on your little phone, you see that little flat image. The majestic scale has been dialed down. Um, it's this sterile little square, and it just can't quite get there. And this is because we cannot package glory like that. It's just not possible. It needs to be experienced. Because when we capture it and we control it, it actually ceases to be glorious. It's just a vague memory of those things. And our culture is obsessed with this. We're obsessed with capturing and controlling those peak experiences. We want to lock them down, that vacation, that concert, that spiritual high. Because we think if we can capture these moments, then we can relive them. We can constantly tap into that. Uh-oh. Test, test, test. Oh, I'm back. Okay, there we go. Um, we can tap into that sense of glory. We long to stay at the peaks of life. We dread going back into the valley of ordinary life. So, today, as we look at uh Mark 9, we're gonna see Jesus confront three of his disciples on one of these mountaintop experiences. And they're gonna, he's gonna really shatter their attempt to capture his glory. And so the question I want us to look at today is how do we walk with an untamed Jesus without reducing him to this safe formula? And the idea is that Jesus' glory cannot be captured, it's impossible, and it is only with us by listening to him and his voice and all of life, all the ups, all the downs.

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And then pray for us.

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Yeah, Spirit, I ask that you come into this place, that you humble us, that you will move distractions from our hearts and from our minds, and let us listen to you.

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May everything else get out of the way. Amen. Hey Nathan, there's music playing over here.

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It's mildly distracting. Um, I don't know what it is, but there's something going on. Let's dive

Mark 9 Sets The Stakes

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in. Um, so Mark opens this narrative uh with this specific chronological marker. After six days, thank you, Ken. You're the hero we all deserve. Um yeah. So six days prior to this story, Jesus actually shattered his disciples' worldview by declaring that the Messiah must suffer. That means he must be rejected by the elders and executed. That happened in Mark 8. Uh, and they are paralyzed and unsettled by this proclamation. They don't know what to do with that. This guy, this rabbi they dedicated their life to and were following, needs to die and he needs to suffer. And so Jesus brings this core leadership trio up onto the mountain uh to provide an objective visual guarantee that it's gonna be okay. He's gonna give them a glimpse of God's kingdom and his glory, right? So I tell you, that's why he starts in verse one. Truly, I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God has come with power. So the six days also draws our attention back to a parallel in the Old Testament, directly back to Exodus. So if you're familiar with the Exodus story, uh, it's where Moses goes up on the mountain, Mount Sinai, and he sees God's glory and he's given the Ten Commandments. Um, and Jesus is starting to establish the second Sinai. This happens all throughout scripture, parallels of things that happened in the Old Testament that Jesus comes and he fulfills, or he does better, or he shows that he is the promise that was given in the Old Testament. So on the first Sinai, when Moses goes up, the divine presence, God's presence is external. There's lightning, there's thunder, there's smoke, and there's these stone tablets where God's commands are written on. But on this mountain, God's authority isn't given in the same way. It's actually concentrated entirely in this living person. It says Jesus was transfigured. This is not this external spotlight shining down upon Jesus, highlighting him. This is an inside-out eruption. It's a temporary tearing back of his flesh, and some not literally, um, but it's exposing the glory of the creator that is within Jesus. The blinding majesty that is. Everything that was veiled in him when he came down as a human, as a baby, as he was incarnated as a man, is pulled back for a second. We get to fully see this blinding glory that is God. You can even see Mark, he strains to even figure out how he's going to say this, right? He says, Whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. Um, it's just it's hard to describe how even Jesus' clothes are glowing and they're blindingly bright because his glory is shining through them. This is divine purity. Picture that moment, right? We can see it. We can see the Hollywood movie moment of Jesus just radiating this goodness and overwhelming everything around him. We still need to stop and be awed by this in the story. Um, it's so easy. You and I felt the desire just to skip. I want to tell you guys what to do. I want to dive into what the disciples did wrong here. Um, but we need to stop, be transfixed by the transfiguration of Jesus, by his glory fully on display. This is amazing. Okay, I'm gonna call the band up. We're gonna worship now. That's all that's all we get today now. And this reality is then suddenly verified. Jesus' glory and how he's the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament is verified by Moses coming. He represents the law, which he got on Mount Sinai on the back, and then Elijah, he represents the prophets. So, what's God doing? He's bringing these two people, these two heroes of the Israelite faith to say, Jesus is the fulfillment of everything. He is my son. He's what you were longing for. All of Israel's theological journey leads and points to him, and now you get to see him fully revealed. You get to see God's kingdom on display.

Transfiguration And True Awe

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But unfortunately for us, it's really hard for us sinful humans, us broken people, to sit in the fully unleashed glory of God. It's uncomfortable, it's terrifying. Our brokenness gets in the way of just stopping, stopping and worshiping, and we're still going to see that response pretty quickly in the disciples. Because when we are confronted with this raw, untamed majesty of God, our default human reflex is to shrink it down into a size we can manage. We look at the uncreative light of God and realize that He is holy. We are completely exposed. We're not the ones in control. And to cope with this, we flee to these false refuges, these booths, these tabernacles, these wooden huts that we want to build as a false sanctuary. And the first one that we see and come across here is the false refuge of domesticated holiness, making something grand and majestic, something domesticated that we can control. It's the attempt to turn the wild, unpredictable Lord of the universe into a safe, predictable utility. We want a God who is influential enough to improve our lives, but not absolute enough to disrupt our autonomy and demand our total surrender. We want to domesticate him. We take the blinding light of Christ, put a dimmer switch on it. Just turn it down so we can bear it. Jesus becomes a life coach, a political mascot, or a predictable set of religious checklists. And this instinct to reduce overwhelming majesty is actually a documented human thing. There's a study, it's called a great name, Photo Taking Impairment Effect. Um, if you want to read it, go dive in. Um, but the Kohl's notes are data shows that the moment people attempt to capture a massive, significant event like that Grand Canyon picture on a camera, their brain offloads the raw experience to the device. And it flattens how we actually process that reality. It minimizes it. We don't fully engage in that moment. The best thing to do with the Grand Canyon is to sit there for half an hour and take in the sunset and let that overwhelm you and let it go deep into you. If you do it through a screen, you've just sterilized it. You've taken away the majesty of it. We do the exact same thing spiritually. We try to capture and categorize and digitize the majesty of God so we don't have to experience the weight of our own smallness. When the church has consistently struggled against this drive to swap a majestic God for a manageable one, uh A. W. Tozer, church theologian, has this quote uh in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy. It says, The church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted it for one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking worshiping men. We have domesticated God. We have substituted theological commentary for the living God, and the result is a safe, dim bulb instead of a consuming fire. That warning cuts straight to the heart of this text. The disciples were face to face with the consuming fire of God's glory. And when we domesticate that holiness, we treat God's fire as a small campfire to sit around and control and use solely for our own comfort. And this gets implemented in our lives by transforming Christ's disrupting reality. He barges in on his own terms, and we want to domesticate it into a flat, intellectualized, formulaic faith that is under control. Because we'd much rather argue about complex theology, what faith means, all these fine little points. We want to have our checklists of what it means to be part of West Village or part of a church or what the church needs to do for me. Uh, or we want to just consume high-production Christian media. I want the best band, I want the best speaker, I want to watch the best shows uh that align with my worldview. Because this we want to do that, then allow the raw, uncreated authority of Jesus to disrupt our career decisions, our pocketbooks, or our private habits. We treat God like a hobby or just a regular relationship to be managed. But the transfiguration, seeing Jesus in his glory, shatters those formulas. Because he didn't come in that moment and hand the disciples a lecture or a manageable self-helper team. He blinded them with his raw identity. He showed them that he cannot be managed, packaged, or domesticated, that he is the king, and our only option in that moment is to fall on our faces and yield control. But that's the last thing that our hearts want to do. We're independent, we're autonomous beings. We want to make our own decisions, we want to control things. And so when we realize that we can't dim the glory of God, we can't domesticate him, we freak out, we panic. It's natural part of human brokenness to freak out and panic in that moment because we can't control

The Reflex To Domesticate God

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it. So, what do we do when we can't mentally adjust or mentally put a wrapper around something? We default to our hands. The disciples instantly stop using thinking about stuff in their heads, and they default to we're gonna build something. We're gonna move from a mental strategy to a behavioral strategy. If we can't reduce God's glory in our minds, we will try to build a structural perimeter around it to capture that moment. And so Peter, we see it right in the text, moves from this blinding, silent terror to immediate, frantic construction project. Oh, see in verse 5, we'll read here for us. Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters, one for you and one for Moses, and one for Elijah. He did not know what to say. They were so frightened. Then a cloud appeared, covered them, and a voice came from the cloud. This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him. Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them, but Jesus only. Look at the chaos of Peter's thinking, right? Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. So Peter, in the midst of God's glory, goes back to that familiar name of teacher for Jesus. If any moment to call him Lord or Messiah or King, this was the time. But under pressure, our theology always defaults to our comfort level, and he was comfortable with him as a teacher. And so he wants to build these three tents to create a pantheon where he can keep Jesus safe and predictable and under control inside of that wooden booth. It's all of his mind could conceive of in the midst of God's glory. Um, and I like how in the brackets at the end it says he did not know what to say, they were so frightened, but he still started talking. Classic, classic. Um, he speaks anyway. To start with this construction project, to start organizing and managing and controlling Jesus' glory. God doesn't let him get very far. This is probably a deep act of mercy and grace on the disciples. Uh, because then this cloud appears and a voice comes from the cloud. This is my son whom I love. Listen to him. It interrupts completely what Peter's broken heart wanted to do. He doesn't say evaluate him or build a monument for him or keep him safe in a booth. He says listen to him. And all of a sudden, the cloud goes away. Moses and Elijah go away.

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It's just Jesus and the disciples left.

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They're not left with any of the glory. They're left with the ordinary Jesus of Nazareth standing in the dirt, ready to walk down the trail. It's a roller coaster of emotions for the disciples. That spectacular vision was temporary, but the simple relational presence of Jesus is permanent. And Peter's panic, his gut response exposes another refuge that our own hearts want to go to. Because our life is unpredictable, it is chaotic. We want to do that same psychological maneuver that Peter did. Um it's called the illusion of control, uh, famous study that's come into our vocabulary and our culture. Um, it's when macro realities, giant things terrify us, we micromanage our immediate perimeters to manufacture this false sense of uh security. That's the illusion of control. And spiritually, we do exactly what Peter did all the time. All the time today, we still do this. We construct these religious booths, safe, sterile, Christian subcultures, hyper-religious rules, or these checklists to make us feel good, that we can be functional, that we can be warm, that we can be encouraged by. And we fall into this false refuge of what I call insulated perimeters. We put up barriers, we insulate them to keep out the world around us. We create this sanctuary where we feel safe and secure, we miss out. Uh, another quote here from John Calvin and his commentary uh on Mark and uh Luke and Matthew all three at the same time. He had this these words about Peter to capture his foolishness. He says, Peter, by wishing to build tabernacles, that's the booth, that's the little tents that he was looking to build, was seeking a permanent resting place before the warfare was ended. He was wrong in wishing to enjoy a state of peace when he was still in the midst of the battle. He wished to enjoy the cross, the crown without the cross. This isn't just a spiritual beating up of Peter after the fact. He's not saying it's wrong to want rest, but he's critiquing Peter for trying to force a permanent state of organizational and environmental security right in the middle of active mission. Jesus is marching towards the cross. And Peter's like, we're just gonna take a good old pit spop here. We're gonna ignore that mission. Um, we're gonna act like the battle is over when it's not. He wanted something that he could manage and control instead of the acceptance that Jesus had a mission to complete. We do the same thing today. We try to manufacture peace through environmental control. Usually it ends up backfiring on us. Um use the example of someone who volunteers for every ministry, um, every task. They run the group, they coordinate, set up, they serve on three different teams. From the outside, it looks like tireless devotion. We fight hard to not let people do this at West Village. We say, serve one Sunday a month. Um, don't fall into this trap because this is a trap of the human heart to set up ministry as a tabernacle, as a place that we can control where we can experience God's glory on our terms and experience Jesus on our terms. But people that fall into that trap, that are allowed to just endlessly serve, need to peer underneath the hood of their heart because a lot of the time it's not driven by love or devotion to Jesus. It might start there, but it has a deep terror vulnerability. Because in a ministry booth, you're the ones calling the shots. You can manage the outcomes, you control the narrative, control the people, you can avoid the messy, unpredictable work of actually just sitting in your weakness before God. When we do, do, do, do, do, we miss the opportunity to sit and understand that we are broken and we need Jesus and He's gonna meet us there. And this text whispers to us that the Father didn't allow them to stay in that place. That is his mercy to the disciples, that is his mercy to us today. He does not us to stay in that place of over-serving and over overly doing ministry to avoid what's going on deeply inside of us. Because the cloud vanishes, their plan is upended, and they're left with only Jesus. This ordinary Jesus standing in the dirt, refusing to be kept in a booth. And if we're gonna follow him in act of obedience, we must step out of our self-made sanctuaries and abandon our illusions of control and walk directly behind him back down that mountain.

Peter’s Booths And The Illusion

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That would have been oh man, just think of the disciples in that moment. They just had this amazing, miraculous experience. And then they gotta walk back down into those crowds, into that promise that the cross was coming, their rabbi, that their Messiah was going to be ridiculed and murdered, that his execution was on the way. It keeps going. We'll read uh verse 9 through 13 here. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what rising from the dead meant, and they asked him, Why did the teachers of the law say Elijah must come first? Jesus replied, To be sure Elijah does come first and restores all things. Why then is written that the Son of Man must suffer and be rejected? But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him. So we look at verse nine, they're coming down the mountain, and they tell Jesus says, Don't tell anybody. About what you've seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. This is called the Messianic Secret, if you've ever heard that term. And we got to ask the question: why would Jesus hide his glory? To the modern reader, it sounds like exclusion and secrets, but historically and pastorally, this is actually an act of care. Jesus is being wise here. He knew what the crowd would expect of him. If they ran down the mountain and they all started yelling about this transfiguration and Moses and Elijah, the masses already wanted to turn Jesus into this political and military figure, and they would have just amped that right up. They would have made Jesus a commodity. And he refuses to become just a good to get someone else's ends. He insists on being known through his self-giving love on the cross, not just that transfiguration power on the peak. Because they go together and they can't be separated. So the disciples keep going, they're all confused about what rising from the dead meant as modern Christians. We can read this and think, how are they so dumb? Like, why are the disciples so dense? Don't they get this? But for them, there was no concept of the dead being raised in first century Judaism. It just didn't quite fit in their idea of what was going to happen in human history. And so this Messiah, this conquering king that they're so excited for being executed by the Romans and then rising was completely outside of their imagination. So Jesus keeps going. Talks about Elijah coming first and that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected. Keeps coming back to this point of suffering and rejection for his disciples. Rejected here is just like being treated as nothing, being counted as zero, to be worthless, treated with contempt. Jesus is saying, if you want to understand the timeline of the kingdom, you want to understand what's going on here, you must look at how the world treats God's messengers. That's why he talks about Elijah. He says, Elijah has come and they have done to him everything they wish, just as is written. So who is this Elijah? If you think back to the beginning of Mark and the Gospels, John the Baptist, it's John the Baptist. We've looked at that story throughout this series. And what did they do to John the Baptist? Herodias and Herod did everything they wished to him. They locked him in a dungeon, they used him as a pawn in their drunken political game, and they chopped off his head. So what's Jesus doing with his disciples here? He's giving this devastating lesson. If the forerunner, if the one who came to prepare the way for Jesus, was treated with contempt and executed, then Jesus as King is not just gonna get a red carpet rolled out for him.

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It's gonna be even worse.

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And this sobering

Why Jesus Hides The Glory

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message starts to dismantle the disciples' timelines. It's not what they expected. They wanted something different. They thought they were entitled to this victorious conquering king who's gonna kick out the Romans and make their life in that moment easier.

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They had a small picture there. We also have that same entitlement in us.

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You know, we don't expect to be executed by Roman emperors anymore. Um, but we do expect that our trajectory, our life with God is gonna be this upward, unbroken trajectory. Personal, financial, spiritual success will keep coming and piling on top of one another if we follow Jesus. If we follow this teacher, if we give our lives to this rabbi, then it's just gonna get better and better. That's what the disciples were expecting. They thought the mountain was just gonna keep going up. In reality, it had to come down. So I called this the false refuge of unbroken progress. Create sanctuary in the story that we tell ourselves. When life gets difficult, when a business venture fails, when a chronic illness lingers, or when just the chaos and uncertainty of life comes, we assume that God is angry with us or that we have failed him, or that he simply doesn't care because we are trying to control the narrative of our own success. Um, and to understand this, why we would demand such an upward trajectory must look at how theologians expose our baseline human psychology. Um, so this theologian, his name is Gerhard Ford, and he captures the core of this, the core of the theology of the cross. Why is the cross so important to Christianity? Um, and what he calls this the glory story. So here's the quote from him. He says the most common overarching story we tell ourselves, we tell about ourselves, is what we will call the glory story. We come from glory and we are bound for glory. The glory story is all about our progress, ethical, mystical, personal, social, psychological, and emotional, ascending rung by rung up the staircase until we finally return to paradise. Ford is capturing here in this idea of the glory story why we break down when life unravels. Because we start to view God as this life coach whose job is to keep us moving up the staircase towards him. But the gospel presents something so totally different. It presents a descending king. The cross, the theology of the cross captures that your trajectory smashes into failure and illness and brokenness. And when that happens, you haven't fallen off the staircase. You've simply been given an opportunity to encounter the God who meets you at the bottom. Every other religious, philosophical, or secular framework demands that you perform your way to the top of the mountain to find the God. They tell you to climb the ladder of moral perfection, climb the ladder of professional success. They put the burden of control entirely on your shoulders. But the Christian gospel presents the only God that does the exact opposite. He doesn't stay on the peak waiting for you to perform your way to him. He descends. He enters our weakness. And the suffering of the valley of ordinary life is not proof of God's absence. It's the very place where his saving power is forged. Jesus didn't tell us to leave the mountain and obey. He went first. He went before us. He was treated with contempt, reduced to absolute worthlessness, so that when you are sitting in the valley of the dark failure of disappointment and grief, you can look up and know that the God of the universe is not looking down on you in judgment, but sitting right next to you in loving solidarity, he is there with you. Because he is there with us in the moment, because he has that solidarity with us, he gives us his spirit. He gives us this relational peace to remind us and be with us in that space. Because Jesus had every right to step back into the glory of the mountaintop. But out of his love for us, he walked down the trail. He descended into the dirt, into the spit, into the mocking Roman soldiers, and ultimately into death on the cross. And because he was treated as nothing, and because that gave his glory a chance to shine through and for his righteousness to become our righteousness, we get a new permanent status in God's eyes when we follow him. The cross secures our eternal acceptance into God's family. And so the call, the daily call to obey that the Father's command on the top of the mountain, listen to him, is not a high pressure, exhausting performance to earn his love. It is the joyful, restful response of a child who has already been welcomed home. And the disciples on the mountaintop are paralyzed by that experience because they didn't have the Holy Spirit yet. So they try to manage God's glory with tense. But on the day of Pentecost in Acts, the cloud of glory didn't just hover over the mountain. The Holy Spirit descended and took up residence inside the hearts of believers. And if this sounds crazy to you, you don't think of the Holy Spirit as some spooky, mystical cloud or weird, unpredictable force. The Holy Spirit is God's personal, comforting, and encouraging presence, taking up residence inside our normal, everyday lives. It's the active presence of Jesus helping you believe the gospel right when you're tempted to default to your own refuges of comfort and control. The Spirit's primary work is to act as a cosmic spotlight on that high stress weekday afternoon when the pressure is redlining. The Spirit shines his light on the beauty, the majesty, and the finished work of Jesus. It makes that mountaintop glory of Christ subjective. It's heart-transforming reality right in the middle of your mess in the week. It allows us to connect to the mountaintop in a way that we can't ever imagine. We can't take a picture of that moment, but the spirit is connected to God's glory all the time and can whisper that into our hearts.

From Rowing To Sailing By Spirit

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So, how do we break the grip of these false sanctuaries we build in our lives? The places we try to escape to when things are hard. You don't do it by staring at your idols and trying to white knuckle your way into obedience. You don't break your love of comfort by simply trying to be tough. It doesn't work that way. Think about this picture. If you had to row, big old rowboat across the harbor, across a lake, by sheer human effort. You're sitting there, you're rowing with blistered hands, aching shoulders, probably going in circles because you don't know how the oars even work. Um, start to drift backward as the tide and the wind pushes you back. This is moralism. This is trying to do it by ourselves. So when we default to our own strength in the Christian life, we end up with this exhausted, barely moving forward effort of endlessly rowing. But God's spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the wind of God. In Greek, spirit and wind, same word. This is a beautiful picture of how God comes in and doesn't get us to white knuckle row, but instead sail. Hoist that sail and let the spirit push us. Now don't misunderstand this. Raising a sail is not just passive laziness. It's not doing nothing. As anyone who has ever sailed, Stephen, I'm looking at you, um, knows it requires immense intentional effort. It requires constant villigence and active adjustment to catch the wind. But the fundamental difference is this you are no longer attempting to generate the power of yourself. You don't create the wind, you don't control the wind. Your job is to actively position your life in alignment with it. You get to follow God's command on the mountain.

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Listen to him. Let the beauty of Christ finish work, carry you forward, push you to his destination.

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Because when the Holy Spirit reveals the supreme, dazzling beauty of Jesus Christ, the King who laid down his glory for his enemies, those cheap plastic booths, those refuges that we create for our own comfort and security completely lose their luster. They're just pittance compared to the glory of Jesus. The Spirit cultivates in us this serious, unshakable joy. It makes you look at the suffering of the valley of life and say, even this is worth it because I have Jesus. I'm gonna call the band up. We looked at these three refuges today. We recognized, hopefully, that we can't survive in the valley of life by just building little shelters around our peak experiences. If you stay caught in these refuges, I'll go through them. If you stay caught in that refuge of false domesticated holiness, you'll spend your life shrinking the communion, consuming fire of God into a dim light bulb. You'll interact with only a flat, intellectualized character of Christ that never actually disrupts your comfort, demands your surrender, or sustains you when your life unravels. If you stay trapped in the false refuge of insulated perimeters, you'll spend your life building safe, moralistic bubbles, hiding from a broken world, while cold self-righteousness rots your heart from the inside out. If you stay trapped in that false refuge of unbroken progress, you will expect a crown without a cross. And the moment suffering touches your life, your faith will collapse into bitter cynicism. And as we conclude, I want us to hear what Jesus is offering us this

An Invitation To Surrender Control

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morning. For anyone in this space or listening online that has yet to believe in Jesus, you might be sitting on the outer edge of this scene, been looking at Christianity, you've been looking at the church and assuming I have to climb the mountain myself. I need to get my act together to clean up my moral performance and build a beautiful spiritual resume before I can approach Jesus. Hear this clearly. Bring your dirty hands, your broken relationships, your secret habits, and your exhausted minds to him. Let him do for you what you are completely powerless to perform for yourself. Don't need to sign a contract or promise a perfect performance for him. Today, simply drop your defenses, step out of the exhausting grind of trying to manage your own life, and surrender to his untamed grace to begin the lifelong journey of simply listening to the beloved Son, who already has you in his grip. For those of us that do believe, stop waking up every Monday morning, treating your faith like some formula or safe moral checklist designed to keep your life low risk and predictable. Stop trying to manage God. It is impossible. Tomorrow morning, you step back into the valley of life, and your inbox overflows, and your kids are arguing when the shadow of suffering or rejection touches your life. Stop. Take a breath. Yield to the quiet, powerful prompt of the Holy Spirit inside you. Turn your gaze away from your self-made comfort shelters and your exhausting attempts to control your life. Look up and see Jesus only. Let his unearned affection, his sovereign power, and his finished work fill you with sustaining joy. Step out of your own striving and deep into alignment with his spirit. Let his wind carry you. Take great joy in his command to listen to him, because he has many great things to tell you. Know that the King who reigned in glory on the mountain is the exact same Savior who walks with you through the valley of life. Pray for us.

Final Prayer And Sending

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Spirit, thank you that you still reveal Jesus' glory to us to this day. And that is enough. That is enough to sustain us and make us whole and show us where to go to comfort us when we are down. So come into this place, speak these truths into our heart so that we may go from here fully dependent on you, joyfully looking forward to listening more to Jesus. Amen.