SPEAKER_00: Well, when I was in high school, I went through a little bit of an identity crisis.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it was going into my junior year.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you know, I gone into that year with really high hopes.
SPEAKER_00: Everything that I wanted in high school, I thought I was finally gonna have.
SPEAKER_00: I uh was moving into getting to play on varsity, I got my car keys, I was able to drive, so I had some independence.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was um I was actually uh getting out of a very unhealthy relationship, so that felt like a lot of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And so all these things were coming together.
SPEAKER_00: And in my mind, I was like, junior year is going to be great.
SPEAKER_00: Like I thought, I thought I had everything I needed to be happy, but then I just got into that year, and you know, the football practices start to get hot.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you've probably heard my stories about football.
SPEAKER_00: We were really, really, really bad.
SPEAKER_00: Like I didn't win a game for two years bad, uh, like two whole years.
SPEAKER_00: And so all these things I thought were gonna make me happy, right?
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden I got to pay for gas and and uh junior year is hard, you're in the AP or individual credit.
SPEAKER_00: And I just found myself purposeless and sad.
SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't figure out what was wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Why wasn't I happy?
SPEAKER_00: And so I did what a lot of us do, and I just tried to add on more stuff, tried to chase different trails or paths that I thought was gonna somehow fill that hole inside of me that felt like something has to be missing.
SPEAKER_00: And eventually none of it worked.
SPEAKER_00: And I got to this point, call it rock bottom, call it whatever you want, where I just realized the problem is not that, you know, I'm not doing enough or that I'm not trying hard enough or any of that.
SPEAKER_00: The problem is my life had no real purpose.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what my goal was in life.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know where I was going.
SPEAKER_00: And I would have never said it this way.
SPEAKER_00: But like most of us, as we're going through middle school and high school, we just assume that the point of life is to be good at a sport, or if you're not good at a sport, pick an extracurricular you're good at.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, take all the good classes, make the good grades, get an NHS, get enough service hours, get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, get your license, get a job, become independent.
SPEAKER_00: And like that was the whole size of my world.
SPEAKER_00: And what I didn't realize is that's actually a really, really, really small world.
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't ever going to provide the purpose that I was looking for.
SPEAKER_00: It was just pastime.
SPEAKER_00: And that forced me to face a question that honestly scared me and might scare many of us tonight, and that is what is my life for?
SPEAKER_00: Why am I here?
SPEAKER_00: What is the right way to spend the life that I've been given?
SPEAKER_00: Well, why am I telling you that story tonight?
SPEAKER_00: Well, because many of you, whether you realize it or not, came in here tonight asking those same questions.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe you realize it, maybe in your mind you're like, yeah, I've thought about all those things recently.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe there's a part of you that's just noticed like you're trying to find something, something you're good at, something where you feel accepted, or something where you feel like you belong or you're loved, and you're just striving after something.
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you, let me peel back the layer that the deeper desire underneath that is that you want meaning and you want belonging.
SPEAKER_00: You want to know that your life matters and you want to know that you have people to do it with.
SPEAKER_00: And so tonight, as we continue our Philippians series, Paul is actually gonna help us answer those questions.
SPEAKER_00: What is life all about?
SPEAKER_00: Where is this thing going?
SPEAKER_00: And through his personal reflection on his situation, we're gonna see his perspective on life and we're gonna see the purpose that it gives him.
SPEAKER_00: And in turn, we're gonna see our perspective and what our purpose should be.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you have your Bibles or you have the Bible we passed out from last week, also caveat, I know I promised you more of those.
SPEAKER_00: Turns out we just bought all of them than Amazon had.
SPEAKER_00: So we have more, but they're coming next week because they just told me, like, sorry, tough.
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna be here in a week.
SPEAKER_00: No prime shipping on those.
SPEAKER_00: So if you have your Bible, Philippians 1, verse 12, we're gonna be walking through 12 to 26.
SPEAKER_00: If you've got your Bible from last week where you can take notes, grab that, we'll follow along.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 12 says this, it'll be on the screen too.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest of my or and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord in my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.
SPEAKER_00: Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill.
SPEAKER_00: The latter do it out of love, knowing that I'm put here for the defense of the gospel, and the former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.
SPEAKER_00: What then?
SPEAKER_00: Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: So hold your spot there, we're just going to walk through all of that.
SPEAKER_00: I know that's a lot of text.
SPEAKER_00: This is taking place after what we read last week, right?
SPEAKER_00: We're just journeying through Philippians.
SPEAKER_00: And so last week we got this introduction and this prayer for the Philippian church.
SPEAKER_00: And in that prayer we got a picture of what it looks like to be spiritually mature.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul is talking about the past there, and now he moves to his current situation.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul's current situation, we learn from the books of Acts, is that he's sitting in a jail in Rome.
SPEAKER_00: But he didn't get arrested in Rome.
SPEAKER_00: As you continue to read, you realize that this whole saga mess of a situation that he's in actually started two years earlier.
SPEAKER_00: He was preaching in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: There was this riot that broke out, he got arrested.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then when he was arrested, some people plotted to kill him, and so they actually had to move him out of the city, and then he spent two years in prison somewhere else, and then he appealed to Caesar, and then he went to Rome, and then on the way to Rome, he got on a boat that got shipwrecked, and then somehow he got bit by a poisonous snake, uh, and then he finally got to Rome, and now he's here.
SPEAKER_00: And so this has been a long, treacherous, hard last couple of years for Paul.
SPEAKER_00: So by the time he's writing this, it's been it's been a lot.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what makes his perspective that we read so surprising.
SPEAKER_00: Because when Paul looks back on it, he doesn't complain.
SPEAKER_00: The first thing he says is not, man, how hard it's been, how tough it's been, like, you guys won't believe what God has let me go through, like you won't believe my no.
SPEAKER_00: That's none of it.
SPEAKER_00: The first thing he says is what has happened to me has served to advance the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And then you see him come back to that theme throughout that entire paragraph.
SPEAKER_00: He says, My imprisonment is for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Others are speaking about Christ more boldly.
SPEAKER_00: I'm here to defend the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is being preached, so I rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason I highlight that is because what we're seeing and how Paul looks at his circumstances is how Paul views his life as a whole.
SPEAKER_00: Everything is viewed through this lens of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't know much about Paul, Paul used to be called Saul.
SPEAKER_00: It was his uh Hebrew name.
SPEAKER_00: And Saul used to make sport of killing Christians.
SPEAKER_00: He would go and he would drag them out from synagogues, he would put them in prison.
SPEAKER_00: He was actually there when a young man named Stephen was stoned to death.
SPEAKER_00: Like Paul was a bad dude.
SPEAKER_00: And then on the road to Damascus to go throw more Christians in prison, God got to him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus appeared to him, struck him with blindness, and he knocked him down a peg.
SPEAKER_00: And Saul, soon to be Paul, got humbled in that moment.
SPEAKER_00: And from that moment when Jesus appeared to him and changed him from the inside out forever and ever and ever, everything about how Paul saw himself changed.
SPEAKER_00: And we'll talk more about that as we journey through Philippians, his circumstances, what mattered.
SPEAKER_00: And now all of a sudden, Jesus is the lens that everything gets viewed through in Paul's life.
SPEAKER_00: And it changes what he considers a win or a loss.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what you see as he mentions what he's been going through.
SPEAKER_00: First, he gets thrown in prison.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Hey guys, it's all right that I got thrown in prison because the guards have heard about Jesus, which makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you are chained to Paul and you have to watch him and you can't leave, odds are you're probably going to get the gospel shared with you.
SPEAKER_00: Like homie's probably telling you about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: But then secondly, Paul says that when he got thrown in prison, it actually made other Christians in Rome more confident to preach the gospel too.
SPEAKER_00: And even that wasn't all sunshine and roses, though, because in verses 15 through 17, he says that there were two groups of these people who were sharing the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: One did it from a good heart.
SPEAKER_00: They're like, hey, Paul, our brother, he's wounded, he's off the battlefield, we're gonna step in, we're gonna pick up some slack.
SPEAKER_00: The other group were actually his rivals, and they saw it as an opportunity of, hey, Paul's influence is decreasing, maybe this is a chance for ours to increase, right?
SPEAKER_00: I remember back in a former spot that I was in ministry, uh, there was a large church in town that all of a sudden had a lot of issues, and they started to, a lot of people left and they went through a bunch of turmoil, and you had some people, really, everybody started doing outreach events all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_00: And some people is from this place of, hey, we need to make sure that these people get shepherd, they get cared for.
SPEAKER_00: And then other people were like, hey, maybe this is a chance, maybe we can get them to come to our church.
SPEAKER_00: We can bump our numbers up.
SPEAKER_00: They were doing the same thing, different heart.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul says here, but that's even crazier because his response is not, hey, those guys who are doing it out of envy, they're terrible people, they're awful.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm gonna go write a strongly worded Yelp review on their church page, or I'm gonna tweet about them or ex about them.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the you say now that it's X, but you get the point.
SPEAKER_00: And he says this, he says, I'm not gonna make this about me.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Look, if Jesus is being preached, then I can rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: One commentary I read kind of put it this way.
SPEAKER_00: It said that Paul cared more about people hearing about Jesus than he cared about being the one that they heard it from, which is just an insane perspective.
SPEAKER_00: So often we can make this whole Jesus thing about us, not Paul.
SPEAKER_00: And so at this point in the story, you're like, who is this dude?
SPEAKER_00: Like he has been nearly killed, threatened, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and now even fellow believers are using him being in prison for the faith as an opportunity to try and knock him down a peg, and he still has joy.
SPEAKER_00: How can someone go through all of that hard stuff in life and still have joy?
SPEAKER_00: It goes back to his perspective.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's not looking at his life through the lens of comfort, reputation, control like we often do.
SPEAKER_00: Paul sees his life through Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And as you look through the lens of Jesus, you see that the cross teaches that what looks like defeat, what looks like suffering, what looks like hardship is not always defeat.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so Paul doesn't have to pretend that prison is good or that suffering doesn't hurt.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't need to like just act like everything's okay, but he can know that the suffering and the hard stuff he's going through right now is not the whole story.
SPEAKER_00: That the God of the universe is working behind the scenes and he's going to use it.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul can look back and say, look, none of this is exactly what I would have chosen, but look at what God's done.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the doors that he's opened.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the people that I've been able to interact with and share the gospel with.
SPEAKER_00: And that perspective changes the way that he walks through whatever's in front of him.
SPEAKER_00: When he stands before the governors and the kings and the people that he's on trial with, he shares the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: When he gets shipwrecked on that island, he actually shares the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And a large amount of people on that island actually come to know Jesus and start a church.
SPEAKER_00: When he's changed to soldiers, he doesn't see an opportunity to feel bad for himself.
SPEAKER_00: He says, All right, look, this is a dude who can't leave.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to share the gospel with him.
SPEAKER_00: He keeps finding opportunity where most of us would just think it's an interruption or it's an inconvenience.
SPEAKER_00: And that's because the way that you see your life will shape the way that you live your life.
SPEAKER_00: One of the best examples I've seen of this was actually a family member of ours, one of Christine's family members, uh, he was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.
SPEAKER_00: And him and his family were missionaries.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and he had, what, nine kids at that time, or was it 10?
SPEAKER_00: Nine or 10 kids at that point.
SPEAKER_00: Nine kids.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, now he has 10.
SPEAKER_00: And he was the primary provider for his family.
SPEAKER_00: And so if anybody had a reason to feel bad for themselves, to uh be down, be depressed, and just really just like not want to deal with God at all, it would be this guy.
SPEAKER_00: But I remember seeing him after the diagnosis and treatment had started, and I was expecting to see just this, you know, broken, sick guy, but he was none of that.
SPEAKER_00: Like physically he looked great, but but the most important and just the crazy thing to me was emotionally, he just had this different perspective.
SPEAKER_00: I I expected him to talk about maybe, man, it's been really hard, or you know, we're just trying super tough to keep everything together and it's been stressful.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure he felt all of those things, but that's not what he talked about.
SPEAKER_00: He would just talk about, man, you don't believe how many doors that God has opened for me, like the nurses and the doctors that I've gotten to share the gospel with, right?
SPEAKER_00: The people who are also getting treatment who I've been able to share the gospel with, and uh, you know, maybe I'll start like a Bible study or if I'm a church or whatever, and it just blew me away because in the middle of what was the hardest season of his entire life, he didn't even know if he was gonna live to see his nine now ten kids grow up, and he didn't know any of that, but he had joy.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because he was looking at the science of Jesus, he saw the purpose uh or he saw the perspective that that really mattered in life.
SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you the question: what is your perspective?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: What is the lens that you view your life through?
SPEAKER_00: Who are you?
SPEAKER_00: What are you on this planet to do?
SPEAKER_00: What stories have you believed about your life?
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing.
SPEAKER_00: We're wired for stories.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we love movies, good books, music.
SPEAKER_00: Like we we want to believe stories.
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is just like we can believe true stories, we can believe untrue stories.
SPEAKER_00: And so the stories you believe about your life, are they true?
SPEAKER_00: We all live out some sort of story.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's that my life is about being successful.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's the story that my life is about being liked.
SPEAKER_00: Or my life is about having fun or being comfortable or proving yourself or getting into the right school, making the team, getting the relationship, getting everything under control.
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is, whatever story you believe about your life will ultimately shape how you interpret everything.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you believe your life is about success, when you fail, you'll be crushed.
SPEAKER_00: If you believe your life is about being liked, when you're rejected, uh you will feel despondent, you'll feel desperate.
SPEAKER_00: If you believe your life is about staying in control, anything unexpected comes your way will make you feel like you are swimming in complete chaos.
SPEAKER_00: When you try to find your purpose or your perspective, when you try to build your life on anything other than Jesus, when the storms come, you will be shaken.
SPEAKER_00: But the gospel gives you a better perspective, that you can stop viewing your life through what happens to you, but instead start viewing your life through what God has done for you in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you were made in God's image, you are made uh to know him, to love him, to serve him, but we've all decided to turn away from him and go in the opposite direction.
SPEAKER_00: That we've said, God, I don't want you, I don't want your life, I don't want your rules, I'm gonna do it my way.
SPEAKER_00: And when we do that, we turn away from the source of life and we choose death.
SPEAKER_00: But God didn't want us to face that fate.
SPEAKER_00: And so he sent his son Jesus, who lived a perfect 33 years here on this life, never did anything wrong.
SPEAKER_00: But at the end of his life, he died on a cross.
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't on accident, it wasn't because he got in with the wrong crowd or said the wrong words, it was completely on purpose because scripture says that we had earned death because of our sin.
SPEAKER_00: Yet Jesus took our death so that he could give us his life.
SPEAKER_00: And if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved.
SPEAKER_00: And when you get that, and when you understand that, when you build your life on it, you understand that my value, my worth, my life's purpose is fixed.
SPEAKER_00: It's not an achievement, it's not in comparison, it's not in any of that junk that I try to run to.
SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And then you learn that defeat is not always defeat, that suffering does not always get the final word because there's life on the other side.
SPEAKER_00: And the gospel tells you that your life is not random, it's not worthless, and it's not about building the most comfortable or popular or athletic version of yourself possible.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel says if you've placed your faith in Jesus, you belong to him.
SPEAKER_00: You're a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul experienced.
SPEAKER_00: Paul went from death to life, and he couldn't help but build his entire life around it.
SPEAKER_00: We used an illustration a few weeks ago of someone who sees God change someone's eternity, sees God change their own heart, and it just flips the switch of how could I live for anything else if this stuff is really real?
SPEAKER_00: Because your perspective, the way that you shape, or the way that you see your life will shape the way you live your life.
SPEAKER_00: And what we're gonna see in the rest of this passage tonight is that when you see Jesus is the main point and purpose of your life, or when you see Jesus as the main point of your life is your perspective, you will naturally begin to live with purpose.
SPEAKER_00: That the perspective of Jesus leads to purpose.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna read in verse 18.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and through the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not at all be ashamed, but that with full courage now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.
SPEAKER_00: For to me live is Christ, and to die is gain.
SPEAKER_00: If I am live in the flesh, that means fruitful label for me, yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.
SPEAKER_00: I am hard pressed between the two.
SPEAKER_00: My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.
SPEAKER_00: But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.
SPEAKER_00: Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again.
SPEAKER_00: So, again, we just read a lot, but to just explain it.
SPEAKER_00: In the last section, Paul was looking back.
SPEAKER_00: He was looking back at um everything that had happened to him and how God had moved, and now he looks forward to what's coming up, because he's still sitting in jail.
SPEAKER_00: He's about to be on trial, and the death penalty is on the table.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul basically says this hey, I believe that all this is gonna work out for my good, for God's glory, because you're praying, the Holy Spirit's in me.
SPEAKER_00: I know that when my trial comes, I'm not gonna shrink back, I'm not gonna be ashamed, I'm gonna boldly honor Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And whether I walk out of that courtroom alive or dead, God will be glorified.
SPEAKER_00: Again, that's his whole point to life, is Jesus at the middle of it all.
SPEAKER_00: And that causes Paul to think, and he kind of goes on a personal like side note here, a little bit of a tangent, about what are the options?
SPEAKER_00: What if I live, what if I die, what is that gonna look like?
SPEAKER_00: And on one hand, he says that he would rather depart and be with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And now you read that and you're like, well, that sounds kind of dark, Paul.
SPEAKER_00: Like, is he depressed?
SPEAKER_00: Is he uh like suicidal?
SPEAKER_00: Like, what's going on here?
SPEAKER_00: And no, that's not the case.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what he's advocating for.
SPEAKER_00: He's actually making a theological point.
SPEAKER_00: And he simply knows that that death means being with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It means getting to see the person who changed his entire life and his entire eternity, who loved him deeply, despite all of the terrible, terrible things that he had done and made him a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: He gets to see that man face to face.
SPEAKER_00: And so he doesn't need to be afraid of death.
SPEAKER_00: Death has lost its sting because on the other side there is hope, there is joy, there is Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And that's just a real reality for him.
SPEAKER_00: And so we don't need to walk around uh morbid and just like sulking around all the time, but we also don't need to be afraid of death.
SPEAKER_00: We have this hope that one day we will get to be with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole nother sermon for another day of what that will look like, but it's not just like sitting on a cloud playing a harp for the rest of eternity.
SPEAKER_00: Like there's a bodily resurrection, like the earth and the heavens will be remade, like we'll live in physical bodies doing physical things.
SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna be incredible.
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be existence as it was originally meant to be, and we can look forward to that hope.
SPEAKER_00: But there's another side of the coin, and Paul considers the other possibility.
SPEAKER_00: What if I live?
SPEAKER_00: What if he gets acquitted, he he walks out of that courtroom, he's free to go, and he gets more years on life?
SPEAKER_00: And that's where we start to see the perspective we just talked about that gives him a purpose in life.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says that while being Jesus would be while being with Jesus would be better for him personally, he knows that remaining here, staying alive, would be better for the Philippians.
SPEAKER_00: And that if God gives Paul more life, he knows exactly what he wants to do with it.
SPEAKER_00: He wants to spend it on people.
SPEAKER_00: He says remaining would mean their progress and joy in the faith.
SPEAKER_00: And so he's saying, hey, if I'm still here, I'm gonna pour into you, I'm gonna serve you, I'm gonna love you, I'm gonna do everything I can to see you grow in your faith with the one who saved me and saved you.
SPEAKER_00: And do you see the connection here?
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul sees his life through Jesus, he knows what his life is for.
SPEAKER_00: His perspective gives him purpose.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't look at more years of life and think, awesome, more time for me, I can be more comfortable, like the tent business is really kicking off, like I can make a lot of money, like buy me a brand new camel or whatever they bought back in those days to make themselves feel important, right?
SPEAKER_00: New robe.
SPEAKER_00: Like he doesn't look at it that way.
SPEAKER_00: He thinks there's more people I can serve, there's more people I can encourage, I can be a part of God building his church, more people I can tell about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's what the gospel does.
SPEAKER_00: If you've truly placed your faith in Jesus, he saves us from this life curved in on ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's all about me, me, me.
SPEAKER_00: What can I do for myself?
SPEAKER_00: How can I make myself look?
SPEAKER_00: How can I create my image?
SPEAKER_00: And instead frees you to live a life for others.
SPEAKER_00: Because following Jesus doesn't just mean spending your whole life sitting alone and praying your Bible, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's not, hey, go up on a mountain and spend a lot of alone time with Jesus and there you're going to grow spiritually.
SPEAKER_00: Like that matters, but it matters because it's forming you for something.
SPEAKER_00: It's shaping you into the kind of person who can get up and go out and love and serve people.
SPEAKER_00: Tell them about the Jesus you know, to spend your life for the good of somebody besides yourself, because that's what Jesus did.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't use his life to grasp for comfort or status or power.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus gave himself away.
SPEAKER_00: He humbled himself even to death on a cross.
SPEAKER_00: And when he saves us and he makes us his kids, kids start to look like their parents.
SPEAKER_00: We begin to be shaped in that same direction.
SPEAKER_00: Recently, we had the privilege of taking a young adult mission trip to Guatemala.
SPEAKER_00: And our in-country mission coordinator was a young lady named Raquel.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and she was about my age and she had been serving there for a while.
SPEAKER_00: And at the beginning of the trip, she told us that it was actually her last week in that role.
SPEAKER_00: And so throughout the week, and before I knew this, I was really confused because people would just like come up to her and like hug her and cry.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what is going on here?
SPEAKER_00: And then like one day, some dude like shot off like a confetti cannon in the mission center that scared me half to death.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, because also apparently in Guatemala it's just a thing to set off fireworks.
SPEAKER_00: Like 3 a.m.
SPEAKER_00: Like sounds like somebody shot an artillery shell, made no sense.
SPEAKER_00: But it, you know, whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so we're here, and I'm like, what is going on here?
SPEAKER_00: But as I start to learn more and more about her, and I see these people, you know, family after family after family, come up and hug her and thank her, you could tell pretty quickly that she had deeply impacted all 400, 500 families that they worked with at that center.
SPEAKER_00: And as the week went on, we learned more about her story.
SPEAKER_00: She had a D a theology degree, like she went to seminary early on, and then she went back to school and got her degree in social work.
SPEAKER_00: And at one point we asked her, like, hey, have you ever thought about like moving to the United States?
SPEAKER_00: Because, like, in my mind, I'm like, she could go anywhere, she could build a career, she's obviously driven, like, she can make all this money.
SPEAKER_00: And she was like, No.
SPEAKER_00: And she started talking about how good God had been to her, to her family.
SPEAKER_00: And basically, her response was like, Man, God's done so much for me.
SPEAKER_00: How could my life be about anything else?
SPEAKER_00: And he's opened a door in front of me here to serve the people in my own country, people I grew up around.
SPEAKER_00: And that stuck with me because here's a young woman who is probably never gonna end up in a newspaper or on a podcast or write a bestselling book or speak.
SPEAKER_00: On stage at some huge conference, maybe, but but probably not.
SPEAKER_00: But she spent years pouring her life into hundreds of families in this little, you've never and probably never will heard of it town in the middle of impoverished Guatemala.
SPEAKER_00: And you and most people will never hear of her in life, but she's made an eternal impact in hundreds of families because her view of what God had done for her changed the way that she viewed the life God had given her.
SPEAKER_00: And so instead of asking, hey, how much can I get out of this life?
SPEAKER_00: How much instead, how much can can she?
SPEAKER_00: She asked, How much can I give away?
SPEAKER_00: She could have chased all this stuff, but she instead chose to spend her life loving people made in the image of God and serving them the way that Jesus did.
SPEAKER_00: And so earlier we asked, man, how do you see your life?
SPEAKER_00: Well, let me ask you a next question.
SPEAKER_00: What is your life pointed towards?
SPEAKER_00: What are you spending your life on?
SPEAKER_00: Because there's all sorts of answers to that question.
SPEAKER_00: I know some of it's out of your control.
SPEAKER_00: You're in school right now, you have to work to do a job, you have parents putting pressure on you to do certain things.
SPEAKER_00: But in your heart of hearts, where does the the deepest affection of your heart go towards?
SPEAKER_00: What what what do you consider a win?
SPEAKER_00: What makes you most happy and joyful in life?
SPEAKER_00: And be honest with yourself.
SPEAKER_00: Are you living mostly for yourself?
SPEAKER_00: Just trying to collect as much comfort, pleasure, success, and control as you can in this life, make the team, get the relationship, build the future.
SPEAKER_00: I've been there.
SPEAKER_00: But but let me ask you an honest question tonight.
SPEAKER_00: Like Garrett to insert your name here.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Like whatever you're spending your life on, where does that road actually lead?
SPEAKER_00: A paper you get to hang on the wall one day?
SPEAKER_00: A lot of money so you can get a nice condo in Gulf Shores when you retire in 40 years, 50 years?
SPEAKER_00: You get your name on the wall, on some plaque in the field house that nobody's ever gonna look at again.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying any of that stuff is bad, but where does it actually go?
SPEAKER_00: Has it ever felt like it's enough?
SPEAKER_00: Has it ever given you what you're looking for from it?
SPEAKER_00: And my guess is no.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want to show you another way to life, and that's the way of the gospel, and that's the message that we shared earlier, that God made you, and even though we separated ourselves from him, he made a way for us to come back and become his kids again.
SPEAKER_00: That God came after us, that he gave his life to bring us home.
SPEAKER_00: And when we place our faith in him, he doesn't just forgive our sins.
SPEAKER_00: He actually uh that old you is dead and gone.
SPEAKER_00: You are a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: And that new creation has a new purpose, a new way to see yourself.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not here to just take up space on a floating rock for 80 years, you are a servant of the living God of the universe who put the stars in the sky, who made the sun and the millions and billions of suns that are just like it, that God gives you a role to play in his eternal plan for all of history, that you could be a part of somebody going from eternal separation from God to eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: That's your purpose.
SPEAKER_00: And what I want you guys to see in a town like Bernie, where we have a lot of things that we can do, we have a lot of um, you know, a lot of you guys have a lot of gifts and talents and skills, and you'll go off to school and you'll do all this good stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I just want you to get a bigger like view of your life than just making a lot of money and retiring one day.
SPEAKER_00: Or just playing the BHS or CHS or Geneva or a homeschool game well, or climbing the social ladder, getting into the school you want so you can experience Greek life.
SPEAKER_00: I just want you to get a bigger view of your life than that, because there is so much more.
SPEAKER_00: God has something incredibly special for each and every single one of you.
SPEAKER_00: And special doesn't mean necessarily standing on a stage like I am.
SPEAKER_00: Special for you might mean, hey, God has gifted you to care for people in a medical setting well, and you are gonna be the hands and feet of Jesus to people with terminal illnesses one day, experiencing the worst day of their life.
SPEAKER_00: That could be God's purpose for your life.
SPEAKER_00: His main purpose is to glorify him and to love others, but that could be expressed in a million different ways.
SPEAKER_00: But if we're so caught up in spending our life on ourselves, we're never gonna realize that.
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna settle for some cheap counterfeit version, and we're gonna get 80 years down the road and look back and realize I just lived for a bunch of nothing.
SPEAKER_00: You see, my story that I started earlier on, that that identity crisis didn't leave me broken and hopeless.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it actually led me to life.
SPEAKER_00: And I realized that that whole church thing that I had grown up, that game I had played for the vast majority of my childhood and teenage years, uh, wasn't really a game at all.
SPEAKER_00: That it was actually everything I'd ever been looking for.
SPEAKER_00: And in that moment, the Lord humbled me and I read a book called Reason for God by Timothy Keller, and it spoke to the reasons we have for belief in the Christian God, and it became real to me in a moment.
SPEAKER_00: And just like I shared that explanation, when I realized, hey, this stuff is real, it was like, how can I live for anything else?
SPEAKER_00: And you trace that decision 10, 15 years down the road.
SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm standing on the stage preaching to you right now, because I realized the Lord has called me into ministry to students, to teenagers.
SPEAKER_00: And I wouldn't have it any other way.
SPEAKER_00: But again, it started with realizing my purpose in this life was not to just climb a ladder or to succeed in the world's terms.
SPEAKER_00: It was to live for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And for me, that looked like vocational ministry.
SPEAKER_00: It looked like preaching God's word.
SPEAKER_00: For you, that might look completely different, but that's the invitation of Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: Life with the God who made you and spending that life for something bigger than yourself.
SPEAKER_00: Serving, giving, sharing the gospel, becoming more like Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And look, like Raquel, you may never go viral, you may never have some huge platform, but none of that determines whether your life mattered or not.
SPEAKER_00: How far you go in your sport or your activity, even what your family looks like one day, none of that matters.
SPEAKER_00: If none of that determines whether your life matters because you can spend your life loving people, serving people.
SPEAKER_00: And one day when this life is over, death doesn't get the final word.
SPEAKER_00: We can spend our lives instead of desperately trying to hold on to them because we know where we're going.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to have a scarcity mindset.
SPEAKER_00: We've got enough love in God.
SPEAKER_00: We've got enough life in God.
SPEAKER_00: So if that means sacrifice to love someone else here, no big deal.
SPEAKER_00: Because if we live, we get to live for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And one day when we die, we get to be with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That is a life worth spending.