Episode 9 - Getting Hacked & Resurrection Hope

On this week's episode, Pastor Paul shares the embarrasing and disappointingly (normal) way that his email got hacked. We also begin our look at a philosophy of preaching and consider how the doctrine of the resurrection provides an unshakeable foundation in suffering, a unique hope, and an unshakeable security. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey, welcome back to the Disappointingly Normal podcast. I'm your host, Paul Stiver. This podcast is a project of Hope Community Church North Lakes, which meets in Shoreview, Minnesota. This is the Disappointingly Normal Podcast. We are disappointingly normal. There's something about following Jesus that makes it so we don't seek to be impressive to the outside world. We also try not to be weird. We want to be disappointingly normal. We want people to encounter us as followers of Jesus and say, well, they were pretty normal. But there was something about them that was distinct, and it was that we follow Jesus. And the goal of this podcast is to take discipleship beyond Sundays to the rest of the week and all of life. And so we spent a lot of time looking back at Sunday. We spend a lot of time looking at uh, we'll do a little Sunday recap. We look at some theology, we consider ways to engage culture and ways to apply what the gospel's teaching us, both in our personal lives and as a church. Wanted to start off with a way that I am disappointingly normal. Got to tell a story of how I got hacked. I got hacked this morning, and it's, as you would think, embarrassing. I feel pretty embarrassed about it. There's nothing I can do now except apologize and uh make amends. But what happened was this morning I went to work at Caribou before I had a morning meeting at that same caribou. And uh since last night, I've had an email in my inbox uh from a friend inviting me to an event. Some of you are already like, dude, don't, don't what are you doing? Stop doing what you're gonna do. Well, so I got this email, and ironically, Allison had just hung out with this guy's wife. So I'm thinking, oh, it tracks that we would get invited to an event. They just hung out at the of course we would get invited to event an event. Well, I'm opening the link at Caribou primarily because I want to clear the email from my inbox, and uh, it's not working. And I'm thinking, oh, it must be because I'm on Caribou's Wi-Fi. That's the issue. So I've got to go to Hotspot. Either way, I'm trying it, it's not working. The weird thing about it is the event doesn't have a title. And some of you are like, yeah, because it was a scam. Well, I didn't think that. I was thinking I had to click into the event to get the title information. Again, embarrassing. Then uh to go through to the next page, uh, you had to enter a password. And I'm thinking, okay, well, that's common when I use Gmail that they ask me to re-enter my password. I must have gotten logged out by switching on to the Caribou Wi-Fi. So let me throw that bad boy right in there. Throw that password in there, and it wouldn't click through. And I'm like, this is very confusing. I'm very frustrated. I'll switch over to Hotspot. And I tried again and it didn't work, and I'm thinking, man, this is a bummer. And I'm almost about to text Allison and say, what was the event that we got invited to? I can't get the link to work. Um, but it was already too late. I had given it my password, and so it decided to email, I think, every one of my contacts from my personal email. And uh, and immediately messages start coming back to me. Hey, is this you? Hey, what's this about? Did you get hacked? Is this spam? And to which I could only say, it is a scam. I got hacked. I am sorry. I've been defeated by the internet. And now here's the hard thing about this. I never get to now hold the the I told you so button or whatever over someone else when they get hacked. I have now been a victim of getting hacked, and I have lost all justification as it stands in this category. That's that's not just that's not disappointingly normal, that's just disappointing. And um, but it's a good humbling thing. Anytime you think you know a lot, which maybe will happen to me once in a while, God allows something like this to come in and chop me down a peg or two to humble me and remind me that uh that I can make not just mistakes, but kind of impressively bad mistakes like that. So that's the story of how I got hacked. Uh, let's get into Sunday recap. Um and uh just thinking about uh well, I talked a little bit yesterday about um preaching, but I wanted to share a little bit more about preaching this week and next week and maybe beyond, and just how how did preaching come to be so central in the life of the church? Uh how were we thinking about it at Hope, at Hope North Lakes, and some of those things. So just wanted to share just a brief uh philosophy and even history of preaching. And so one of the things uh that has uh stood out to me, we went to a Bible study training one time where they were uh equipping people who were brand new to the Bible to lead Bible studies, and which I on paper sounds cool, but that these were people who were brand new to the Bible. They didn't understand it, didn't understand how to read it yet. So the way they were equipping them to lead these Bible studies was along the lines of what do you think it says and means? Now that's a challenge when you're looking at God's word because there are ways to uncover what it says and means. One of the ways we do that at Hope is we practice observation, interpretation, integration, application. O-I-I-A, observation, what does it say? What is it just saying? Who are the characters? Who are the players? Interpretation, what then do we think it means based on what the story and narrative and and passage is telling us? What do we think it means? Integration, based on what we think it means, where else do we see that idea, that theme, those concepts in the rest of the Bible and then application? How do we now take that truth and bring it into our lives? So that's a more of a typical way that we would want to study the Bible than just thinking, what do we think it says? And in that, then though, it dawned on me that this equipping people to just lead the Bible without read the Bible and lead Bible studies without ever really spending time with God's word uh was a little different than what I see in the pattern of scripture. If you look at the pattern of scripture, there are always teachers in the Bible. The way that we see it in the Old Testament is there's leaders that God has raised up to speak his word to the people, whether it's prophets or kings or others. Then in the New Testament, obviously, even among the culture of Jesus' time, there's rabbis, there's teachers. Jesus Himself comes as a teacher. And then when he equips the disciples, they go out as teachers. When the apostles are sent, they are sent as teachers. Ephesians 4 tells us he's given us shepherds, evangelists, apostles, prophets, teachers. That's the way God has set it up. There is typically teachers of God's word. That's not to say that those teachers possess all authority. Only Jesus and His Word possess all authority. But there is a level of teaching with authority. In fact, one of the ways that we teach with authority is the Sunday morning service. And Hope's view that Sunday morning service is a moment where all the congregation is gathered together and the preaching of the sermon delivered from an elder is teaching with authority. That would be one of those times it'd be distinct from, for example, a class where someone could teach and lead a class and not necessarily be something that the whole elder team and all of Hope's theology would get behind. Now, on the Sunday morning preaching, that's the opposite. If Sunday mornings come and the preacher decides to say something off the rails that actually wouldn't fit with Hope's theology, that would be something that would merit and warrant a further conversation. So that teaching with authority and that Sunday morning emerges from the teaching that emerges in the scriptures. In the Protestant tradition, the Sunday service or gathering of people around God's word has always revolved around getting people together, yes, but also around the preaching of the word. So the Protestant tradition, which we follow in, in some ways, the Reformed tradition, Protestant tradition, you name it, however you would describe it, we gather on a Sunday and spend a lot of time focusing on God's Word. The hymns that we sing are centered around theology and scripture. The teaching and preaching that we try to do is expositional. And I want to share just a few different ways that people preach. So there can be different kinds of preaching. Sometimes churches will preach in a very life application way. They'll show you principles from the Bible and give you principles for living your life. Other times there's topical sermons, which we haven't really done at North Lakes, except for maybe you could say our vision sermons are that. Topicals give a topic and let's look into it. This fall, we're going to be digging into cultural engagement. That's a topical sermon. Or if we looked at marriage for three weeks or relationships for three weeks, or the government relationship with the government, church and state, or um lying, or some other topic as a topic, that'd be a topical sermon. So you've got uh life application, topical, and then you've got expository teaching, which could take a number of forms, but essentially what you're trying to do is unearth what the biblical text says and then what does it mean. And for us at hope, we're trying to do that kind of teaching to show what the text is saying, what does it mean? And we're also pivoting to why does it matter? And one of the ways we want to pivot to why does it matter is where is Jesus involved. We see Jesus as the central figure of all the scriptures, all the Bible is about Jesus. And so that fourth or that further lane of preaching we would call Christ-centered preaching or gospel-centered preaching, that's really our emphasis at Hope North Lakes. You might see that play out in that uh we don't rely on as much application, very little um five steps on how to fix this or address this in your life, and very much more heralding that good news, which actually leads me into what is preaching. And a simple way of thinking about preaching is it is heralding the good news. It is announcing news. We are not um creating a message of our own. Uh, we are announcing a message that we have received, that message that the King Jesus has come into the world, has died for sin, and that in him is life, and we can have that life uh by trusting in him, by faith in him. And so uh even Isaiah going back says, How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring the good news. The job of a preacher, the job of a communicator is to herald the good news, to point people to Jesus. That's actually the work of the Spirit to point people to Jesus. And uh so that is what preaching is heralding the good news. And um, one of the great places, just to wrap this up, is to build a philosophy of preaching and how we think about preaching, what is its purpose and aim and power, is the uh book of Acts, to look at the different sermons preached in the book of Acts by the Apostle Peter and by the Apostle Paul in particular. And one thing you notice that they do is they go back to the Old Testament story and they quote it and they reference it, but now they show how it centrally locates all the themes, all the dreams, fears, hopes, whatever it was of that Old Testament passage and story or reality or person, how those all come to bear in the person of Jesus Christ. A great example is Acts chapter 2, when it talks about the resurrection of the person in Psalm 16. What is the resurrection of the person in Psalm 16 referring to? It's not referring to David, who remains dead as the passage teaches. It is referring to Jesus Christ, the one who died and rose again. So a great place to look for preaching and how preaching should look and what form it should take is actually the book of Acts, where the apostles are beginning that preaching ministry that the church continues to this day, heralding the good news of Jesus until all have heard. Now, that uh idea of resurrection that Psalm 16 in Acts 2 put forward actually brings us to our shot chaser, Theology Corner, one theological concept to unpack more fully from the sermon. And I want to talk about the doctrine of the resurrection. So we talked a lot about the resurrection uh on Sunday in service. And so here, let me just lay out, because I didn't do this in the service, but a little bit of more, a little bit of more about the doctrine of the resurrection. Now, what happens on the cross is Jesus in his death pays the penalty for our sin. We very much understand that. Chase came home from church singing a song about that. We understand that on the cross, Jesus in his death pays the penalty for our sin. But then his resurrection does a couple things. It does more than what I'm going to share here, but here's a couple things that his resurrection does. First, it ensures our justification. The resurrection of Jesus Christ ensures our justification. You go to Romans 4.25 for verification of that concept, where it the apostle Paul says Jesus died for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. So the death and resurrection now of Jesus Christ ensures that we will have a right standing before God. Why can it do that? Because the resurrection, second part of this, the resurrection is the vindication of Jesus' own righteous life. Here's what I mean. If someone were to rise from the dead, it would be because they did not sin, that they were killed but hadn't actually sinned. They died, but hadn't actually sinned. Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus' own righteous life. In other words, Jesus dies as sin for us, as 2 Corinthians 5 says, He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He dies, but he rises again as vindication that death could not hold him, the grave could not hold him, that he was righteous, and now because he lives, we too can live. When we put our faith in him, it is though, as Paul says in Romans 4, it is as though he died for our sins, and as he was raised for our justification, so we too can trust that we will also be raised. In fact, the Bible teaches that there will be a resurrection of the just and the unjust. What that means is at the end of all things, when Jesus comes to make all things new, he will raise everyone from the dead, and those who trust in him will join him in eternal bliss, and those who have rejected him will be rejected themselves. And so that actually fits with our doctrine of the resurrection. What we look forward to then is a day where we will receive glorified bodies that we actually will uh the perishable will put on imperishable, as 1 Corinthians 15 says. One of the ways that transformation happens, or that I like to think about it, is a think about a sunflower seed and what it looks like, and it becomes a giant sunflower. What a transformation that you don't even get. We're gonna get these glorified spiritual bodies not subject to death or decay anymore, because we will be free from sin. We're gonna live in the new heavens and the new earth. Nancy Guthrie's book uh Um From Garden to City, I'm getting the name wrong on it, but she wrote her book, Oh, even better than Eden, to point out we're moving from a garden, the Garden of Eden, to a city, something even better than the Garden of Eden. We are gonna live in the new heavens and the new earth, where, as Revelation 21 and 22 promise us, there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. Why? Because this resurrection has happened, Jesus has made all things new, there is now no more sin, no more evil. Now the resurrection of Jesus is a guarantee, it is an assurance that he will fulfill all those promises to us, what we saw in the sermon that Peter calls precious and very great promises. We can trust because Jesus has been raised from the dead, that he has gone ahead of us to prepare a place for us in his Father's house. So if your hope is in him, your hope of resurrection is sure, your hope of a glorified body and a life with God forever in the new heavens and the new earth is sure, and we wait and long for that day. That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, just a little bit of how preaching engages the culture. One of our values at Hope North Lake is uh to be engaging. And so we want to see how the gospel comes to bear in an engaging way with our lives. Even this podcast is seeking to engage or take discipleship beyond Sundays to the rest of the week and all of life. And so the way preaching uh engages the culture is that preaching always takes place in its context and the culture in which it is set. So, for example, we live in 2026 in Minnesota, and our congregation and the culture and context that we are in is the suburbs of Minnesota, or the suburbs of the Twin Cities, I should say. Uh, the Shoreview, Lino Lakes, White Bear Lakes, Centerville, uh, that area. Uh, and so that's our context, that's our culture in which we are set. And so then with that, we're trying to engage in preaching the fears, the dreams, the idols of that culture. I was thinking of an example because as soon as you move into an area as a pastor, you're starting to do this, what the phrase is called cultural exegesis. You're trying to exegete the same way that we we talked about expository preaching and trying to understand the meaning of the text or what the text is all about. We talked about uh cultural exegesis. Uh so exegesis comes through and uh and culture and says, what is the culture? Who lives here? What uh demographics are they, things like uh um where they go to school, what they value, what are their fears, dreams, idols of that culture, uh, other identifying characteristics like race, uh, education level, income level, all those things kind of fit with cultural exegesis or learning the culture of the area that you are. Whenever anybody does something like church planting or global missions or local missions, whatever it is they are doing this cultural exegesis, for us at Hope North Lakes, it looked a lot like identifying and kind of continues to look like in preaching and in our other efforts in ministry, identifying the fears, dreams, and idols of the culture. One of the things I identified later in my time moving here to Shoreview was people in our area, the North Suburbs, are very uh capable. People, the school district is very nice, the Shoreview Commons area is very nice. A lot of the spaces and places we live are very well maintained, and it helped me understand and meeting more people, talking with more people. We live in a highly capable area where people are very capable of bending the world to their will. They want the world to look like they think it should look, which is not necessarily a bad thing all the time, but it is an interesting thing when you consider what preaching is trying to do. One of the things you're trying to do in preaching is herald the good news of Jesus, and what that does is actually confront our will because we're bringing to bear God's will. One of the things you're trying to do in preaching is help bin people to God's will, what God says is life-giving, how God says his kingdom is to come into the world, and that actually then in one sense becomes engaging or even confrontational to the way that we worship other things in our lives. So preaching is always looking to identify fears, dreams, idols of the culture, and apply the gospel to bear on those realities. And the beautiful thing about the gospel is it is consistently engaging our hearts and it is always working on us. God is always working on us. And one of the ways we talked about it, I want to move into a beyond Sunday's personal application point, is that living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now. Living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now. We put our ultimate hope in God and not more for ourselves. If this life is all there is, then we should live for more experiences, more money, more of whatever we think is important. That is how we should live and where we should give our time and energy. But living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now because we don't live in ultimate hope of more, whatever that more would look like. We live in the ultimate hope that God is one day going to make all things new, that God has promised to restore us, to resurrect us, to give us new life, glorified bodies, a new heavens and a new earth, that he's gonna take away all the pain and all the suffering. And that's not some sort of fluffy message that actually gives real hope right now. I just want to share three ways that living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now. First, with suffering. It does not make suffering something to just say, oh, well, one day it's gonna be alright. But it doesn't dismiss that either. Whatever suffering we go through, one thing we can know is that it is not ultimate because Jesus, when he experienced the ultimate suffering, rose from the dead to gain victory over death and mourning and crying and pain, and one day we'll make all things new. Second, living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now because we have an unshakable hope. God has promised to do something and he has made it sure to us by raising Jesus from the dead. So we have an unshakable hope. We have something to hope in that is out of this world, and it isn't aliens. Apparently, that's more in the news these days. We have something to hope in that is out of this world that we aren't hoping in our own abilities to save ourselves, we aren't hoping for our circumstances to change, we aren't, although those that'd be nice at times, we aren't hoping for different things, we're hoping in God to fulfill his promises, and we know he's going to because Jesus already walked out of the grave. So living in the life of the resurrection changes how we hope. And then finally, it changes our security, and mainly it changes where we look for security. I gave the example in the service of looking to security, looking to wealth for security, and how easy it would be to look to wealth for security to say, if I just have enough, or if I just make a little more, then I know I'll be okay. Now, interestingly, what we see from Jesus in the gospel is the story of how living that way misses the point. And that's what God comes in and says, I'm your security. Put my hope in my precious and very great promises that I've given you, God says, and that will create in you a spiritual power that gives you a security that helps weather any storm, any circumstance, any challenge. And so that's a way that living in light of the resurrection changes our lives now. The way that we suffer, the way that we hope, the place we look for security. And that's good news. And as a church, then thinking about this as we close, more people need to get in on this. More people need to get in on this. Here's what I mean. Everywhere around us, we're living our lives and maybe even very capable lives, very good lives, very comfortable lives. But people around us need this kind of unshakable hope. They need this kind of meaning and purpose for their suffering. They need a security that this world can't provide, and all of this is found in Jesus and in Jesus alone. And as a church, we have the opportunity to invite people into that, to share our lives with them, to share our hope with them, to share how Jesus gives us meaning and purpose in our suffering, to share how Jesus provides for us a security that we can't provide for ourselves. We get the chance to be, for example, disappointingly normal, that we aren't the ones who get the glory and the honor and the fame. He does, and we get to point people to that. So let's be reminded of our goal to make him more known, to help more people start and strengthen their relationship with him, because he truly is that good, he truly is that kind. He gives us a security, a hope, a love, and an unshakable foundation not only for this life, but also for the life to come. Friends, it's been great sharing these things with you, thinking more about the goodness of God to us in his life, death, and resurrection of his son Jesus. As always, friends, the news is good, the grace is free. Have a great week.