Episode 11 - Security & Significance

Join us for another episode of the Disappointingly Normal podcast. This week we break down how to craft the ultimate playlist and what the word "Messiah" means. We look to Jesus for security and significance and hear a powerful story that teaches us what life can look like when we're tapping into the power of Jesus. 

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back to the Disappointingly Normal Podcast. This podcast is a project of Hope Community Church North Lakes that meets in Shoreview, Minnesota. I'm your host, Paul Stiver, and we are disappointingly normal. What does that mean to be disappointingly normal? I think every week I come up with a disappointingly normal explanation of it because I didn't pre-record one for all time. But I think it means, and the way we think about it at our church, is it means we're not trying to impress anyone. We're trying to be normal followers of Jesus. We're not trying to impress anyone. We're also not trying to be weird. We want to be disappointingly normal because Jesus is the hero of our story. He's the hero of our lives, and we are not, nor do we have to be. And that's actually incredibly freeing. And it forms and creates a culture of people who are disappointingly normal as they follow Jesus together. I wanted to jump in with a quick story about playlists, making playlists on uh actually switched from Spotify to Apple Music recently, mostly because I was being a curmudgeon and was getting frustrated with paying the increased and continually increasing prices of Spotify. You can hear a little bit of my frustration come out there. Uh thanks to Spotify for sponsoring this program. They do not do that, but they do. This does go out on Spotify. Um, but I'm now on Apple Music, always love making playlists. There's an art to making a playlist. This is something that it's easy to miss, but there's an art to making a playlist. And uh some of the playlists that I've made include uh you have to like with the art of it, you have to think about um uh and I maybe I've shared this before. With the art of it, though, you have to think about things like does each song flow well with each other song? Let's say you have 20 songs on a playlist. Does one song kind of jump out like nails on a chalkboard? And you're like, this does not fit. So there's like a vibe to it, there's a theme or like a feel of it, even a tone of it, maybe. Um, that that these songs have to kind of all merge together and fit together. Um, so that's a big art of it. Uh, the other thing is like forming it around a genre uh or and kind of a direction. And so what are you what's the purpose of this? Is this a long time playlist that you're gonna come back to over and over? Are you putting together a playlist for like a grad party or something? And it's one time. So here's some of the playlists I've made and just talk through them. I love also adding images and descriptions to my playlists. Um, so I've got dad bod. That's uh that's dad rock for guys with bad backs who uh grunt when they stand up. So the dad bod playlist is kind of stuff that dads, 90s dads would play in a garage. So a lot of like 90s angsty music. You got like Creed on there, nickelback, third eye blind, collective soul, three doors down, crossfade, anything you'd expect that like 90s, maybe elder millennial dad to just throw on in a garage when he's being in this garage. That's the dad bod playlist. You got old school, that's just classic rock, and I'm I'm just starting to build that one out. Getting excited about old school. I've got one called DJ Unk. This one's more recent, and this is just a song, kind of the crazy songs that kids like, like that chicken banana song is on there. Uh, a lot of stuff from like this peri grip that has like pancake robot and these crazy songs that kids love, but I call that DJ Unk. Got uh playlist called Soft Hands, brother. That's now this this is a phrase that blue-collar men will sometimes use for white-collar people. They'll say, You got soft hands, brother. But this playlist is like a bunch of kind of that maybe like southern rock, like more new southern rock type stuff, Tyler Childers, uh, some people like that, a little Zach Bryan, a little um a bit of like Coulter Wolf, you know him. So it's like kind of that range of like newer southern rock, has a western feel to it, a little Johnny Cash on here, but it's for it's kind of that blue-collar vibe. That's soft hands, brother. I've got I like country music, a lot of people don't. Uh, and I grew up uh there was a season where all my buddies we got into like 90s country for like a year in high school, and so I still go back to that music. So I've got a playlist. Uh the play my country music playlist is actually named after the jeweler in my hometown because the jewelry was named Klug's Country Gold. And I thought, what a perfect name for a country playlist, Klugs Country Gold. And it's because it's just the country gold. Got other playlists that worship playlists has been a fun one to continue adding to as we've added new songs at Hope North Lakes. I kind of continue updating songs as Chase learned songs at school, different things. It's fun to add songs, but I love making playlists. I just talked for way too long about playlists. I hope you enjoyed that combo. What are the playlists you're making out there? I'd love to hear what you're working on and songs you're finding, how you're orienting your playlists. But I want to jump into Sunday recap as we do every week, thinking about the sermon uh yesterday, but also looking at uh going a little deeper, maybe what got cut, what did we talk about? One of the things we talked about yesterday was the idea of Messiah, of this Old Testament promised, anointed king, this king who is gonna come and drive out enemies and reign in righteousness, establish again the kingdom of God. Who is this king gonna be? And we referenced three passages, and I just want to hit on those a little bit more in depth. Um, and so I reference 2 Samuel 7. So this is Old Testament. This is King David, his son Nathan. They're having this encounter with God. Nathan is a prophet, and David's wanting to build a house for the Lord. He thinks he should build a house for the Lord. And he's not necessarily out of line in that, but God says, I'm actually gonna build a house for you. He says, I'm gonna raise up, this is in 2 Samuel 7, verse 12, when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. And he continues, and to your house and kingdom, your kingdom and your he says, and your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever because of me, your throne shall be established forever. So we've got this promise. This is called the Davidic covenant, this covenant God makes with David, this promise he makes with David, and he says, There's gonna be a king who comes in your line. He says, from your lineage or an offspring after you who shall come from your body. That's very much heritage, lineage talk in the old testament. And he says, This king is gonna establish your throne forever, which obviously then the next king is King Solomon, and that's clearly not him. And the king's kind of going this downward spiral. So we're waiting on this king, which leads us to one of the royal psalms, Psalm 110, which we looked at, and just a couple verses here. It says, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter, rule in the midst of your enemies. Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power in the holy garments. From the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours. The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek. So there's this crazy passage here, but it's about this coming king who's gonna be established, who's also somehow a priest, which we don't have time to get into, but it's really fascinating, and at some point we will cover. But here comes this king who's gonna rule, and actually, it's gonna be this king is gonna be a lord, uh, seemingly God in some way, and this king is gonna sit at God's right hand until God makes the this king's enemies a footstool. Really compelling stuff. The other place I wanted to go was Isaiah 53. How is this king gonna come into the world? So if you're familiar with the book of Isaiah, there is this servant in Isaiah. I want to say there's five different major sections in Isaiah that describe a servant being sent by God to do all kinds of things. But in Isaiah 52 and 53, we see that this is a suffering servant. So this servant that God is going to send is a suffering servant. And now listen to these verses here, verses 10 through 12 of Isaiah 53. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him, he has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days, the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors. So now here's this king who is promised and will have enemies under his feet, but then Isaiah comes in and says he's actually, according to the plan of God, going to be put to grief, going to be crushed, going to offer up his soul for guilt, but it's not his own guilt. He's bearing the sin of many. So now this king who's going to rule, who's going to see enemies destroyed, is going to do so by offering his life to make it possible for his enemies actually to be counted as righteous because he's going to bear our iniquities, he's going to take away our sin. What kind of king has come into the world in the Messiah in the person of Jesus? Well, friends, he's the defeated king. He's the defeated king, but he's also the exalted king. Psalm 110 and Mark twelve say, Sit at my right hand. The book of Hebrews over and over says God has raised him. He's raised him to the right hand. He is the exalted king. The defeated king is the exalted king. Now what this means is that then God has provided our ultimate need. God has provided the king who has dealt with our sin by being defeated as though he was a sinner, and now has been raised to sit at the right hand of God when we are now connected to him and his life, we also sit with God in that place of honor, in the heavenly realms, as Ephesians 2 says. And so if we can trust that God has provided our ultimate need in Christ, we can trust him to provide the rest of our needs. And that's what stands out about how the widow lives in Mark 12. She gives all she has to live on because she trusts that God is all she needs. Then one commentary pointed out, uh famous understanding of this passage. I mentioned yesterday that this is the most famous donation in all of history. One commentary had reflected on that. But another thing that jumps out is the woman gave two coins. The poor widow gave two coins, all she had to live on, two coins. And someone pointed out she would have been right, she could have held one back. Out of all she had to live on, she had two coins and she gave them both. She could have actually been in the right to hold one back. It's amazing how she trusts God and how she's not even our ultimate example. That she's actually a picture of how Jesus gave all for our sake without holding back, so that we can now know God will always provide for us, always care for us, and always bring us into that place of honor with his son Jesus. What amazing news. Now I want to tap into the next thing here in just theology corner. We're talking about the incarnation. So quick transition from that kingly talk, that Messiah talk, into the incarnation. And what the incarnation is, is that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. I think perhaps my favorite ways to think about the incarnation are twofold. One is the ancient quote that says, Remaining what he was, he became what he was not. Remaining fully the Son of God from all eternity, Jesus became what he was not. In other words, a baby and eventually a human man. So Jesus took on flesh, remaining what he was, he became what he was not. So he's fully God and then becomes fully human. But another way of thinking about it is the author, in our case, the author of all creation, has written himself into the story. What amazing truths come out of this doctrine of the incarnation. To be honest, I've taught systematic theology for years. And besides the doctrine of the Trinity, which I do love, I think this incarnation is my favorite doctrine to study and talk about. It is unbelievable that the creator God, who exists in pure holiness from all eternity, would see fit to write himself into the sinful, messy, broken, rebellious world that we have designed apart from him. And yet that's the story of the gospel and the incarnation. The way we saw it in the passage, and the way we can think about it is that Jesus is then both son of David, following in that heritage, that lineage, and also son of God. He's the son of God from all eternity. He's the son of David in that he comes in the kingly line of David to be that Messiah to save. So where we see that in the Bible is all over, but one of the places we can find it immediately is in Matthew 1. When Matthew's writing his gospel, he's very much trying to establish the pattern of history. And so he starts with the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew chapter 1. In fact, the first sentence says this the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. And then he's going to go on to list in the first six verses how did we get from Abraham to David? And he's tracing that heritage. And then he's going to go on to say, and now from David, all the way down to in verse 16, it says, And Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. So he traces the line then from David to Joseph, who is the earthly father of Jesus, in as far as he was Mary's husband and becomes Jesus' father. Obviously, we know Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Luke 135 tells us that. But we see here this lineage of Jesus, that he is in fact a Messiah to come in the lineage of the King David. And then we also come to understand that he is the Son of God in Hebrews chapter 1. The author starts out by creating and emphasizing the argument that the God that God's Son is supreme over the angels. And in that he quotes Psalm 110, and he just says, To which of the angels has he ever said, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet? Over and over and over, and Hebrews 1, here another spot, but of the Son he says, Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore, God your God has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. So on the one hand, Jesus is the Son of David. Hebrews and other places in the New Testament emphasize over and over He's the Son of God. In fact, that's how Jesus shows us out of Psalm 110. So the incarnation, Jesus is the Son of God, He's the Son of David, He's the perfect Messiah who's come and again has come to be defeated for our sin, to bear our death and sin, so that we now can have resurrection life in Him, acceptance by God because of Him and through our faith in Him. Unbelievable news here. I'm getting excited. Uh, wanted to drop into the cultural engagement piece that we try to try to tap into every week on the podcast and think about just a question for you. And shifting gears a little bit, but how often do you feel insecure? How often do you feel insignificant? Insecure. Like I just don't know what the world around me's got for me. Insignificant. Does anyone really care? Does anyone really notice? Does anyone love me? Am I small, forgotten? What causes that for you? Ironically, for interestingly enough, for me, one of the things that causes me to feel insecure is getting dressed up. Uh dressing up in nice clothes for some reason. I just always that that calls back so many memories of not fitting into clothes or different challenges, and it it just brings it's becomes oddly personal for me. And um, so but what how often and when and why do you feel insecure and insignificant? The reason I bring that up, and this actually comes up from way back, an old old book uh by a guy named Larry Crab. There's this old book, and uh, and he writes though that the two basic needs for human beings are security and significance. Now, here's what's interesting. He's writing not just for Christians, he's writing for all people, and he says, security and significance, security and significance are the two things that drive us. So uh, you know, it's interesting then thinking culturally about this. So many of our actions in this world are done to ensure that we have security and significance. Think about this. Now, remember during COVID, uh, for those of us that haven't forgotten it or tried to black it out of our memories or whatever, but during COVID, I remember uh toilet paper, paper towel, different things like that at Costco were flying off the shelves. Really trying to, everyone was trying to make sure they had those items. I remember uh the the feeling of uh excitement when I was able to find paper towels at Costco during that time because we didn't know what was going on. And I remember even then the feeling of stocking those paper towels on a shelf in our laundry room was really a feeling of security. It's and even now, whenever I buy stuff like Kleenex, paper towels, toilet paper, and I'm stocking those shelves in our laundry room so that we've got a backup supply and that when we need it, I don't have to go to the store, I can just go to the laundry room. I feel secure from that. So many of our actions in this world are done to ensure that we have security. So many are done to ensure that we have significance. You know, we live in a time. Well, we saw it in our passage. The scribes live for honor, they want to know their significance. So everywhere they go, they demand that people honor them and show them that, hey, you're significant. We get it, we see it. You got the best seat here, you got the best seat there, everyone's acknowledging you. Everywhere you go, you're significant. In our culture, we have this thing we call expressive individualism, which essentially is the idea that life is found and finding out, discovering, uncovering, if you will, who we are really, and then expressing that upon the world. And then the level to which we are free, the level to which we are recognized, is the level to which the world acknowledges us for who we are. So if I discover that I am a Packer fan, that's who I really am, then the level to which I am free is the level to which other people acknowledge me as a Packer fan. Acknowledge me all the time, see my significance, recognize me. Now, if we are living in a world to ensure our security and significance that's going to cause us to do things we might regret, we might force people to recognize our significance and in the in so doing be unloving to them. We might look to other things for security that can't ultimately provide. I mean, a paper towel rack full of paper towels in our laundry room can only do so much for my life. What happens when the world around me is shaken? I can't run to my paper towels unless it's a spill. Then I can't. But so many of our actions in this world done to ensure we have. Security and significance. Now, here's the distinctiveness for Christians. For Christians, our security and significance come from God. How do we know we are secure? The Bible says, even of things like our tears, He keeps our tears in a jar, He watches over us without sleeping or slumber. He's aware of us. He sees us. He loves us. He's looking at us. He knows who we are. And because of that, we know He we are secure in Him. And in fact, when we trust in Christ, we know we are secure in the heavenly realm, sitting with Him, as it were. And our significance comes from God. How do we know we have significance? One of the hymns we sing, Who You Say I Am at North Lakes, says this Who am I that the highest king would welcome me? I was lost, but he brought me in. Oh his love for me. For Christians, our ultimate honor then, our ultimate significance comes not from things we produce or how much people recognize us for what we've done or who we are. Our ultimate honor, our ultimate significance, our ultimate security are found in Christ, the one who loves us and cares for us, the one to whom we are his sheep and he is our shepherd. Friends in a world grasping for security and significance, trying to squeeze it out wherever they can find it. We have the best news. We have the best person in Jesus to offer. And for anyone out there who lacks security and significance, they can find it in him and in their love, in his love for them. Moving into a little bit of application for going beyond Sundays, again, the goal of this podcast is to take discipleship beyond Sundays into the rest of the week and all of life. We talked about yesterday that if we're trying to look like Jesus without tapping into his power, then we're relying only on ourselves and we'll fall flat. And I thought, what can it look like to access the power of Jesus? I thought it'd be helpful to use forgiveness as an example. What can it be look like to access the power of Jesus when it comes to forgiveness? I love talking about this topic because forgiveness is so difficult and because it's so hard to do in our own strength. So if we're looking at forgiveness, how can we forgive in the power of Jesus? And there's a few things I wrote. Acknowledge our inability. I actually don't have the ability to forgive you like I should. Acknowledge the hurt. Here's how this hurt me and why I'm feeling it so deeply. Acknowledge our need for grace to be provided. You know how beautiful a prayer is when you say, God, I know you're calling me to forgive this person, and I cannot do it. I need your help. Further, we can remember how God in Christ has forgiven us. We get to, we can reflect on the freedom we feel in knowing that God has, as Psalm 103 says, removed our sin as far as the East is from the West, that our sin has been taken away from us. God has forgiven our sin. We're free from it. He's forgiven it. And then we can take that reflection and turn and say, what would it mean then for the other person, no matter how much they've hurt us, to encounter that kind of forgiving love? So instead of then white knuckling the forgiveness in our own strength and ultimately clinging to grudges because we would fall flat, instead of that, we could experience the power and freedom of forgiving someone that God actually works in spiritual power in us when we obey Him like that, when we seek His Him for the grace to do that. There's this incredible story from Corey Tenboom that really highlights that. And so I want to take some time just to tell it. She says it was 1947, and I'd come from Holland. So she was in uh the war, World War II. She was hiding Jewish people in her home, and obviously they dealt with a lot of struggles because of that. If you've ever read any of her story, but she said I'd now I'm a speaker for God. She says I'd come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter bombed out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander's mind, I like to think that's where forgiven sins were thrown. When we confess our sins, I said God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, and silence collected their wraps, and silence left the room, and that's when I saw him working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat, the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush. The huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, this is her reminiscing on her time in the concentration camp, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister's frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsy, how thin you were. Betsy and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland. This man had been a guard at the Ravensbrook concentration camp where we were sent. Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out. A fine message, Fraulein, how good it is to know that as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea, and I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course, how could he remember one prisoner amongst those thousands of women? But I remembered him. In the leather crop swinging from his belt, it was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors, and my blood seemed to freeze. You mentioned Ravensbrook in your talk, he was saying I was a guard there. No, he did not remember me. But since that time he went on, I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Frulein, again the hand came out. Will you forgive me? And as I stood there, who I, whose sins every day had to be forgiven and could not. Betsy had died in that place, could he erase her slow, terrible death simply for the asking? It could not have been many seconds that he stood there hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it, I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition that we forgive those who have injured us. If you do not forgive men their trespasses, Jesus says, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses. I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had I had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids, it was as simple and horrible as that. And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart, but forgiveness is not an emotion, I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. Jesus help me, I prayed silently. I can lift my hand, I can do that much. You supply the feeling, and so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands, and then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. I forgive you, brother, I cried with all my heart. For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then. Friends, when we think about tapping into the power of Jesus, look how it is in her prayer. All she says is, Jesus help me. If we want to look like Jesus in this world, it starts there and ends there. We look not to ourselves, but we look to Jesus and we say, Jesus, help me. And friends, then as a church, we get that chance to remind each other of that news. We get that chance to lean into the grace of God. Being needy and trusting God to provide, like we see in this story, like we saw in the story of the Bible, like we saw in the widow with the two coins, being needy and trusting God to provide is the normal pattern of following Jesus together. And we can trust, because he's met our ultimate need in Jesus, that he will always care for us and always provide for us until that day that we see him face to face. So, friends, it's been great to again join you and talk about the grace of God, friends. As always, the news is good, the grace is free. Have a great week.