SPEAKER_00: I want you to get to Colossians chapter one.
SPEAKER_00: Colossians chapter one.
SPEAKER_00: We'll start in verse 15.
SPEAKER_00: There was a guy named Howard McDavid.
SPEAKER_00: Howard McDavid lived in Madison, Wisconsin.
SPEAKER_00: He lived in an apartment building on one of the higher floors.
SPEAKER_00: Howard was in the apartment building.
SPEAKER_00: He was with his wife, and it was the middle of the day.
SPEAKER_00: And Howard just felt something.
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, like felt something.
SPEAKER_00: Like, is this a little bit of an earthquake?
SPEAKER_00: What is going on?
SPEAKER_00: He felt something, was a little unstable in the foundation of the floor.
SPEAKER_00: And he looked and he could see actually just a little bit of a sag in the floor.
SPEAKER_00: And so Howard got his wife, they got out of the apartment, and he kind of just started doing a walkthrough because he was like, What is going on?
SPEAKER_00: Walked through the apartment building, found a work crew that was in the basement.
SPEAKER_00: There was some remodeling that was going on, and they were working in the basement that day, even remodeling the basement area, and they were trying to clear out some things.
SPEAKER_00: They had done a little bit of work in the basement.
SPEAKER_00: And Howard was like, guys, stop.
SPEAKER_00: You need to come up and see my apartment.
SPEAKER_00: So they agreed.
SPEAKER_00: They go up the stairs with he and his wife.
SPEAKER_00: They get to the entryway of his apartment.
SPEAKER_00: He points in and he says, look at the floor.
SPEAKER_00: And as Howard points in and says, Look at the floor, the floor collapsed and went through to the next apartment, to the next apartment, to the next.
SPEAKER_00: His apartment collapsed all the way into the basement.
SPEAKER_00: Now, luckily, it was in the middle of the day.
SPEAKER_00: Howard and his wife were the only ones in those apartments that were home, other people that work.
SPEAKER_00: They were standing outside of the apartment, so they were okay, but they watched as his apartment just collapsed all the way through four stories into the basement.
SPEAKER_00: What had happened is that work crew was clearing out some space and they removed a wall.
SPEAKER_00: Except it wasn't just any wall, it was a load-bearing wall that was holding the weight of four apartments up for decades.
SPEAKER_00: We start this series.
SPEAKER_00: It's called The Life You're Chasing.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing that I think every single one of us is chasing something.
SPEAKER_00: We talked about that last week.
SPEAKER_00: If you're young, you're chasing like purpose and that next job and that promotion because the thing you got now, you know, is not what you're gonna end up with.
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, if I could just make it to this, and we're always chasing something more.
SPEAKER_00: If you're old, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_00: You're chasing your youth.
SPEAKER_00: Like I show up on Monday nights and I play with a bunch of 35-year-olds, play some basketball.
SPEAKER_00: They're super gracious.
SPEAKER_00: I'm chasing my youth and I am not catching it.
SPEAKER_00: It's just not happening yet, right?
SPEAKER_00: We're chasing relationships.
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Some of you in your family, you're chasing a family that is thriving, not just a family that's surviving.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's a marriage relationship or a dating relationship.
SPEAKER_00: You're chasing things, we're chasing purpose.
SPEAKER_00: We are reaching and grasping for so many things, and for some of us, we're either catching it and then going, I want more.
SPEAKER_00: This isn't satisfying, or we're reaching and grasping for it, and we don't have a lot to show for it.
SPEAKER_00: We're missing it.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we went through Luke 9, 23, it's our verse.
SPEAKER_00: Like we're new to central, it's it's been our verse for four decades.
SPEAKER_00: Not gonna change because we look at this, and Jesus said, He just stepped out and he said, You want to, you want to know how to find the life you're looking for.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying this to his disciples.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I'll just give it to you, really plain and easy.
SPEAKER_00: Luke chapter 9, verse 23.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Whoever wants to be my disciple, last week we talked about that idea, disciples not church member.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a little bit of time, an hour on Sunday morning, or we got services on Thursday night, an hour on Thursday night, or you know, a few minutes in the morning.
SPEAKER_00: A disciple is not a church member.
SPEAKER_00: John Mark Comer in his book Practicing the Way, we said it last week, he defines disciple as apprentice.
SPEAKER_00: These young men that would leave their jobs, people like Peter and James and John and others, people who would leave their jobs, leave their family, and they would follow a rabbi, and then when they left to follow this rabbi, like spend 24-7 with them, learning their values, learning their beliefs, learning their philosophy and their teaching, they would give this blessing to them and say, May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.
SPEAKER_00: Meaning, may you follow so closely after your rabbi that the dust literally from his feet on those dusty dirt roads would kick up and get all over you.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Jesus is saying.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone wants to be my disciple, not church member, but a print, a person who patterns their life after me, who follows so closely that we get the dust of the rabbi on us, his values, his belief, everything, the way he loves.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up the cross daily, and follow me.
SPEAKER_00: A verse is, I said it last week.
SPEAKER_00: If you drive by and you're like, why in the world do they have the cross on its side?
SPEAKER_00: It's that idea.
SPEAKER_00: There was Jesus' cross 2,000 years ago that saves us, and then there is our cross that we pick up, surrender, and we follow and put Jesus first in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: John Mark Homer says, discipleship looks like this, or being a person who follows that closely after Jesus means that we are with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That we are trying to, because we're with him, we're becoming like Jesus, and then we are trying to do what Jesus did.
SPEAKER_00: We would say it around here in our three values.
SPEAKER_00: Like to be a disciple, not just a church member, but to be one who follows that closely after Jesus, we would say it is a person who has three values, puts Jesus first, loves people always, and realizes they are made for more.
SPEAKER_00: Like you realize you were made for more.
SPEAKER_00: You're not made just to sit in a seat, you're not made to just consume.
SPEAKER_00: You are made to contribute, not just to sit, but to serve.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: We love people because Jesus loved people, even people who are different in their beliefs, their thoughts, their background, their skin color, whatever.
SPEAKER_00: We love because Jesus loved and created all people, even us.
SPEAKER_00: And then we put them first in every area.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what's interesting, we're going through this value series, it's all of those values.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, You won't find the life you're looking for?
SPEAKER_00: You lean into these values more, and you will begin to see the miraculous work of God's Spirit working in you and giving you more of the stability, not a perfect life, because we are imperfect people, but give you more of the stability in areas like your relationships, your parenting, even your finances, your thoughts on purpose and what this life is all about.
SPEAKER_00: He says, if you lean into this, you're gonna find something.
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna grab hold of something, and it's not gonna be just that you're wanting more.
SPEAKER_00: You're like, hey, this is bringing meaning to my life.
SPEAKER_00: But in those values, here's the thing we need to understand all three of those lead to that kind of life, but one holds the rest of them up.
SPEAKER_00: You could say that this one value is like the load-bearing wall that holds the weight of all the others.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have this one, it's no use even worrying about the next two.
SPEAKER_00: And that value is our Jesus' first value.
SPEAKER_00: We would say it like this: we would say that Jesus isn't just part of your life, he is your life.
SPEAKER_00: Meaning you can't compartmentalize Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what so many of us do.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you have said this phrase?
SPEAKER_00: My spiritual life.
SPEAKER_00: Like, have you said that before?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my spiritual life.
SPEAKER_00: And we kind of have this concept of well, I got a spiritual life, and then I got a private life, and I got a social life, and I got a professional life, and I got a family life, and no, you have a life.
SPEAKER_00: You have a life, like God created you, and he's not meant to be one category in your life.
SPEAKER_00: What Jesus is meant to be is he's meant to be the organizing principle, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like the organizing principle, be the foundation, like the load-bearing wall that holds every other area up.
SPEAKER_00: And you see, when you when he is the one that you pattern your parenting after, it changes what the goal is, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like, well, what are we producing in our kids?
SPEAKER_00: Like some of us, we're we're going after, man, the scholarship.
SPEAKER_00: We're going after the, you know, helping our kids be successful in life.
SPEAKER_00: And what if you get the end of that and they get all of the things that make them successful in this world, but they miss eternity and a relationship with God and what God could do in their life with so many other people.
SPEAKER_00: When Jesus is first in your marriage, you stop loving for what you can get, and you start loving for what you can give.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's what Jesus did.
SPEAKER_00: When Jesus is first in your finances, it changes how you save, it changes how you spend, it changes your view on generosity and realizing that God has given it all to us, and he says, I want you to be a part of this mission that's called the church, and we invest because we realize that we are laying up treasures in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that is really hard because there are financial pressures we all feel.
SPEAKER_00: But when Jesus is first, something drastically different begins to happen in our life when he's not.
SPEAKER_00: It's not always that the apartment falls through four floors into the basement.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of times what happens is when we just remove him, some of the load-bearing weight that he can handle, what happens is we don't see it all crash down.
SPEAKER_00: We just see a crack here, we something see something sagging here, we see another crack there, and what it does is slowly over time it erodes the stability of our life.
SPEAKER_00: Colossians chapter one, Paul writes to the church in Colossee.
SPEAKER_00: It was a church that he planted.
SPEAKER_00: He had been there, he knew this church.
SPEAKER_00: He writes from prison, so it's later on in life.
SPEAKER_00: Paul was in prison in Rome, or you could say in house arrest in Rome, and he writes four letters.
SPEAKER_00: They're called the prison epistles.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the word epistle means letters.
SPEAKER_00: So he writes four letters: one to the church in Ephesus, Ephesians, one to the church in Philippi, Philippians, one to the church in Colossee, Colossians, and then one to Philemon.
SPEAKER_00: And he writes these letters in response to different things in the church.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul writes to Colossae, and when he writes to them, he's writing in response to heresy.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you got to understand the context real quick before we get in and we talk about this Jesus first idea.
SPEAKER_00: He's writing in context of a heresy that was invading into the church.
SPEAKER_00: It was coming into the church.
SPEAKER_00: They weren't saying no to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: What they were doing was saying yes to Jesus and to other things.
SPEAKER_00: So what they were doing in that culture is they were saying, oh, Jesus and.
SPEAKER_00: And it became Jesus and Jewish law, Jewish commandments from the Old Testament and the Jewish law.
SPEAKER_00: It became Jesus and philosophy, Jesus and mythology, Jesus and mysticism, Jesus and whatever background someone was coming from, they were bringing into the church, and there were people that were teaching, well, yeah, Jesus, this, but also if you want to be saved or if you want to grow this.
SPEAKER_00: Paul was like, that doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like this.
SPEAKER_00: You ever been to McDonald's with somebody and you walk up in your order and they order a Big Mac, a supersized fry, and a Diet Coke?
SPEAKER_00: It's like you lost the calories, man, of the war right there at Big Mac, right?
SPEAKER_00: And a diet coke, it just doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul's trying to say in a much, much bigger sense.
SPEAKER_00: He is saying, geez, and that's heresy.
SPEAKER_00: And he writes in the next five verses, Colossians chapter 1, 15 through 20, he writes one of the deepest theological explanations for the nature of God, not just the nature of God, the nature of Jesus and who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Man, you want to know why he can be the load-bearing wall in every area of your life?
SPEAKER_00: It's because he's this big.
SPEAKER_00: And you take all that he writes in Colossians chapter 1, starting at verse 15, going through verse 20, and you could just summarize it down to two words.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus only.
SPEAKER_00: Not Jesus and but Jesus only.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to what he writes.
SPEAKER_00: He says, the Son, meaning Jesus, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for in him all things were created.
SPEAKER_00: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.
SPEAKER_00: He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
SPEAKER_00: And he is the head of the body, the church.
SPEAKER_00: He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.
SPEAKER_00: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Paul steps in and he just looks at the church in Colossae and he just says, Guys, you are missing it.
SPEAKER_00: As soon as you step in and say, Jesus and what you're doing is you are minimizing Jesus and you are having yourself stand over him.
SPEAKER_00: What Paul is just trying to paint this picture of is you don't under what you and I, we begin to understand, like throughout life, when we start trying to hold up the pressure and the weight of being the best parent we can, of handling our finances amidst our circumstances, of being the best spouse or the best person for the relationships that we're in, or the best boss that we can be, when we start trying to, eventually we start going, man, I just don't think I'm strong enough to hold all of this up.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, when you when you become Jesus in, that's what you're trying to do.
SPEAKER_00: But when you step back and you put Jesus first and you realize Jesus only, and he is the one who becomes the organizing structure under everything in your life.
SPEAKER_00: He defines how you love, he defines how you believe what you believe.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about that.
SPEAKER_00: If he is the one who created all things, the one that designed all things, then he is the one when it comes to your beliefs.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like Jesus gets a vote, Jesus gets the final say.
SPEAKER_00: When it comes to cultural issues that we look at and and all those things, and we all have our opinions.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the one who defines what is best in all of those areas.
SPEAKER_00: And some of you don't like hearing that.
SPEAKER_00: You're like, I, man, I want to be open and understanding of all kinds of different ideas and all kinds of different backgrounds.
SPEAKER_00: And do you understand that Jesus was?
SPEAKER_00: That's why the crowds, that's why the outcasts, that's why the herding, that's why the people who were different than the Jewish people flocked to Jesus because Jesus was the most loving.
SPEAKER_00: You want to go to our people always value that's next week?
SPEAKER_00: He was the most loving people, person that's ever lived.
SPEAKER_00: But he becomes the one who defines, and when he's not, that's when things begin to crumble in those areas of our life.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you just begin to read Colossians chapter 1, 15 through 20, it's like, wow, yeah, Sean, that's great.
SPEAKER_00: If you just read it, you don't get it.
SPEAKER_00: But when you read it and understand it, you begin to see the power of Jesus to hold up the weight of your life and so much more.
SPEAKER_00: Like when Paul writes, if we just go through it just for a second, if you look at verse 15, he says the Son is the image of the invisible God.
SPEAKER_00: He's not saying right there that Jesus is a rough sketch.
SPEAKER_00: You know, kind of kind of look at Jesus and look at the gospels and you just get a picture.
SPEAKER_00: No, he says he is the image, the exact, that word means exact representation.
SPEAKER_00: You want to get to know who God is.
SPEAKER_00: You look at the person of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: God the Son, who came in the flesh with all the compassion, all the mercy, all the love, all the grace, all the forgiveness, the sacrifice that went to the cross for our sins to make our lives right.
SPEAKER_00: And then he goes on, he says, the firstborn of all creation.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you are firstborn?
SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand.
SPEAKER_00: Got a lot of firstborns in here.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a firstborn.
SPEAKER_00: I've got a sister named Sarah, she's six and a half years younger than me.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what we're talking about, being the firstborn chronologically, what he's saying.
SPEAKER_00: First century culture, man, firstborn was rank.
SPEAKER_00: Firstborn was authority, firstborn was about inheritance.
SPEAKER_00: What he's saying is Jesus is the one with supreme rights over everything because he created all.
SPEAKER_00: He's the blueprint.
SPEAKER_00: He designed this whole thing.
SPEAKER_00: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authority, all things have been created through him.
SPEAKER_00: He's not just the architect, he's the builder, and he's building it ongoing through his Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And you would look around and you would say, Well, man, our world is sure messed up if he's building.
SPEAKER_00: You know what?
SPEAKER_00: That's because we do so much, we minimize him and we try to do the building.
SPEAKER_00: But in the places where God's spirit, where Jesus is being placed first, you see beauty and you see compassion and you see mercy given where it's not deserved, and you see grace, and you just see this beautiful picture of what heaven's gonna be like, and there's just a little bit here on earth, and if we would put him first more, he could build more through us.
SPEAKER_00: And then it says, been created through him and what?
SPEAKER_00: For him.
SPEAKER_00: Man, that's where we miss it.
SPEAKER_00: That's where you and I miss it.
SPEAKER_00: I know that's where I miss it.
SPEAKER_00: Because half the time I think this whole thing was created for me.
SPEAKER_00: And so what I try to do is I try to hold it every everything up.
SPEAKER_00: I try to fix it.
SPEAKER_00: I try to make it, I try to, and this whole thing begins to revolve around me.
SPEAKER_00: When my wife and I were first married, we moved to St.
SPEAKER_00: Louis, I took a youth ministry job.
SPEAKER_00: I was super excited because now, man, finally I was I was diving in.
SPEAKER_00: I was getting to do the Lord's work, right?
SPEAKER_00: And this is what I've been working for.
SPEAKER_00: And it was a great youth group with a lot of things that were going on there.
SPEAKER_00: And we dove in, my wife also, because we were newly married and didn't have a whole lot, and I wasn't making much.
SPEAKER_00: She had a full-time job teaching.
SPEAKER_00: And I was asking of her, I was like, I know you got this full-time job, but I need you as a volunteer in my youth ministry.
SPEAKER_00: I need you to show up on Sunday and Wednesday and show up at every event and do this.
SPEAKER_00: And my wife, man, faithfully did that and just was an incredible leader in so many areas, but she was also a teacher that was two blocks down the road at Coldwater Elementary.
SPEAKER_00: In two and a half years, you know how many times I stepped foot in that school to invest in what was happening in what she was doing in her ministry in her life.
SPEAKER_00: I remember once.
SPEAKER_00: I remember we had a conversation along with that and some other things.
SPEAKER_00: I remember she looked at me and she said, Man, sometimes I think you think you're the center of the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And don't we all?
SPEAKER_00: Don't we all?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not just a me thing, but way back then thing that it that is a every single one of us.
SPEAKER_00: We just get off kilter, and what we do is we just see think we are the center of the universe, and all this is created for us.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, the sooner you figure out that it wasn't created for you, it wasn't created through you, it wasn't created in you, it was created in him, through him, for him, and that almost sounds a little selfish, created for God, no, for him, so he could give the best to you.
SPEAKER_00: And that's all you see Jesus ever doing is coming into this world and give is sacrificing himself to love you for what he can give to you.
SPEAKER_00: And what he says, if you'll just figure out that the best thing you could do is realize that putting me first, making this thing about me, will give you what you're looking for.
SPEAKER_00: In him, for him, through him.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says this he says, he says that in him all things hold together.
SPEAKER_00: In him all things hold together.
SPEAKER_00: Now, that's another one of those things that you just read that, you don't get it, until you get the context of what Paul is actually talking about.
SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about holding together your life.
SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about holding together your family or your deepest problem or your finances or this relational issue.
SPEAKER_00: It's not, he's not talking about our city, he's not talking about our nation, he's not talking about our world.
SPEAKER_00: What Paul is talking about is just keep stepping out bigger and bigger and bigger to where he says, no, he's talking about the cosmos.
SPEAKER_00: Like what Paul is saying is big enough here, he's saying he is talking about the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And to give you a little bit of a picture of how big that is, right?
SPEAKER_00: How big that is.
SPEAKER_00: The James Webb telescope was launched on December 25th, 2021.
SPEAKER_00: We talk a lot about the Hubble telescope way back in the day that you would see all kinds of pictures.
SPEAKER_00: The James Webb telescope orbits around the sun.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a million miles away or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: It is now giving us deeper looks into the universe than we've ever seen before.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you see these pictures of galaxies, like galaxies are out there, and you just we just have no idea of like how big that is.
SPEAKER_00: Like, let me tell you just a couple facts about how big that actually is.
SPEAKER_00: When I was growing up in like college, I remember they would talk about and say, Man, there are millions of galaxies out there.
SPEAKER_00: You remember him saying that?
SPEAKER_00: They got the James Webb telescope out there, most powerful telescope ever.
SPEAKER_00: They have other things that they've been looking at.
SPEAKER_00: Scientists say, Now that they believe it just goes on and on and on and on.
SPEAKER_00: They believe that there are potentially two trillion, not million, two trillion, not stars, two trillion galaxies.
SPEAKER_00: Galaxies, step back from that, just our Milky Way, that's the galaxy that we live in.
SPEAKER_00: They believe that there might be up to 400 million stars just in our galaxy.
SPEAKER_00: Scientists say this that if you take a speck of sand off the seashore, a speck of sand, and then hold it at arm's length, the area it covers in the sky, they believe potentially covers over a hundred thousand galaxies.
SPEAKER_00: Guys, what Paul is stepping back and saying is he's saying, understand what Jesus holds together, like in the palms of his hands, what he holds together is that.
SPEAKER_00: Circumstances happen and all that, but he can at least be the one who is with you through all those things to hold your emotions and your life and your loves and your cares and your purpose in this life.
SPEAKER_00: I think Jesus could probably hold the weight of those things.
SPEAKER_00: Would you not agree?
SPEAKER_00: And well, what we do is we put him, when we put him in first place, what happens is becomes the load-bearing wall in those areas of our life.
SPEAKER_00: As we said it again, when Jesus becomes first in our life, what we do is we begin to spend time with him.
SPEAKER_00: Begin to spend time with him.
SPEAKER_00: We begin to learn to pray and we begin to get in scripture and to understand more of who he is.
SPEAKER_00: And we begin to spend time with him bringing our difficulties and saying, God, through your Holy Spirit, give me a picture of how to love well in this relationship.
SPEAKER_00: Not to love for what I can get, but to love for what I can give.
SPEAKER_00: Well, again, with our parenting, what is the goal?
SPEAKER_00: And it's okay to have the goal.
SPEAKER_00: Man, my kids have a goal to get their school paid for, like through sports or academics or whatever that is, to get their school paid for.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the deal: underneath that, that's not my wife and I's goal.
SPEAKER_00: Man, it'll be fantastic if Jake gets a scholarship to play basketball like his sisters have, and whatever.
SPEAKER_00: It would be great.
SPEAKER_00: But the greater goal is that that kid grows up knowing who he is, whose he is, what he's been gifted to do, and what his purpose is in this life.
SPEAKER_00: That is a greater goal.
SPEAKER_00: And that's a Jesus first goal.
SPEAKER_00: In our finances, what does that look like?
SPEAKER_00: It looks at saying, not Jesus being last, like after everything that comes in, what not Jesus being last, but Jesus being first.
SPEAKER_00: The one we honor first with our finances, saying, God, you have given, you provide, even in the moments we're like, I don't know where it's coming from.
SPEAKER_00: We live Jesus first, and I tell you, in the moments, so many times it feels like, I don't know how this is gonna work out.
SPEAKER_00: But over time, what you see is a life that is so much more stable.
SPEAKER_00: Where is it for you that you've been Jesus and?
SPEAKER_00: And you need to be Jesus only.
SPEAKER_00: Where have you minimized Jesus and his power to hold up the areas of your life?
SPEAKER_00: I walked out of the auditorium a couple weeks ago, walked into the lobby, and there was a lady there, and she walked up to me and she handed me something, and that's not unusual.
SPEAKER_00: I you know, people hand me notes and you know other things.
SPEAKER_00: I've had like stuffed animals.
SPEAKER_00: I think my favorite was last year I talked about peanut butter MMs, and I gained 10 pounds because you guys gave me so many peanut butter MMs.
SPEAKER_00: It was fantastic.
SPEAKER_00: I'm still eating peanut butter MMs, just so you know.
SPEAKER_00: Um I walked out and she handed me two things.
SPEAKER_00: Two things.
SPEAKER_00: You've probably seen these things before.
SPEAKER_00: They were two tiny Jesus figures.
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen these?
SPEAKER_00: Two little, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: They're everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I people leave them all over the place.
SPEAKER_00: You're sitting in a restaurant on a table, there's a tiny Jesus sitting there.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I and it's funny, I've talked to people all ages of people, and it's like everybody knows.
SPEAKER_00: My high school kids know about this, my college kids know about this, my wife, everybody knows about these little tiny Jesus figures.
SPEAKER_00: And this lady walks up to me and she says to me, She says, Sean, I I don't know why, but I felt like God is just telling me to give you these two little tiny Jesuses, which I which I thought was interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Not just one Jesus, but twin Jesuses, you know.
SPEAKER_00: But I I was and I didn't know why.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know why at the time that she was giving this to me.
SPEAKER_00: And then I started studying this passage and it's like, I get it.
SPEAKER_00: I get it because so many times what we do in our life, when it becomes comes to decisions, we want Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Like Jesus says, what does he say all throughout scripture?
SPEAKER_00: He says, Do not be afraid, I will be what?
SPEAKER_00: With you.
SPEAKER_00: I'll be with you.
SPEAKER_00: And what he's saying, what Paul's saying is the one who holds the universe in his hands will be with you, all the power to carry the weight of your life.
SPEAKER_00: And what we do is we minimize them down to this, and we take a Jesus with us until we take the pocket-sized Jesus with us, so that when our opinions or our beliefs or our whatever or our decisions disagree with Jesus, we can just kind of pocket them and say, Hey, Jesus, you know, I want to see that.
SPEAKER_00: That decision, that conversation, that scrolling, that entertainment, that way I didn't love my spouse or my kids or my girlfriend or my boyfriend or whoever, the way I should have.
SPEAKER_00: Just kind of puts you in there until I need you again.
SPEAKER_00: Or the Jesus that we say, man, he's gonna walk with us.
SPEAKER_00: He walks with us.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus even says, Hey, understand, I'm going away.
SPEAKER_00: He says his disciples, I'm going away.
SPEAKER_00: And if I go away, understand it's gonna be better for you because I'm gonna send my Holy Spirit that's gonna be me, not beside you, but inside you, with you every single day.
SPEAKER_00: The power of the one who created the universe, and we're like, yeah, come on.
SPEAKER_00: And then what we do is we put him second or third or fourth or fifth, and we got this little tiny Jesus guy that's walking with us.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but I don't there's no weight of life that that's carrying right there.
SPEAKER_00: I want the Jesus who stands like this and holds the power of the universe together.
SPEAKER_00: And I think so many of us, we sit there right now and we go, Sean, you don't understand.
SPEAKER_00: Like I have removed him from the load-bearing spot in my life in whatever area.
SPEAKER_00: And what's happened is, man, I I see some cracks, I see some ripples in the floor, and I've left it long enough that it just fell through.
SPEAKER_00: Man, I remind you, you look through the Old Testament and you see that constantly.
SPEAKER_00: You see it with a guy like David, who was a man called a man, God called him a man after God's own heart.
SPEAKER_00: And what happened?
SPEAKER_00: David did phenomenal putting God first.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was a psalmist, he wrote the psalms.
SPEAKER_00: He did, there's so much, he was a king that brought the people back to God, and then all of a sudden he kind of removed God from being, he got a little soaked up in the power of being a king.
SPEAKER_00: And it says in 1 Samuel, when kings went off to war, where they were supposed to be off to war, David stayed home.
SPEAKER_00: Went up on his rooftop, and what happened?
SPEAKER_00: He had seen a woman bathing up there quite a few times.
SPEAKER_00: Her name was Bathsheba.
SPEAKER_00: And he invited her over, and an affair happened, and then a murder happened, and God's king, who had been the one who was after God's own heart, failed.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing I think we need to understand with this passage.
SPEAKER_00: We are to put Jesus first in every area of our life, but this is an ongoing struggle for every single one of us.
SPEAKER_00: And what happens is sometimes we don't even realize it, but we remove him from that place.
SPEAKER_00: Colossians chapter one, we go back to verses 19 and 20.
SPEAKER_00: It just looks at what Paul says about this.
SPEAKER_00: He says, For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to what?
SPEAKER_00: To reconcile.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what that means?
SPEAKER_00: It means to go from an enemy to a friend.
SPEAKER_00: Like you look at a God that most of us think of, we would think that David went from a friend of God, the one who was after, and he all of a sudden is an enemy of God.
SPEAKER_00: Not what happened.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what it says.
SPEAKER_00: And through himself to reconcile himself to all things, whether things in earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Man, for each and every one of us, where those walls have crumbled down or we have removed and we just see in the cracks, what God says is he wants to reconcile those moments.
SPEAKER_00: Now you may have to live with the consequences of your actions, but what he says in your relationship with him, to have the one who holds the universe in place, step back into, and if that's the power that steps back in, he not only wants to hold up what's in the future, what he wants to do is reconcile and rebuild what might even be in the past.
SPEAKER_00: But you have to let him.
SPEAKER_00: And so how do we let him?
SPEAKER_00: Back in 2012, I became the lead pastor, first-time lead pastor of a church in Colorado.
SPEAKER_00: And uh it was a church I've told the story a little bit before, but I was a first-time lead pastor.
SPEAKER_00: I'd I had uh never, I wasn't even a speaker at churches very much, uh, or even at my home church.
SPEAKER_00: I was more of an administrative team builder and that behind-the-scenes executive pastor, that's what I was doing.
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to become a lead pastor, but I didn't have the experience teaching, so the job opportunities were not coming.
SPEAKER_00: I'd been told no a couple different times, and and some churches that were really healthy and would have been really exciting, but they chose somebody else and somebody younger and whatever the story was.
SPEAKER_00: Well, there was this church down the road, Rocky Mountain Christian Church, Life Rich Christian Church, where it was where I was.
SPEAKER_00: They had planted Rocky.
SPEAKER_00: Story went that Rocky um had had this meteoric rise, went from zero to 2,400.
SPEAKER_00: They were incredible over 30 years, just incredible church, tons of people coming to Christ, missionary stuff, all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00: But they had run into a crisis and financially in 2008.
SPEAKER_00: They launched a$22 million campus right before the economy crashed, two months before.
SPEAKER_00: $22 million, only$3 million of commitments came in.
SPEAKER_00: They were flailing, they were having to lay off staff, there was difficulty that was going on.
SPEAKER_00: They had asked 16 different people to take the lead pastor job, and 16 people were wise enough to say, man, that's too much.
SPEAKER_00: I was a one sucker who said yes.
SPEAKER_00: It was a job that was open, it was available, it was right there in town.
SPEAKER_00: I knew the church, and so we jumped in.
SPEAKER_00: There's a whole story that goes along with it.
SPEAKER_00: But we got into 2015, we were three years in, and guys, we were like attendants.
SPEAKER_00: I thought I would walk in.
SPEAKER_00: You ever have that job where you're like, man, if I get promoted, this is what I'd do?
SPEAKER_00: And I've fixed everything because I know exactly how to fix this.
SPEAKER_00: And then you get there, you're like, wow, this is harder than I thought.
SPEAKER_00: Man, it was harder than I thought.
SPEAKER_00: And we also had a young family and competitive sports with our kids and just running all different ways.
SPEAKER_00: And my wife's got a job, and I got a job.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just so many things, and there were some marriage issues going on, and then we bought a house.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we got all excited, and and we had this fixer upper we saw, and we're like, well, if we extend ourselves, the church is gonna grow, and I'll get a raise and we'll be able to handle this financially, which we couldn't at the time, but we were didn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: Bought the house.
SPEAKER_00: Tends didn't go up, giving went down, attendance was going down at the church.
SPEAKER_00: It was just an unhealthy situation and difficult.
SPEAKER_00: And 2015, I was sitting there and I just was feeling I had never felt so much anxiety in my life.
SPEAKER_00: I was feeling like I was just holding the weight of the world and I was trying to fix everything.
SPEAKER_00: And what I was doing was not spending the time with God that I needed to spend to say, God, where do you want me to lead this church?
SPEAKER_00: Jumped in, had a consultant come in, and we figured out, like, you know, mission and vision, and here's what we're doing, and trying to change all this stuff and implemented, thought it grow, didn't grow.
SPEAKER_00: Struggling.
SPEAKER_00: I sat down with a guy named Alan Augram, who is a mentor of mine, sitting across from Alan.
SPEAKER_00: And I sat down with him in 2015.
SPEAKER_00: I was we're at a Mexican restaurant that we'd go to, and I just bare in my soul, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm emotional.
SPEAKER_00: I just sat there and complained and whined and everything for like an hour.
SPEAKER_00: An hour.
SPEAKER_00: And I just like going after it.
SPEAKER_00: And and Alan, who was actually the former senior pastor of that church who had grown an incredible church, who was a great friend of mine, sat there and he looked at me and he goes, You done?
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't done.
SPEAKER_00: I went like another 10 minutes, you know.
SPEAKER_00: And then he looked at me and he said, Are you done?
SPEAKER_00: He said, Sean, I've been exactly where you are.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what you need to understand.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Sean, he looked at me and he said a line that I have never forgotten and I've come back to so many times.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Sean, the position of savior is already taken.
SPEAKER_00: And it was like, Because I was sitting there trying to do everything I could and trying to do all this on my own way, and trying to, and what I had done is minimize Jesus down to this, and was thinking I had what it took to lead this.
SPEAKER_00: There's a whole story that goes on with the rest of that, but I went home and talked to my wife, apologized for probably just the stress I was causing at home because I was so stressed at work, not leaning into her, not being there where I needed to be with the kids, and just said, hey, let's just step back and leave the results and let's put Jesus first in these areas and we'll just see what happens.
SPEAKER_00: And guys, you just go through the story and you go on to 2024.
SPEAKER_00: I moved here.
SPEAKER_00: And over those next few years, man, God just there were things that happened that you're just like, man, that is not anything we did.
SPEAKER_00: But just leading through prayer and leading through the letting the Holy Spirit lead and do what he did.
SPEAKER_00: I got a call three months after I got here.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, we were$19 million in debt.
SPEAKER_00: We paid off about six million in that time that I was there.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, the church was doing well and it was healthy.
SPEAKER_00: And lead pastor, new lead pastor, called me, been with me for 10 years, hey, you will not believe this.
SPEAKER_00: We just had a couple things happen, a group of people, and somebody sold a business, all that.
SPEAKER_00: We just got checks for$13.5 million.
SPEAKER_00: And this church is debt-free.
SPEAKER_00: And this church's staff is healthy, and there's a guys, you just step back.
SPEAKER_00: There's so many things we're trying to do this with.
SPEAKER_00: I'm putting you first.
SPEAKER_00: What do you want to do with these things?
SPEAKER_00: And step back and leave the results to him.
SPEAKER_00: You know, Howard McDavid probably saved his wife and his and himself, their life that day because he did a little walkthrough.
SPEAKER_00: Saw something happen, he saw it felt a little bit, and he walked through that apartment, found that work crew, said, Hey, here's what's going on.
SPEAKER_00: And he did a little walkthrough before the place collapsed and saved his life.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's what we need to do this week.
SPEAKER_00: A little bit of application for us.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we need to do a walkthrough of the different areas, the different compartments of our life, and saying, have we just made Jesus another compartment?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus and?
SPEAKER_00: Have we minimized Jesus down to this little tiny Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: Or where is it that we need to say, God, I am not strong enough to hold this?
SPEAKER_00: What I want to do is just put you first.
SPEAKER_00: Marriage, finances, parenting, relationships, job, purpose.
SPEAKER_00: I want to put you first and don't choose ten.
SPEAKER_00: Choose the one that's the big one and start there.
SPEAKER_00: Put him first, do what he says.
SPEAKER_00: Spend time with him on that thing.
SPEAKER_00: Become more like him in that area.
SPEAKER_00: Do do what he did he does in those areas and see what God does.
SPEAKER_00: And when we put Jesus first, here's what happens when he becomes the load-bearing wall underneath everything in our life.
SPEAKER_00: What happens is life is not perfect, but you definitely find a whole lot more of what you're looking for.
SPEAKER_00: Father, I just come before you all of our campuses today.
SPEAKER_00: Every individual walking in this door, whether they've been here forever or they're brand new, we all have our stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we need you to be a part of our stuff.
SPEAKER_00: We need you to be first in our stuff in every single area.
SPEAKER_00: So, Father, may that little twinge we feel, may us may we understand that is your Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Holy Spirit, show us where you want us to change, where you want us to readjust and who you want us to become.
SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray that there will be a whole lot more life that we find in the process.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.